Golden Lining by GarySavage

 

Fan cover made by Clavietika

Despite her lack of content in the main game, Jane, the gender-bent version of John has gained a certain popularity in the Student Transfer community ad the predetermined choice for MTF storylines thanks to John's protagonism in the game and the inclusion of Jane's Tina Koya uniform sprite since v4, which makes her a great choice to use without using side characters or additional sprites that might not fit in the main game.

Golden Lining chooses Jane as the protagonist but changes the sprite for a similar-looking girl to add the possibility of use CGs from her source game since the original Jane's CGs are forbidden for use in scenarios to avoid spoilers. Another advantage of Jane is the number of similar sprites to her coming from the same artist working in the same GIGA visual novel series, allowing the writer to pick another "Jane" in this case without making the choice look too out of place.

Story-wise, Golden Lining shows an alternate timeline where John does not get his heirloom's spellbook but is instead gender-bent due to the side effect of the magic energy contained on a doll after accidentally getting seen as a witch hunter by Lin, a paranoic Witch of the Chinese tradition.

John wakes up as a woman the next day and escapes out of nervousness, he meets Lin, but she doesn't know to revert John back, but since John has now the magic power of the Chinese tradition thanks to the energy absorbed by the doll, she promises him to teach her magic, the issue? Lin's magic is not as powerful as Blackwell's magic, and even then, it requires practice.

As the case is with Spitting Image, this set up is pretty great by the fact that avoids a lot of the escalation issues presented in the main game like characters not using certain spells or commands when they can to out of pure principle or simply because they do not think about doing so, John's magic is not anymore godlike and omnipotent, but something that needs to be worked on and that will not give John everything that he wants, allowing the reader to enjoy the story without recurring too much to the suspension of disbelief.

Golden Lining is in summary a 2-hour introduction of a story yet to be made, but even then doesn't suffer from any slow pacing issues, all this time is used to introduce the new characters like Lin and her friend Edward, as well as the place they come from, the Chinese restaurant Red Lotus, John's doll incident happens actually quite fast and afterward the scenario focuses in his arrival home and transformation in the morning, a great scene that shows going from confusion, to shock, and panic allowing the reader to feel and experience all those emotions in almost real-time; a perfect example of how to do a TF sequence and a character's reaction to an abrupt change and contrasts with a lot of rushed out sequences in TF material.

In general, Golden Lining is part of the new generation of scenarios that provide amazing and more natural pacing to the story compared to previous rushed v3 content, all scenes are given their own space, their own dialogue, and we get to meet and understand all the characters.

There are some scenes that Gary said are set up for future plot points, everything that happens in the scenario happens for a specific reason, there are no scenes wasted in the whole 2 hours; even then, readers might get confused since a lot of the reasons things happen are not answered in the state the scenario is now.

Besides all the ideas Golden Lining brings to the table story-wise, it also introduces a lot of graphic elements to make the visual format less stale, starting from Jane's CGs, there are also a lot of edited backgrounds, animations, phone menus, transitions, and visual clues to show character's feelings more properly.

Golden Lining is currently on hiatus and therefore not because of its quality, but because it finishes too soon (in terms of the general plot) it might not deserve a spot yet as a Student Transfer Classic but is still recommended as it is to anybody who enjoys MTF content, it is hoped the project gets continued one day.