Septem is a lonely knight with a big problem: Venice’s rogue fanatics think he’s an evil heretic, and his new best friend, Nicole, a fun and terrifying naivete. servant of satan who doesn’t see the problem of killing anyone and everyone who tries to fight them – it’s kinda hard to pretend he’s not the devil’s number one fan. It’s far from the first game to call me an enemy of the state, but I can’t think of the one against me the heavens themselves before leaving the first city.
Most RPGs can only dream of having an opening as captivating as this, or claim to take their hero on a journey that spans half as many fantasy-themed reimaginings of real-world cultures as Xuan- Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains eventually did.
But this particular re-release of Softstar’s 1999 RPG does something even more special than that: it makes a piece of gaming history previously inaccessible to English-speaking gamers for the very first time. Xuan-Yuan Sword has long been a central pillar of Chinese language gaming, from its floppy disk debut to the impressive action RPGs of the 2020s. Yet even in a series as beloved as this Mists Beyond the Mountains receives a extra love, in the same way that we might fondly think of Final Fantasy 6 as a standout retro moment in Squaresoft history. It is This special, a game that forever changed what I thought a list of essential RPGs should contain – and where they might come from.
So it’s a shame that this modern PC port is closer in spirit to the delisted and hideous “HD” Final Fantasy 6 than the excellent Pixel Remaster, leaving us with a game that’s neither an accurate representation of the original Xuan-Yuan sword nor in-depth analysis. improve.
Whichever language you choose to play in, this new version is based on the existing (and untranslated) mobile remaster – the visibly thumb-sized icons in battle instead of the original’s text menu reveal it. I’m sure this approach is convenient (and profitable) for the developer, but paying a lot of money for a PC port of a mobile port of a PC game feels a bit like being asked to savor half-chewed food.
I wish that was the worst thing I could say about it, but it turns out that’s where the ugliness begins. Like many RPGs, it’s the story that ultimately makes Mists Beyond the Mountains interesting, and yet…Againas also happened with the English version of Softstar’s Sword and Fairy 7 – the translation created for this epic tale can only be described as appalling.
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That’s all technically correct, just littered with phrases no human would ever say. Like, and I quote: “being executed by burning in public”
Come on, “burned at the stake” is just there.
The description of an achievement reads “The resolution of a species in the creature catalog reaches 100”. Honestly, I don’t know what that means, although I apparently did.
These issues run so deep that the incongruous high-res English font often contains the kind of basic presentation issues that most of us thought we left behind decades ago. Almost every sentence is dotted with appearance
random new line
s and/or,
uneven text justification
And that’s where it remembers to stay in the dialog in the first place.
I really wish the editor had chosen either ellipses “…” or interpoints “···” and then stuck to one of them, instead of going back and forth multiple times in the same sentence. A story that feeds on heightened representations of real-world cultures and religions needed to be treated with more care. The game opens with xenophobic Christians trying to burn foreigners alive and a huge dollop of noble rivals pulling political strings in the background – this is neither the time nor the place for a hero who says “Dude”. This game deserves better. Damn, any the game deserves better.
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The good news is that it’s much easier to deal with these unforced errors than it would have been in the original 1999 Chinese version, which I’ve owned and loved for years. This new port of Mists Beyond the Mountains has been rebalanced with the impatient in mind. Combat is generally a lot easier, Septem starts with a lot more money, and it’s now possible to put the game down wherever you want with a free save. Old dungeon save points have been turned into free full food stations. On the surface, these changes seem useful for the modern era, but in truth, they and a number of other seemingly minor changes rob the game of much of its interactive joy. Combat is now mostly mindless, and there’s no real reward for dungeon crawling anymore: what good is a new sword or other healing item when I can already easily kill anything in sight?
Why bother experimenting with the game’s Shin Megami Tensei-ish capture/merge/equip monster mechanic when I can almost destroy anything in one hit?
The graphics used in these now unforgettable encounters and dungeon crawls are messy. The field of view has been widened to fill modern widescreen displays, meaning battle scenes have had their art shifted slightly, then tiled horizontally to compensate. Some key events show a gap on either side because they were built with 4:3 monitors in mind. There’s now lingering blur on impressively animated pixel art, and some special effects aren’t as smooth as they originally were: a waterfall now has clear tiled edges evident at its animated frothy end , while the original game – released 24 years ago – looked seamless in its natural surroundings.
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Elsewhere, switching between a poorly scaled cutscene and the game itself can leave the action taking place in a smaller part of the screen and only repair itself when characters move to a new area. There’s always something that spoils a nice feature or a great idea that was perfectly fine the first time around.
The Xuan-Yuan Sword series, like so many other Chinese-language RPGs, definitely deserves a spot – no, a throne– at the table of our collective gaming consciousness. They’re finely crafted experiences, good enough to hold their own against anyone’s favorite Japanese RPGs, filled with characters fans always love to see in TV adaptations or buy as expensive statue form in Taiwan and China. So it breaks my heart to see this game treated so badly, knowing that this will be the first and probably the last impression many English speakers will have of the game. It’s like hearing that a friend has finally started watching Star Wars, only to realize he’s seen the non-widescreen special editions. On VHS.
In Chinese, this is a modern, if mediocre, reissue at best. In English, it’s a totally wasted golden opportunity.