Finished The Weeping Swan. A direct sequel to The Hungry Lamb and very infamous for controversy after it was released, leading to average score on Steam.
The story is about a famous massacre in a major Chinese city at the ending of the Ming Dynasty. We follow as a scholar that had a psychotic break after his childhood love died and has sunk into depression and alcoholism, forgetting most of his past. The story is split evenly between events immediately after the fall of the city and the massacre's start, and few years prior that lead to the lover's death.
The events in the present are done quite well, with the atrocities committed being shocking but still believable and having a logical ramping up rather than being evil for evil's sake. The past events are very interesting culturally and historically (for people without knowledge of Chinese history at least). But there is a bit too strong of a contrast between the two, leading to a very jarring change in tone between the depressing and immediate danger in the present and the laidback and optimism of the past. Maybe it was the point, but it just doesn't shift well. In the previous game there was also two plots, but those had similar tone overall.
The game is a lot more depressing than the previous game, with a lot of relatively okay bad endings (usually describing your immediate gruesome death for choosing wrong, but never having a bad ending route) with many normal endings that are more historical epilogues than character endings (which are the true endings). So pure writing wise I will recommend the game. I think some of the backlash is people expecting a conclusion that is more than bittersweet despite the fact that the game outright tells the player it will be dark.
Visuals and music are pretty good and do a job of setting a tone and having a large amount of character art. The translation is not bad but I had couple of times I stumbled into non translated text or placeholder text, but it never caused me to have an issue in understanding what's happening. Only the final ending for some reason was blank and it wasn't patched.
The controversy is usual Chink insanity. One of the main characters (but not the main character's childhood love) is a prostitute and Chinese are angry about that fact as if it constitutes NTR despite the main character never looking at her at a romantic light or the player seeing her sell her body. I saw arguments the writing is very edgy with her, but it's pretty bullshit argument and I think it's just leftists trying to justify hating it without calling NTR.
The other argument about the novel is that it doesn't portray events in a good way, but it's also ridiculous standards of wanting one side to be completely noble and pure rather than the game's reality that no side was completely innocent. Or that the main character meeting a lot of important historical figures, but that's just the usual trope of historic fiction.
Overall I recommend, but you really need to play the previous game to get the full enjoyment as there are many characters that come back.
