Once` Review

There’s a phenomenon in the Chinese hip-hop scene: some rappers copy a foreign artist’s style, flow, cadence, even melodies and beats and vocal delivery, wholesale. All they do is sing in Chinese. People used to call them “localization tailors”; these days there’s a more precise term — “clones.”

The word is blunt and easy to get. It describes exactly what’s happening: full-on imitation of someone else, to the point of copying and cloning. If the language were the same you’d just call it plagiarism. But it’s not quite plagiarism — it’s arguably worse than plagiarism. Most clones copy only the flashy surface, never the substance. The result is clumsy and ridiculous and doesn’t bring anything new, whereas plagiarism at least lets you appreciate the original by proxy.

This isn’t limited to hip-hop. Every scene has them. Even the visual novel scene — a sunset industry that’s been pronounced dead for years — has its clones, especially in the “Chinese-made” corner we’re all familiar with. Honestly, most Chinese visual novels are clones. The story is set in Chinese daily life, but nothing about it feels Chinese; the phrasing and every joke come straight from Japan. This is the “can’t talk like a normal person” anime-speak I’ve been complaining about for years. It’s deeply infected most Chinese gacha games too, making a whole bunch of Chinese voice actors sound painfully awkward, and then everyone blames the VAs’ skills and “mother tongue shame,” plus the purified fanbase that forms once these VAs get idolized and turned into streamers, all rushing to defend them. Peak postmodern structural carnival.

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. A few days ago I played a “Chinese-made visual novel” on Steam called Once`. This bizarre game really made me think of the whole “clone” concept, and the author himself qualifies for the clone label just fine.

First, the game. Once` has a pretty simple story — some school stuff, some vaguely depressive mood descriptions and a love triangle. It’s short and you can finish it quickly. The problem is the storytelling is genuinely abstract. It learned the “Japanese people are subtle” thing way too well. The dialogue is stuffed with meaningless lines, and the core narrative beats trail off before they say anything. If you don’t read closely and re-read, you can’t really tell what’s going on.

Throughout the game you can clearly feel a suffocating, quiet sense of pain, which actually pairs decently with the story. The funny part is this isn’t because the atmosphere is well-crafted — it’s because the production is so crude. All the CGs look cheap, and direction is cut to the bone, to the point where there’s basically none. The music has zero presence. The author even proudly says Once` has “no traditional sprite-based dialogue style” — so the whole game is a picture-book PowerPoint? The backlog doesn’t support jumping around. I honestly think a PowerPoint would be more flexible.

At this point you might assume the team just had no budget and had to cut corners on presentation. But if you search for Once` online, you find news everywhere about their successful crowdfunding and the large (actually not that large) sum they raised, with all the attitude of a lavish, premium production.

So dig deeper: this game was supposedly built with big money, so why did it turn out like this? Turns out someone online leaked that the crowdfunding people took the money and ran, and not that much actually went into the game — hence the result. The drama around this game is way too long, and nobody’s summarized the core of it; it’s just random chat logs pasted everywhere, as unable to speak plainly as the game itself, so I couldn’t be bothered to keep reading.

Back to the game. Beyond the anime-speak, it gave me a strangely familiar feeling I couldn’t place. I got curious and looked up who wrote and produced it, and what I found made my jaw drop…

And seeing all the Key references in there, I understood why the game felt familiar — the characters’ school uniforms are a bit too much of a “tribute” to Little Busters!.

Still, I’m happy. Our visual novel scene finally has its own “clone” culture.