Love in Summer Review

As Gu Yi, you have just graduated and are heading off to Guangzhou on a road trip with your best friend, Lao Liu. You’re heading there to find Ji Yanyu, your high school crush. At the last minute, your university junior, Yuan Qi, hitches a ride. The first two chapters (of 3) focuses on this initial trio as they travel. While side characters appear, they’re irrelevant and often misused. Love in the Room alumni, Yan Jianing, appears late and only has a few brief scenes via a cameo role.

As your travel companion, Yuan Qi adores you but hasn’t worked up the courage to tell you yet. Played again by Tina Chen, she’s the same bubbly, naïve, and likable personality from EoY. When you go to kiss her during a game of spin-the-bottle, she gets embarrassed. When she dresses up to look mature, you can be honest about her appearance. And when she catches fireflies, you can scold her for being out late.

Some responses are too binary and being mean to her always feels horrible. In addition, many other narrative choices tend to result in the same outcome anyway, like when fixing the car.

The time spent with Yuan Qi is soured because Lao Liu is always hanging around. While he is still a funny character, Lao Liu worked better in smaller doses. It may fit his personality to complain that you and Yuan Qi are being too affectionate, but it gets annoying. And when you act cold to her instead, he says you’re cruel. So sweet moments with Yuan Qi are too few despite her ample screen time.

You only meet Ji Yanyu in the last chapter and her romance is more intense. In EoY, her arc was unsatisfactory and ambiguous. The developers clearly wanted to give her a more fitting conclusion. Fortunately, they succeeded, with sincerity on both sides and powerful dialogue that lifts the romance a few notches. While her relatively low screen time makes thematic sense, it’s still overly lopsided. The two love interests don’t have meaningful interactions either, so their destined collision ends in a whimper.

Love in Summer is worth playing, if you liked either of these two love interests from Echoes of Yesterday. It is a high quality production with genuine feeling. Due to a few imbalances, it may not be the best romantic adventure this year but it is never easy to construct the perfect outcome.