Xuan Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament review

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Xuan Yuan Sword is aimed at the Chinese audience. The game has only English and Chinese language options. With that, let’s get into this story within a C-RPG and see whether it proved worthy of an RPG.

STORY

In Xuan Yuan Sword, it all begins in a fantasy land in ancient China. There lies a great gate that separates the Earth from the realm of the heavens. At a certain time, the great Emperor of Heaven decides to open this gate to recruit allies for his quest, in which he hopes to find his beloved daughter. These same humans who ascend to heaven to help the emperor receive divine powers in return to search for the girl.

However, with this somewhat easy gain of power, several humans followed only in pursuit of power and not to help the Emperor. This gate was closed, since many people began to cause great problems. The emperor in turn decided to close the gate, but it was already too late and the world fell into its own wars and conflicts. At this moment a new entity descends from the heavens to intervene in the world of men, and a new era of magic and mystery begins.

But all this history serves as a basis to introduce the boy Sikong Yu: a young fighter from the small village called Youxiong, who ends up getting involved in this divine war, while trying to protect his village and his friends.

The game offers a good amount of story: about 15 to 20 hours of gameplay; easy missions; some “bosses” will make you lose some time, but nothing at the level of wanting to break your controller. For those with JRPG experience the game may be a bit easier.

GRAPHICS and SOUND

We can say they are far from resembling anything from this current generation. Even though this aspect is not the game’s focus, it is something that bothers a little, given there is a lot of good stuff out there, even Indie games. It is believed that even a PlayStation 2 would run this game without major difficulties. If a friend sees you playing, they will never believe this game belongs to the current generation.

Some details seem to have been made ten years ago. The characters’ movement is horrible and very limited, besides giving an out-of-the-ordinary impression: sometimes it looks like your character is running on a gym treadmill. The mini-map doesn’t help either: it takes over the top of the whole screen if you need to enlarge it. You can get lost if you have to zoom.

The game’s soundtrack proves quite decent: full of Chinese instruments in the performance of the music. At some moments it is really nice to listen to the calm, well-arranged melodies. Something that really caught my attention in Xuan Yuan Sword.
But not everything can be a bed of roses: unfortunately the game is full of small visual glitches and truly bizarre bugs, which at some moments get in the way of your gameplay. On two occasions I had to reload my previous save because the character got stuck at the map portal.

GAMEPLAY

Xuan Yuan Sword is totally based on the most varied traditional RPGs, with mechanics that mix modern elements with the most classic ones, reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIII’s turn-based style, which even works fine, but could be much better and more advanced. Like every good RPG, it has its various side quests, a crafting system for items and equipment, some puzzles, and everything that the vast majority of RPGs have to have. In general terms, it is a very traditional RPG.

It looks like it, but is far from open world. You walk on a map whose areas, towns and dungeons are connected by roads. The battles are not random: we can always see the enemy on screen before entering combat, and if you get close to it, logically you end up facing it; or if you prefer you can dodge, avoiding many enemies on the map. The combat system is distributed across the controller buttons, and your job is to chain blows that “cancel” enemy attacks, reducing the damage taken.

Watch the video, recorded by me.

You choose in real time the commands you will use, but you don’t control the characters so freely around the battle arena: this is the kind of game that takes the battle to a screen with a pre-animation, and there you move your character choosing where you attack your enemy, while you must take command of attacks, spells and items, waiting for the delay of each button to charge, for a new attack.

It takes a little adjustment time for anyone not well used to this style of RPG, which was my case in particular. And even after you get the hang of it, the fights are still somewhat messy. It works one way or another, and ends up giving the combat a quite dynamic pace.

You can collect dozens of monsters, who can fight at your side, becoming pets that help your team. The presence of certain little monsters in your party can generate automatic buffs and debuffs: this can help you in battles, and there is even an achievement for obtaining all the monsters available in the game.

CONCLUSION

A mediocre RPG for those looking for something new, and who really like “niche” JRPGs. But it is not the kind of game that makes you remember the name of every character after the end nor stay hours and hours in a row in front of the screen. The game urgently needs polish and the fixing of several bugs, something that sometimes gets in the way of gameplay. And the fact that it is a practically unknown series around here, even though it is in its sixth edition, shouldn’t inspire much confidence.

For a generation that already has a good number of excellent RPGs, so that a game that isn’t so well known, this indie needed something much bigger to become sought after.

Story: 6
Audio and visuals: 4
Gameplay: 6

The version of the game tested was for XBOX ONE.