SummaryWhat happened to Softstar?.. (含翻译)

【据说俄国人写的仙四评论】

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.

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中文翻译：

　　我是一个大宇公司和它所有的两个伟大的RPG游戏的忠实粉丝。尽管在安装了最后一代轩辕剑作品后，我丧失了些许对它的期待，但我仍旧保持了一些对大宇的信任。我当时有很多游戏可玩，很长时间没有去浏览他们的网站，所以我甚至不知道仙剑4正在制作中。但是某天我忽然在一家上海人的小店里看到了它，就是那种会卖各种物品，从三明治到避孕套，再到游戏盘的小店（实际上我当时正想去买三明治）。没有迟疑，我从架子上拿起了这部游戏，递到了收银台前。随后我急急忙忙的回家，很快的开始玩了起来。
　　这部作品中有一些好的地方。它的整个故事和人物描述，都是传统的仙剑模式。又一次的，一个男孩和一个女孩爱上了彼此，分享了他们的希望和梦想。像过去几部游戏一样，对白做得不错。 这部游戏有着很长很长的对白，而且大部分对白值得你去花费努力去理解那些中文（译者：从这里可以看出来这老外的中文不太过关）。对白用生动，口语化的中文写成，所以让现在的中国年轻人很容易的就为他们的那些来自过去的英雄感到同情。
　　仙剑系列实际上就是一个中世纪的肥皂剧。在西方并不常见，但在中国到处都是。在中国有一半的电视肥皂剧都发生在一个历史背景下。一个发生在来自神秘山上武术派别的弟子和一个孤单美丽的拥有神秘力量的公主之间的爱情故事，这在中国的电视剧中，就和台湾剧中一个富有家族的公子和他的办公室女职员之间的爱情故事一样典型。
　　所以，如果你还是为了看一场中世纪中国肥皂剧，仙剑四在这个方面仍然和它的那些前辈们一样。
　　但是，这还是一部游戏。这就意味着你必须去“玩”它，甚至更多，而不仅仅是阅读那些对话框来继续游戏。一部游戏包含许多内容，除了剧情，还有画面，音乐，和最重要的——可玩性。不幸的是，在这些部分，我们会直接得出一个很差的评价。
　　坏话：
　　看到我对这个游戏最初购买时的热情在我玩时慢慢褪色，我想我大概会丧失对东方RPG兴趣。我甚至玩了点轩辕剑四去看这是不是真的。但是不是的，那个游戏仍旧让我觉得很好玩。甚至我复习了过去的其它仙剑系列，来试图理解为什么我认为他们都很好，但是却无法喜爱这最后一部作品，即时他们很相似。
　　最后我想这大概就是原因：这部作品跟前作太像了。这个系列到现在一直有着一个统一的结构：第二代包含第一代的故事，第三代有它的外传，实际就是它的结论。 你不能期待从外传中有什么创新，因为它的发行仅仅在前一代发行的一年之后，目标是继续和总结故事。第三代仙剑创新了么？确实！这是第一部使用完全3d贴图的作品，它有着很大很复杂的迷宫；它还有着很精巧，完全重新设计的游戏系统。
　　这样，仙剑四有跟前代相同的游戏系统么？这不应该是一个复杂的问题。东方rpg有着异常保守的作风，一个成功的系统被沿用到下一代是很平常的事情。
　　是的，我发现了这一点，这也就是为什么我还是会喜爱Suikoden V，尽管我不喜欢保守的设计。但是，唉，问题在仙剑身上更严重。像它的同期作品轩辕剑五一样，仙剑四不仅仅是保守，而甚至是缩略的，或者好听一点，是沉闷。
　　制作人在仙剑四里能省略掉什么呢？你会问。毕竟，与轩辕剑系列相比，仙剑系列的设计总是十分简易的。
　　你当然可以很容易的原谅仙剑1的简洁操作设定。那是一部爱情主题的游戏的先驱。剧情的不可阻挡的力量让游戏的其它任何部分都变得无关紧要。仙剑二介绍了不少好的设定，如怪兽召唤。接下来是仙剑三，使用了一个全新的系统，有点受Grandia游戏的影响，但是有自己的新奇的设计。虽然战斗模式仍旧是回合制的，但是攻击是即时的，你必须提前计划攻击哪个角色，因为敌人也是在移动。魔法的使用需要真实的时间，所以你会有很大的兴趣通过不断的使用提升你的魔法等级，通过这样形式还会出现新的魔法。