|
Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre is a culmination of Jin Yong's martial arts trilogy, a stand-alone masterpiece. Heaven and Dragon come back, for a martial arts resurgence reincarnation. Unrivaled martial arts secret applications: knives, swords, boxing, martial arts stick are used by the dominant clan an you journey along rivers and lakes. You have complete control over the future Wuji martial skills. Story wise, it follows the original story quite closely, but you play as a fictional created character, not just the main 3 Tian Long character like other games, and you can get involved in several important events in the novel and decide the fate of those original characters. Not only can you allow the plot to follow the original story, you're allowed to change some of the outcomes too if you wish, and make some original sad endings into a happy one. Your main character can even learn most of the famous Wu Gong in the novel if you discovered how to. Gameplay wise, it's like a traditional 2D RPG. You explore the map and town, meeting NPC and doing many many side quests or triggering the advancement of the main plot. You shop for equipment and items like any other classic RPG, or get them through event or quest. Personally I felt they did a good work in balance between maintaining the original feel of the novel, as well as adding new favor and surprise for players, even those who are already familiarize with how the original story go. You can develop relationship with one of the 3 main female characters, one of which is a character from the original novel in the game too. And you can also take the path of evil and good, but this choice affects the items and Wu Gong you get, rather than the main plot. The difference in the main plot is relying on how you treated and control the fate of Qiao Feng throughout the game, not how evil or good your character is (though some choices availability to save or sabo Qiao Feng might depend on your alignment at that time). Battle is also the traditional 45 degree 2D top-down view. It's a half turn base real-time fighting like Final Fantasy, you can only perform action when your time-bar reach certain length, the longer your time-bar increased, the more powerful an attack you can perform, but it also meant your enemy are jumping at you while you wait for your time-bar to grow. You can only control your main character out of 3 characters participate in a battle, while the other 2 are controlled by AI which you can chose a general directive for them to act upon, but lousy AI isn't too much a worry under such battle system. If recall correctly, you can have up to 6 NPC in a party, but at one time only 3 will do the fighting, you can change the fighting party order anytime you want, even during the battle. One thing good about Tian Long is that all Wu Gong not only come with acceptable and some great visual effects, you character will shout out their Chinese name as they activate the Wu Gong. Your Wu Gong will also improve as you used them, the more you use, the more powerful they will become. |
