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otome_gamesI really enjoyed the Chinese fantasy m/f romance visual novel My Vow To My Liege, historical RPF set in the 5th Century BC Kingdom of Ng/Wu about various real and mythical people. The protagonist is King Fuchai, a woman cross-dressing for Reasons (to do with Evil Dragons)
It's well made, with good art, UI, music, and (Mandarin) voice acting. The writing is pretty good, too, a little repetitive in parts and with some pacing issues but made with a lot of heart. The English translation was done by one of the writers and is a little clunky and in need of proof-reading but has some moments of real poetry. And the game is LONG, you get a ridiculous amount of story for the low price.
Content notes for the game: suicide, violence, incest (not a love interest), rape (not from a love interest), age gap ships, slavery, fatphobia, hurtful gender reveal, master-slave relationship, major character death, violence between love interests
Here's the masterlist of my reaction posts and a character guide.
(More thoughts at my blog, no spoilers)
It's well made, with good art, UI, music, and (Mandarin) voice acting. The writing is pretty good, too, a little repetitive in parts and with some pacing issues but made with a lot of heart. The English translation was done by one of the writers and is a little clunky and in need of proof-reading but has some moments of real poetry. And the game is LONG, you get a ridiculous amount of story for the low price.
Content notes for the game: suicide, violence, incest (not a love interest), rape (not from a love interest), age gap ships, slavery, fatphobia, hurtful gender reveal, master-slave relationship, major character death, violence between love interests
Here's the masterlist of my reaction posts and a character guide.
(More thoughts at my blog, no spoilers)
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Date: 2022-01-11 13:54 (UTC)This seems interesting!! I'm trying to consume more media in Mandarin (it's my mom's native language, but I'm super bad at it) so I had actually been wanting to find a good Mandarin VN (self paced, has voice acting, can also have the translation) for a while. Thanks for this post! :D
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Date: 2022-01-11 14:02 (UTC)Oh, excellent! I hope you enjoy it!
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Date: 2022-01-17 14:32 (UTC)The other otome game by these devs, Lost in Secular Love, is also voiced with an English translation, and there's a "play back the audio for previous lines" function. It's a more lighthearted and lower-stakes game (though some endings get quite psychologically dark), and I really enjoyed it overall--the heroine is absolutely great, the love interests are really interesting takes on their archetypes (and voiced by the VAs for Chenfeng, Goujian, and Wu Zixu), and I loved all the old lady side characters. Warning that the sex scenes aren't the best about consent, though.
Other than that...some Chinese mobile games like Tears of Themis allow you to combine English subtitles with Chinese audio, although I haven't played them myself. (A lot of them have Japanese audio as an option and sometimes the only option, interestingly, and Tears of Themis in particular has a ridiculously all-star Japanese VA cast, because Chinese voice acting has a poor reputation, and even a lot of Chinese players prefer Japanese VAs.) And Soulslayer is more of a mystery game than an otome game, but it does have full voice acting (the MC is voiced by Shaojiang's VA!) and an English localization. The art isn't the best, but the story was more than worth the while, and the devs of that game have also made a wuxia otome game that I hope gets localized someday.
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Date: 2022-01-18 02:57 (UTC)I just checked out Lost in Secular Love and laughed at the hair switch option!! It's on sale for the next ten days, so chances are I'll buy it while it's still on sale :D Thank you to you and your friend for the information!!
That's too bad re: the prevalence of Japanese only audio, although I guess I get it. I remember watching some Chinese dubbed anime growing up, and it was soooo bad. But I also watched a lot of Chinese-original cartoons and stuff that didn't have the same issue. I feel like maybe it's just a different style of acting, and one that worked well with Chinese media at the time, and not Japanese media. I've also noticed that with American stuff... the same style of acting sounds great with Spongebob, and totally unbearable with anime.
But I've been watching some more Chinese anime-style stuff recently, and I feel like it's much more listenable than before. I'm not really sure how it all works, but hopefully the voice-acting industry is more robust in China/Taiwan now! What I listened to for those games seemed very promising :D The only issue for me now is the cognitive dissonance I think (since I usually only hear my mom speaking Mandarin... and now it's my sexy brooding love interests... going to take some getting used to LMAO)
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Date: 2022-01-19 14:40 (UTC)Yeah, I'm pretty new to watching much Chinese language media but the recent animation and games I've encountered have all had good voice acting, to the extent that I can tell as someone whose knowledge of Mandarin ends at, like, being able to count to three very badly.
Can't help with the associations with your mum, haha, but hopefully the cute boys will help you move past it :)
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Date: 2022-01-13 18:38 (UTC)Going to get it. Do you have a recommended route order or suggested routes?
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Date: 2022-01-15 14:26 (UTC)OOH SO IS THE OTHER GAME THAT COMPANY MADE ABOUT SEXY MONKS :D buys
Uh, anyway. There's no obvious natural order to play them in, except for maybe putting GouJian first. My feelings on the routes, in the order I played them:
Content note: rape
GouJian: kinda messed up enemies to lovers that some people love and others hate, I quite liked it. I'm glad I played this first because he is an ABSOLUTE ASS on some other routes which would have made it less fun. But maybe you want to know the full range of his character first, your choice!
YiGuang: Chill childhood friend. I like him as a character and they were convincingly happy together but it wasn't my sort of romance. I still enjoyed it as part of the story.
Wu ZiXu: Most people's fave afaict. Hot subby father figure. I liked this a lot. I didn't like him that much in the common route but he grew on me after playing the previous two routes.
ChenFeng: Intensely protective childhood friend/servant. He's not sexually creepy himself but this route had multiple scenes where FuChai has (short, vague) flashbacks to being raped by someone else, which triggered me and cast a pall over the whole route(), so it's hard for me to judge what it's like for someone who *isn't triggered by that sort of thing (if you are then maybe skip it unless you're feeling competionist). I have yet to see anyone say they especially liked this route, but afaict most people just didn't click with it and think they're a cute enough couple.
()The Wu ZiXu route *also has her having a flashback to the same rape, but it didn't bother me because brains are weird.
Also I liked doing all the bad ends, there's one per route.
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Date: 2022-01-15 18:51 (UTC)GuoJian is definitely the one that appeals to me the most, given enemies to lovers (messed up is often a bonus for me :D), but on the other hand that may mean I should save him for last. With Psychedelica I definitely regretted playing...well, you can guess...early, because it made it a little harder to satisfyingly hate him in the future routes. I missed out!
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Date: 2022-01-15 19:28 (UTC)Haha ok if you want to enjoy hating GouJian BEFORE his route then yeah put him off until at least second. Rating the routes by my level of GOUJIAN YOU ASS it was like Wu ZiXu > ChenFeng > YiGuang but even in the YiGuang route I was going "Wow I am glad I didn't see this BEFORE romancing him".
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Date: 2022-01-15 19:32 (UTC)