Qie Ting Qin Yu (且听琴语) is a game that Steam’s front page recommended to me while I was in a mood, telling me it was only 6 yuan. Not that I haven’t seen my share of 6-yuan Chinese-made visual novels. I just never had much interest, because with a lot of them you can tell the route they’re taking at a glance, or you can tell they’re ripping off some Japanese game. I personally have high hopes for Chinese visual novels. It’s just that most of them fundamentally struggle to give off the impression that “we’re seriously making this,” and instead seem to be thinking of nothing more than making a quick buck, stirring up some buzz, and cashing in big. That’s all. So Qie Ting Qin Yu still felt a bit fresh to me. First, the art style was decent. Second, the setting and the CVs. Never mind the art—the CVs really surprised me. A Chinese-made game, yet almost all the characters are Japanese by setting, and the CVs are genuine Japanese people too. A lot of people probably find it weird for Chinese developers to make a game with a Japanese setting and hire Japanese voice actors. I personally don’t. Look at Japan—they’ve had Germans and French people speaking Japanese for years, and I haven’t seen anyone in Europe protesting, right? Everyone’s still shouting “banzai” at Nordic big-breasted armored knights. Besides, Chinese-made games with a Japanese flavor have actually been pretty good these past few years; some have even been exported back to Japan. Haven’t you seen how many Japanese otaku have learned to say “thanks, eggplant” while yelling “shoot it”? So as long as the game is good, I think either a Japanese or Chinese setting is acceptable. Plus the art looked decent, the CVs were bound to be better than the cringe-inducing domestic chatter level, and the music seemed to have Japanese outside help too. Even if the scenario was only at the level of a Guo Jingming, I figured it’d still be the peak of Chinese-made stuff… Of course, after playing the game, I felt… I was still too naive.