"Only You" follows Yun Xinyao & Jiang Xiyue, two opposite personalities who both attend the same elite academy, Moxiangshan. Yun falls for Jiang at first sight, and over time those feelings twist and grow into something obsessive & ugly. As Yun finds out about the behind the scene bullying that targets Jiang, she becomes willing to do anything to protect or save her from the situation, no matter the cost.
I want to preface this by saying I didn't particularly enjoy this visual novel until it got to the last perspective. For me personally, it kind of dragged, especially through the middle with Lins perspective, but the last half recontextualized everything for me and honestly made me do a complete 180 on the game.
There's a lot of good here. The art is eye candy (especially the CG's), good story, the character writing is quite frankly amazing in my eyes, with pretty realistic motivations and reasons for why things happen. I can't really fault any of the characters for what they do (though I did find Yun became obsessed a bit too quick; that's a personal take though), and the soundtrack, while I think being copyright free, was beautiful. The game kind of has a Psychological or Drama Thriller vibe with the whole "I'll stop this bullying of my love no matter the cost" plot, but what really saved the game for me was the 'twist'. The 'twist' actually had me laughing and clapping my hands going "THIS IS ACTUALLY INSANE WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥!" (slightly paraphrased). The art added to this too, with a lot of things changing once it happened (IYKYK). Suffice to say I didn't see it coming, and seeing the multiple perspectives of the different characters really saved the what I thought to be somewhat dragged & overdone yandere plot.
Now that my praise is out of the way there are a few grievances I have with the game. First off, and this is my most major issue - the english TL is honestly chopped. There were a lot of parts were the prose didn't make sense at all, or where I had to infer what was going on in the scene because the text didn't quite make sense to me, but I can't fault the studio behind that because they're indie devs, so in the end I'm just glad I was able to experience this. There were also some bugs with Renpy, with code or command lines showing up in the dialogue box, but it didn't take me out of immersion too much. For the plot/story, I'd say the only issues I have were Yun becoming obsessed to quick (which I already mentioned), along with Yuns perspective dragging towards the mid point, and the final perspective dragging out somewhat. To me it felt like the pacing was moving too slow during these segments, but again, just my personal opinion. As for the art, there were some minor perspective issues in the CG's, but I could honestly care less and I'm just nitpicking at this point; the rendering really really makes up for it. Finally for the voice acting, the voice acting was really good, but you could tell the mics they were using werent of the best quality, especially when Yun raises her voice at times, it kind of peaks and distorts; again, just a minor nitpick, doesn't take away from the experience for me at all, just wanted to point it out.
So would I reco this game? HELL YES. If you like Yanderes, Toxic Yuri, realistic characters, and big twists, cop this ASAP. It's about 15 hours I'd say? Which is pretty short for a VN. If you can bare the chopped english translation, I'd say this is well worth your time even at full price. Also it ends in a title drop, which makes it absolute cinema in my eyes. 10/10, probably the best indie VN I've played in recent times. I genuinely can't reco this enough its seriously so good.
