Developed by White Dew Games and published by Kikai Digital, Melancholy Love is a romance, Yuri Visual Novel that takes place in an all girl elite High School in Linghua.
Story:
Qianxun is the class monitor and student of the same class as Mianxue, who in contrary is isolated from the class because of her delinquent look. Qianxun is bound by her position as class monitor, and cant allow herself to stand out, but secretly has fallen in love with Mianxue.
To help vent her frustrations, Qianxun dresses down and sneaks out at night to skateboard through the local park. After accidentally meeting Mianxue in the park one night, Qianxun does not answer to her name when Mianxue called her, and instead decided to create a second identity for herself so that she could form a fresh relationship with Mianxue.
Thanks to this, new opportunities open up allowing Qianxun to develop her relationship with Mianxue, but in the process she is finding herself diving deeper and deeper into lies. At the same time, she is also aware of the demise that is awaiting Mianxue with her being involved in a bigger scheme and wanting to help her so she can stay in the all-girls elite high school.
Characters:
Mianxue: Cousin of the floriculture class teacher, but struggles to befriend others as her classmates reject her efforts to be their friend due to her delinquent appearance.
Qianxun: Class monitor from Mianxue's class who has a very influential family background that has become a burden restricting what she is allowed to do at school. At night, she lives a second life skateboarding at a park to vent off the pressure of her life circumstances.
Qiulin: A very shy little girl also in the floriculture class and friend of Qianxun. She helps both to understand themselves better but is still easily scared of both of their unique personalities.
Yuxi: Best friend of Mianxue and student in the musical art class. She helps Mianxue and listens to her stories in her on ways
Visuals/Audio:
Melancholic Love is well drawn with beautiful CGS. The characters are also nicely done and feature a few facial expressions, but the sprites do not move. It lacks a bit of variety in the outfits though, having only two, the school one and the casual one.
The game plays in both window or fullscreen, I personally played in fullscreen with a resolution of 1920x1080 which had a small black border on both sides to fit the desired resolution.
The visual novel is fully voiced in Mandarin (Chinese) with a calm piano music background accompanying us through the story. The vocals and background music were done well fitting the scenes and emotions fine.
There are a few achievements, but at first they did not seem to work. This eventually fixed itself as I continued to play through the game with previous achievements finally showing up correctly.
Routes:
We have only one route that has a few different endings with one true ending. The true (happy) ending requires the correct choices to be made throughout the novel in order to unlock.
Overall thoughts:
Melancholy Love proposes a rather dramatic romance, where two girls are confronted with feelings for each other, but are not sure how to express themselves in their earnest feelings. The environment is well presented, with an interesting storyline. The dialogue is mostly centered on the relationship which the four girls have during and outside of class, but there is an excessive amount of teasing, to the point you will only see a small bit of normal conversations. I would have liked to see more of the normal conversations and interactions to further explore the story and characters as well as to further show the evolution of their relationship.
In the end, we have a good base for a great romance novel, but it is missing content and events preventing the overall story from feeling complete. Romance fans will still enjoy this novel, even with some development issues that hopefully will be resolved in any future games by this developer.
Check out the game on Steam
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I really like the designs for their casual outfits! 😍