I’ve been on a bit of an RPG kick lately. A few months ago I was on a run of short, snacky and mostly roguelite games. I began to crave something a little meatier. Something where I wouldn’t be forced to watch my failures pile up in inverse proportion to my remaining sanity. Something with level up dings and incrementing stats and that won’t be polished off in a lunch break. So when the lengthily titled Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains plopped into my inbox I was intruiged.
I’d never heard of it or the series it belongs to. Partly because I’ve not shown much interest in turn-based RPGs for a while but mostly because I can’t read Chinese. The series has been going on for quite some time, with the most recent being number seven in 2021. Today’s subject is a little older – it was first released in 1999, and has now been touched up for PC and Switch. It poses a question. Given that very little has been done to it, how should I approach a game to review that released when I was only six years old?
History (But Not)
I think the best approach is just to assess it like a museum piece and see how its various original elements hold up. Let’s start with the writing – something that should be (mostly) timeless. Well, Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains opens with our main man Septem, a Frankish knight currently in Venice, searching for a way to avoid war in his home country. Venice is currently in the grip of Tempar control, however, who are roughing up merchants and blocking trade. Then an old bloke draws a pentagram on an altar and summons a demon from hell named ‘Nicole’ and we throw the history book straight into the rubbish bin. This is a story about God and Satan, that casually strolls through ancient history.
As a plot device, it’s not half-bad. While I’m not too interested in listening to people banging on about their religions, the nature of the plot takes us all over the place. Septem’s quest to find something to end conflict continually changes the more he studies, so we end up traipsing from Venice, through Arabia before ending up in ancient China. Also, hell. That’s down to his constant conflict with demons. It’s nice seeing the scenery change as we go, though unfortunately the writing behind the plot rather lets things down a bit.
There’s two reasons for this. The first is a simple one: the translation isn’t that great. Not the worst I’ve seen, though. Still, it’s enough for characters to all start sounding a little off and robotic, which isn’t great for characterisation. It’s also probably why Septem comes across as a jerk, making it inexplicable why everyone immediatly falls for him. The writing also suffers from an exposition issue. Characters will regularly vomit descriptions of the current world situation at you, like they’ve memorised the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page.
Wait Your Turn
It’s a tell don’t show world. I ended up completely losing track of the plot as new names were thrown out and characters came and went. The core group of characters weren’t bad, but Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains never stayed still long enough to let them breathe. Still, maybe we’ll have a better time focusing on the combat. It’s turn-based, with an ‘Active Time Battle’ element, where your characters can only strike when their agility bar is full. It works pretty well and did hit some old school nostalgia buttons for me. It’s nice to play a turn-based game that hasn’t been messed with.
It does bring along a host of issues from the past though. The first is random encounters. Admittedly, this is par for the course. I do hate it when games don’t let us dodge the encounters though. Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains loves pushing you into labyrinths – going so far as to give you items that help you escape – then ramping up the encounters. So if you blunder down the wrong way, it’ll take you two or three fights to get back to where you were. Double that for the world map. Given the rather loose instructions for goals, this can be very frustrating.
The second big issue is also endemic to the genre: the balance is all over the place. The first two thirds are relatively stable, a little easy even, with a few intense spikes in the boss fights. Then in the last third, bosses begin breaking out the one-hit-kill attacks out of nowhere, turning every fight into a roll of the dice. I ended up walking away at the final boss for just this reason. Still, at least grinding is pretty quick. The battle animations are fast and smooth, which makes the smaller fights zoom past. Thank the Lord.
Time Capsule
It’s not devoid of good ideas. There’s a nice capture mechanic, where you can capture monsters from the battlefield and equip them – or throw them at your other enemies. You can then fuse them with items to make stronger monsters. It’s neat, and adds a little something. There’s also a frankly staggering amount of enemy variety, which draws from both western and eastern mythology. Only a handful are re-skins too, which is impressive. The graphics in general aren’t too bad. It works hard to keep the different regions as distinct as possible.
It’s for this reason that I was originally quite happy with Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains. But as I went through, the combat, the labyrinths and the writing began to wear me down. Then there are the weird re-release bits. Audio seems overly compressed at times and the cutscenes (the ones that don’t use late nineties 3D at least) seem to be running at 240p. In the end, all the good will I had towards it seemed to dribble out, leaving me a little saddened at the end. I wanted an RPG but not like this. Not like this.
