Sword and Fairy or the Legend of Sword and Fairy is a game franchise from China and is also known as Chinese Paladin. This franchise dates back to 1995 and has seen many sequels and spinoffs in China. As far as I know the 6th game was the first international release on PC and this newest one, the 7th in the series, has been released for PlayStation as well as Steam.
I have no experience with this franchise or the mythology and felt quite bewildered and lost when trying to play.
It starts off with you as a deity from the Deity world, trying to escape from demons in the Demon world. Apparently, he went there to fulfil a mission but fails miserably, losing his sword in the process. This whole beginning section acts as a tutorial to the gameplay and mechanics, which one of them is Quick Time Events! I thought QTE´s where things of the past but here we are in 2022 and a brand-new game is throwing old school QTE´s our way like this is Shenmue. Anyway, mister deity makes it out of the Demon world only to land in the human world, and now you are controlling a human woman that finds a weird glowing fruit.
Spoiler alert, the deity is the glowing fruit! If you are lost then welcome to my world, and I was lost for the first few hours, only getting slightly less lost as the game progressed, but nonetheless lost. It doesn’t help that the game is all in Chinese and the English text seems to be a poor Google translation of the Chinese script. Poor grammar and syntax. If you can get past that you might find an enjoyable experience here.
The graphics are pretty for the most part but some assets feel very early 2000´s and even the animations feel old and stiff, cloth at weird angles as if it is solid. The baking of the terrain (a term in game development meaning a surface that the character models can move on) could have been smoother as the character models tend to jump up and down when running over small stones and pebbles, which makes for a jarring experience and feels off on a game with pretty PS5 graphics. Though the animations feel like PS2 or 3 which could explain the lack on a properly baked terrain.
The combat is decent but not without flaws. There is a dodge mechanic and when you perform it at the exact right moment you get a perfect dodge that slows everything down and gives you a moment to damage your enemies but the enemies telegraph their attacks so badly that it is nigh on impossible to get a perfect dodge. There are combos in the game as well and the more you level the more combos you unlock but I was having a difficult time getting my character to do the combos I wanted and felt the timing was the culprit, it was always either too fast or too slow and I just ended up doing some random combo instead of the one I was trying to do.
There is also a target lock in the game but it is woefully inadequate, if your target moves a little too fast the game can’t keep up and you lose the target lock. So many times I was fighting the camera and target lock system rather than the actual enemy.
There were plenty of bugs when I played Sword and Fairy. The game definitely needs more optimisation than it got. One of the most common bugs I encountered were character models in the wrong place during cutscenes and even in the wrong pose. I also encountered cutscenes that were off sync with the audio making them an even more of a chore to try and keep up with what is happening.
I was curious to why the story and events were hard to follow and found that many Chinese players and reviewers say that this game is targeted to fans only as there are many plots that are follow ups on previous titles.
In conclusion many of the issues I encountered can be fixed with bug fixes and patches but the story is apparently hard to follow if you have no experience with this franchise. So, stay away unless at a good sale and you have nothing to play. Thankfully the game is not that expensive at release and you should be able to grab it for the price of a burger while on sale.
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