My Bully Is My Lover Walkthrough

Getting Through My Bully Is My Lover Without Losing Your Mind

I've spent more time than I'd like to admit working through this interactive fiction. The common approach most people take is just clicking through every scene and picking whatever option looks best in the moment. That's not how you actually beat it efficiently. You need to track your affection meters and route triggers separately, because the game doesn't make that distinction obvious until you've already locked yourself into a dead path. The core mechanic revolves around two hidden variables — the bully character's affection and the rival/love interest's affection. Each dialogue choice affects both numbers, and some choices move one up while moving the other down. That's the trap most players walk into. You pick what seems like the morally right option and suddenly you've tanked a whole route because you didn't account for the hidden scoring system. I ran into a specific issue on my third playthrough where I hit what I thought was a hard lock on the good ending. I had maxed out the bully route affection by chapter three, but the game was forcing me into the bad ending anyway. The problem turned out to be that there's a separate hidden flag tied to how many times you confront the bully directly versus avoiding confrontation. If you never directly challenge them in dialogue, even with high affection, the game marks you as passive and routes you toward endings where nothing changes. I fixed it by going back and making the aggressive confrontation choice in chapter two instead of the diplomatic one I'd originally picked. That single swap unlocked the route I needed.

The save system is also worth noting. The game auto-saves at scene transitions, but it doesn't always save at choice points the way you'd expect. I've lost progress twice by assuming a save happened right after a long dialogue tree. Always manually save before any major branching moment. It takes three seconds and will save you from redoing ten minutes of scenes.

Route Breakdown and What the Numbers Actually Mean

There are four main endings and two minor ones. The happy ending requires hitting an affection threshold of 15 in the bully route AND completing at least one direct confrontation scene. The neutral ending happens when your affection sits between 8 and 14 — the game acknowledges feelings but doesn't resolve anything. The bad ending triggers if you never reach 5 affinity points, which is easier to do than you might think if you keep choosing the overly kind options. The secret ending requires max affection plus a specific item you only get by choosing to skip studying for a test in chapter four, which seems counterintuitive but is the only way to trigger the library encounter that starts it. Here's something most guides miss: the item you get from skipping the test also soft-locks you out of the neutral ending. You can't get both the secret and neutral routes in a single playthrough without a manual save from before that choice. Plan your saves around that trade-off. It's a deliberate design constraint, not a bug.

Common Pitfalls and Where the Game Falls Apart

The biggest issue I've seen people hit is the pacing in the middle chapters. Chapters three and four stretch the same dialogue set across multiple scenes with minor variations, which makes the game feel longer than it actually is. It's roughly a 45-minute to 90-minute experience depending on how many routes you clear, but the replay value is uneven because later chapters reuse background art and the same sprites with different expressions. If you're expecting high production value throughout, you'll be disappointed in the middle section. The romance route also has a weird quirk where choosing to defend the bully character in certain social scenarios actually lowers their affection if you've already chosen the confrontational path earlier. The game treats consistency as a separate trait from kindness, which is an interesting design choice but poorly communicated. You end up wondering why the character you've been building toward suddenly stops responding warmly to your interactions. It's not a bug — it's by design — but the game never explains that these two approaches are mutually exclusive in its internal logic. If you're looking to speed through this, I'd recommend a focused first playthrough targeting just the secret ending. It gives you the most complete picture of the story in one run and lets you see the alternate routes with full context. Going in blind and trying to maximize every route simultaneously just leads to confusion about what triggered what.