I wasn't the biggest fan of 7 personally, but Village took all the good from that game and just fucking smushed it together with a bunch of old Resi stuff that I do love, layered it in fresh ideas and somehow made one of the best games in the series. It's the perfect amount of utterly bonkers while maintaining just enough "logic" that it's possible to follow what's going on.

Without saying too much, it does also touch on some things in 7 that I wasn't really into, and I think I may be able to appreciate that game more after playing this one.

I nearly slept on this entry. I'm really glad I didn't :)

As a franchise that I - or anyone I know - had never heard of before, Sword and Fairy exceeded just about all of my expectations and ended up being a really nice surprise.

To give a little context, my gf has just taken a 2-week trip to visit family, and as such could not play her PS5. Mostly for fun, I decided that in this time I wouldn't use mine either, and finally get some use out of my Gamepass subscription and dust off some Switch games I've been neglecting. It was a perfect plan honestly, I'd probably play tons of games.. right? :)

Every time I've gone through the Gamepass library since it was added, this game has caught my eye. The cover is pretty, the title implies romance within the party, and as an Eastern-made RPG the interest was almost unavoidable. I must've checked the screenshots half a dozen times before installing it and deciding that I'd "just try it" to see how it is, fully expecting some half-baked, incoherent or clunky title. How wrong I was 😌

The cold open maybe wasn't the best draw for the game if I'm being honest, taking place in what would later prove to be the worst setting in the game by far. That said, by starting out with a full arsenal of skills it was quickly clear that the combat was the sort that I would enjoy a lot, which I s'pose makes it a good cold open because it sold me on the game lol.

Immediately after this we switch to Yue Quingshu, the beauty on the box. The character designs, costumes and locations in this game - while admittedly still "AA" in their quality - are really pretty. The overall aesthetic of the game is really colourful and all the major locations look grand and intricate. It's all very well done, and each region or realm has it's own flair, as do its inhabitants. And to top it off, the music is gorgeous. It's hard to describe how but the soundtrack is full of songs that match the tone or emotions on screen, and the inclusion of a library to find and listen to any song at any time is just a nice touch.

To address what is probably the biggest negative I have about this game: It's a skill issue honestly. Chinese as a language is so foreign to me and that really showed while playing this. It's so weird to think about how accustomed I've become to hearing Japanese that this inspired such a different reaction to it. Not recognising a single sound and having to read every line of text in order to follow what was happening was honestly quite jarring to me.

Not understanding is one thing, but because of this at times it was difficult to recognise the nuances of conversation. Of course when someone was shouting or particularly sad or jokey it was clear, but any time there was a subtle emotion conveyed in a spoken line it was completely lost on me, as I had only the text to go off and am not experienced enough with the language to recognise things like that.

To make matters worse, there are plenty of translation errors throughout the game, which I can't put too much fault on the devs for as it's clear this was no mega-budget production, but unfortunately it did make it harder to pick up on the true meaning of things at some points, leaving me to just assume how something was meant.
And even worse still, some of the subtitles would run really long, even over the gameplay or during combat, so it was a struggle to read the entire thing before it left the screen. This was at its worst in the late-game when big lore dumps would happen and even if I read the whole thing in time I'd need to read it back over to make sense of it :(

With all that said though, for whatever reason I was surprised to find this game to include as much comedy as it did, and it was kinda cool seeing similar comedic beats being hit as you might expect to find in a Western or a Japanese game. Obviously I know China isn't another world or anything, but for how unfamiliar the language felt it was a small comfort to have the familiar jokes and bonds. I s'pose they maybe helped me recognise the tone in related scenes as well🤔

Anyway I've rambled enough, final small point is I did experience some frame drops in the equipment menu of all places, even running on a Ryzen 7 and a GTX 3080Ti, thankfully I'm not a stickler for that but if you are then you've been warned :p

Otherwise there's not much else to say, this was surprisingly really enjoyable and I'm super glad I gave it a try! Solid little ARPG with a cool world and story, great music, fun combat, and it was only around 20 hours. Definitely recommend if any part of it appeals to you, I'd love to see more of this series over here in the future 🙏

Thanks for reading to everyone that did, hope you're having a wonderful July!

P.S. I am aware that there's a mod on nexus that supposedly fixes the translation errors, but I only learned of this 2/3rds inso I didn't use it. Might be worth a look!

Four days ago I completed Wolfenstein: The New Order for the first time and made note in my review that neglecting the challenge perks was something I regretted. Over 3 of the 4 days since, I have played through the prequel completing all challenge perks and nightmare levels, as well as getting all collectibles, and honestly, it's been a delight.

This one is shorter than the last, and structured much more linearly with a little less in the way of characters, but personally I think I prefer that. In my review of New Order I commented on the fact I expected a plot to barely string along a series of missions, but now that I've played this - in which that's pretty much the case - perhaps I was wrong to assume that wouldn't be as fun!

Suffice to say, I am really digging ole Wolfy right now. I may even go for a cheeky platinum for this one if I can.

Overall I really enjoyed this. The nightmare levels were boring and a couple sections are a little BS, but I re-did so much of it anyway for the challenge perks it all blended together. That said, anytime a final boss has a threat attacking both you and your enemy, but the enemy still takes the time to shoot you even while the boss is killing them. Yeah that's dumb as fuck I'm sorry. Anyway fuck nazis o7