The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl

Renji Kusakabe works part-time at an arcade and meets a British girl named Lily. They exchange diaries and begin their friendship, or maybe something more.

Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl is based on the Game Center Shо̄jo to Ibunka Kо̄ryū manga series by Hirokazu Yasuhara. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Somewhere around the middle of this episode, I started making a list of all the times Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl strained my suspension of disbelief. I don't generally do this because I don't see CinemaSins as a valid way of interacting with art; fiction is not reality, and most stories have little narrative conveniences and coincidences to smooth things out and allow narrative arcs to happen. But a slice-of-life story ostensibly set in the real world must at least somewhat reflect life, and when it becomes too abstracted, the mirror breaks. Thus, here is a list of all the times Renji and Lily made me say, “That's not how that works.”

1. Lily's atrocious accent, but we went over this in my review of the first episode.
2. That Lily would have been attending mainstream school in Japan for several months without picking up the language. She's right at the edge of the age when language acquisition doesn't take active effort, but months of immersion would grant her at least some proficiency.
3. That Renji's little sister Aoi would just happen to attend the same school as Lily. This is just how fiction works, so I forgive this one.
4. That Aoi wouldn't recognize her own brother when he slicks back his hair and puts on sunglasses. If you're going to disguise yourself against your own sibling, you're going to have to try a little harder than that.
5. That Lily's mother would look at Renji, who is clearly several years older than her daughter, and not only be totally cool with the idea of him being her girlfriend but also give her suggestions on how to win his heart. I mean, some parents are pretty neglectful and let their children enter into completely inappropriate relationships, but your average English parent is not going to just smile and accept their young teenager dating a legal adult.

And even if it didn't commit such sins against believability, I'm just not interested in watching a series about a 13-year-old one-sidedly flirting with an 18-year-old and playing crane games. That hasn't changed since the first episode, and at this point, we'd need a Turkey!-level rugpull for me to find this show anything but creepy at times, and dull when it's not.

I try to do some basic research about upcoming premieres ahead of time. I like knowing the medium of the source material, intended demographic, some of the creative staff members, and so on. It helps me to set expectations and develop a frame of reference—though it can be fun to guess whether something originated as a light novel, manga, or other without knowing ahead of time. When reading up on Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl, three phrases jumped out at me:

• Thirteen years old
• Eighteen years old
• Romance

NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. A young teen with a one-sided crush on a legal adult? Sure. But “romance” implies reciprocation, and no thank you to that.

Not that I think I would have been into Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl to begin with. Watching Renji and Lily wander through the arcade as he shows her how to play the games was about as exciting as… watching two people walk around an arcade playing games—which is to say, not at all. Even without knowing the horrifying truth of what's to come, Renji and Lily have no chemistry whatsoever, as friends or otherwise.

There's also the issue of having multiple languages. Renji is here doing his best to communicate in English, which, having lived in Japan, I totally respect. I even found it resonated with some of my own cross-cultural friendships. But Sally Amaki's performance as Lily Baker has some… issues. Amaki is a native English speaker, but she's American and not British. She spends the episode struggling with a foreign dialect, producing something only recognizable as British English through context clues—such as her mother (who also sounds conspicuously not English) offering her a “cuppa.” Further obfuscating matters is how she's developed the cadence many native English speakers do after living in Japan long term—which is almost a dialect of its own determined by its legibility to Japanese speakers. Or maybe she's just trying to sound like Japanese audiences expect an anime girl to, rather than anything authentic. Either way, there's something distinctly “off” about how Lily Baker talks that pulled me out of the episode.

The show does have nice color design, but that's not nearly enough to make up for everything about the episode that I found either dull or off-putting. Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl was never going to get a high rating from me, but knowing where this is going makes it downright untouchable.

The first episode of Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl was a snoozefest tempered by the possibility of problematic-age-gap romance. So, of course, the second episode swerves even harder into the romance angle. This means there's more going on, as the communication conundrums between the leads start closing a bit, even if it's mostly amateur-hour misunderstandings and bad romantic advice from kids too young to know better. So it's still not great, but it's at least marginally more interesting than that first episode.

One uptick is the show introducing other situations for Lily to interact in beyond chumming around with Renji. Viewers could surmise that she was having trouble communicating and fitting in at school, so this episode shows her there, using her new game-center-gleaned confidence to make a friend. Is it only a little hacky that said friend happens to be Aoi, Renji's younger sister? Yeah, but that keeps the narrative circle of the characters effectively connected for now. And Aoi's got a bit more energetic rapport with both Renji and Lily than those two have with each other, so that's something.

On the other hand, Aoi's perspective also provokes Game Centre Girl to feel like it has to comment on the tangibility of the romance itself and the inherent issues with it. I feel like Aoi talking about how creepy Renji's courting (accidental or not) of Lily is, combined with him overcompensating by donning an even more sleazy looking disguise, comes off like the show trying to have its cake and eat it too with regards to the age gap. It ain't cute, and just calls attention to how weird the arrangement is. It's also only a little noticeably odd that Aoi can't recognize her brother in sunglasses while Lily can immediately tell it's Renji regardless. It's a show where the drama and comedy thrive entirely on what's most convenient for its narrative in the moment, overall sensibilities be damned.

That includes a small jealousy subplot as Lily ramps up her certainty in her affections for Renji. If you've ever wanted to see a desperate thirteen-year-old girl attempt to violently cockblock a grown-ass man, this anime is delivering that prime rom-com material. It's already obnoxious, since I'm more into the moments where the show is doing that "cultural exchange" thing. The conversations Renji has with Lily and her mom about the different uses of "Auld Lang Syne" or the availability of glitter pens are downright cozy. But too much of that and Game Centre Girl would go right back to the languid nothingness it floundered in with the first episode. So this is what audiences are stuck with, I suppose: the awkward, misunderstood flirtings of this average guy who, despite his best efforts, just cannot stop rizzing up this little white girl. I sadly know that that's going to be somebody's bag, but it sure ain't mine.

Look, it's always nice to hear Sally Amaki. Even if her attempts at an English accent in Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl are…charitably endearing, the rest of her delivery as Lily Baker here is precious enough. In concept, it could be cute enough to watch her—possibly in short anime form—perform as a cute little British girl playing around in a Japanese arcade, plugging away at crane games, and blurting out "Bloody Hell" as adorably as possible. Maybe the others in the cast glimpsed in the OP could join in later, and "Cute Girls Playing Cute Arcade Games" could take off. This isn't even the first premiere this season where Street Fighter is glimpsed at the beginning, this is an alright time, potentially.

Unfortunately, the show that Game Centre Girl is interested in being at the outset here is both a bit more ambitious and a good bit more prone to chafing under that ambition. I won't get too much into the issues obviously inherent in the young adult Renji inadvertently ending up in a courtship with the 13-year-old Lily—much of it so far has been played for the "precocious crush" angle. Renji's just trying his best to be nice and, at least partially on account of a language barrier, doesn't seem to be quite aware of how deep in he's getting with Lily thus far. Hopefully that aspect of the series works more as a way for both of them to grow and learn overall, on account of that "cultural exchange" element in the title. Though I certainly understand anybody side-eyeing the relationship at the beginning already here.

Rather, the more pressing issue is that a simple communication barrier just isn't enough to sustain a full episode's worth of interactions between these characters as they putter around an arcade. At least in more standard "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" shows, there might be odd little conversations to lend personality and flavor to the goings on. Here, our two leads can barely talk to one another, so there are just a whole lot of repeated basic sentences over them playing arcade games. Lily figuring out UFO catchers and discovering an aptitude for not-House of the Dead (featuring Jill Valentine?) are slightly more compelling than her kind of hovering around Renji, fawning over him, and waiting for him to figure out what her emotional intentions are.

Maybe this will be "cute enough" for some viewers. It looks nice enough, and even if most of the arcade games are unlicensed stand-ins, some are still neat enough to see (I am not going to argue with an unexpected Dropkick on My Devil! cameo). And maybe the energy will increase once more cast members show up to shake up the dynamics. And maybe even further, the leads will actually learn to communicate and the cultural exchange part can drive things more earnestly. But none of that was delivered in this premiere, and there wasn't much else to help it beyond barely cresting that "cute enough" threshold.

I don't know much about Lily Baker's mom, other than her dedication to offering her tiny, thirteen-year-old daughter a proper “cuppa” in the afternoon. If I were her, though, and I found out that some random adult Japanese man who works at the arcade was sharing an “exchange diary” with My Girl, let me tell you…wait a minute. I don't know who the British equivalent of Chris Hansen is. Crap. You get the idea. Renji needs to establish some boundaries, is what I'm saying, unless he wants to end up working at the Prison Game Centre.

Cultural Exchange plays up Lily's crush on Renji a lot more this week, and the show is running with the romantic-comedy vibes in a way that will probably turn off a lot of viewers. That's a very unfortunate choice on the show's part, since I think almost every other element of the show is still pretty darned cute. If Lily were just a little older, so that the obvious age gap between her and Renji wasn't so distracting, I could probably run with it. Would the show lose so much if Lily were, like, sixteen or seventeen? I don't think so. It would honestly make a lot of the show's weirder elements make a lot more sense. Like the scene where Lily's mother pressures her to say hello to the nice man she has a crush on - I would get it if Lily weren't half Renji's size and age.

Cultural Exchange doesn't even do that thing where the supposedly middle-school-aged kids all talk and act like young adults who are about to enter the workforce. Lily is very obviously a kid, one with a very doe-eyed fixation on the sweet older guy who went out of his way to help her feel less lonely in an intimidating new country. This would be all well and good if I didn't have the sneaking suspicion that the show wanted us to root for Lily to eventually win her man. The show is still mostly playing Renji's preternatural ability to accidentally seduce tweenage girls who may or may not also be related to him as a wacky joke. I know this racket.. First, you have the scene where Renji's sister just so happens to get all flustered and blushy when Renji pats her head in his cool-gut disguise, and before you know it, the two girls are going to end up in a weird, semi-incestuous love-triangle with the guy.

Or maybe not! I'm harping a lot on the not-so-subtextual romantic elements because they are the most distracting element of an otherwise well-made and consistently entertaining sitcom about language differences, miscommunications, and the overwhelming forces of attraction that run rampant in the middle of Japanese arcades. With just a few very simple tweaks, this could have made for a great summer romance. What a shame.

What do you do when you have an anime that stars a native-English speaking gal with a lot of lines? Why, you hire Sally Amaki, of course. Given how much of the comedy and cuteness of Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl revolves around the linguistic barrier that separates Renji the Game Center Clerk and Lily the Adorable Little Weeb, this was a fantastic casting decision. This is a show that would work a lot less for both Japanese and native-English-speaking audiences alike if Lily and Renji didn't actually have to figure out ways to communicate with each other. Could I snark about Lily's English being a little all over the place? Sure, but once you hear her mother try to offer her a “cuppa,” you'll understand how much worse things could have been.

Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl is an anime that earns my affection by preying on two of my greatest weaknesses: It gives me a genuinely sweet little sitcom about two well-meaning dorks trying to figure out how to be friends, and it throws a bunch of nostalgic throwbacks at me in the form of classic and modern arcade games. I, too, once dreamt of making friends with a cute girl who would play House Town of the Dead with me. I also dreamt of impressing that same girl by catching her a cool prize from the claw machine, but the claw machines in America suck ass, so I had to wait until I could show off my skills to my wife in Yakuza 0. Ah, the joy of the arcade…

With its charming leads, its candy-colored artwork, and it's generally quite pleasant atmosphere, Cultural Exchange just might be your ideal rom-com of the season. Well, maybe except for the “rom” part. You see, despite checking all of the boxes and running through all of the usual tropes of a romantic comedy, the show runs into a bit of a stumbling block with the fact that Lily Baker looks by all accounts to be, like, twelve years old, max. Renji, on the other hand, has a job, and has to be, what, seventeen? Eighteen? Either way, there's no chance of there being any romantic chemistry between these two, and we wouldn't want any, either, because that would send Renji straight to jail.

That said, the show seems to mostly be playing Lily's potential crush on Renji as a joke. This is an anime, though, so who knows how things will play out in the end. For now, though, I'm willing to be cautiously optimistic and hope that Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl isn't going to try and force any other kinds of exchanges between its protagonists.