A romance becomes much harder to dismiss when the warning arrives before the relationship does. Knowing that someone is a terrible idea should make walking away simple, yet attraction has never been especially respectful of good judgment. I am usually more interested in that uncomfortable middle than in the eventual answer, because wanting somebody while actively arguing against the feeling gives even an ordinary conversation something to fight over.
There’s No Way I’d Fall in Love With a Womanizer, Right? gives that argument almost entirely to Asahina Umeko. Her first encounter with Yuzuha Kirino happens at night, when Umeko helps a woman she believes is drunk. The surprise comes later at the mall where Umeko works, when the same woman turns out to be the popular new employee. Attraction is already there before Umeko learns the part that should end it, Yuzuha has a reputation for breaking women’s hearts. From there, the story does not need a complicated external obstacle. Umeko has already decided what the sensible answer is, while her feelings keep refusing to cooperate.
That simplicity works because TeamANPIM made this as a kinetic novel. There are no routes to optimize or dialogue choices that let me manufacture a safer version of the relationship. I had to stay with Umeko while she tried to decide whether Yuzuha’s reputation should outweigh the person directly in front of her. I liked losing that usual visual-novel escape hatch. If I could simply pick the cautious answer whenever Yuzuha became too persuasive, much of Umeko’s conflict would belong to me instead. Keeping the story linear makes her hesitation hers, and the slow burn has room to come from conversation rather than a route-selection screen.
Umeko is easy to understand without being reduced to naïveté. She cares about people to a fault, and her first meeting with Yuzuha proves it before the romance asks me to take that trait seriously. Yuzuha pushes against that softness with confidence and a history that gives Umeko a concrete reason to distrust what she feels. I enjoyed the imbalance between them most when Umeko was clearly aware of it. She is not walking blindly toward an obvious problem. She knows the warning, repeats it to herself, and still has to deal with the fact that knowing better does not automatically switch attraction off. That gave the romance more tension than a simple question of when two people would admit they liked each other.
The visual presentation stays focused on the same relationship. Udon, credited as saint_udon/udon-udon, handled the art as well as the writing and programming, while ki contributed part-time editing and ki, kv, rolo, and elyk-steel are credited with part-time quality control. The 2D anime-style artwork keeps Umeko and Yuzuha at the center, and I appreciated having the person shaping their dialogue also responsible for how their expressions and scenes are presented. TeamANPIM even built in a simple way to clear the screen, with the middle mouse button or H hiding the text box. I used that whenever I wanted an unobstructed look at the artwork rather than treating the images as decoration behind the script.
Music has considerably more specific crediting than I expected from a free jam release. Khaim’s “Somebody” serves as the intro theme, while “Geneve” is used as an everyday theme and “Never” accompanies another specific scene. Yuzuha has “Flowers at night” by Flehmann associated with her, and the rest of the credited soundtrack draws from Make a field Music, Dango’s Studio, Yuli, FLASH☆BEAT, Moppy Sound, and Hamoota. That variety gave different parts of the romance their own musical texture without making the project depend on a single recurring cue. I especially liked that Yuzuha receives a dedicated theme, because so much of the story depends on how Umeko reads her presence before she can settle what she actually believes about her.
The production itself explains some of that concentration. TeamANPIM submitted the game to Yuri Game Jam 2023, with the finished release arriving on December 8, 2023. Work had begun a month before the jam’s official start, and a deadline extension helped the project reach completion after TeamANPIM had missed participating the previous year. That context made the restraint of the final design easier for me to appreciate. The game does not pretend it needs branching systems simply because it is built in Ren’Py. It commits to being a linear romance and spends its effort on the writing, backgrounds, character art, CG presentation, and music surrounding that story.
There are a couple of practical touches I was glad to have as well. Pressing A opens Ren’Py’s text-size options, which is useful if the default lettering feels small, although longer lines can extend beyond their intended space at larger settings. The game is currently offered as a name-your-own-price download for Windows, macOS, and Linux. A separate bilingual build followed in February 2024, allowing English or Simplified Chinese to be selected from the preferences menu, with Yuan credited for the translation. The game later appeared as a submission to WOMEN’s GAME FEST in Spring 2025, giving this small 2023 jam project a life beyond its original deadline.
What kept me engaged through all of that was how little the romance needs to manufacture around Umeko’s central problem. Yuzuha does not require a fantasy setting, an elaborate mystery, or a branching route structure to become dangerous to Umeko’s peace of mind. Her reputation does the initial damage, then every new interaction has to compete with it. I went back and forth with Umeko because the premise keeps asking two different questions at once. Should the warnings about Yuzuha be believed, and can Umeko trust what she experiences herself? I will not say where that conflict ends. The uncertainty is more useful before the answer arrives, especially in a romance whose title already tells me how desperately one person wants to deny where her feelings might be heading.
The writing occasionally leans so hard into that denial that I wanted Umeko to stop circling the same fear and confront it more directly. At the same time, shortening that resistance too much would undercut the slow-burn structure TeamANPIM deliberately chose. I preferred the scenes where a fresh interaction complicated her judgment rather than merely restating it. When the story gives Umeko something new to weigh against Yuzuha’s reputation, her indecision feels earned instead of delayed for the sake of runtime.
Verdict
There’s No Way I’d Fall in Love With a Womanizer, Right? works best when it leaves Umeko trapped between information and experience. The linear structure keeps that conflict firmly hers, while Udon’s control over the writing, art, and programming gives the presentation a consistent focus on the two women at its center. I also appreciated how specifically the soundtrack is matched to characters and situations, especially Yuzuha’s dedicated theme. Some of Umeko’s resistance circles familiar ground, but the stronger conversations keep adding enough pressure to make her uncertainty worth following. It is a small romance built around the difference between recognizing a red flag and actually becoming immune to the person carrying it.
