This was my first time with this (longrunning) series that I just decided to pick up as it was leaving game pass. While I’m glad I did, it left me feeling quite lukewarm, although if the chance arises, I wouldn’t mind playing another game in the series.
First, this game is gorgeous with breathtaking environments, beautiful outfits and music and more than once I just ended up standing still for a moment and admiring the nature or buildings around me, while the peaceful music is playing in the background. The cutscenes also looked really good and the ones that focus on the action are really very well made and just nice to look at. But with the cutscenes comes one of the biggest problems I had with this game, which is that there is just sooooo many cutscenes and some of them last up to ten minutes. I love me some cutscenes, but the biggest issue is that most of them are just the characters talking and doing nothing else. What makes it even worse is the fact that there is sometimes moments when you have a cutscene and then you get to walk few feet, but right after there is yet another one. If I’m being honest, most of the time it does not add anything and it also makes the game really frustrating to play as many of these cutscenes could have just been normal conversations, although those are kind of weird as well. A lot of the conversations the characters have are just them standing in a circle, just talking for minutes. You can’t walk or even speed up the talking/text and you’re just stuck there. It just feels really weird and really destroys the flow of the game. Maybe this is just typical for Chinese games (this being my first one), but it felt jarring.
The gameplay was relatively fun and enjoyable, but sometimes it just didn’t feel fluid. I enjoyed the combat and spamming of different abilities, but sometimes I just couldn’t dodge or use a spell because of a hit I received or for some unknown reason. The boss battles never felt too frustrating and I thought they were very well done and I enjoyed destroying the smaller creatures with couple sword swings.
The story is decent and relatively interesting, but it kind of obvious that this isn’t the first game in the series as there is a lot of lore and sometimes the game doesn’t bother to explain some concepts. It doesn’t help that the translation (as this game is spoken in Chinese only) is just what it is, with few grammatical and spelling errors, but I could still mostly keep up with it. I do think that better translation could have helped with the understanding the lore/story better. What I really liked about the story is that good chunks of the game is dedicated to exploring the past and current problems of your teammates, you really getting insight into their life and getting to understand their motivations and reasoning for things. This made these characters feel realistic and interesting and you really felt for them. I also enjoyed the ending, I was expecting something else but it did surprise me positively.
Overall, I enjoyed the game and it could have been easily a four star game for me, but just the small (and big, please never make me watch cutscenes again) issues dampened the experience. I do still think that the game is worth exploring because it has interesting characters, gorgeous environments and fierce foes and if you have never played a Chinese rpg, this might be a good choice for you. ~
First, this game is gorgeous with breathtaking environments, beautiful outfits and music and more than once I just ended up standing still for a moment and admiring the nature or buildings around me, while the peaceful music is playing in the background. The cutscenes also looked really good and the ones that focus on the action are really very well made and just nice to look at. But with the cutscenes comes one of the biggest problems I had with this game, which is that there is just sooooo many cutscenes and some of them last up to ten minutes. I love me some cutscenes, but the biggest issue is that most of them are just the characters talking and doing nothing else. What makes it even worse is the fact that there is sometimes moments when you have a cutscene and then you get to walk few feet, but right after there is yet another one. If I’m being honest, most of the time it does not add anything and it also makes the game really frustrating to play as many of these cutscenes could have just been normal conversations, although those are kind of weird as well. A lot of the conversations the characters have are just them standing in a circle, just talking for minutes. You can’t walk or even speed up the talking/text and you’re just stuck there. It just feels really weird and really destroys the flow of the game. Maybe this is just typical for Chinese games (this being my first one), but it felt jarring.
The gameplay was relatively fun and enjoyable, but sometimes it just didn’t feel fluid. I enjoyed the combat and spamming of different abilities, but sometimes I just couldn’t dodge or use a spell because of a hit I received or for some unknown reason. The boss battles never felt too frustrating and I thought they were very well done and I enjoyed destroying the smaller creatures with couple sword swings.
The story is decent and relatively interesting, but it kind of obvious that this isn’t the first game in the series as there is a lot of lore and sometimes the game doesn’t bother to explain some concepts. It doesn’t help that the translation (as this game is spoken in Chinese only) is just what it is, with few grammatical and spelling errors, but I could still mostly keep up with it. I do think that better translation could have helped with the understanding the lore/story better. What I really liked about the story is that good chunks of the game is dedicated to exploring the past and current problems of your teammates, you really getting insight into their life and getting to understand their motivations and reasoning for things. This made these characters feel realistic and interesting and you really felt for them. I also enjoyed the ending, I was expecting something else but it did surprise me positively.
Overall, I enjoyed the game and it could have been easily a four star game for me, but just the small (and big, please never make me watch cutscenes again) issues dampened the experience. I do still think that the game is worth exploring because it has interesting characters, gorgeous environments and fierce foes and if you have never played a Chinese rpg, this might be a good choice for you. ~