This game has probably the best plot/story development of any game that I've played in the last 10 years. It's as if DOMO Studio invested 90% of their budget into developing the story, voice acting, and music. The atmosphere of the game, the interactions of the different characters, the personal growth that each character experiences and presents, all come together to bring the player a unique perspective into Chinese mythology.

With that said this game is not without its flaws: http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1215941852

Xuan Yuan Sword (XYS) game series are like the Final Fantasy games in China/Taiwan (though Final Fantasy is also quite popular in Asia). The parallel game series to XYS is called Chinese Paladin (or Legend of Sword and Fairy, LSF; the names are interchangeable, just translation differences). XYS is heavy on mythology/history, the main character is usually inserted into previously established mythology/history, and DOMO developed storylines/supernatural events are added. LSF is generally original story lines with much less emphasis on history.

The XYS games have a "core" series, titled XYS 1, 2, etc..., and a spinoff series, titled XYS 外傳 (wai zhuan). Some of the spinoffs are sequels to the core series, and some are completely independent games that are unrelated to the rest of the XYS series entirely. Gate of Firmament falls into the latter category (for the most part). You don't need to play the others to understand this game.

This game is about the things that happened to Earth when the Yellow Heavenly (thanks Mew) Emperor decided to open the gates of heaven for all mortals to obtain divine power. The reason why he opened the gates was so they could find his "dear missing daughter". This led to tons of chaos since now you've basically got a supervillain fountain. To stop this from happening, a tribe/civilization with divine power along with some other tribes + gods decide to seal off the gate, which leads to the story in the game. All of this is rendered in the prologue's intro video.

The game is built on the Unity engine, so stuff looks pretty dated, however the game came out in 2015 so that's sort of expected (for a Chinese game). The characters are a bit stiff, since there aren't that many facial expressions that can be modeled; however some things are animated such as: eyebrow furrowing, sadness/tears, joy/smiling/laughing, agreement/disagreement, and "sighing".

Though the character models are so-so. the environment is great, you can just google for background images of the game and they look pretty amazing. It's unfortunate that some of the backgrounds are only used a few times in the game, but they truly look amazing in the 3D world. A significant portion of the game is also done with hand-drawn art (a XYS tradition), such as the UI portrait photos, loading screens, some of the Steam card backgrounds etc.

The game runs at 60FPS for the most part, turning down AA + shadows should fix FPS drops.

6/10

Beautiful music, that's why they have a separate soundtrack for you to purchase. It's also part of the XYS tradition to have a great soundtrack, sometimes performed at concerts (like Nobuo Uematsu concerts). You can probably scope out the music on YouTube for more info.

Voice acting is fantastic, I have no complaints here. Originally people were really frustrated because of the awkward pauses between conversations, since the engine would load the 2nd person's response a few seconds slower than expected. A patch was introduced so you could just press "confirm" and end the first person's pauses, this (though requiring a bit of manual labor) sped up the pace of the conversations to feel more natural.

Sound effects are "not bad", I say this because as per XYS tradition, some of the sound effects are reused (from as far back as games in the early 90s). But that's not all bad, they've all been re-done to sound "modern", and if you haven't played the old games you wouldn't notice.

9/10

The game is a mix of Tales style and Final Fantasy ATB. You walk around a 3D environment map, and there are monsters that randomly spawn. If you walk into them or are detected by them, a fight occurs. You can initiate the fight early with your map ability which causes specific effects.

Once in combat, it's an ATB style system (however your bar is a cooldown timer that doesn't really change unless you're slowed). Your physical attack/supportive attack is hotkeyed, health/mana pot is hotkeyed, and you can shift to 4 different spells. At the start of the game, you can only hit enemies once (no combo'ing), as you level up, additional attacks are added.
There is no "limit break" like in other XYS games (or Final Fantasy style games), though at level 20 and 30 you do get different combo finishers.

For most of the game it's just button mashing, because there's a ton of trash mobs, so I completed 70% of the game just button mashing my AOE nuke.

Towards the end of the game you have to do some micro management since the AI isn't very smart.
Example: Switch to defense hero, cast buffs, switch to healer, cast debuffs/buffs, switch to physical, cast buffs, switch to each character to attack, switch to healer, etc. Some people describe this as FF13 style (since you constantly switch characters to change spells/buffs).

For that matter, the AI is TERRIBLE. If you skill spells on your non-main, the AI will constantly spam them, and eventually consume all your mana potions (called powders in this game). However this can be worked around by the weird money glitch (which is listed in the Steam guide section).

5/10

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that the story is fantastic. However you're gonna need some patience as this game is nearly 70% cutscenes/voice acting conversations/FMVs, 30% combat. Some of the cutscenes/FMVs are nearly 20 minutes, so treat it more like a long movie/TV series/soap opera. It took some getting used to in the beginning, but towards the end, I felt it really was necessary to set up appropriate ambiance.

10/10

It's not very good, a lot of the clever puns and alliterative conversations are lost in translation. I could do a better translation, but at the number of lines per character, that might take quite a while. I'm fluent in English/Chinese, so I played the game with English subs to see what the translations were like. Often times they misrepresented the reason/emotion of what a character was expressing. Even so, I feel you can still understand the story and challenges faced by each character; (some of the best character-character sequences were non-vocal).

4/10

This game has a lot of flaws, but the plot alone is worth a playthrough. For the last sale price ($4.49!!!) it is 100% worth it to give it a shot. I bought it on release for $15 (which is still worth it!). Expect around 25 hours of main story (without skipping cutscenes). Probably 40 hours to do all the sidequests + side bosses. A 2nd playthrough is required to 100% cheevo the game.

7/10