What do you think about Chinese VN?

[BaaldFraudSam]

Personally, I have never played them before but there seems to be some Chinese VNs which is crazy popular for VN standard on Steam like Tricolour Lovestory, Gaokao love 100 days, or Our End of The World. The thing is they all have shit reviews on VNDB (below 6) so I'm not sure those games are worth playing at all.

What do you think makes these games so popular even though they are not exactly high quality work judging by VNDB standards?

Edited July 23, 2019 by BaaldFraudSam

[Yuuko]

They are good

[Plk_Lesiak]

The shitty VNDB scores on most Chinese VNs have relatively little to do with their quality and much more to do with the way they were localized. Tricolour Lovestory was released by SakuraGame, known for their throwaway, machine-translated Western releases. That game at least had some editing and is borderline-readable now, but just barely and most of their titles, like the first Fox Hime, are pure gibberish. And even Chinese VNs that weren't machine translated, like Goakao or The Innocent LunA, had major issues with the quality of their English text. A few games picked up by major publishers, particularly Sekai Project, escaped that fate, but bad English releases are still much more common than not, pretty much blocking Chinese VNs from having a proper reception in the West.

Other than that, it's my impression that for the indie titles they are, Chinese VNs are often quite impressive and polished visually, but struggle more in the storytelling department. They could still offer a lot to the Western audience though, if they were handled by respectable localisation companies – I mean, people can say all kinds of shit about Sekai, but those Chinese publishers pushing MTL crap all over Steam make them look like saints. Not sure if that will ever happen, as the scam SakuraGame and similar companies run is profitable (by making no real effort in localizing their games they can sell them dirt-cheap, and on Steam good-looking, cheap games will usually sell a lot of copies), but you can always dream...

Edited July 23, 2019 by Plk_Lesiak

[Dreamysyu]

So far I only played one Chinese VN. I'll quote myself from "What are you playing?" thread.

On 6/24/2019 at 7:13 PM, Dreamysyu said:

So, after finishing another 100 hour long behemoth recently, I decided to play several shorter and less well-known VNs.

 Cryste: the Faith of Fire Volume 1 is a Chinese VN that I've seen in recommendations on Fuwa some time ago, and it looked like something that I could enjoy so I decided to play it. The basic premise is that some random hikikomori guy gets isekaied into the body of a silver-haired loli princess, but the whole gender bender doesn't really matter that much in the end because The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body . Overall, this feels like a lot more typical story for a gender bender light novel (just why is it always silver haired lolis, I wonder?) rather than a visual novel, so I wasn't really surprised when I learned that it actually is an adaptation of a Chinese light novel.

Overall, it's a bit hard to talk about this VN since it's supposed to be only the beginning of the story. The first 80% of the plot mostly consists of just character introduction and some basic world building. There isn't really much "plot" in this part at all, and, while predictable, but still works pretty well as an enjoyable light read. The characters are more or less generic, but I wouldn't call them bad or boring. Overall, their motivations make sense if you stop to think about it, and it didn't feel like they were there simply to push the story forward like in many works like that. I'm really interested to see how they will interact and develop in the future. What I didn't like, however, is the story structure and the general writing quality. Many scenes that would be pretty important for the characterization were skipped, and, though it's technically not very difficult to guess why the characters acted the way they did, it still felt like something was missing. There also appear to be some factual mistakes, and I'm not sure if they were made during the translation or existed in the original work.

However, in the last 20% the story makes a complete U-turn, and it actually did manage to surprise me. Definitely didn't expect the plot to go this way, even though the hints were there, and I feel very excited to see what happens next. Unfortunately, the novel ends right at the most interesting moment, and we are forced to wait for the next volume for the continuation. And here we come to the worst part - this VN is unfinished. While it has "Volume 1" in the title, I don't really expect the continuation to ever come out. It's been two years after the release, and it doesn't look like there is any news about the next volume. And even if it does come out eventually, the original light novel is pretty massive, so I doubt that we will ever see it fully adapted into the VN format. And the novel isn't translated (I hoped that there could be a fan-translation available somewhere on the Internet, but no, doesn't look like it), so there's no way to experience the full story if you don't speak Chinese.

Still, it wasn't a bad experience. The first 80% of the story mostly work on their own even without the continuation. I definitely enjoyed it overall, and I will play the next volume if it ever comes out. And also, the production values are surprisingly good for an amateur work. Both art and music are quite pretty, and it's fully voiced. Overall, if you're okay with reading an incomplete work and feel like you might enjoy it, I recommend giving it a try (it's quite short anyway).

I'm giving it 6/10 for now. I'll most likely raise it the the sequel ever comes out.

PS. And now I realized how many Japanese loan words are Chinese in origin.

Also played God's One Day World  for a few minutes, but I didn't really like it, so I dropped it right after that. 

[littleshogun]

For sure it's not Japanese VNs.

My serious answer is that they've been less known compared to Japanese VN, and in regard of VNDB score I would say that you better ignore that and just read the VN by yourself to find out whether the Chinese VNs in question is good or not. As for the reason on why it's less known, I guess it's more like that the user would prefer familiar VN out there and by familiar VN I mean Japanese VN, while for Chinese VN it's still relatively new. I'm still not reading Chinese VN yet, but I guess there's some hidden potential in those kind of VNs.