The quests are interesting enough when they work and can be fun to experience. To fill the world you’ll find many villages and quests. They feel Chinese but also fantastical at the same time, and it fits the tone of the game perfectly. These zones are often big and beautiful to look at. Exploring the zones is easy enough thanks to a map that has all the info you’ll need, including active quests in the area. The world and worldbuilding are nice but damaged by technical issues. Perhaps they were intended as another riddle, but either way the end result is a process of trial and error until you get it right. Instead, the answers are so absolutely confusing that I cannot imagine even localization could explain them. I’m fairly sure these are intended to be factual questions to which you would need to find the answers outside of the game, which would be acceptable if the answers were sensible. Finally, there are questions and answers on obscure topics such as wine tasting. They simply don’t make any sense whatsoever. Then there are riddles which, unsurprisingly, fall victim to localization. For anyone fluent it should be so natural that it might as well not exist. It’s a task most suited for someone first learning the language. The first is a spelling minigame when opening certain chests - you’ll be given three words in English with each one missing a letter and you must choose one of four letters to fill the blanks. There are three types and they fundamentally do not work. On the flip side, the game does also contain some strikingly strange design decisions in the form of its puzzles. The menus are also filled with countless game systems that go unexplained and are largely useless once you do figure them out, such as a Pokemon-esque capture system that has practically no influence on battles. Very early on, it’s possible to buy ingredients for 200 coins, craft an item, and then sell the crafted item for 500 coins, instantly generating unlimited money. For instance, the game offers crafting as well as traditional vendors. Instead, the game is littered with half-measures that break the game. This doesn’t refer to things like textures flashing and quests permanently breaking so that they can’t be completed, although that certainly happens. In terms of design, Xuan-Yuan Sword has a lot of good ideas that have been done badly due to technical woes. All of this works despite the exceedingly poor localization while there are times when you’ll know the translation conveyed a different tone than was probably intended, the story is still far better than a traditional JRPG, and it’s interesting enough to drive you deep into the game. There is mystery that starts with an interesting premise and drops just enough bread crumbs to keep you actively engaged. The main party is fleshed out with realistic motivations that make them easily relatable. The entire tale comes off as a Chinese folktale and it’s complemented by added depth. It’s a game set in ancient China and you’ll be dealing with a lot of unlikely heroes, princes, princesses, deities and other divine beings. It helps that the story is actually quite decent. The experience is frankly absurd, but it is absurd in a way that can become endearing. There are a catastrophic amount of spelling errors, including a misspelling of the main hero’s name on the Character tab of the menu. Text runs off the screen because the literal translation was too long, leaving you confused and bemused. You cannot play the game for five minutes without running into basic issues that could have been solved by proofreading. Xuan-Yuan Sword is absolutely riddled with errors. Since cultures are different, especially comparing China to the West, it’s important to ensure that cultural quirks that make sense in China are altered to convey that same message in an understandable way here in the West. An ideal translation will be meticulous, making sure each word is both literally correct and also that the overall message is kept intact. The translation work in this game is extremely poor. These two come together to create an experience that is somehow very charming on first impression. It is impossible to talk about Xuan-Yuan Sword without first talking about its localization, but it is likewise impossible to talk about it without also addressing its voluminous number of technical issues. Because a game must be played actively, all the negatives would outweigh the positive aspects. If you’d asked last month whether a game could capture that “so bad it’s good” experience of a B-movie, I’d have definitively told you no.
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