afreaknamedpete
Member
Anyone eager to play a game owned by less than 4000 people in the US?
How about the sequel owned by 1500 people?
Well you might want to give it a shot, because this is legit one of the best RPGs I've played in recent memory. Let's talk about...
As a quick primer this is a Chinese-developed RPG based heavily on the works of Jin Wong, and is set in the Wuxia fiction genre. Despite being called the "Pre-Sequel", which I assume they stole from Borderlands, this game is like 99% a Prequel of Tale of Wuxia with only a small epilogue that takes place after the first game.
I've discussed the first game here, but to summarize it's primarily a combination of a life-simulator (think Persona or Princess Maker games) with an isometric Baldur's gate style sequence of fights and fetch quests. It has a very cartoony chibi-fied life sim phase and a more realistically proportioned phase where all the fights, towns and dungeons took place. It featured oodles of RNG and a really draconian event system that basically forced you to continually reset in order to play with any efficiency. The translation was also so atrocious that the game was unfinishable unless you used guides since progression important puzzles can only be solved w/ guesswork or Chinese literacy. Large amounts of the game were translated even worse than google translate, with no proofreading and a story so destroyed by the translation you got at most a vague gist of what's going on.
The original Tale of Wuxia is ruined by its shit translation; but even if the translation was perfect the game is plagued by tedious minigames and tons of RNG and can only be loosely recommended for all of the unique things it does and less for how good it is. So 1 year later we have a prequel that has completely vaporized the life-building segment of the game and created a straight JRPG. It's MUCH less ambitious than the first game, but instead it has a clarity of purpose and has trimmed out all of the busywork and fluff of the first game and filled it with something I've never really seen done before... the MetroidVania RPG.
---------------------------------------------
1. The Setup
---------------------------------------------
The game starts off with a completely untranslated smooth sounding Chinese guy tell you the setup of this game.
The Cult of Tianlong and Fengdu are at war with each other, and at the height of the conflict the Imperial Court has issued the Acquit Period. All the martial arts sects of the world are given a blank check by the government to fight, kill and war against each other without any intervention from the court. Now not only can the two largest sects fight in open warfare, peaceful martial artes sects find themselves isolated with no government support as forces align to ruin them. You play as the senior and junior disciples of Wuxia Zi, as they find themselves zeroing in on a shadowy society of martial artists who are taking advantage of the Acquit Period to wipe out martial sects seeming at random. With only the vaguest of clues and tenebrous of leads they set out on a journey to warn other martial art sects and uncover and wipe out the secret society.
---------------------------------------------
2. World and Quest Setup
---------------------------------------------
Tale of Wuxia the Pre-Sequel is really half a JRPG and half a WRPG. While there are few explicit decisions or moral dilemmas to make on quests, there is a near total free-form method of talking quests and who to take with you. See at the beginning of the game you have an hour or two where you get introduced to the characters, go on a few canned adventures and quests, and get used to the battle system. A simple linear introductory segment. Afterwords you get the main quest that drives the whole game; an intercepted message reveals the names of five strongholds of the secret society.
Then the game tasks you to visit some friendly martial artes sects and there's like 3 of them you can choose to visit in any order.
And then the game just tells you to find out where the strongholds are and pretty much blows open the entire world map. With no guidance.
This is a game that doesn't tell you what the main quest is. It doesn't tell you what's mandatory, what's fluff, and what's substantial side-quest content. What it loses in the convenience of "following the main plot" like alot of WRPGs do it gains in actually emulating the feeling of adventure that the characters are supposed to be experiencing.
What it does is a GREAT job of tying all the random sidequests you get wandering through towns and sects into the larger overall story. A random NPC might get you to deliver a letter to a friend... only the letter is filled with wuxia anthrax and you trigger a war between two sects by accident but this leads to a clue about where an enemy stronghold might be. Quests also weave in and out of their own structures. You can start a story arc at the beginning of the game, then get stuck cause the next destination of the quest chain contains a language your characters can't understand. Then like 30 hours later you stumble onto a party member who's bilingual; then suddenly your first quest progresses. I'd say for the first 75% of the game you'll probably have more than a dozen active quests at once.
Even as simple stuff as picking up stuff off the ground is tied to this. There's no "highlight interactables" button but stuff like potion supplies will be highlighted if you have a poison user in your party. Your main character is too lawful good to steal; but if a thief is in your party they'll go straight ahead and pocket books into your inventory. The game knows how to CONSTANTLY drip feed you progress. Everything you do gives you meaningful rewards; it might unexpectedly progress the main scenario. You might get a party member; this party member might be needed for future side quests and even main quests. You might get martial art manuals needed to level up your skills. There is an overall progression curve too; it is unlikely you'll access the end game areas since many of the later game areas require you to first beat certain bosses. But ultimately there is no "sequence" to sequence break. Get strong enough and get the right party members and the world becomes your oyster.
Hell this structure is probably the only system I've seen that makes FETCH quests interesting. NPCs rarely tell you where to get stuff; they task you with finding something and give you either a vague hint or just tell you to keep an eye out. You feel alot less like a delivery man and more like a problem solver. And again, these quests often lead to very dramatic strings. A mountain monk asks for a bag of rice cause he's too small to carry it up the mountain. He doesn't have the foggiest idea where to buy rice. Go to the nearest village, only to find out the rice is marked up 10x cause the populace is in a panic over zombie sightings. Talk with the people standing in line for rice and figure out there's rumors about a local lord being missing and connected with the sighted living dead... and 2 hours later you've tracked down one of the 5 villains. The biggest weaknesses only show up near the end of the game where your quest lists start narrowing; if you find the mountain monk at the end of the game after you've already basically beat all the main villains tracking down the rice does become a simple fetch quest. At least it gives you interesting rewards then.
This freeform quest design even applies to the difficulty and combat encounters. You have to keep a rotating party by nothing more than quest design. There's no auto-levelling; so early game some of the progression blocks might simply be in the form of an insurmountably complex boss. Many times in my playthrough I would isolate one of the major villains, only to get utterly curbstomped. I would hunt down party members that had the specific disabling skills I needed to counter the villain's specific gimmick, then try again with actual success.
While many modern RPGs is a straight shot from A>B, or at least A>B with detours Tale of Wuxia the Presequel is instead a progression "web". You weave in and out of multiple plot lines at your convenience and your ability to progress. The only game I can think of that does this style of interweaving quests better is the first Town in Divinity Original Sin. I'd argue Divinity does the idea better in a smaller scale, but Tale of Wuxia pulls it off on a much grander scale taking course across the whole game. While the destination will be the same (the game basically has a normal ending and a slightly expanded "true" ending, nothing like the whole half dozen 10 hour routes of the first game), the path towards it will be extremely different from player to player.
---------------------------------------------
2. Character and Customization
---------------------------------------------
While getting rid of the time-management aspect of the first game, the prequel instead attaches a stripped down bastardized version of the first game's progression system but is still the better for it.
Rather than 20 different stats for everything from punching things to your ability to get drunk, every character in the prequel has 4 major stats.
Again, EVERYTHING major you do gets you awards, and one of the biggest you get are Perspective points. Anytime you beat a big boss, help out a citizen, etc you're awarded points into a shared pool of stats. You then spend these points to level up base statistics. While the stats affects combat their effect is fairly minor; all the major combat arts and skills are learned from transcribed martial artes manuals you pick up in the world and most of them have statistical benchmarks to reach before you can learn them.
Every party member (and there are like 30 of them you can recruit into your massive 9 man party) has differences in base stats, base traits, and compatiabilities with various martial artes that determines what kind of party member they sort into. Some of the party members are blank slates with weak starting skills but the ability to learn many different martial artes. Some are built as healers; others thieves, some tanks etc.
While combat does grant experience points; instead of levelling a character level every character picks a martial art move to "study". As you get more levels in a particular martial skill you get a corresponding base stat increase and the move itself becomes more powerful. There's decisions you have to make on whether to level useless combat abilities that grant large base stat bonuses, or focus on the immediately useful skills? Who do you teach the HP granting martial art to, the tank who gets hit all the time or the squishy in case they are out of position? Hell who do you even bother to level in the first place is probably the biggest decision.
---------------------------------------------
3. Combat
---------------------------------------------
Like the last game, combat takes place on a hexagonal grid and various attacks have widely different characteristics like distance, damage, and AOE potential. Unlike the last game, which was mostly 1 on 1 or 1 vs many, most battles here are party vs party affairs.
There's no real terrain effects beyond stuff like corridors and the odd tree or rock. Instead alot of the depth is on the "internal style".
Every major enemy has a specific "internal style"; this is a unique case-specific (or enemy type specific) buff. One enemy boss may pull in nearby minions to automatically guard him, another boss will gain one hit of superarmor everytime they successfully dodge an attack. One boss might just plain no-sell critical hits or regenerate 10% of their health per turn. Status effects in this game are also absolute; unless a boss has a SPECIFIC immunity granted by their internal style a status effects are guaranteed to apply; although they tend to only last one turn. Bosses that dodge too much can be first slowed by making them "Dizzy" and "Bound" before hitting with high power accuracy attacks. Powerful status effects like "Stasis" or "Internal Injury (that shuts down all their style granted buffs)" will only work if the boss is <70% MP so you have to either weather their attacks or drain their energy before trying for them. It really makes the harder bosses ones where you have to puzzle out a "solution" to their particular combination of defenses to damage them before they slaughter you. This also really plays into the fiction of the world; beating the enemy involves studying the enemy's martial arts and finding an exploitable weakness.
The internal style system also applies to your characters; just like you get different moves found in the game as manuals, different internal styles can also be taught/read. Your main character starts off with a regen and tanking style; but you can level up a style that focuses on dodging or counterattacks. Everyone playing this game can have a different party; with different internal styles; using different moves.
---------------------------------------------
4. Translation
---------------------------------------------
While I'm gushing praise on this game, ultimately there's two major issues holding back the game as a whole. The first is that the translation sucks. Can't dodge around the biggest barrier and unfortunately the totally legitimate reason this game isn't gonna to be well enjoyed.
The first game had a translation that was best described as "not-English". No clear grammar, clear evidence of multiple translators for whom English wasn't so much as a second language but maybe a 10th language. This game actually sounds like it was translated by the same person or team. The language is now elevated to "broken-English". The intent and content of speech is now 95% clear. The story is much easier to follow. Dramatic scenes feel dramatic, sad scenes feel sad and... well there's alot of unfortunate anachronisms beside that. The screenshots are my cherry picked samples of some of the main strange lines; most of the translation is better, and thankfully it is rarely worse than my examples. Again there's about 2-3 optional quests with some (thankfully very weak) martial art skills that requires you to answer a quiz about the tenets of Buddhism or poetry interpretation of an obviously non-translated poem. For some of them the translators literally highlight the answer for you, but not always. Most poetry or songs are outright just left in Chinese, though I suppose this is preferable to any butchered translation attempt. Annoying some of the in battle dialogue also gets cut off by the size of the text boxes as well. The biggest improvement I can say is that while the translation sucks it does so in a consistent way and the translation never impedes progress and the most important part of the game, the quest log and all the clues for the dozens of quests you are juggling are well translated.
---------------------------------------------
5. Accessibility Problems
---------------------------------------------
Finally the biggest problem this game has is accessibility. I hate to say it but the game does assume knowledge about the prequel to some extent. The biggest example of this is the first battle; while the first game opens with a tutorial battle against a chicken the FIRST fight in this game is not a tutorial. Instead the first fight is between the officers of two of the warring clans fighting against each other; you pick a side to control as the battle tutorial. And it's legit one of the most complicated fights in the game; you control 4 bosses with widely different abilities against their counterparts. Worse off your main characters get PERMANENT skills depending on whether you won the tutorial fight or who you pick; these skills are so powerful they actually can direct your playstyle. The game never teaches you the systems; instead it seems to expect you know how the game works from the first entry and doesn't really bother to explain itself. The cast list is massive, including most characters from the first game and a ton of new ones. Much of the old cast isn't given much of an introduction. It's cool how they cameo in so much of the previous game's cast members, but those unfamiliar with the series will probably be confused as to why someone is important.
Again while I praise the freefrom quest structure there are a handful of missables that can approach near Zodiac-Spear levels of obscurity (namely a single missable party member and 3-4 super moves). They do follow a logic and from the obscurity of their obtainment and how OP they are they do seem to be more easter-eggs than essential moves, but missables in any game like this is really annoying. Since this game doesn't have anything even approaching objective markers, instead the game depends on giving you verbal hints and directions. Early on in the game if you get stuck there's something like a billion other things you can be doing, but near the end when the quest list is winding down there will be an invariable part where you get stuck. Sometimes the instructions are too vague; to the point of busywork. You might be told to investigate a clan of knife wielders, but the quest trigger isn't in their complex on the left side of the city but in front of a rug dealer on the right side. Or you might get a clue to talk to gather the word on the street, and that usually requires you to run around talking to all nearby NPCs until someone gives you what you need. I had to consult a guide/talk on forums because I got stuck on my progression once or twice.
The game is mercifully well optimized. On launch it was pretty much unplayable, but now it runs smoothly but with very frequent 1-2s long loading screens. There's also a rare (happened once in 50hrs) where the game would randomly freeze in battle, but multiple players have reported this.
---------------------------------------------
6. In Conclusion
---------------------------------------------
The first Tale of Wuxia was a flawed masterpiece of a game, super ambitious but in many ways somewhat of a slog to get through. It's a game with a shit translation and is very difficult for me to recommend.
Tale of Wuxia the Presequel is very different. This is a game worth playing in spite of its translation. If you think you can stomach the "gist" of the conversation, and are willing to read a gameplay guide or two on steam to achieve familiarity with the systems. It does so much unique things and has a game structure I've seen no other game try, at least not with this much success. So the next time you're playing the next sword and board, elves or sci-fi RPG consider at least giving wuxia a try. At the very least, it ain't all that expensive!
How about the sequel owned by 1500 people?
Well you might want to give it a shot, because this is legit one of the best RPGs I've played in recent memory. Let's talk about...
As a quick primer this is a Chinese-developed RPG based heavily on the works of Jin Wong, and is set in the Wuxia fiction genre. Despite being called the "Pre-Sequel", which I assume they stole from Borderlands, this game is like 99% a Prequel of Tale of Wuxia with only a small epilogue that takes place after the first game.
I've discussed the first game here, but to summarize it's primarily a combination of a life-simulator (think Persona or Princess Maker games) with an isometric Baldur's gate style sequence of fights and fetch quests. It has a very cartoony chibi-fied life sim phase and a more realistically proportioned phase where all the fights, towns and dungeons took place. It featured oodles of RNG and a really draconian event system that basically forced you to continually reset in order to play with any efficiency. The translation was also so atrocious that the game was unfinishable unless you used guides since progression important puzzles can only be solved w/ guesswork or Chinese literacy. Large amounts of the game were translated even worse than google translate, with no proofreading and a story so destroyed by the translation you got at most a vague gist of what's going on.
The original Tale of Wuxia is ruined by its shit translation; but even if the translation was perfect the game is plagued by tedious minigames and tons of RNG and can only be loosely recommended for all of the unique things it does and less for how good it is. So 1 year later we have a prequel that has completely vaporized the life-building segment of the game and created a straight JRPG. It's MUCH less ambitious than the first game, but instead it has a clarity of purpose and has trimmed out all of the busywork and fluff of the first game and filled it with something I've never really seen done before... the MetroidVania RPG.
---------------------------------------------
1. The Setup
---------------------------------------------
The game starts off with a completely untranslated smooth sounding Chinese guy tell you the setup of this game.
The Cult of Tianlong and Fengdu are at war with each other, and at the height of the conflict the Imperial Court has issued the Acquit Period. All the martial arts sects of the world are given a blank check by the government to fight, kill and war against each other without any intervention from the court. Now not only can the two largest sects fight in open warfare, peaceful martial artes sects find themselves isolated with no government support as forces align to ruin them. You play as the senior and junior disciples of Wuxia Zi, as they find themselves zeroing in on a shadowy society of martial artists who are taking advantage of the Acquit Period to wipe out martial sects seeming at random. With only the vaguest of clues and tenebrous of leads they set out on a journey to warn other martial art sects and uncover and wipe out the secret society.
---------------------------------------------
2. World and Quest Setup
---------------------------------------------
Tale of Wuxia the Pre-Sequel is really half a JRPG and half a WRPG. While there are few explicit decisions or moral dilemmas to make on quests, there is a near total free-form method of talking quests and who to take with you. See at the beginning of the game you have an hour or two where you get introduced to the characters, go on a few canned adventures and quests, and get used to the battle system. A simple linear introductory segment. Afterwords you get the main quest that drives the whole game; an intercepted message reveals the names of five strongholds of the secret society.
Then the game tasks you to visit some friendly martial artes sects and there's like 3 of them you can choose to visit in any order.
And then the game just tells you to find out where the strongholds are and pretty much blows open the entire world map. With no guidance.
This is a game that doesn't tell you what the main quest is. It doesn't tell you what's mandatory, what's fluff, and what's substantial side-quest content. What it loses in the convenience of "following the main plot" like alot of WRPGs do it gains in actually emulating the feeling of adventure that the characters are supposed to be experiencing.
What it does is a GREAT job of tying all the random sidequests you get wandering through towns and sects into the larger overall story. A random NPC might get you to deliver a letter to a friend... only the letter is filled with wuxia anthrax and you trigger a war between two sects by accident but this leads to a clue about where an enemy stronghold might be. Quests also weave in and out of their own structures. You can start a story arc at the beginning of the game, then get stuck cause the next destination of the quest chain contains a language your characters can't understand. Then like 30 hours later you stumble onto a party member who's bilingual; then suddenly your first quest progresses. I'd say for the first 75% of the game you'll probably have more than a dozen active quests at once.
Even as simple stuff as picking up stuff off the ground is tied to this. There's no "highlight interactables" button but stuff like potion supplies will be highlighted if you have a poison user in your party. Your main character is too lawful good to steal; but if a thief is in your party they'll go straight ahead and pocket books into your inventory. The game knows how to CONSTANTLY drip feed you progress. Everything you do gives you meaningful rewards; it might unexpectedly progress the main scenario. You might get a party member; this party member might be needed for future side quests and even main quests. You might get martial art manuals needed to level up your skills. There is an overall progression curve too; it is unlikely you'll access the end game areas since many of the later game areas require you to first beat certain bosses. But ultimately there is no "sequence" to sequence break. Get strong enough and get the right party members and the world becomes your oyster.
Hell this structure is probably the only system I've seen that makes FETCH quests interesting. NPCs rarely tell you where to get stuff; they task you with finding something and give you either a vague hint or just tell you to keep an eye out. You feel alot less like a delivery man and more like a problem solver. And again, these quests often lead to very dramatic strings. A mountain monk asks for a bag of rice cause he's too small to carry it up the mountain. He doesn't have the foggiest idea where to buy rice. Go to the nearest village, only to find out the rice is marked up 10x cause the populace is in a panic over zombie sightings. Talk with the people standing in line for rice and figure out there's rumors about a local lord being missing and connected with the sighted living dead... and 2 hours later you've tracked down one of the 5 villains. The biggest weaknesses only show up near the end of the game where your quest lists start narrowing; if you find the mountain monk at the end of the game after you've already basically beat all the main villains tracking down the rice does become a simple fetch quest. At least it gives you interesting rewards then.
This freeform quest design even applies to the difficulty and combat encounters. You have to keep a rotating party by nothing more than quest design. There's no auto-levelling; so early game some of the progression blocks might simply be in the form of an insurmountably complex boss. Many times in my playthrough I would isolate one of the major villains, only to get utterly curbstomped. I would hunt down party members that had the specific disabling skills I needed to counter the villain's specific gimmick, then try again with actual success.
While many modern RPGs is a straight shot from A>B, or at least A>B with detours Tale of Wuxia the Presequel is instead a progression "web". You weave in and out of multiple plot lines at your convenience and your ability to progress. The only game I can think of that does this style of interweaving quests better is the first Town in Divinity Original Sin. I'd argue Divinity does the idea better in a smaller scale, but Tale of Wuxia pulls it off on a much grander scale taking course across the whole game. While the destination will be the same (the game basically has a normal ending and a slightly expanded "true" ending, nothing like the whole half dozen 10 hour routes of the first game), the path towards it will be extremely different from player to player.
---------------------------------------------
2. Character and Customization
---------------------------------------------
While getting rid of the time-management aspect of the first game, the prequel instead attaches a stripped down bastardized version of the first game's progression system but is still the better for it.
Rather than 20 different stats for everything from punching things to your ability to get drunk, every character in the prequel has 4 major stats.
Again, EVERYTHING major you do gets you awards, and one of the biggest you get are Perspective points. Anytime you beat a big boss, help out a citizen, etc you're awarded points into a shared pool of stats. You then spend these points to level up base statistics. While the stats affects combat their effect is fairly minor; all the major combat arts and skills are learned from transcribed martial artes manuals you pick up in the world and most of them have statistical benchmarks to reach before you can learn them.
Every party member (and there are like 30 of them you can recruit into your massive 9 man party) has differences in base stats, base traits, and compatiabilities with various martial artes that determines what kind of party member they sort into. Some of the party members are blank slates with weak starting skills but the ability to learn many different martial artes. Some are built as healers; others thieves, some tanks etc.
While combat does grant experience points; instead of levelling a character level every character picks a martial art move to "study". As you get more levels in a particular martial skill you get a corresponding base stat increase and the move itself becomes more powerful. There's decisions you have to make on whether to level useless combat abilities that grant large base stat bonuses, or focus on the immediately useful skills? Who do you teach the HP granting martial art to, the tank who gets hit all the time or the squishy in case they are out of position? Hell who do you even bother to level in the first place is probably the biggest decision.
---------------------------------------------
3. Combat
---------------------------------------------
Like the last game, combat takes place on a hexagonal grid and various attacks have widely different characteristics like distance, damage, and AOE potential. Unlike the last game, which was mostly 1 on 1 or 1 vs many, most battles here are party vs party affairs.
There's no real terrain effects beyond stuff like corridors and the odd tree or rock. Instead alot of the depth is on the "internal style".
Every major enemy has a specific "internal style"; this is a unique case-specific (or enemy type specific) buff. One enemy boss may pull in nearby minions to automatically guard him, another boss will gain one hit of superarmor everytime they successfully dodge an attack. One boss might just plain no-sell critical hits or regenerate 10% of their health per turn. Status effects in this game are also absolute; unless a boss has a SPECIFIC immunity granted by their internal style a status effects are guaranteed to apply; although they tend to only last one turn. Bosses that dodge too much can be first slowed by making them "Dizzy" and "Bound" before hitting with high power accuracy attacks. Powerful status effects like "Stasis" or "Internal Injury (that shuts down all their style granted buffs)" will only work if the boss is <70% MP so you have to either weather their attacks or drain their energy before trying for them. It really makes the harder bosses ones where you have to puzzle out a "solution" to their particular combination of defenses to damage them before they slaughter you. This also really plays into the fiction of the world; beating the enemy involves studying the enemy's martial arts and finding an exploitable weakness.
The internal style system also applies to your characters; just like you get different moves found in the game as manuals, different internal styles can also be taught/read. Your main character starts off with a regen and tanking style; but you can level up a style that focuses on dodging or counterattacks. Everyone playing this game can have a different party; with different internal styles; using different moves.
---------------------------------------------
4. Translation
---------------------------------------------
While I'm gushing praise on this game, ultimately there's two major issues holding back the game as a whole. The first is that the translation sucks. Can't dodge around the biggest barrier and unfortunately the totally legitimate reason this game isn't gonna to be well enjoyed.
The first game had a translation that was best described as "not-English". No clear grammar, clear evidence of multiple translators for whom English wasn't so much as a second language but maybe a 10th language. This game actually sounds like it was translated by the same person or team. The language is now elevated to "broken-English". The intent and content of speech is now 95% clear. The story is much easier to follow. Dramatic scenes feel dramatic, sad scenes feel sad and... well there's alot of unfortunate anachronisms beside that. The screenshots are my cherry picked samples of some of the main strange lines; most of the translation is better, and thankfully it is rarely worse than my examples. Again there's about 2-3 optional quests with some (thankfully very weak) martial art skills that requires you to answer a quiz about the tenets of Buddhism or poetry interpretation of an obviously non-translated poem. For some of them the translators literally highlight the answer for you, but not always. Most poetry or songs are outright just left in Chinese, though I suppose this is preferable to any butchered translation attempt. Annoying some of the in battle dialogue also gets cut off by the size of the text boxes as well. The biggest improvement I can say is that while the translation sucks it does so in a consistent way and the translation never impedes progress and the most important part of the game, the quest log and all the clues for the dozens of quests you are juggling are well translated.
---------------------------------------------
5. Accessibility Problems
---------------------------------------------
Finally the biggest problem this game has is accessibility. I hate to say it but the game does assume knowledge about the prequel to some extent. The biggest example of this is the first battle; while the first game opens with a tutorial battle against a chicken the FIRST fight in this game is not a tutorial. Instead the first fight is between the officers of two of the warring clans fighting against each other; you pick a side to control as the battle tutorial. And it's legit one of the most complicated fights in the game; you control 4 bosses with widely different abilities against their counterparts. Worse off your main characters get PERMANENT skills depending on whether you won the tutorial fight or who you pick; these skills are so powerful they actually can direct your playstyle. The game never teaches you the systems; instead it seems to expect you know how the game works from the first entry and doesn't really bother to explain itself. The cast list is massive, including most characters from the first game and a ton of new ones. Much of the old cast isn't given much of an introduction. It's cool how they cameo in so much of the previous game's cast members, but those unfamiliar with the series will probably be confused as to why someone is important.
Again while I praise the freefrom quest structure there are a handful of missables that can approach near Zodiac-Spear levels of obscurity (namely a single missable party member and 3-4 super moves). They do follow a logic and from the obscurity of their obtainment and how OP they are they do seem to be more easter-eggs than essential moves, but missables in any game like this is really annoying. Since this game doesn't have anything even approaching objective markers, instead the game depends on giving you verbal hints and directions. Early on in the game if you get stuck there's something like a billion other things you can be doing, but near the end when the quest list is winding down there will be an invariable part where you get stuck. Sometimes the instructions are too vague; to the point of busywork. You might be told to investigate a clan of knife wielders, but the quest trigger isn't in their complex on the left side of the city but in front of a rug dealer on the right side. Or you might get a clue to talk to gather the word on the street, and that usually requires you to run around talking to all nearby NPCs until someone gives you what you need. I had to consult a guide/talk on forums because I got stuck on my progression once or twice.
The game is mercifully well optimized. On launch it was pretty much unplayable, but now it runs smoothly but with very frequent 1-2s long loading screens. There's also a rare (happened once in 50hrs) where the game would randomly freeze in battle, but multiple players have reported this.
---------------------------------------------
6. In Conclusion
---------------------------------------------
The first Tale of Wuxia was a flawed masterpiece of a game, super ambitious but in many ways somewhat of a slog to get through. It's a game with a shit translation and is very difficult for me to recommend.
Tale of Wuxia the Presequel is very different. This is a game worth playing in spite of its translation. If you think you can stomach the "gist" of the conversation, and are willing to read a gameplay guide or two on steam to achieve familiarity with the systems. It does so much unique things and has a game structure I've seen no other game try, at least not with this much success. So the next time you're playing the next sword and board, elves or sci-fi RPG consider at least giving wuxia a try. At the very least, it ain't all that expensive!
