Xuan Yuan Sword VII | PS4 Review

I can’t say I’ve consumed a lot of video games from China, or even much fiction out of there at all. So, I entered Xuan Yuan Sword VII with a heavy helping of curiosity. This is the first of a long-running Chinese RPG series to make its way westward, but DOMO Studios and eastasiasoft sold me with the early trailers of this excellent world and the fantastical monsters. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming focus on narrative.

Family Comes First

The story starts off incredibly compelling, and frankly checks an insane amount of my personal boxes. It’s about a young man protecting his sick little sister, and he’s forced to become the parental figure since she’s much younger. Early on in the story, things take a turn for the worse, and our protagonist has to make a bargain with a companion of unknown magical origin. Later on, this crew is joined by a harsh woman that slowly learns to let down her guard. It’s a found family recipe that strikes right to the core of me.

Thankfully, the dynamic between these characters is the focal point for much of the adventure. Though it’s presented entirely in Chinese dub, I could feel the camaraderie amongst these traveling companions. There’s a great deal of banter during side quests that especially brings to light little nuances about their dynamics, and the campfire chats they often have elicited a lot of genuine laughter and smiles from me. Zhao, Xiang, Hong, and Jipeng are all excellent characters, and I loved learning about them as they learned about each other.

A World at War

There are two major overarching plots going on throughout the game: The search for a magical cure to Xiang’s sickness, and two opposing forces descending into war. While these two plotlines do actually converge fairly impressively, neither of them are terribly engaging. It doesn’t help that one storyline is held up by a bland, boring villain, and the other ends up involving a character the game becomes so weirdly obsessed with out of nowhere that I have to imagine she was prominent in a past title.

My main issue with the story, however, is that it often wants to wade into weighty moral dilemmas, but then has nothing to say on the matter. Zhao does some pretty awful stuff as his morals slowly become compromised as he continues protecting his sister. This is excellent stuff that appeals to me at a core level, but Xuan Yuan Sword VII never addresses these moral issues with any kind of depth. Too often a character will point out how complicated a situation is, but then it’s never actually addressed in a meaningful way.

Darkness Unexplored

You do terrible things, but the party is always treated as being morally correct. None of our heroes question their actions, despite murdering thousands in some scenarios. This would be great if the point was that they were so assured of their actions that they were blind to the complicated nature of them, but they’re played as being entirely heroic, even as they murder unarmed or innocent people. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, but it came across as naive.

Where the darker tone works to the benefit of Xuan Yuan Sword VII is in its side quests. While most are fairly standard fetch quest sort of deals, the tiny stories they tell are usually pretty great. Some can be light-hearted, such as tracking down “marital herbs” for a struggling couple, but most are quite a bit sadder. Nearly all end in some kind of tragedy, and it makes them very memorable. I highly recommend doing them just for the brief narratives alone, and that includes the chess mini game side quest that runs alongside most of the campaign. Even chess is tragic in this world.

Hit Them Where it Hurts

Combat is, of course, a core component to the adventure. It’s a standard lock-on, stamina-based system, and it’s solid. There’s a few interesting martial arts special abilities to unlock, but you’ll nonetheless be dodging and striking for most of the adventure. This is a style of combat I love, but Xuan Yuan Sword VII has one of the most unbalanced difficulties I’ve ever encountered. For most of the game, Normal is a complete cakewalk. I would go hours without an enemy even trying to attack me. Hard disappointed me by just upping the damage enemies dealt, but they still just stood around idly. Even bosses would fall before me on Normal, even beating some in 20 seconds or so. Yet bumping it up to Hard would make these bosses annoying difficult, though not for interesting reasons.

The wide gulf between these options left me unsatisfied with an otherwise intriguing combat system. There would be moments where it came together and felt good for a while, but it would either veer too hard or too easy depending. Around the halfway mark, some new enemies get introduced that balance it out a little better, but the bosses were still all over the place. Sometimes I would beat one in a minute, and then the next could take me hours. It’s very strange and never left it clear what kind of challenge the game wanted to present.

Focus is a Strength

I must applaud Xuan Yuan Sword VII for its contained size and breadth. In a sea of overly large games, it was incredibly refreshing to play a relatively linear 15-18 hour game. The path of the game is largely one of heading forward, with side quests mostly just taking you back down familiar paths. I’ve long been a proponent of backtracking as it helps you to really learn a world, and I’m happy to report that that is indeed the case here. I came to really enjoy simply walking around this fantasy-fueled Chinese wonderland.

I’ve listed a great many complaints of Xuan Yuan Sword VII, and yet I feel compelled to recommend it. It’s the rare case of something being more than the sum of its parts. While it does falter in key ways, there was just that special something that kept pulling me into its world. The core cast of characters is so strong, their camaraderie so heartfelt, that I thoroughly attached myself to them even without an English dub (normally something I find it hard to get past, a fault of mine I know). If you’re a believer in seeing something interesting in the mid-tier space, you should at least check Xuan Yuan Sword VII out.

This review is based on a PS4 copy of Xuan Yuan Sword 7 provided by Plan of Attack for coverage purposes. It is also available on Xbox and PC via Steam.