This is a wonderful RPG that I almost dropped several times a day, and in the end I can say it is the best wuxia title I have personally gotten to experience. The game looks and sounds fantastic, which is impressive given its obviously lower budget. The locales are some of the best I have seen in any HD-2D game and the art style is actually a lot more coherent than even some of the Square titles (or the recently released Eiyuden Chronicles, which falls into a more similar indie category.) Overall, I consider this game a must-play for people looking for interesting indie RPGs. This reccomendation comes with some deep caveats though, because this game has a veritable spiderweb of divergent paths throughout. The amount of barely signposted alternate sidequests, missable companions, multiple endings and hidden content is overwhelming.

While the main story quest follows a linear progression typical of such a narrative; wherein the protagonist travels the world, cultivates several martial art techniques, and acscends from lowly peasantry to literal godhood; the side content represents a dense web of interlocking stories where nearly every action can have later consequences. Going in blind, it is extremely easy to miss small dialogue cues that will open up entirely new narrative paths. While this can result in an innocuous change like getting different quest rewards, more often than not it can lead you to missing out on the chance to recruit companions. This can take the form of not being able to build the needed affection to recruit them; resigning them to just standing there taunting you with one line of generic NPC dialogue; to them getting murdered offscreen because you progressed too far in the main story quest. Several very important characters arcs are accessible only at certain points of progression, and only through very specific quest progression and dialogue choices can you see them to their true conclusion. And while it stings to miss out on some rare gear or skills because you can't reach 100 affection, this really comes to ahead with the Southern Chronicles DLC, where not having 4 very easily missable companions will summarily lock you out of 4 additional recruitable characters and lock you into a bad ending for the DLC.

The Southern Chronicles is easily the best content in the game, with compelling character writing, awesome locales based on Chinese wetlands, and a twisting plot regarding political intrigue and national self-determination (something that I really enjoy out of Chinese RPGs, which often tackle the subject with gusto in comparison to their milquetoast neoliberal cousins in Japan). But the fact that I started playing this blind and missed out on three characters, because I didn't complete one throwaway sidequest before going where the game told me to go, had serious consequences. It forced me out of a lot of really interesting content. It was frustrating to the point I actually did want to drop it, but the rest of the game's high quality made up for it, and I am unashamed to say I used Cheat Engine to at least grab the healer before the DLC concluded. With the addition of the DLC, NG+ functionality was added anyways, greatly complimenting the core conceit of the game's multiple routes and endings. The opportunity to carry over skill points, manuals, etc. to expedite the grindy earlygame will really encourage players to run through the game multiple times, this time with the benefit of hindsight and voluminous google docs to assist them.

Outside of the issue of signposting progression, Wandering Sword is still a top-caliber game. Players are locked to one of the top martial arts sects, but can consult other NPCs to unlock skills from various other sects. Once you get strong enough, you can just run around the top martial arts schools, beating ("sparring") the elderly masters senseless for all their loot. Being able to rob the "Invincible" and "Supreme" masters blind is such a satisfying barometer of your progression. Along the way you will build a trusty nakama of interesting and varied characters: among them is a female swordfighter looking to train with a sect of solely women; a wheelchair-bound detective who rejects the martial arts; a spurned vagabond who is basically the protagonist of his own story. The side characters are a nice change of pace from some of the more common wuxia tropes - for every character that is typecast into a sort of plastic love interest for the MC (this sort of boring and sexist romance writing is one of Wandering Sword's most glaring narrative faults, but that's the norm in a lot of pop fiction sadly) there's also women in the game who aren't just treated as romantic partners and instead as equal comrades in battle. For the most part (meaning outside of the MC's inner circle of love interests) all the characters are well written with a lot of depth to their personal storylines, and you can have basically all of them in your party all the time once you're able to recruit them. The build variety for each individual character can get pretty staggering, and theres mods to recruit a ton of the NPCs too which elevates the potential teambuilding even higher.

The combat is also a high-point, with the ability to swap between a turn-based tactical RPG style of combat and a real-time mode, both with autoplay capability. I could take my time with the more difficult fights but for longer and more tedious busywork (like fights where you control 10+ units against big enemy hordes) you can set auto and let it run without having to laboriously move all the crappy NPC units. The cultivation system is typical of wuxia power fantasies, allowing you to grow from zero to hero but offers a diversity of combat styles and stats to play around with during the progression. Overall, as someone who loves messing around with builds in party-based RPGs, this game offers some really excellent content to sink your teeth into. For much of the game the combat is also quite strategically dense, until it isn't and you become an overpowered martial arts wizard. But this too offers its own satisfying conclusion and works ludonarratively with the theming of cultivation. It is hardly atypical of these sorts of games, either. For those who want more of a challenge, I have read (and observed) that the extreme mode offers insane challenge from start to finish. But for me, the power fantasy was well-earned- considering I actually dropped this game shortly after release cause I was hitting too many walls in the combat. Coming back, studying the game and learning how to build up my meridians, and watching my team overcome previously insurmountable fights is a nice shot of dopamine.

I think a game as dense and complex as this, where documentation outside of Chinese message boards can be a little hard to come by, presents a daunting challenge to those who are used to RPGs that hold your hand. Wandering Sword really requires a closer study to make meaningful progress in, but you're rewarded with a really well-constructed game that holds up very well against its contemporaries. But if you're a completionist this is like a couple hundred hours worth of content, for sure, with even more DLC likely to come and enhance subsequent runs. Just beware, if you're not very careful and don't save liberally, you're liable to get as pissed off as I did.

Wandering Sword gets a shining recommendation, worthy of its ancestors. Amitabha.