(Note: Screenshots from Steam page)

I have gotten bingo on my second backlog bingo board (A bingo board of games in my backlog I cross out if I complete the game), and the game that did it was 千面 Melancholy Love. Honestly, I thought this would be one of the last games on the board I’d finish because my goal was to read it in Simplified Chinese, but I guess I had the motivation to push through it. This post will be about half me talking about the game and half talking about my language learning process with it. Let’s start with talking about the game.

千面 Melancholy Love is the second game in the Linghua Yuri Series, a series of baihe(Chinese term for yuri) games that take place in the Linghua Girls’ Academy. I didn’t realize it was the second until partway through, but it doesn’t matter much. There’s definitely threads from the first game here, but it’s not difficult to understand what happened in it, along with it being more the B-plot here.



The game is about Qianxun and Mianxue, an elite student and delinquent who are constantly at odds. Or are they? As the game progresses they constantly butt heads, growing closer in the process. It’s pretty standard yuri fare. They are frequently renegotiating their position in the school hierarchy, whether it’s analyzing how they got into these positions, feeling restricted or envious towards the other, trying and failing/succeeding to change it, or outlets to escape it. Along with that there’s misunderstandings, false identities, school power plays, internalized homophobia, and more.

Despite the well-trodden structure, it’s overall a solid yuri story. I liked all the characters and it handles its themes well. Sometimes the fundamentals are enough. It’s relatively short, about 5-8 hours(as you’ll see later it took me much longer), so it’s pretty straight to the point, the story only gets a few breathing spots here and there to just let the characters hang out which I would’ve appreciated a bit more of.



There’s 3 endings: 2 bad ends and 1 true end. I got 1 bad end and 1 true end. I would’ve tried for the third if the game engine was a little better. The fast forward was nowhere near fast enough, with some music and segment transitions being unskippable. Getting the true ending took 20-30 minutes of fast forwarding through the entire game again to make the necessary choices. There were also some issues with the voice acting taking a while to trigger or even desyncing in the unskippable segments.



Aside from those technical hurdles, I enjoyed my time with 千面 Melancholy Love. I’ll eventually go back to play the first game, 寄甡 Symbiotic Love, along with the rest of the series. There’s 5 games overall, but only the first two have English translations. Hopefully the other 3 games get translated, but considering those translations were over 3 years ago, I’m not hopeful, but who knows?

Now time for the language learning part of this post! This is the third game I’ve played the entire way through in Simplified Chinese, the first being The Legend of Sword and Fairy, and the second being The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~. The way I played this game for about the first 20% was I would read about 1-3 text boxes, add every new word I came across to my anki flashcard deck using the pleco app, then look up the English translation of the game to check how much I understood. This isn't perfect, translations aren't always 1-to-1, sentences are rearranged, placed in more text boxes since English takes up more space, etc, but it's good enough. I was right about ~50% of the time, and I noticed my main issue was grammar. Particularly that while I had little problem with sentences that have a few grammatical elements, but when there's a lot, I struggled.

That's when I started referring to Routledge's Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide while playing. The chapter on phrase order immediately shot up my accuracy since it showed me how to break down sentences into their constituent pieces. From there I would look up things I didn't understand as they came up and it significantly increased my understanding. For the next 60% I would only look up the English translation if I still couldn't figure out a sentence after looking in the book.

The final 20% I fell off looking up stuff and would just try to read as fast as I could then check the English translation. I could've kept with the previous strategy, but I saw the finish line and really wanted to read faster to see what was going to happen next lol I obviously had the worst accuracy in this part.

It took me ~25-35 hours to play through this with 1413 new words added to my anki deck, the highest amount I've gotten from anything I've read/watched/played/etc in Simplified Chinese. Understandable considering it's a visual novel with some literary language that I didn't get to fully appreciate. It's gonna be a while before I've actually studied all the cards, so I might hold off a bit before starting another game in Simplified Chinese. I got a long list of them I want to play!