Have you ever wandered about what would happen if we could peek into alternate timelines? What if a movie that never came out actually released? What if a famous book was never made? What if Harmony Gold never existed and SRW was now a world renowed series with 25 years of western releases? Well, during these last weeks I felt like I traveled into a different timeline, and saw the result of a completely different evolution of a long running JRPG series spanning 20+ years. Except this series isn't japanese, didn't release on consoles for most of those years, and obviously was never translated outside of its native language. Let's enter this mysterious new world, the world of the Sword of the Xuan-Yuan (軒轅劍)
In today's age it has never been easier to have access to "exotic" videogames. Platforms like Steam, more standardized OS, an increased interest in global sales all allow users to buy and experience titles which would have been impossible to even install, if not play in the past. Hell, even series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are in our memories because they released on popular consoles sold worldwide. But 30 years of videogames is a long time, and the world is vast and who know how many series escaped our grasps. 2 "sister" series share this history,
The Legend of Sword and Fairy and
Xuan-Yuan Sword, and today we'll focus on the latter. Developed by DOMO Studio, a taiwanese dev team, this series started on pc only, chinese only, and more than 20 years ago. This isn't a retrospective and it's not like I even have the knowledge to talk about it, but 20 years are a long time and during this time the series evolved in the same way other similar RPGs changed: from sprite based top down 2D 16-bit games, to the age of pre-rendered backgrounds and more colorful and detailed sprites, to the early low poly 3D models, and up to the high definition era. By some mysterious force one day the "gaiden" chapter of the sixth game in the series (and 12th game in the series total) ended up on Steam Greenlight, passed, and then was released with an english translation (which eventually made slowly made its way to consoles too) and thus the series was available to us outside of china. And this is the game I'll talk about today
The Gate of Firmament feels like a lost PS3 era JRPG. It's a familiar yet different title. The Xuan-Yuan Sword titles are historical fantasy rpgs, set into the real world in different time period, but featuring fantastical/mythological elements. Story wise this game is set in the actual chinese age of myths. The story focuses on the aftermath of the
Juedi Tiantong, originally a religious reform in 2000 BC china which in the game world is taken more literally (
Severance of Heaven and Earth). The heavenly kingdom of Huaxu sacrificed their lives to seal away the Celestial Gate forever (that allowed anyone to reach the realm of the gods in hope of receiving divine powers, in exchange of informations on the location of the Jade Emperor's daugher which was said to have escaped to the human realm) in order to bring order to the realms. Thus with the gods gone from the affairs of the world, the age of man started. But as hundreds of years pass the world succumbed to turmoil. The Xia dynasty was said to have inherited the gods blodline (and so had the "mandate of heaven"), but eventually fell into tiranny and so the dynasty was overthrown. This market the beginning of the Shang dynasty. But during this reign the land fell victim to natural disasters, such as great floods or famine, and as the years passed many questioned if the Shang were the ones "responsible" for this, as they lacked the "mandate" unlike the Xia. With the country in turmoil many tribes became nomads, and rebellions were common. The actual story starts in one of these nomadic tribes. We are in the 1200 BC period and the protagonist of the story is Sikong Yu, a young inventor/engineer which spends most of the time coming up with traps (mostly to protect the village from potential invasions by barbaric tribes). But on a faithful day to save her adopted sister and dear friend, who was kidnapped by a local tribe to be used as a sacrifice, he infiltrates their hideout and, together with his sister, meets and rescues a mysterious young woman. This woman helps in repelling the enemy tribe with her mystical powers, but Sikong Yu is blamed for the barbarian's attack and so he is forced to leave the village as its relocated to a new, more secure place. The chief decides to give him a chance and will allow him to return only after he escorted their mysterious saviour, Mu Yue, back to her kingdom. And so this "true RPG" journey starts. Sikong Yu is soon joined by Feng Yu (based on a real
historical figure), a "high ranking officer of the Shang" (who is totally not the prince of Shang searching for a way to stop the rebellions), and Zi Qiao (also based on a
historical figure), a preistesses traveling the land while searching for her future husband by reading the stars. The 3 (and a piglet mascot character named Aqi) so end up accompanying Mu Yue, who is not very subtly eventually revealed to be a survivor from Huaxu (so a celestial being), on this journey to find a way back home, while step by step discovering the true force bringing turmoil to the land and their role (or destiny) which awaits each of them. And obviously the titular Celestial Gate will end up being the focal point of it
The story is without a doubt the strongest point of the game. As it's deeply based on chinese mythology it feels very novel to the "western" mind, but even outside of this the story is well written, with twists, a good lenght and pace, love, mysteries and goodbyes. A true positive is how every town the party visits in the game ends up "important" to the overall journey. While some areas are obviously fillers, the actual towns all have a reason to exist in the story pace, and not many RPGs nail this part. Unfortunately the translation isn't that great but maybe because I'm not a native english speaker I somehow still managed to understand what I was reading. Typos are still common, as are obviously wrong subtitles (the same exact line repeated multiple times even as the character speaking changes, for example) and often the game flip flops on how to write character names or on the terminology. I also found the soundtrack to be quite good, with many tracks all fitting the "ancient china" period. A negative point is with the presentation however: the models are good but outside of the protagonists everyone else lacks any expressivity with the face (and it's not like the protagonists have that many facial animations either). This is one of the most obvious things in the game: its nature as a pc first game means the game looks clean, with textures large enough to not appear blurry and detailed models, but the actual geometry is lacking. The game looks like a weird inbetween of ps3 and ps4 era JRPGs: not enough "graphics" to look as good as its ps4 siblings, but also not bad enough to look like the older ones. Another issue with the story are the simple repeated animations, which will eventually be very noticeable, as well as the various pauses which oftem make the dialogues take too long. An overall "slowness" is also very common gameplay wise. And speaking of slowness, I can't believe the game pretends some of the twists in the story are some sort fo mystery that needs to be delayed for so long, like Feng Yu's identity which was obvious from the moment he started speaking
The game, outside of battles, plays very similar to the PS3 era Tales game: there is no overworld, and every area is made of "corridors" outside of towns which are more open. But instead of connecting the world each "field" is a separate area, with the player travelling between them from a menu based map. Thus exploration is very limited. There is basically no difference between a "field" or a "dungeon", and the only reason to explore is to find treasure chests. The story is completely linear and so the "journey" also ends up like this: every new area, being a town or a new field, is unlocked after seeing all events in the previous one. And this is very literal: usually a new field features multiple events, starting near the entrance and ending near the exit (usually with a boss fight), but the player doesn't really need to "exit" from the exit since as soon as the last event is done the next area is already available, and I tested it by walking back to the entrance and "exiting" from there once and behold, the next area was there. This small thing really makes the "exploration" feels like a "checklist" instead of a journey, and it doesn't help the whole game only has 2 fields which are truly optional (not needed for the main story progression), the
DOMO Studio (which is a
dev room/museum where you meet the dev avatars and can see artworks and models from the series) and the
Realm of Thoughs (which is accessible after finishing all of
Sikong Yu's sidequests and it's used to
unlock the true ending). As I used the word "side quest" it's important to point out that while the story is very linear, the game is filled with side quests. Most of this side quests are simple "speak with guy, go somewhere else/speak with another, come back" for some extra items, but some have much better rewards, and/or have more involved cutscenes which expands on the cast or the world. The 4 (well 5 including Aqi) protagonist all have a full side "questlines" made of various quests which is used to learn more about them and unlock their best equipments. But these sidequests can have very strict timing and a small distraction can cause the player to miss them. Unfortunately the game does require a guide (or the player always checking every available quest) to avoid missing something. Also the characters move so slow... A simple dash button or a faster move speed would make such a massive difference since there is no "fast travel" for fields: you always enter from the entrance and any side quest that forces you to go to an already explored field (so most of them) will force the player to walk all the way back there, and while there are no random encouters there is no way to actually avoid the enemies since as soon as one of them spots your player characters they immediately rush there, and avoiding them is basically impossible
And speaking of enemies, the battles are uh... a mix of real time but still pretty relaxed? The player controls 1 character while the others are AI controlled kinda like Tales, but it's not full "action" like Tales: positioning doesn't matter, and attacks are limited by cooldowns, but these cooldowns feel more like a "there is no reason to spam the button" cooldown since they mostly end as soon as the attack animation ends. Your character can use light attacks (which can be comboed to a mxaimum of 3), heavy attacks (which can end a combo and can hit multiple targets) and 4 equippable magic skills. It's... not a very original battle system but also not very common, but it's also way too simple since you only have those options + using an item and it doesn end pretty spammy, especially on hard difficulty (which does nothing but making the enemies stronger so it's useless). The game is also very grindy with materials to grind to craft items and equipment aside from the standard experience levels. There is also an option to "capture" monsters but, again, it's not like you use the monsters to fight, you simply turn them into crafting materials to create new monsters or to power up some special accessories by "feeding" monsters to them. Captured monsters are needed to fully unlock their encyclopedia page so you have to do it for the achievements, but that's it. Each playable character also has a way to "interact" with the roaming enemies, like Sikong Yu can hit them (they start the battle stunned) and Mu Yue can turn invisible for 9 seconds (the only way to truly avoid roaming enemies)
The annoyances with the slow, pointless exploration and the repetitive battles become even more noticeable if the player is going for the 100% completition, because aside from the game requiring a careful playthrough to not miss anything the final achievement/encyclopedia entry requires new game+, as the last item needed to get the last entry (and so the last achievement) is obtained past the point of no return, but the "quest" that needs it is actually before that point. It's kinda bullshit honestly, an actual fuck you type bullshit. Which is a shame because there is a good core, it's just the game also suffers from all those "PS3 JRPG" problems that make them not that liked compared to their predecessors (or more modern ones), and the overall slugginess really doesn't help, and for this reason it's not a game you can fully recommend without understanding its problems
But the game can be bought for very cheap at this point, and I enjoyed peeking into an up to that point unknown reality. Without this game (and Sword and Fairy 6) who knows if all these chinese titles would be available on Steam in english for us to enjoy
