[h2]Overall: 6.5/10[/h2]
[h3]Story:[/h3]
This is the first Xuan-Yuan Sword game I’ve played, but from what I gathered before jumping in, each entry tells its own story, so you don’t really need knowledge of the previous games to understand what’s going on here. In theory, that’s great for newcomers like me. The narrative is clearly meant to be one of the biggest focuses of XYS7, and I appreciated being able to jump in without homework from older titles. That said though, by the end of the game the overall narrative still felt a little all over the place, slightly disjointed, and unfortunately pretty undercooked.
XYS7 is also a bit of a slow burn at the start, and it takes a while before things really get moving. However, the core motivation is clear enough: Taishi Zhao is trying to [spoiler]restore his sister Xiang’s body through magic after she gets mortally wounded.[/spoiler] It’s a strong and personal starting point, but the journey that follows and all the information you learn along the way ends up feeling scattered and difficult to follow at times.
The real issue, at least for me, is that this game tries to juggle too many plot threads for a story that only lasts around 15 to 20 hours. You can tell the developers didn’t want the plot to be as simple as [spoiler]“just go resurrect your sister,”[/spoiler] (which is understandable), but the way the journey is extended doesn’t always feel convincing. You’ll run into elements like [spoiler]the Blackflame disaster, political conflicts between factions, and various pieces of Chinese mythology.[/spoiler] All of these ideas are interesting on their own, but they rarely feel like they connect together in a satisfying way.
It’s not outright bad, but the best way I can describe the narrative is "surface level", in a game where the narrative is a HUGE focus. Outside of the main goal of [spoiler]saving Xiang,[/spoiler] most of the other story threads only give you just enough context to understand the immediate situation you’re in. They rarely go deeper than that, even if you take the time to read the character logs and location entries the game provides. By the end, I felt like there were a lot of potentially cool ideas floating around, but not enough time or focus spent tying them together into something more cohesive.
[h3]Gameplay:[/h3]
The gameplay left me feeling slightly conflicted. On one hand, the combat is a pretty fun and approachable action RPG system that focuses on fast swordplay, stance switching, and flashy executions rather than overtly punishing difficulty, but just like the story, it took a while to really “get there.” Going in, I had also seen a lot of comparisons between this game and the souls-like genre because of features like a stamina bar, parry/dodge mechanics, and enemies respawning after resting at campfires, but in my experience this is 100% not a souls-like. At most, it’s an action RPG with a few moderate souls-like elements layered in. Regardless, when I first started playing, the combat actually felt pretty stiff, and I had to reel myself in and meet the game where it was at for a while before things began to click. But even then I'd say XYS7 is just good at what it does, not great. Despite that, most encounters revolve around locking onto enemies, chaining light and heavy attacks into quick combos, and dodging/blocking when monsters try to attack, which quickly felt familiar without getting the sense that the game was trying to do too much. Furthermore, there are four martial art stances you unlock throughout the game, which change the properties of your heavy attack and give you access to unique special techniques, keeping combat fresh while further proving its distance from a souls-like formula.
With all that said though, one of my biggest pet peeves with the combat is how bosses always seem to target you, the player, exclusively during boss fights. On hard difficulty this made certain bosses with faster move sets like [spoiler]Sun Ke or Mo Huang[/spoiler] feel genuinely tedious, especially when potion + stamina cooldowns forced me to back off constantly. There were several moments where I found myself getting chased around an arena while my companions freely attacked from the sidelines without ever pulling the boss’s attention, leaving them completely unharmed while I tried to survive. It just made some moments feel more frustrating than challenging.
[h3]World:[/h3]
I genuinely liked the map, but there is no sense in beating around the bush about its structure, the entire world is basically one long corridor. Progression is extremely linear, with each area feeding directly into the next rather than offering any real exploration opportunities off the beaten path. Still though, I would not call the world lazy or even repetitive. In fact, XYS7 does a pretty good job of giving each city/region you pass through along the way its own distinct personality. My biggest issue with the world design, then, is that although you have the option to, there's honestly no real reason to ever return to any of these cities after you move on from them for narrative reasons. Aside from the Chess players or merchants, there is nothing to interact with. From a technical standpoint, however, the world generally runs quite well. I experienced little to no frame drops during my playthrough, and aside from a couple spots inside Kunyang or right outside Caiyang, there was not much noticeable pop-in either. It is just a shame that there is not more to actually do in any of the towns, because the world itself has enough charm and identity that I found myself wishing the game gave me more reasons to spend time in it.
[h3]Visuals:[/h3]
By the time I finished XYS7, I actually felt that the visuals were also good, especially considering what the game is and the scale of the project. During normal gameplay the environments, character models, and lighting all look very solid. The real problems with the visuals show up in the cutscenes rather than the gameplay. A lot of the major story scenes are surprisingly cinematic and almost movie-like in how they are framed and directed, but several of the smaller/more transitional cutscenes can feel a little funky. More than once I noticed subtle issues like characters moving/rotating faster than their animations, or camera angles that feel awkwardly positioned during conversations. The biggest visual issue for me, though, is how blurry some of the cutscenes can look. Even the well produced ones. At times, it feels like the depth of field is way too aggressive or simply not positioned correctly, which causes characters or parts of the scene to lose clarity when they are obviously intended to be in focus. It is not something that happens in every cutscene, but it certainly happened throughout the entire game. It's a shame too, because when the camera isn't smeared in Vaseline, XYS7 genuinely looks good.
[h3]Music/Sound Design:[/h3]
The music is easily one of the best aspects of XYS7, hands down. The soundtrack leans heavily into traditional Chinese instruments, which fits the game’s historical fantasy setting extremely well and gives the world a distinct musical identity. However, what surprised me the most was just how much variety there is across the soundtrack, and how well the music reinforces the atmosphere of each location and moment in the narrative. On the dialogue side of things, even though I couldn't understand exactly what was being said since the game is voiced in Chinese, I still felt like most of the character performances were expressive and well acted. The tone, emotion, and delivery still came through clearly enough that I rarely felt disconnected from what was happening in big narrative moments. On the other hand, the general sound design outside of the music and voice acting is not anything particularly special. It was all serviceable, but at the same time nothing about them ever really stood out or left me particularly impressed.
