Tale of Two Cranes

If you are looking for political intrigues and longterm strategy and some spiritual mystery, this is the right text adventure for you. I had fun. Took about 10 hours. But first you have to get through the first chapter about the training in the academy which is awkardly cutted and apart from that just okay. After that the political stuff starts where the text adventure is at its most comfortable. There are still time jumps of several years as this text adventure spans over mulitple decade, but from here on they are more fitting to the flow of the story. The romantic subplots are as minimalistic as they can be. Feels like there are mainly there to give you the option of having an heir. But yay to the lgtb+ inclusivness, gender plays no role and same sex couples can adopt kids if they want. The writing itself is of average quality. The only thing that annoyed me, where the way to obvious describtions of your choices. You usually know exactly which ability to need to make an approach succeed, because it is written into it, e.g. "I'll convince them with my husbandry skills." or "My reputation within the court will help me to get him on my side." This tempted me to only skim the options for the keywords instead of actually reading them. I only did one playthrough so I can't evaluate the replay value, but I will update here once I am done with the second one.

j'ai bien aimer

Classic subversion of expectations with gender ideology. I wish I hadn't already spent 6 hours on it and could still ask for a refund.

Took me two years I guess to finally play it all the way through. Attention to chinese history? Myth? Culture? is nicely done; but otherwise this is pretty much close to trash. Narrative strands left untied, random charecters constantly introduced for no real reason or matter. Don't play is the best advice, though not as bad as many titles, this is low.

Immersive lore with interesting characters. Starts slow but picks up later on. Somewhat challenging due to stat checks, but with a variety for how to develop your character.

worth it

A long-going tale with plenty of decisions both big and small to make. While the jumping of years took a bit of getting used to the overall intrigue of the plot made up for it. There's also plenty of room for multiple go-throughs as there can be drastically different choices to make and experience.