– Advertisement –
It’s always a little embarrassing when you receive a review code for a video game franchise you’ve never heard of – especially since it’s an almost 27-year-old RPG franchise, even if the 6e The series’ entry came first to the west.
Sword and Fairy: Together Forever (oddly renamed for the original title’s PlayStation release) The Legend of Sword and Fairy 7) makes a clear and concerted effort to make a dazzling impression from the gates, as it is a powerhouse for visual storytelling, with stunning environments, endless cutscenes, and a huge script that feels like reading a long Chinese fantasy novel steeped in mythology.
It’ll probably surprise you, especially for a series you’ve probably never heard of. The story takes you to a variety of incredibly diverse landscapes, such as mist-covered mountain peaks, sunset-lit beaches, and lava-spouting underworlds (to name a few) and all feature massively designed and detailed architecture that are all screenshot-capable. worthy, giving the game a beautiful canvas to build on. It’s not just eye candy either with a brilliant soundtrack filled with traditional Chinese music contributing to a very natural and holistic presentation that blends brilliantly with the ancient mythology and fantasy story.
Also the running animation is great which I just needed to get outside.
Putting gods, humans and demons and their respective realms at odds with each other, it’s up to the 4 protagonists to try to unravel the mystery behind the ever-occurring incidents that threaten the safety of the many sects into which the world is divided. The show is led by Yue Qingshu, a mind-controlling member of the Mingshu sect who forms a symbiosis with the deity Xiu Wu after investigating Vicious Beasts. First name Vicious, middle name Beasts.
A hallmark of a good story is to make the surrounding characters more interesting than your protagonists and Sword and Fairy manages to do just that here, providing plenty of intriguing characters around the two main characters that are largely undescribed while providing enough knowledge to keep you interested in the slower sections but you better enjoy the deluge as there is an avalanche of fully voiced cinematic cutscenes that take precedence over most other gameplay, the game often guides you to walk from cutscene A to B to get the story across.
The only knock on what makes an admirably great main story is that this game has some of the most imprecise English subtitles I’ve ever come across (although apparently it’s still an improvement over episode 6). It’s understandable, but it’s full of spelling mistakes, wrong word choices, and grammatical problems. A common example is characters who answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions with ‘good’. It can sometimes affect the tone of a conversation, especially if it’s a serious scene and the mistakes make them almost comical.
For the PS4, it should be noted that while the presentation is mostly great, this experience is clearly optimized for more advanced hardware with some elements that have either been degraded or still need polishing, such as water effects and a beach with sand that looks like you’re on a yellow background. cardboard box running.
The game itself starts off quickly, plunging you into the action of a combat tutorial and cinematic action sequences with QTEs, but then the game slows down to a crawl, as it tries to introduce a huge main story and immersive world. The former eventually picks up the pace, but the latter fails to click because as the game creates an in-depth story within the bubble of the main characters, there is a broken connection between them and the world around them, constantly jumping around the hub world maps without really allowing any meaningful interaction beyond the cutscenes you have to activate there.
I should have prefaced this by first saying I’m obsessed with video game “immersion” (after being bitten by the bug after playing Shenmue) and it hurts me when games are called “open-world” when it’s better to call them “open-field” games, and at the same time, it’s also frustrating when a game makes something so detailed (as in Sword and Fairy‘s case), but makes it more like a museum exhibit.
The side missions try to alleviate the problem by giving it a quasi open world feel to fill the world with details and also provide feedback in the RPG gameplay loop with loot and XP, but helping the NPCs often makes little sense in terms of story , in addition to a basic leveling system, so the justification for both open-world and RPG elements feels very artificial.
I have no doubt that implementing a more interactive open world would be more expensive, but as it stands, the beautiful maps feel more like you’re visiting sights rather than the birthplaces of these characters. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but it makes everything outside of the main story seem somewhat disjointed and unnecessary at worst.
Of course, to justify this as an interactive piece of entertainment there has to be some gameplay for the game to hang its hat on, and Sword and Fairy injects a hack-and-slack JRPG-esque combat system between the run-cutscene-run formula. Each of the four characters has combo strings and eight slots for special moves on two skill wheels, but despite this the combat is more style than substance and to me it felt like a means to an end, rather than something I particularly looking forward to.
One bug bear I have with MMOs is the very small animation when enemies are attacked and the only display of your offensive actually landing is damage figures and flashy effects from your own attacks. While not an MMO, this is still the case here and there are only a few bosses whose varied attacks and moves make combat challenging, resulting in one-on-one battles with standard enemies feeling desperately empty.
Personally, I also feel that there isn’t enough notable struggle or tragedy for a 30-plus hour story that feels like the length of an entire TV season, and that it’s just one of the few attempts at tear-jerking moments that I I felt really landed properly. This could be because this game is rated for teens (and I’m old) but bloodless and being told that men and women holding hands is prohibited – despite the story constantly threatening genocide of all races – was a bit too childish for my taste and a contrast I couldn’t quite grasp.
That’s why I often hoped that the game would be a little less conservative at the end and funnily enough there was one chance for the game to do it – a side mission where a peddler rips the main character off, and after he finds out, you have an option to forgive or kill them. Unfortunately, after you choose to kill them, not only do you see nothing happening – literally no animation, nothing – but the main characters barely flinch, as if your choice made no difference. I mean, I know the character was insignificant, but some compassion – please.
The inconsistencies of Sword and Fairy don’t end here either, with the game’s implementation clearly lacking a layer of gloss – or two – with cutscenes often ending abruptly and immediately interrupted for in-game conversations, cutscenes getting out of sync for a few seconds, and bugs in the last boss asking me to reload the game, they all represent obvious and obvious issues besides the most essential area that needs an update: the subtitles.
All hope is not lost though, as the developer has released 7 updates since the game’s release 3 weeks ago, which is a good thing – I guess.
unfortunately Sword and Fairy is not a case of ‘What you see is what you get’ as while the music and presentation are top notch the game fails to maintain its high level of quality across the board so while the story is intriguing it continues to slog in a bit too much mediocrity to really recommend this to anyone, despite its dazzling strengths.
0 Comments