An acceptable side scroller action that's greatly undermined by its short length, lack of expansive features and weird story rummaged from existing tales.
In the waning days of the 16th century, Joeson, old Korea, defended itself against repeated Japanese invasion, "thanks to the heroic efforts of many." The art displayed with this sentence features exclusively Korean soldiers and completely ignores the efforts made by hundred thousand Ming Chinese troops that were essential to Joeson's defense. Indoctrinatory narrative alert. After the war, the suffering of the common people continued, with corrupt officials and their neighbors who resorted to banditry exacerbating their pain. And one Seonbi with mysterious intent, starts his journey to the capital arming himself with a bow to "address the turmoil." Seonbis, like the title of the game says, were primarily scholars in higher social caste. While they took military roles, brushes and books about confucius came first and foremost in their lives, and yet this guy grabbed his bow first. Bro is up to something.
Tutorial. Seonbi hears about the presence of Japanese holdouts terrorizing and kidnapping nearby locals. To rescue hostages our guy kills dozens of Japanese, including the one who was desecrating a grave right in front of the hideout. He restores the grave, and heads inside of a cave hideout and defeats a samurai boss. But little did he know, there's always a bigger fish. 8 foot tall oni mask wearing samurai suddenly appears and with a single cut from his katana, our protagonist is sent to purgatory before being saved by the spirit from the grave earlier.
The spirit's name is Chunhyang, who became a ghost due to her longing for her husbando who went to capital and never returned. Now this story of her is an existing story written hundreds of years ago, with the same names of the characters and core plot. Except, the girl never ends up dead and buried, at the worst possible place no less. You don't need to know about feng shui to say this. She chooses to accompany our Seonbi since her partner is at the capital, too.
In the first stage, bandits are harassing the locals. And our Seonbi, witnessing this injustice, takes matters into his own hands. You'd think considering the fact that some people only became bandits to simply survive and with his background as an intelligentsia of the era he would try to solve the issue diplomatically first, but no. This guy's on warpath, and he's not in talking mood. A massacre follows. After the bloodshed, he turns his head back, looking at the corpses of the people he slaughtered. Seonbi and Chunhyang justifies their actions, and they walk away. Yeah. Stage 2 sees our return to the Japanese stronghold, and Seonbi duels with the scary oni samurai guy, defeating him. Not much to say.
Stage 3. Zombies. Those zombies. Clearly inspired by the Rampant and Kingdom devs again borrow the ideas of the others. This isn't going to be a half realistic plot at all. Seonbi kills the zombies, and expels the evil tiger spirit. It is told that this spirit of the tiger was seething because it got hunted by Taejo, who founded Joeson, and caused all this ruckus as revenge on him and his nation. I found it funny that this deed of Taejo, hunting a tiger is described as a good thing, but when Japanese doing the same and eventually succeeding later on is somehow often seen as a bad thing in Korea, but I digress.
Next station, Dokkaebi land. What are Dokkaebis? Rather joyful harmless creatures from Korean mythology that pulls occasional ill mannered pranks, this time they had kidnapped a daughter of a local official. And how would our Seonbi react to this? By using the power of the cold, hardened steel tip of his arrows. A total extermination. It's worth saying that the Dokkaebis are inherently nonviolent. But our guy, he's done playing games. He purges them and their king, and rescues the daughter. But who is this we found behind the throne? He's the guy who was sent by Chunhyang's significant other, Mongryong! The fact that he's all and well shows how the Dokkaebi king was capable of showing mercy unlike someone. He was supposed to go straight to check Chunhyang on Mongryong's orders, but the guy got distracted. Why didn't Mongry- Stop. We don't ask that question here.
Guys who conceptualized and designed the enemies must have run out of passion at this point, because they recycled the enemies from the past 4 stages. Our Seonbi, for some reason is following a white mysterious fox casting illusionary veils of enemies to make his life harder. This fox turns out to be a Kumiho, another creature from Korean mythology, with its humanlike appearance exposed. And I am telling you, they got the whole thing the wrong way. What Kumiho foxes do is to make themselves look like Kpop idols to seduce males. They do not disguise as foxes. They are foxes. Imagine if mermaids only showed their fishtails to sailors in attempts to seduce them, what a good way to get harpooned I say.
At last. The final stage. Giant ominous looking black thing is seen stuck in the ground. Chunhyang explains that they are metal stakes planted by the evil Japanese invaders to disrupt the spiritual flow of land or something. This is from a pseudohistorical rhetoric that came from unverifiable spoken tales and common folk' contempt towards Japanese surveying operations in the colonial era 3 whole centuries later. Disgusting propaganda. Back to the game. As an effect of the iron stakes, confused Korean guardians are turned hostile. Multiple stakes are emitting evil black auras. Those stakes gotta be the primary targets, But no. You can't do anything about the evil stakes. What you can do however, is killing the guardians. Crazy stuff. When the Seonbi meets the final boss, the boss states that Seonbi has no right to enter the capital due to the incompetence the ruling class of Joeson showed during the war and before. Guess it was not all that evil Japanese, huh. Seonbi defeats the boss, turning the colors of its clothing from evil black to saintlike white. He acts all chill praising Seonbi's qualities and wishes him luck, and the ending cutscene plays.
Chunhyang finally meets with Mongryong, and they embrace each other. Seonbi presents himself as a royal inspector(secret agents who directly reported to the king, this was originally Mongryong's role) to Magistrate Byeon, who got Chunhyang killed, to enact justice. So ends the story of our Seonbi. And Mongryong's one too, with him reduced as a powerless cuck. He failed to save his girl in time, the guy he sent wasn't successful in his goal, and he didn't even get to avenge his loss.
Before playing this game, I had some degree of expectations for this game because it is rare to see a game that's based on Korean history. And what a disappointment this was. Story isn't even a main focus of this game. I agree. But this lazy disrespectful bastardization of Chunhyang-Jeon is hard to swallow. When I saw the Seonbi first grabbing his bow, a thought passed in my mind about the guy pulling a Katniss regicide move, the king Seonjo got a bad rep for his cowardice that extends to this very day. Of course I knew something like that is too radical of a story. But I did expect the game to say more about the corrupt officials part, after all, it's one of two groups the game pinned down as the cause. But the devs chickened out, and our Seonbi as a result, only draws his sword to the first group. All this shows at the end of the day that this is not a story of some hero who seeks to rectify Joeson and save its people like he originally claimed. Rather, this is a story of a bootlicker with naught ending up as a bootlicker with privileges, still serving the ancien regime that served the role of cancer to its populace.
In short, I didn't like how the story unfolded and felt misled by the devs. Play only for the gameplay, if you're going to play this at all.
