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SummaryWhat happened to Softstar?..
The GoodI am a big fan of Softstar and their two great RPG franchises: Xuanyuan Jian and Xianjian Qixia Zhuan. After the disappointment that was for me the latest Xuanyuan Jian installment, I still retained faith in Softstar, even though I have certainly lost a good deal of my expectations. I was playing many other games at the time, and haven't checked their website (or other Chinese game websites) for a long time, so I didn't even know that "Xianjian 4" was in development. But then I suddenly saw it sitting on a shelf in one of those little Shanghainese stores that sell everything, from sandwiches to condoms and video games (I was actually after sandwiches that time). Without even thinking twice, I grabbed the game from the shelf and handed it to the cashier. Then I hurried home, installed the game, and immediately started playing it...
There is some good stuff in the game. In terms of overall story quality and characterization, this is typical Xianjian. Once again, you'll have boys and girls falling in love with each other, sharing their dreams and hopes. As in the previous games, the conversations are well-done. There are lots and lots of dialogue in the game, and for the most part the understanding of them was worth the effort of reading Chinese. The conversations are written in a lively, colloquial Chinese language, so that any modern young Chinese will be easily able to feel sympathy for the heroes from the past.
Xianjian series is in fact a soap opera set in medieval times. You won't find many of those in the West, but in China it is a very common thing. Half of the TV soap operas here take place in some historical setting. A love story between a courageous apprentice of martial arts from some mystical mountain and a lonely beautiful princess with magical powers is as typical for Chinese TV as one between a boy from a modern rich Taiwanese family and his poor office employee.
So if you are here for yet another good medieval Chinese soap opera, "Xianjian 4" is still on par with the previous installments of the series in this aspect.
However, it is also a game. Which means that you'll be playing it as much, and maybe even more, than reading the dialogue text boxes that advance the story. It is a game that contains something else beside the story, which are graphics, music, and, most importantly, the gameplay. Unfortunately, this is where we head straight into the "Bad" section of this review.
The BadWitnessing my initial joy from purchasing the game slowly fade away as I was playing it, I thought that maybe I've lost interest in Eastern RPGs. I even played a bit of Xuanyuan Jian 4 to see if it was true. But no, that game was still good. Then I recalled the previous Xianjian games, and tried to understand why I considered them all good, but couldn't enjoy playing this latest installment, even though the games were so similar.
Then I thought that perhaps this was the reason: the game is too similar to its predecessors. The series have had a symmetrical structure until now: the second game concluded the story of the first, and the third game had its own waizhuan, literally "outer story", which was in fact its conclusion. You couldn't expect innovation from this waizhuan, because it was released only a year later that its predecessor, and its goal was to continue and conclude its story. Was the third game innovative? It certainly was. It was the first one done entirely with 3D graphics; it had large, complex dungeons; and it introduced a refined, fully re-designed gameplay system.
So, does "Xianjian 4" have exactly the same gameplay system? That shouldn't be such a big problem, you'd say. Eastern RPGs are awfully conservative, and it's normal that a game utilizes the same old gameplay system if it was successful.
Yes, I'm aware of that, and that's why I could sill enjoy Suikoden V, even though I disliked its conservative statement. But alas, the matters are much worse here. Like in its contemporary, Xuanyuan Jian 5, the gameplay is not just too traditional - it is simplified, or, better to say, dumbed-down.
What could they possibly dumb down in a Xianjian game, you'd ask. After all, compared to Xuanyuan Jian series, Sofstar's other main franchise, Xianjian games have always been quite simple gameplay-wise.
And yet... you could of course forgive the first game its simplistic gameplay. It was a pioneer in love-themed RPGs; the incomparable strength of its story made everything else irrelevant. The second game then introduced all kinds of nice gimmicks, such as for example monster summoning. Then came the third game, presenting a brand new system, somewhat influenced by Grandia games, but with cool ideas of its own. Even though the battles were still turn-based, the actual attack animation took place in real time, and you had to plan ahead which character to use for attacking, because the enemies were constantly moving. Magic casting took actual time, so it was in your best interest to improve your magic skills by repeatedly using spells of a certain discipline, which also opened new spells...
In short, all this resulted in a fun, exciting, fast-paced combat. Now let's see what "Xianjian 4" did with it.
The so familiar turn bar in the upper right corner is a bogus. It has no meaning whatsoever, except for telling you the order of turns. The game pauses when you or the enemy attack. Which means that the combat is once against slowed down to the old, boring "I jump to you, I hit you, then I jump back and wait for you to do the same" kind of thing.
Magic casting takes no time now. Once again, the game simply pauses when you cast a spell. Which means that you can forget about improving your magic casting time by repeatedly casting spells, because there is nothing to improve.
You can still choose the discipline for the spells you want to learn, but you no longer gain access to better spells by casting lower-level ones over and over again. Instead, you are automatically given some measly points you can allocate into learning new spells, which makes the learning slow and unrelated to your own efforts and style of playing. Remember how cool it was to gain access to powerful spells through excessive training in the two previous games? Nothing of the sort here.
And that's it. Really. There is nothing else you can do in the game. There are certain field abilities, like setting traps, but I haven't found a good use for them. You are left with the standard turn-based battles stripped to bare bones. There is nothing to develop in this game, nothing to customize.It almost doesn't feel like a RPG any more, not even like an Eastern RPG. Why did they do that? Even if they didn't have anything new and creative in mind, why did they take away all the fun stuff they have invented in the past?..
Really, do you know any Eastern RPG released in this millennium that has such a shamelessly simplistic, gimmick-less, ordinary system? Probably only "Xuanyuan Jian 5". Which kind of proves my point about something going wrong with Softstar.
The whole structure of the game shows that they didn't even bother to cover somehow for the weaknesses of the genre. Look, I don't demand every new Eastern RPG to be a Final Fantasy XII, but if you can't top yourself in innovation and quality, at least do it with quantity. But we don't even have that. The complex, maze-like dungeons are replaced by smaller, more linear, unexciting (but sometimes still confusing) areas. The game is depressingly linear, even for an Eastern RPG. You just move from point A to point B nearly all the time.
But that's not all. There are many design flaws that I can't understand, especially because I'm sure many people have noticed them before. None of Sofstar's games known to me has ever had voice acting (except some line spoken by a narrator in a couple of games). Neither does "Xianjian 4". Sure, we've all accepted that before, because the other stuff was so good. But really... it's 2007. And here is a RPG with plenty of conversation and no voice acting at all. Why?
I've complained about the lack of fully rotatable camera in some other reviews, but nowhere did it infuriate me more than in this game and in "Xuanyuan Jian 5". Those two are the fourth and the fifth fully 3D RPG Softstar has developed. Why can you still only look to the sides, but not up and down? Why?
And now the graphics and the music. The two previous Xianjians had marvelous music. The newest Xianjian has either recycled the songs from the predecessors (which for some reason are performed on different instruments and sound worse), or added some rather mild, harmless stuff of its own. That's right, just like "Xuanyuan Jian 5".
Those two recent games by Softstar are so similar in their weaknesses, that I have a serious suspicion that something must be going wrong in the company. Did they fire some of their more talented developers? Is there an internal struggle, or maybe budget problems? I don't know, but it saddens me to see that such a great development team is producing games that are below its standards.
The graphics are also not very good. They have now realistic character models instead of super-deformed ones. I remember complaining about the super-deformed style in my reviews to the previous Xanjian games, but now I want to take those complaints back. The character models of "Xianjian 4" look lifeless, and their animations are by far not as cute as before.
As for the rest of the graphics, they are really average, and even though the two previous games were anything but cutting-edge, they still looked nicer somehow. There is something unpleasantly bright in the graphics, they lack detail, and some of the textures (like on the trees) simply look ugly.
Even though I didn't like Xuanyuan Jian 5, it still had a pretty colorful and large character cast. In this Xianjian, the character cast (including party members) is small,and it consists of the traditional male and female types that we have seen in every other Xianjian game. Don't get me wrong, those characters are still appealing and all, but I feel they have really exploited those character types to the full in the previous games. This is just another overly traditional aspect of the game. I mean, how many classic Chinese love stories can you tell?
Although, even though the game begins with a very impressive intro, and the story opens with an interesting premise, after a while it becomes the usual comfortable slowly-moving Eastern RPG on rails. The main objective is being pushed further away, and smaller linear tasks take its place...
The Bottom Line+ Well-written conversations
+ Traditionally good characterization...
- ...which is perhaps too traditional
- Terribly outdated, simplistic gameplay
- So-so graphics and music
- The common flaws of the genre are too apparent
I really don't understand this. I've been a passionate fan of Softstar since the moment I discovered Chinese RPGs. I was impatiently waiting for both Xuanyuan Jian 5 and this game, and both disappointed me very much. I could have accepted the mediocre graphics and music, the overly traditional plot themes and characterization; but I couldn't accept the stone-age, dumbed-down gameplay. I didn't have enough patience to go through the slowly-developing story to the end because I found it painful to witness a gameplay system taken straight out of the 80-ies in a 2007 game. The game is not fun to play, and is so outdated in pretty much every aspect, that I can't help but feel that something must be going wrong with Softstar. I sincerely hope that they'll overcome this crisis and make more of those creative, inspired games that they gave us in the past and that I enjoyed playing so much.
原文~~~~~ |
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发表于 2012-5-23 00:34:48
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