The Legend of Tianding (2021)

I liked this game. I didn’t love it, but I liked it. Platforming and combat are both tight and enjoyable, the level design is pretty effective in its straightforwardness, and there’s a cool set of abilities and mechanics that make engagements flashy and, at times, a blast to go through (though I wish we had got our hands on the glider sooner). Even if, sometimes, the game is also tough as nails, unevenly so, affecting overall enjoyment. But since some of its strong suits are what makes for a great combat platformer, it’s hard not to recommend The Legend of Tianding to any fans of the genre, especially considering its short runtime.

There are, however, a few problems with this title. And a couple of them almost feel like self-inflicted wounds, which is always frustrating. For starters, there is a lot of story, which in such a short playthrough really affects flowing and interferes with gameplay, arguably its best part. To make matters worse, a bunch of pointless fluff and fetch quest-type content piles itself on top of this, which at times can really annoy the hell out of the player. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with this. Cutting a whole hour off the game by removing all this filler would’ve made the game significantly more enjoyable. Add to this the fact that not everyone is going to enjoy the world, the storytelling, or even its specific comic book art style, and I could even picture someone rage-quitting this game. I know I thought of dropping it at a certain point.

Happy I stuck with it though. The Legend of Tianding starts to get better towards the second half, and if you make it past the nonsense there’s a very solid side-scrolling combat platformer here, one that is bound to bring you some fun if you’re into this type of game. 7/10

Early 20th century Taiwan is, by no means, among the most popular settings to be found in a video game. Combine that with the seductive presentation and you surely get something that catches your attention. Perhaps even more today, given its fundamental anti-colonialist theme.

The historical fiction story has the titular Liao Tianding as a protagonist, a real Robin Hood figure, who had given the Japanese occupiers some trouble back in the day. Chances are you’ve never heard about him, but I’m telling you, he’s of the pleasant sort, lively and funny, while fighting the good fight. And he’s not the only pleasant character in the game.

The combat is very smooth, it has a decent amount of variety, and the bosses are pretty tough. The thieving nature of the protagonist is reflected in his ability to steal weapons from enemies, which leads to a variety of weapons you can use, albeit for a limited time. Our hero has only a big knife and his feet as weapons, but he can borrow a lot of weapons, from bamboo sticks to RPGs. Outside combat, there isn’t much gameplay to speak of. But most of it is related to the protagonist’s nature, as well. For instance, giving to the poor increases your skills incrementally. There are also some side quests with good rewards.

It's always great when you try a game you had never heard of, but it turns out it’s a damn good one, that also happens to teach you one or two things about history.

the good:

• the story and setting is quite interesting and well done. i've never played a game with taiwanese folklore before and enjoyed the experience. the game is about liao tianding, a taiwanese folklore robbin hood kind of character and his fight against the japanese rulers and several other factions threatening the working class in taiwan.
• liked the characters and their development over the course of the game. liao tianding is an charming protagonist and a great character in general.
• the overall artstyle is lovely. especially the chinese manga styled story telling part. the ingame graphics itself are not as beautiful as the manga ones but decent nonetheless. i really liked the backdrops and scenery, not so much the ingame character design and some of the animations.
• combat and controls feel polished and responsive. the "weapon stealing" mechanic is quite enjoyable and interesting to play. increasing the diversity of combat gameplay by a lot.
• skills are fun to use and travelling through the maps is great due to metroidvania kind of abilities like dash, double jump, wall jump and more.
• soundtrack is decent. it's always a pleasure listening to those traditional asian instruments.

the debatable:

~ losing money on death doesn't fit this game at all. it isn't even that of a punishment since the amount of lost money ain't too big so there is literally no point in this "on death"-feature. devs should stop using the worst thing from dark souls in their games.

~ would've loved to read the last pages of the manga in my tempo and not tied to the credits.

the bad:

• didn't like the side quests. they were kinda confusing at first, since the game wraps them up in little errands, but you just have to gather the usual collectibles hidden all over the game. so most of the side quests were done before accepting and for the missing ones i've had to replay old missions. paired with basically no story at all in those errands and little to no diversity, they were stale and boring.
• the train map was kinda buggy. got stuck several times in between wagons and had to restart the game. nothing too serious tho and apart from this single glitch, i've neither had bugs nor other glitches.

8/10