(Spoilers below) This game gave a whole new meaning to the word bittersweet in the best way possible 100% recommend
I started reading at eleven pm thinking I would check it out for a few minutes and stopped reading at 9:30 am the next morning after having ugly cried twice.
I was expecting a fun couple hour otome with time travel shenanigans and instead i got one of the most genuinely heartbreaking and beautiful VNs i've ever read ?? My god, this was so well done, so well paced, i can't believe how much this got to me. The progression of Vu Huyen and Mai's relationship was so sweet, so believable, I was so invested I felt like I experienced all the highs and lows right along with Mai.
The second we heard about the first princess to be betrayed I was like oh god he's gonna betray her so hard isn't he and then i just...forgot ? I was so wrapped up in the story that I assumed it was about the portrait thing. I guessed that Mai staying in the past was never an option, and in the end she would meet the "modern" version of him after a sad last day together. I was so sure I knew what the ending was going to be that the reveal was a huge gut punch, and I was genuinely stunned gobsmacked bamboozled. I heard once that a good plot twist isn't one you didn't see coming but one you *really* should have seen coming and this was just a masterpiece in that.
Oh Vu Huyen, I don't think I've ever been more conflicted about a character before. A huge theme of WMME is whether the joy of being with someone is worth the potential pain. I think the visceral discomfort of the ending is that we spend the whole game building up to their relationship, being convinced over and over again of it's sincerity and the betrayal makes you think it must all have been an act but eventually you come to the conclusion that people who love you can still hurt you and that sucks man 🙂
I love Mai and her character development; despite how heartbreaking the end was and how understandably conflicted she is (me too girl), their love and her time in the past was still a good thing in that it was a catalyst for her growing so much as a person, and learning to let others in. (I loved the progression of her friendship with Dao and Lan!). Anyway yeah, phew, gonna take a while to recover emotionally from this one. 10/10