Toumei no Kanojo to Shinjitsu no Watashi (透明的她与真实的我) Review

I’d been keeping an eye on this one for a while but never bought it, and the reason was that whole abstract Chinese crowdfunding mess from before. You open Modian’s front page and more than half of it is various “heart-stopping Chinese visual novel masterpieces” in vigorous development — who knows if you can actually finish yours, maybe you’ve already run off with the money?

Then I saw the game had launched, and it even went on discount for the winter sale, so I figured I’d buy it and give it a spin. It’s way longer than I expected, and after finishing it I have to sigh — as expected of a team that went to Japan to study, it’s better than traditional Chinese galgames in basically every respect, and in a lot of places it’s genuinely excellent. At the very least it does things “right.” I’ll break this down into a few points, and since spoiling this game would kill half the fun, I’ll try to keep things spoiler-free:

First, the memeing is measured. Most of the references land exactly where they should; the density isn’t low, but it never gets to the “so many memes it’s annoying” level, and it’s nothing like that one game stuffed with the scenario writer’s preachy flexing about “I’ve lived longer than you and know more old memes than you.” It’s relaxing and fun to play.

Second, the game adds a lot of well-placed dynamic effects — not the kind where heads are wobbling the whole time, but movement when movement is called for, and it looks great. Then there’s the performance optimization, which is excellent. If you’ve played any of those Unity games, Japanese or Chinese, with optimization that’s a pile of crap, you know what I’m talking about.

Third, the game recreates a lot of “famous scenes.” Plenty of them give off the vibe of being the dumpling made just to justify the vinegar, but… it’s fine, I guess. At least a lot of those famous scenes are ones I think you’d only get if you’ve played enough visual novels.

Music’s good, the flavor is right — though that’s because it was actually made in Japan. The voice acting is also strong; partly it’s the cast’s own ability, and partly most of the dialogue is fairly normal, so the performance doesn’t feel off.

The systems are even better. I’ve long thought visual novels should have more options like these — choices that don’t affect the plot’s direction but make the characters react differently — plus a bit of a countdown timer here and there to make the game feel interactive. Chinese gacha games do this well; I don’t know why visual novels just refuse to learn it, insisting instead on this paranoid idea that every choice must affect the route. This game did what I wanted, and I want to praise it loudly for that.

The framework of the story is genuinely novel — if you put this framework in a Japanese visual novel, the old guard in the galgame scene would smugly praise it all the way to a 90 on ErogameScape. Japan has similar setups, but those all go the dark yandere route, while this one is sunny, with more emotional sulking. Sure, I figure it’s some kind of compromise, but the result is good.

Now for the parts I’m not happy with:

The mid-to-late game is way too fucking long. It drags and drags. The meta elements in the latter half are something you can already guess when the second playthrough locks your saves, but the story never explicitly says it — it just keeps you dangling. And the romance writing, honestly, isn’t great either. At minimum a story should have twists and turns, but the prose has way too much room for improvement — put simply, it’s not good to read, not exciting. It adds a bit of dark Mary Sue drama, but without any clear, tense sense of fighting the villain, so it’s pretty boring. The meta foreshadowing that should be revealed isn’t revealed, and that’s painful. I noticed the marketing heavily pushed that this is “long-form” — probably afraid players would complain it’s short. I think what matters isn’t length, but whether the story is compelling and fun to read. Even some jokes, little skits, some shitposting, a few minigames — any of that might have eased the boredom of the mid-to-late game.

Anyway, I think on framework and big-picture direction this is a very good game, and a rare “Japanese-leaning Chinese galgame on the right path.” A lot of it is genuinely excellent. But the flaws are just as obvious: set aside the excellent story framework, and the prose at the detail level is just bad. As a romance story or a narrative, it reads as unappealing, boring, and padded. It’s a game whose plot is entirely propped up by “big reveals” and “the setting,” rather than by the heroine or the romance itself. That said, overcoming this weakness isn’t especially hard — find someone with good prose who’s good at narrative writing to help, and it could be fixed quickly. I hope the team keeps at it.