Shuyan Saga (2017)

Playtime: 35 minutes

Intro

Shuyan Saga is a visual novel interspersed with brawling. It was originally developed for mobile phones.

The Good

• Great art.
• Professional voice acting.
• Three difficulty levels.

The Bad

• Dialogue choices don't seem like they affect anything (i might be wrong).
• You can't adjust the difficulty during a playthrough.
• No chapter select option.
• Combat was made for mobile and is quite poorly implemented on PC. Buttons for high strike and low strike would've made much more sense than clicking an area with the mouse. Same goes for movement (yes, you move by clicking on the ground).
• The story isn't very interesting.

The Ugly

• In Dutch we have this thing called "tile wisdoms". They're like motivational posters or memes - shallow sayings that are supposed to be deep but aren't. The story is littered with these.

Conclusion

Shuyan Saga looks and sounds great but suffers from a boring story and clunky combat. You're probably better off reading the comic book.

The hand-drawn art is gorgeous and the story and characters are enjoyable. It's a simple story of evil vs. good, but pretty well told. I chuckled more than once at subtle jokes and interesting turns of phrase.

The gameplay is not as good, though, and the 3D graphics that come with it are rather horrible. Then I realised that it was originally a mobile game now ported to PC without changing neither control scheme nor low-poly graphics.

Combat is divided into top-down "brawler" sections and more one-on-one focused ones. The systems are not at all deep. At the beginning it's mostly punching and blocking, but towards the middle of the game you learn to evade ("greet") and then it becomes stupid not to do anything else since it not only avoids taking damage without consuming stamina (which blocking does), but it also opens op your enemies to counter attacks that deal damage. All in all, is decent even if repetitive and a bit boring at times.

But really, the gameplay takes a secondary role to the gorgeous visual novel aspects. I absolutely loved the art style and I could use any frame as a wallpaper. It's stylish and dynamic, and expressive. It's chock-filled with colourful landscapes and characters.

Is not surprising that there's a comic book version of the game.

The gameplay might not be the greatest, but the beautiful drawings more than make up for it.