Love Begins with Goodbye Review

You rent a house with three women. Luo Xue’er is a Chinese student, just like you. Enola is a Norwegian learning Chinese. And Leah is your Norwegian land lady who acts strangely. The setting of Norway is a fresh change from most other dating sims. The game has some pleasnt forest views and a picturesque panorama overlooking the town. But Norway is still a little underrepresented, and the game needed more outside scenes and cultural references.

The game also has a rigid structure that feels too artificial. You are constantly prompted to choose to join one of the three women. There are not many group scenes, and no chance to get to know them unless you choose to be with them, at the cost of others. So rather than trying to see who is compatible, it is almost like the game wants you to stick with one. But doing this also exposes continuity issues, since the story acts like you’ve done tasks with others. In addition, the game has overly negative choices (e.g. telling someone their tour was garbage), rather than more neutral options or sarcastic responses. These bad choices make full exploration of the timeline slightly unpleasant.

Fortunately the romance arcs are very good, and they make it easy to forget some of the above issues. Each character has a full narrative arc and a little bit of back story to uncover. There are a couple of different endings, and it is not hard to access them. Luo Xue’er has one alternate good ending that is quite the emotional rollercoaster and nicely linked with her origin story.

There is a fourth romance option, Yu Yingluo, your childhood friend who remains in China while you’re messing about in Norway. Unfortunately she only appears in the first and last chapters, and in the latter you go on three short dates with her. The rest of her romance occurs via text messages. Despite her limited appearance, she is fantastic and her happy ending is also very strong. It is a pity we did not see more because the friendship banter is also on point.

First run through the game will take around 2 hours, and about 7 to see everything. The video quality is quite nice, although some of the acting is a little stilted. Audio is especially good because it’s all live recorded. Two characters speak English, and even Xue’er occasionally does too. English subtitles seemed above average and matched the speech. So this might be the first time where a mix of languages actually works. Given how much work went into the romance arcs and what we get based on a (presumably) comparatively smaller budget, hopefully the production team can fly again.