Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament Review

By Kevin Tavore,

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Xuan-Yuan Sword. It is, after all, one of over a dozen entries to the series since 1990, and the series has garnered many spin-offs, including two television series totalling 93 episodes, on top of another that’s coming later this year... or perhaps you’ve simply been living outside of China. Considering its history, the series is obviously incredibly popular in its home country, but until this title, the series had never been localized and released in the West. It’s essentially a Chinese Final Fantasy and that influence is apparent in nearly every aspect of the game. At the same time, it’s a distinctly different experience quite unlike any JRPG you’ve ever played. That makes it an interesting work, if not a good one.

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. Because a game must be played actively, all the negatives would outweigh the positive aspects. This game proves this wrong. 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. These two come together to create an experience that is somehow very charming on first impression.

The translation work in this game is extremely poor. An ideal translation will be meticulous, making sure each word is both literally correct and also that the overall message is kept intact. 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. That didn’t happen.

Xuan-Yuan Sword is absolutely riddled with errors. You cannot play the game for five minutes without running into basic issues that could have been solved by proofreading. Grammar sounds strange and off. Text runs off the screen because the literal translation was too long, leaving you confused and bemused. There are a catastrophic amount of spelling errors, including a misspelling of the main hero’s name on the Character tab of the menu. The experience is frankly absurd, but it is absurd in a way that can become endearing.

It helps that the story is actually quite decent. 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. The entire tale comes off as a Chinese folktale and it’s complemented by added depth. The main party is fleshed out with realistic motivations that make them easily relatable. There is mystery that starts with an interesting premise and drops just enough bread crumbs to keep you actively engaged. 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.

In terms of design, Xuan-Yuan Sword has a lot of good ideas that have been done badly due to technical woes. This doesn’t refer to things like textures flashing and quests permanently breaking so that they can’t be completed, although that certainly happens. Instead, the game is littered with half-measures that break the game. For instance, the game offers crafting as well as traditional vendors. 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. 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.

On the flip side, the game does also contain some strikingly strange design decisions in the form of its puzzles. There are three types and they fundamentally do not work. 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. It’s a task most suited for someone first learning the language. For anyone fluent it should be so natural that it might as well not exist.

Then there are riddles which, unsurprisingly, fall victim to localization. They simply don’t make any sense whatsoever. Finally, there are questions and answers on obscure topics such as wine tasting. 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. Instead, the answers are so absolutely confusing that I cannot imagine even localization could explain them. 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.

The world and worldbuilding are nice but damaged by technical issues. Exploring the zones is easy enough thanks to a map that has all the info you’ll need, including active quests in the area. These zones are often big and beautiful to look at. They feel Chinese but also fantastical at the same time, and it fits the tone of the game perfectly. To fill the world you’ll find many villages and quests. The quests are interesting enough when they work and can be fun to experience. However, quests will break and the quest log’s translation is so poor it can lead to confusion as to where to go to complete the quest. In this case, the poor localization damages the integrity of the quests while technical wobbles hinder their completion generally.

The combat is a cooldown-based active time battle system. Essentially, you can use any ability and then must wait out a global cooldown before you can use another. Basic attacks come in two flavors at no mana cost and can be used to create simple three-button combos. Also available are numerous spells that damage, heal, shield and buff. You can only control one character at a time, but you can switch to any character on the fly.

The end result is surprisingly fun. It feels a bit like Final Fantasy XIII, which saw you switching to different paradigms focused on different aspects of combat. In the same way, Xuan-Yuan Sword’s character swapping allows you to flip between characters casting healing spells on one while another attacks, another buffs and another casts damaging spells. It could be chaotic, but you’ll pretty quickly become accustomed to the feel of it. When fighting a boss, this is incredibly enjoyable, especially if you like healing in MMO’s as you’ll need to heal constantly fluctuating health bars like whack-a-mole. On the other hand, that layer of strategy is never needed as normal enemies are so easy — instead, the ability balance is severely broken and the best strategy is to always spam an AOE spell with a single character.

The combat is also crippled thanks to one of the worst combat AI’s ever encountered in an RPG. While you control one character, the others are always acting in strange ways. There seems to be no logic whatsoever to the AI’s combat choices. On one hand, the AI will happily cast an AOE spell against a single enemy. On the other, they’ll cast a buff when all the enemies are almost dead. Worst of all, these actions all cost mana and mana can only be regenerated by using items.

These AI can, optionally through the menu, automatically use items to refill health and mana. The issue is that they will blow through their mana in seconds without control either way, so your options are either to leave them empty on mana until you need them or to let them vampirically suck all the mana items out of your inventory. Luckily, the previously-mentioned vendor imbalance that allows infinite cash will allow you to buy infinite mana items. It’s an alright solution, although the game is clearly not balanced around you having everflowing mana. It’s a lose-lose situation.

The achievements are standard-fare for a JRPG. You’ll need to do two playthroughs to get them all thanks to a defeat all bosses achievement that can only be completed in the second playthrough. You’ll also need to find all the treasure chests that are very easy to locate, and most are freely available throughout the game. On top of this, you’re collecting all equipment and capturing all the monsters, both of which will not be incredibly complicated if you plan to see everything. The main issue is completing all quests, which is missable if you progress too far, but fairly easy in theory since the quest log will tell you when a new quest is available. The problem is that quests can glitch and fail to progress, making it impossible to continue on in them. It’s not clear if the same quests will break in every game, and all but one of the glitches resolved themselves with time, but it’s possible the achievement is unobtainable.

Summary

Xuan-Yuan Sword is gaming’s homage to a “so good it’s bad” B-movie. There are some really great aspects to the game. The combat’s potential depth is realized in boss fights, the story is engaging, and it has strong characters with depth. It’s got all the essentials of a good JRPG, but it's mixed with a poor localization and shoddy technical work to create a game that is almost enjoyable at first. The technical issues and translation are comical at the beginning and you’ll find yourself surprised at the absurdity, but the humor slowly erodes as the hours pass by. Eventually you’re left with a paper mache house built around a solid framework. It’s a game that could have been good with another few months of development and a better translation, but what we got could still be a fun romp if you approach it with the right mindset.

Positives

Interesting story with moving characters
Boss battles require strategy and have depth
Environments look quite nice
Interesting take on classic JRPG elements

Negatives

Translation is quite poor
Every facet of the game is riddled with bugs
Fundamentally unpolished
Combat AI is self-destructive and broken

Ethics

The reviewer spent approximately 21 hours exploring a mythical ancient China. Along the way he laughed at the absurdity, found characters worth investing time into and earned 15 of 45 achievements for 255 Gamerscore. An Xbox One download code for the game was provided for the purpose of this review.

Review Xbox One

Written by Kevin Tavore

Kevin is a lover of all types of media, especially any type of long form story. The American equivalent of Aristotle, he'll write about anything and everything and you'll usually see him as the purveyor of news, reviews and the occasional op-ed. He's happy with any game that's not point and click or puzzling, but would always rather be outdoors in nature.