the visual novel database

Report an issue on this page.

Review of Will: Meihao Shijie

SubjectWill: Meihao Shijie
ByHelpfulness: 2
Vote: 5
Ileca on 2020-04-06 last updated on 2022-06-03
ReviewDang, the game design was pretty bad.

It's way more a text adventure than a visual novel. If the goddess and her dog have tachie and a BCG, the meat of this game is to read sequences of text, almost nude, if a shadow tachie wasn't keeping us company. Occasionally, a CG appears for a couple of second and we are back to the very dry presentation.
The irony being that I created the characters in my head based on what I read, as anyone would do, and was always shocked to see how they looked like in the CG. I thought of this police officer as being around thirty, forty, classic hardboiled etched with lines by life type of face (I was watching Homicide at the time), and all I met were bishounen, all definitely wet behind the ears, super sexy BL-style men, who don't fit the tone of the story at all. It was hard to compute.

This presentation is understandable. There are too many characters to be able to draw tachie for everyone. The main characters don't meet each other enough to help populating the screen with their tachie. The writer knows what narration means and doesn't rely on dialogues at all. Think of a regular book and how you would adapt it as a visual novel. It would be like wanting to make a movie about dinosaurs and aliens, three different settings, with only a budget of 10k bucks. However, I have seen poorer doujin games and they could last for hours with only BCG (maybe a couple tachie) and though it looked empty, it wasn't *this* empty.


The gameplay consists of reading two+ unrelated stories, see a bad ending for both, have the part where everything goes wrong cut into sentences you can rearrange for you to try to find the best outcome. Philosophically, it means you have no free will as the gods can rearrange your life and attribute your actions to someone else and vice versa. It has limits but it's still very creepy when a typical choice in a VN is supposed to be an action performed by the character itself.
Anyway, it grows old fast as you have many endings to find for every sequences. I would say that the typical number of slices is 3-4 (thanks god) for two stories, meaning 19 possibilities by character for 3 slices, if I am not mistaken, as the order is important, and... too many for 4 slices. You start the game by trying to find meaningful orders based on the text and what the sentences are but move quickly to a try-every-damn-combination strategy. If you have not OCD, you will maybe be able to appreciate the game more as only S rank ending would matter to you and you would be able to drop the ending collection, but I have not not OCD and therefore wasted a lot of time on those sequences.
The thing is that they don't have much variation. Having to try all the combinations for little reward make the whole thing really irritating. I quickly switched to using a guide to tell you how much I didn't care. The worst being that they put a timer for you to be able to read the combination you activated when you unlocked a new ending, because they know that playing logical and thoughtful is not how people will play, and that they will need a little time to discover what was the winning combinations they found while swapping around slices. Not all the combinations and results are all making sense, anyway, just to add to the frustration. It's difficult to understand how an action can have a different outcome just by putting it before or after another action whose impact looks insignificant.

Sometimes, you think they are trying to incorporate new game mechanics but it brings nothing interesting and is rarely re-used through the game. Adding new slices, new spots where to put them or more characters is making the game exponentially difficult. That's why they try to enforce slices movements but it just make the game more stiff. In the end, you will be stuck most of the time with this arrangement.

This gameplay also forces the story to always hop from a bad event to the next bad event. It tends to become tedious and stale on the long run to constantly jump into tragedies, sometimes severe case of ridiculous bad shit happening for the sake of it, and wasting half your time unknotting the endings.
Remind me to never go to Hong Kong or mainland China because I didn't know they had this amount of murderers and rapists.


This VN follows the lives of three main groups of characters. I had a bad feeling right at the beginning and I was sad to be right about it.
You expect such a structure to make the characters meet each other, help each other, leading to a ending with fireworks and a grand feast, Astérix et Obélix style. That will not happen. The three stories are independent from each other, which doesn't make sense at all. It is such a wasted opportunity. I really don't understand why they did that.
Btw, my intuition came from the fact that each group is too far from each other: Hong Kong, mainland China and South Korea. It could have happened but it didn't. You could argue that one character links them all together but I would retort that I am talking about meaningful relationships when this character is such a poor addition. As if not enough bad shit wasn't happening, they really up their game with this one, finally turning it into a parody, a free agent who hops from one story to the other for the sake of saying that "everything is connected". Even Jimmy is wondering what is he doing here? Did they add him so they could technically connect Li Wen and Wen Zhaoren to the others... by proxy!?

Don't forget the gods who are supervising and justifying all of that with mastery, right? Well, let's say that when you don't forget about them, it's another case of a story completely unrelated that is transplanted in this wobbly ensemble with the same kind touch (the boxes being picked up by a psychopath is the best you can come up with? Couldn't you just throw yourself... in the ocean!???).

The stories in themselves are not bad. They are just at the level of Asian TV drama or keitai shousetsu (cellphone novels). It's completely stereotypical. You have the teacher-student romance. You have the naive immigrant who is looking for his sister and discover that life ain't easy in the big city (and the sister who is sold as a slave, fight for her life and is rescued by a powerful man who will turn her into a super badass hitwoman >.> (she kinda falls in love with the powerful gangster even though he is part of the whole system that kidnapped her in the first place >.> and is doing fucking creepy shit on a daily basis (the human sticks wtf!!!))). You have the rookie policeman who is all about JUSTICE and is hired by a team of super duper elite hot detectives led by a cynical man (with a BL subtext oc). I have seen that somewhere... like a thousand times. Like I said, it's not bad, it can be captivating if it's your thing (will Li Wen and Wen Zhaoren find love!!!???? Will Jimmy be able to netori Wen Zhaoren!!??). It is definitely just not mine.

Also, some miracles are happening, without the help of god, like I am Li Wen and I decide to go hiking to forget about my hot teacher (who doesn't go hiking after a romantic disappointment?), I get swept by a landslide (it happens) and who happens to save me on this god forsaken mountain? My hot teacher who happened to be here! Next story (literally): I am Wen Zhaoren, I am hiding my depressive self somewhere in Hong Kong. I got buried under my house because of a earthquake (it happens) and who happens to find me? My cute student! Why invest in a St. Bernard when you can do better with love alone? Everything for the sake of the drama.

I am sure a mobage would have been more relevant.

To return to the gameplay, you read two or more stories side by sides and I wonder if they thought it was enough to feel like the different timelines are connected somehow. It's one of the biggest reason why this game design sucks. The stories are unrelated and have their own flavor. They don't match each other. You don't want to read at the same time a letter about our boy Jimmy playing VR and another letter about a policeman being in a life and death situation. Even if the stories are pretty serious in tone most of the time, Li and Wen love story doesn't mingle at all with gangs, human trafficking or police business. It's pretty rare that they use their own system to do something meaningful like make you read letters from characters of the same group. And the fact that you have to swap the slices around and read countless endings of two water-and-oil stories adds to the confusion. They end up overlapping each other for no good reason.


In the end, it felt this game was the cheapest way to emulate a choice-rich VN with multiple timelines without understanding what was the point of having choices and timelines in the first place. They couldn't accept the fact that they were telling different stories and tried to build a system at the top that did a poor job. It was a failure at mimicking 428 in every aspect, to which it resembles a lot while being drastically different.
2 points
#1 by anonymous
2024-02-19 at 20:15
< report >NevermindLast modified on 2024-02-21 at 11:15
#2 by butterflygrrl
2024-02-19 at 20:39
< report >it's a comment about how stupidly over-the-top the bad outcomes are in this game, a woman can't cross the street without being tackled by rapists.
#3 by Ileca
2024-02-19 at 23:59
< report >Yeah, I make fun of the game, not the actual regions.
#4 by anonymous
2024-02-20 at 05:04
< report >@buttetflygrrl Are you talking to me? Sry my English isn't great, and I haven't played this game yet. I just feel offended by that sentence. If it's based on the game plot and is meant to be satirical, that's okay