Xuan Yuan Sword 7 - XBSX Review

Xuan Yuan Sword 7 by developers DOMO Studio, Softstar Entertainment Inc. and publisher EastAsiaSoft—Microsoft Xbox Series X review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

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While having been released on the PC late last year in 2020, Xuan Yuan Sword 7 has now made its way over to the consoles for both the PlayStation (4/5) and the Xbox (XB1/S/X). Set in a fictional ancient China with magic and monsters taking the form of beasts, clockwork machines and humans, our tale doesn’t take long before deviating from the standard notes that it starts on for a rather fun action adventure RPG.

Starting off on two very familiar notes, our protagonist Taishi Zhao (Zixu) has a childhood friend that you help out before heading back home to help your mother out with your baby sister. Attacked by a rival faction, your home is soon burnt to the ground as everyone you love is cut down as you run away with nothing more than the clothes on your back, a present that your friend gave you for your sister and your baby sister herself. Moving forward to his early adult years, Zixu is tackling odd jobs to make money to pay for his sister's medication as she's been sick since childhood and can’t really leave their mountain home.

Hitting the basic story notes would have made Xuan Yuan Sword 7 a par for the course story alongside a simple enough action adventure gameplay system. From this point though, the story takes a bit of a fantastical turn with a sprinkle of Fullmetal Alchemist soul binding to kick the adventure to its feet in several ways making you wonder what comes next. I really appreciated this as it doesn’t take long for our dependable older brother to find himself in a mess of sorts alongside his sister who’s now in an automata allowing her to truly move around and not feel sick but at the cost of her being able to feel anything.

The rest that follows is their adventure to get her real body back during the warring states period of ancient China. While technically an on rails story, you do get to see both current sides of the factions as you technically do favours for both as you move forward looking for what you need to bring your sister’s soul back into her body. There are plenty of villages and some towns that you’ll be going through either under military siege, monster siege, or siege of something worse, plagues. None of these places are really happy places to be but they help push the story along as while doing heroic deeds, our protagonist isn’t really the hero per say, they just inadvertently become one as they keep moving forward.

To do so, you’ll be running around this world, a lot. If there was perhaps one real complaint that I had with Xuan Yuan Sword 7 it’s that there’s technically no running ability. You can “run” but it’s normal paced and everything can be a bit far at times especially with the magical quick travel points spread out offering you instead campfires to rest and save your game in between. This can get a bit in the way of getting to what needs to be gotten to either for the main quest or for side quests as everything tends to be far enough from the quick travel points making you groan just a bit that you have to run all of that way for the third or fourth time for the same side quest.

From here you'll be running into a variety of enemies from normal humans to the more supernatural kinds. Combat, while never really getting complicated, is a mix of standard attacks and a heavy attack based off of the current set of talents that you have selected. Ox, wolf, bear and tiger are martial art forms that you can over time learn abilities to vary your attack patterns a bit but it's nothing ground or game breaking as it never goes more than skin deep which I found a bit disappointing as you get to see Zixu’s martial arts in cutscenes but never get to reach that depth.

While decent in the beginning as you learn the groundwork, combat even with the martial art moves that you can learn as a third attack type, it can start to feel a bit stale after a while as there’s nothing really new that is ever added short of some new enemy types. Even then, most enemies can be brought down with a good dodge or parry attack allowing you to easily turn the tables.

If I were to add a second major complaint to the overall experience it would be that two or three bosses were made rather unfair as even with a good hang of the combat system and upgraded gear, they can kill you so fast and with them being story related you’ll have to find a way to cheese them out even if that means taking five to ten minutes in which most of it is dodging around while your companions deal enough damage in between you using healing items.

Otherwise, Xuan Yuan Sword 7 can clock in anywhere between ten to twenty hours depending on how much or how little you want to do outside of the main story and how much of a gamerscore / platinum trophy you really want attached to your gamer tags. It’s not a hard title to go through and rake in the achievements as most of it is story based but there are a few that may need a bit more if you want to claim to have done them yourself.

Summary

So overall while Xuan Yuan Sword 7 doesn’t really do anything new mechanically, it’s still enough of a solidly built title especially if you’ve been needing a break from the open worlds that have been all the rage of late. With a duration of a dozen plus hours, the world looked great on the Series X and there’s enough bad dad jokes from Zixu to his sister to make you either laugh or groan while they explore the lands to get her real body back.

Score: 7.25 / 10

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Empire of Angels IV - XB1 Review

Empire of Angels IV by developer Softstar Entertainment and publisher EastAsiaSoft—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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I love the SRPG genre, so by default Empire of Angels IV was likely to hit something of a sweet spot with me. I enjoy tactics games with RPG progression elements, and if you throw in a fantasy setting and some appealing visual aesthetics, it’s not hard to convince me to give it a go. Empire of Angels IV provides all of those things, which is enough for me to enjoy it by and large, even if it doesn’t really do anything all that great to separate it from the rest of the genre.

The story is pretty typical fantasy fare, with warring factions, spreading darkness and characters wielding medieval weapons as they progress through the narrative. The localization is a bit rough in places, with peculiar word choices or stilted sentence structure that provide the gist of the plot, even if it can be a little awkward at times. Probably the most unique aspect of this setting is that all of the characters appear to be female. Certainly all of your characters in the party are.

As for the characters themselves, they tend to be pretty thinly crafted with more attention given to their job class than their actual characteristics. You see the usual mix of types – swordswoman with paladin-like healing, a polearm-wielding attacker who can strike two squares in front of her, an archer who can shoot at enemies from range but struggles in melee and so on. Characters gain experience and level up, and have the option of changing classes or upgrading to a higher tier class with better stats and abilities. Again, nothing revolutionary, but some of my favorite progression tactics to keep me playing like a carrot dangling from a stick.

The character art is generally quite good, with detailed portraits with good use of color. The characters look more vibrant than their actual personalities most of the time, though there are some cute if tropey moments that had me chuckling along the way. The majority of your time will be spent in combat, and this takes place in a traditional downward-ish view with a grid map. Characters become chunky chibi characters as they move around the maps and attack one another. Here the visuals are less impressive, but they get the job done. This was a game released on mobile, and it is anything but a technical powerhouse. There’s a very Akiba’s Beat / Trip -like gimmick at play where defeated characters (who again, are all women) wind up getting their clothes knocked off, putting them out there for the world to see in their chibi underwear. It’s a little odd, though I did laugh the first time due to the sheer absurdity of it all, since I don’t think there’s any real reason in the narrative for this to occur. I suspect it’s just mostly done for laughs.

Unfortunately other RPG elements are rather light. There’s no branching story, no weapons or armor to be acquired. The strength of the characters comes down to level, class and how you use them. It is not a bad premise in and of itself, but it doesn’t provide tons of depth either. It’s all executed well, with options to defend, attack and break out a variety of special moves. Similar to older SRPG games such as Shining Force, area attacks rule supreme. Clusters of enemies are begging to get hit with a multi-square arrow attack. Plan accordingly though, because they can do the same right back to you. Not that Empire of Angels IV is really a difficult game. Maps come with enemies and objectives that give you ample experience, allowing you to level up your characters, but not many of the scenarios really made me think too hard along the way. Generally as long as I didn’t cluster my units too close together, put ranged users in unnecessary harm’s way or under-level my characters by shooting through stages not milking the potential experience points, it was pretty smooth sailing.

Despite having started life as a mobile game, the controls are pretty solid. Bouncing around menus, moving about the stages and advancing dialog boxes all works well. You will be doing a good deal of reading since there are no English voice options. The music gets the job done, and like the sound effects fits with the overall fantasy tone of the game. I would say if you try to make a beeline through Empire of Angels IV to wrap it up as quickly as possible, you’d probably spend about two dozen hours on it. Taking a bit of extra time to grind out experience points to earn all of the achievements (about half of those are tied to reaching the top-tier job class with each character) probably doubles that.

Summary

Empire of Angels IV is a nice enough strategy game that does just enough for me to enjoy it, even if I did find myself sometimes wishing for a bit more meat on the bones. A cleaner translation, items / equipment, and a more interesting combination of characters and narrative would have helped elevate the entire package. What we still have is a fundamentally sound, relatively easy SRPG that can be enjoyed over a couple of dozen hours or so.

Score: 6 / 10

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Chinese Paladin: Sword and Fairy 6 - PS4 Review

Sword and Fairy 6 is the latest release in a long running Chinese series of RPGs that we are only really getting to see now. Starting off in a town in which you are attacked almost seemingly out of the blue by two strangers protecting another, it becomes quickly apparent that they are on your side as they join up with you in order to uncover and stop a corruption that seems like a legitimate charity on the outside but is anything but on the corrupt inside as people are being sacrificed to a god.

Form the onset two things are clear. One? The storytelling is awesome and will keep you hooked. The second? From a technical and performance standpoint Sword and Fairy 6 is an absolute mess. Running on even a PS4 Pro, it’s slow, choppy, laggy and often I wondered if my PS4 hasn’t crashed. That said, even as bad as it was in overall performance, there’s a magic to it that kept me coming back again and again to further explore this world that was set before me.

Being bilingual, it’s rare that I’m left out of a conversation where I live. The core languages are English, French, and then there’s a good spread of others but never enough to pick up on anything. As I’ve essentially being playing games and watching anime forever, and generally Japanese ones at that, I can often look away from the screen and know what is being said just because I’ve picked up enough to know what I’m hearing. Could I speak it? Short of some words, no. But it’s enough to allow myself to be a bit distracted. Sword and Fairy 6? I wish the subtitles weren’t white on nothing as while it feels like a JRPG, it’s not, and if you take the first part for granted, you’ll miss along as the voice overs are all in a Chinese dialect.

The above leads me into my next point. Of late a good portion, not all, of RPGs have been trying to go bigger, flashier, and louder than the rest at the cost of what they should be. Truly story driven with a good narrative and added gameplay to top it all off. Dragon Quest XI showcased that the Enix side of things still have it but the Square side, as excited as I wound up being over time, Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts 3 were ok at best. And they aren’t alone in that vein of thought. So with that said, while Sword and Fairy 6 is a technical mess, it’s a well written one that is fun to play once you’ve saddled up and past the issues as it doesn't try to be super flashy at the expense of the storytelling.

The overall gameplay is pretty standard making me think of a PS2 title. You move your character around a map whether it be a town or a dungeon and you move towards your next story point. While in a dungeon though, moving toward an enemy will trigger a fight, cue a bit of a load time, but once the fight has been loaded up, wow, the battle system? Take the ideas of the Dragon Quest’s series’ styles of automatic combat like “Fight Wisely”, “Heal”, or “Go all out!” and mix it in with the Legend of Legaia’s martial arts turned based combat system but with an active time battle. It was a bit confusing at first but it then started to make sense after a few battles once you've settled into the flow of it.

So taking control of one character, and having the others operate through the AI, you get to choose from a list of moves that the character has. Each of these moves while being their own form of fancy martial arts or magic, will take up a value of one, two or three for example. Being able to chain up to a total value of five, you could spam a basic one point move or experiment with a 1-2-1-1, 1-3-1, or 1-2-2. It’s really up to you and what the situation requires. If you want to simply lay back and allow things to go their own way, the auto combat is really well done, but like in Dragon Quest for example, you’ll want to keep your hands on the controller for boss fights.

So other than the various technical issues that Sword and Fairy 6 has, it’s a good title. With customizable battle styles and a good battle system alongside good storytelling, there’s plenty to love if you can get past the awful load times and the choppy performance.

Game Information

Platform:
Sony PlayStation 4
Developer(s):
SOFTSTAR ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Publisher(s):
SOFTSTAR ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Genre(s):
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
PC

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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