retro styled game review, wandering sword

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ayo, xenpuck here, so like yeah, i'm kinda old at this point, it's hard to admit but with a few decades of life experience under my belt, occasionally i'm reminded of entire genres of art that i enjoyed at some point and have totally forgotten about. that's right! thanks to my new steam deck that finally lets me play indie games that is not big enough to be released on consoles, i've had the pleasure of playing this indie darling of a game from last year, wandering sword. the game is a fairly standard rpg with the kind of 2.5d pixel art that was made famous by games like octopath traveler and such. i almost called it a jrpg, 'cause that's the genre that got me into rpgs in general, none of that dnd type of stuff, but games like final fantasy single digit games, all way down to games like octopath traveler series... however, jrpg standards for japanese rpg and this wandering sword game... wow, i'd call it the most chinese of any game i've ever played. i mean, that's not really saying too much since i'm not even in the chinese game scene generally. but this game... there're just so much of it that reminds me of the wuxia styled pulp fiction novels that dominated a few years of my tweenage years. so yeah, the whole game shook me 'cause it reminded me of a period of my life when my english was barely there and i'd lose myself in the fantastical world of martial artists righting wrongs and kicking butt... and i'm not even talking about all the fun kung fu movies either. i'm talking about straight up reading... something i'ven't done in quite a while as an adult i'm ashamed to say.... anyway, i'm so excited to share my thoughts, so i'll stop ranting on the exposition now


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1. first, since i'm a cynic i gotta get a few complaints about the game out of the way. in no particular order these are... so the font size in the descriptions is just way way too small... i find it mildly amusing that in a game of pixel art proportions, you really have to squint to look at the item descriptions, seriously. that's the reason i think this game is not great to play on the steam deck in portable mode... i actually dock mine and played it on a tv, this is helpful, but honestly i still had to squint a bit. i wish there was some kind of zooming option, that's it. ok next minor complaint is just that i wish there were more variation of animations between the different styles of kung fu and weapon arts.... as it stands, the biggest indicators of what moves are happening are just the different lighting effects... which are cool, but in a game that's heavily focused on awesome kung fu moves... it would have been nice to distinguish shaolin vs wudang style for instance, just visually speaking. i mean i'd have been fine if the new animations are saved only for the more powerful moves? but as it stands, i can barely tell what weapon types my party's using visually, much less what style moves they're using... oh and last nitpick is even tho there're 5 main weapon types, fist sword saber staff and hidden weapons... you do meet characters that use variations on those such as spear as a variation of staff and firearms as a variation of hidden weapons... it would have been nice to see some visual adapations to that too, otherwise it just feels weird to watch a beloved character who's still swing a spear when i have a staff equipped, ya know? but i get it, probably budget constraints, oh well

2. ok ok, let me get to the list of things i loved now.... i love the feeling of progression... this game really doesn't hand hold you much... i think i had access to 50% of the world almost immediately, and boy did it feel real dangerous at the start... i mean, i felt like any random dungeon had a 50% chance of outright killing me. i mean i guess it'd be nice to have some kind of suggested level indicator before each dungeon but honestly i liked the feeling of danger.... 'cause eventually, after much grinding that some people hate but i don't.... my protagonist can now pretty much solo every named character i met, on auto..