Wandering Sword is Wuxia 101

When I say "heroic fantasy", what comes to mind? Knights-errant, saving fair maidens and slaying villains with their shining blade? Wizened sorcerers, good kings, and evil overlords? A decidedly European style of dungeons and dragons? The tropes and traditions of what I thought of as "fantasy" growing up are deeply entrenched in Greco-Roman myth and Arthurian tales. I think I still subconsciously default to this assumption due to just living in western society.

But even in scare-quotes "Generic European Fantasy" media, you occasionally get references to some vague, collar-tuggingly-Orientalist The East because, well, everyone knows that katanas and kung fu are fuckin' cool. That was something I could latch onto. In the right circumstance, a stereotype can sometimes be better than nothing at all, you know? Lan in the Wheel of Time books was obviously a samurai. The Monk class has become a D&D staple. And thankfully, there are a few more options for fantasy these days.

Wandering Sword is an indie RPG from Shanghai-based The Swordsman Studio. I played its NextFest demo a few years ago and was cautiously interested, mostly put off due to its sort of janky UX. But the past few years have also given me a stronger willingness to endure (or appreciate, perhaps?) a certain amount of jank, and I've been feeling like I need a bit more proper wuxia media in my life. A pretty solid use of $25-ish, I'd say.

Visually, Wandering Sword blatantly patterns itself off the "HD-2D" look that Square-Enix used for Octopath Traveler as well as the Dragon Quest and Live-A-Live remakes. This means 3D environments with 2D pixel-art for characters, plus a tilt-shift camera effect to make everything look like it's a little diorama. It's a solid aesthetic when done well, and it lets the devs sort of scrimp a bit on assets without necessarily feeling like it's cheap.

What feels cheap instead is the UI. Controller support is wonky at best, like you're playing through a mobile container or something. Menus often don't accept directional inputs unless the previously selected item is on the proper plane, meaning it's usually easier to close the menu outright and start over. Every new item or technique on every character puts notification pings on huge icons ever-present in the corner of the screen. Hopefully the upcoming PS5/Switch releases (and presumably corresponding PC patch) will smooth things out a bit.

Fixing some of the weirdness in the writing might take a bit more work. The script makes ample use throughout of what I can only describe as internet stage directions, where sometimes a bit of dialogue might include an action like, "~backs away~". During one conversation, a character's dialogue box simply displays, "~livid~". It gives the vibe of a placeholder solution that simply never got fixed. On the brighter side, the English translation otherwise feels perfectly serviceable. It does assume a certain baseline of trope knowledge, but I'm personally okay with certain words like "xiake" or "gu" staying untranslated on the grounds of maintaining the genre flavor.

Your personal wulin warrior is Yuwen Yi, an ordinary young man from a small town in the northern boonies. A simple escort job gone wrong upends his life and thrusts him into the wonders and dangers of the martial world, where he assembles a cadre of loyal fellows and eventually rises from a nobody into the greatest martial artist in the land. Et cetera, et cetera. We're playing all the wuxia hits.

From a reductively Campbellian point of view, you could call the plot "formulaic" or "generic". But to a westerner like myself, the wuxia milieu - the jianghu - is a setting brimming with its own unique appeal. The broad outline of "young hero takes their first step into a larger world" is painted in with details drawn from a completely different cultural context. There's value in that, and Wandering Sword makes solid use of it.

I mean, just on a personal level, my ethnically Chinese father was from British Singapore. By the time I was born, he'd lived in the United States for over 30 years and was fully assimilated. I had few cultural touchstones growing up, and part of what drew me to anime and Japanese-made games in my developing years is that they were recognizably foreign. Apart from a certain performative aspect of demonstrating that yes, I was in fact "Asian" (schoolyard talk at the time gave little care to distinguishing between proverbial shades of yellow), I also could just recognize there was something about these shows and games that ol' Spider-Man didn't have.

I've touched on the idea of divergent evolution in video games before, and it isn't exactly a new observation besides. If we take "1998 RPGs" as an example: Japan could've never made Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate, just as the USA could've never made Pokemon or Xenogears. Each of these games are undeniably products of years of refinement and experimentation in their wider genre, but that process happened in different contexts. I think this proverbial polish is palpable, even if only subconsciously. You can tell something is good, but it's good in a way you aren't as familiar with, creating a certain level of exotic charm.

Back to the subject at hand, there simply isn't enough English-translated wuxia media for many of its more specific aspects to have yet adhered to cultural consciousness (mostly). We've got Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I guess? Kung Fu Hustle too, despite the total lack of the jianghu. Dragon Ball or Fist of the North Star are close, with only a couple degrees removed, but most battle shonen further derived from those start to kinda lose the aesthetic thread. Hell, the game's smattering of xianxia elements ("cultivation methods") might be more recognizable to modern audiences considering the webtoon pandemic of the past several years. The end effect is that Wandering Sword combines tried-and-true melodrama with relative novelty to ride the line between "cliché" and "timeless".

This ended up reminding me of Baldur's Gate 3, of all things. I criticized that game for being the "carnival ride" version of the Sword Coast, which I maintain was fair due to the sheer volume of Forgotten Realms RPGs out there. But, for many people who weren't familiar with the Realms, I imagine it really was a rich new experience that put fun twists on old fantasy tropes like elves and demons. I got a similar vibe from the way Wandering Sword has you traipse across the entire breadth of Ming Ning Dynasty China. I was broadly familiar with many of the character archetypes on display, but in a sort of hazy, intangible way. This game can give them concrete forms, even if they feel a bit standardized.

There are over a dozen distinct factions, each with their own martial arts techniques and colliding motives. The Thirteen Cold-Blooded Condors of the Condor School are hitmen for hire, yet still counted among the Virtuous Sects due to their code of honor. The master swordsmiths of Mingjian Manor bask in the luxuries of the eastern coast while the disgraced Pili School toils and experiments with gunpowder in the southwestern mountains. And it arguably ain't even wuxia without the Taoist Wu-Tang Clan Wudang Sect's famed sword style, the Buddhist Shaolin Temple's commitment to nonlethality, the Beggar's Sect with eyes and ears everywhere, and a scheming Imperial Court eunuch or two.

Despite most party members being optional (a few can even permanently die before they get a chance to sign on), they feature so prominently in major story beats that I couldn't even imagine how the plot would go without them. In particular, Leng Wuqing - aka Gusu Wheelchairman - and Li Yuanxing might as well be main characters considering how often the camera cuts to them while something else is going on. Lü Xian'er also stands out with how her banal recruitment quest gets tossed to the curb in favor of a game-spanning arc where she studies military tactics (and gains a bunch of unique power-ups besides).

Most of what I consider the best sequences in Wandering Sword were patched in post-release both as free DLC and as updates proper. Apparently the original ending path is still available should certain quest prompts be ignored, which is a nice feature to have, but you'd be missing out on entire major subplots. I'm talking like playing XCOM 2 without War of the Chosen, or Bloodborne without The Old Hunters. My understanding is the entire back half of the game has been extensively reworked.

An unintended-but-funny effect of this approach is that the actual plot-mandated party members, including both of Yi's enforced love interests, end up feeling underdeveloped compared to characters whom originally just filled mechanical party roles. Thanks for joining my party, Miss Ouyang Xue, destined inheritor of Mingjian Manor's Celestial Fairy Swordplay, you seem like a very nice lady. Now please step away from the battle line because updates have rendered you worse than Sword Girl A by every possible metric. You can't even learn Immortal Ape's Gale or the Monkey Dance! Why bother!!

Apart from "post-launch patches making the game good," another reason Wandering Sword reminds me of Baldur's Gate 3 is its bizarre commitment to mechanical overcomplexity. Most equipment is randomly generated across both five tiers of rarity and ten tiers of quality, which stops mattering once you find the appropriate crafting recipes. There are dozens of items that exist purely for the affinity system, and you get like six to eight drops per battle. Every major NPC has a 0-100 affinity meter that can be raised via gifting said items; interactions like mugging sparring, learning new skills, or inviting them to your party are gated at certain thresholds. It starts to feel perfunctory when characters flatly refuse your gifts and only certain story events raise their affinity. If these things are already gated by milestones, what's gained from the attempt towards granularity?

I suppose a push towards some kind of simulationist aspect like this is convergent evolution of RPGs, and parts of this approach work well. Major characters have their own inventories and slate of martial techniques equipped in all the same battle slots as you, which allows close observation to add some narrative tidbits. It's neat! ...Until you realize you can enter a feedback loop of gifting items, sparring to immediately take them back, regifting them until you're at max affinity, then learning all their martial arts moves. With the artifice stripped bare and your menus cluttered with far too many options to reasonably sort through, you give up on making any sense of your party build.

Well, maybe that's just me. But let me explain...

Battles in Wandering Sword look simple at first glance. You're on a Live-A-Live-like grid board, and each character has six maneuvers that work on cooldowns:

1. "Normal Move", a basic attack
2. "Special Move", a high-damage attack
3. "Mighty Move", a larger area of effect attack
4. "Unique Move", a big ultimate ability
5. "Lightness Skill", a movement ability
6. "Cultivation Method", a powerful buff or debuff

You can equip up to four options for each of those slots, with attacks locked to specific weapon types. Each technique can be levelled from 1 to 10 with accumulated experience points, which also increases the respective weapon's "Mastery" stat for more damage.

Now, on one hand, this is a fairly clever system for a wuxia game. You don't just abstractly get stronger by leveling up; you only improve by practicing your martial arts over time. Leveling up Cultivation Methods in particular boosts your chi, granting Meridian Points used for permanent stat boosts. Thus, overcoming any given plateau of power inevitably comes down to either upgrading equipment or learning completely new moves.

But things quickly become ridiculous as you collect a library of techniques. Higher-level abilities start granting various conditional statuses and "stacks" of unique buffs, or otherwise gain synergies with previous skills. The enemies become equally complex, escalating in the back half of the game until you're hitting challenge battles where you have to pause and decipher literally dozens of separately stacked passives. The amount of shit you have to keep track of causes combat to more closely resemble a MOBA than Live-A-Live or other JRPGs.

My recommendation is pay to win. Specialize Yi in Fist weapons and beeline the Eastern Sea DLC after the prologue. Even once you hit its first roadblock that can only be overcome with midgame-level numbers, you'll still have gained some solid workhorse skills, a steady supply of crafting materials, and one of the strongest party members in the game. Since, you know, there's just an unknown iron fan technique library powerful enough to shake the foundation of the martial world a mere half-day's journey from the mainland.

The whole point being: of course there is! We're working in the realm of bombastic melodrama here! A silly proper noun in the right place can sell the entire package. I'll hoot and holler when Soulwrecking Bird explains that the forbidden Quietus Devilry technique shortens her lifespan with every use. It is in fact pretty cool when Lonely Jade Flute, one of the Seven Outlaws of Villain Valley, nevertheless chooses to stay behind alone to hold off the seemingly unstoppable forces of Perpetual Sanctum.

Is it all maybe a little silly and juvenile? Sure. But it's surprisingly difficult to find this specific form and flavor of media, so I might as well enjoy these things while I can. I've got enough complex feelings and western cultural imperialism to deal with in reality; sometimes it's nice to just do enough Tai Chi that you can kung fu kick the bad guy in the face. And sure, perhaps these are just the exact same emotions teased out by the heroic fantasy of the chosen king reclaiming his divine sword and leading his army in glorious battle.

But this is wuxia. Here, even gods and kings must obey the Dao of the Fist.