A Brief Review of "Dragon and White Bird in the Great Jianghu": The Jianghu is Not Easy, Young Xia Sighs

"Wuxia" is a complex among many Chinese people. Even if you haven't read the novels of Jin Yong and Gu Long, you must have heard of the stories of Guo Jing, Zhang Wuji, Lu Xiaofeng, and others. Perhaps at some point, the person in front of the screen also fantasized about becoming a hero and wielding a sword to travel the world.

"Dragon and White Bird in the Great Jianghu" (hereinafter referred to as "Great Jianghu") can make players experience a martial arts addiction. As a nostalgic pixel style RPG, "The Great Jianghu" has built a wonderful world of martial arts. But at the same time, there are also many problems with it.

*This review is based on the content of versions 0.1.8 to 0.1.11 of "Dragon and White Bird in the Great Jianghu", and some elements may change in the future.

Rookie's Road to Martial Arts

The background of "The Great Jianghu" takes place during the Southern Song Dynasty, when the Song and Jin dynasties maintained surface peace, but the underworld in the Jianghu was already turbulent, and players began their adventures accordingly.

After some cutscenes, the game world of "The Great Jianghu" is presented to players. Although the pixelated graphics may appear somewhat rudimentary, the map size of "The Great Jianghu" is not small. The big map includes scenes such as Xiaoxiang and Jiangdong regions, as well as towns, villas, caves, etc., making it a complete set.

Just like those classic JRPGs, players need to wander around the game world, explore mazes, or roam the streets. The production team hides treasures and surprises in many places, and if players are willing to spend time exploring, they can still find many good things.

Roaming Town

In terms of plot, the player takes on the role of a novice in the martial arts world. By chance, the protagonist begins to travel around and gets involved in various complex martial arts struggles. Players will learn the skills of various gangs such as Shaolin and Beggar's Sect, and also embark on adventures with specific partners.

Recruiting various martial arts heroes to join the team can be considered the main pleasure of playing "The Great Jianghu". These companions are distributed in different regions of the game and come from very different sources: knights traveling together; A gang leader with a rough personality; The flashy thief dressed up... The player's moral orientation can change the lineup of teammates and also have an impact on the plot itself.

In terms of the story and character script, the quality of "The Great Jianghu" may not be stunning, but it can also be considered good. With the support of a large number of plot texts, the background of various events is explained very clearly. The dialogue between the characters is humorous, interesting, and down-to-earth, making it not boring to read at all.

However, this game has a very unreasonable aspect, which is the lack of intuitive task guidance. Although the plot dialogue will lead to the next destination, there will be no other prompts after that. This flaw will undoubtedly affect the quality of the player's experience. If you remember the destination is okay, you can only wander around aimlessly.

The practical effect of dialogue day is limited

In addition, due to the special triggering conditions in some scenes, players may enter a dead end while playing. For example, in the early version, if the boat at the lower right corner of the "the Taihu Lake Lake Waterway" is not found, players cannot go to the next scene.

The problem here is that the "the Taihu Lake Lake Waterway" is the trigger of multiple events, and the pre dialogue of related events does not indicate whether it is a main line or a branch line task. Therefore, when players complete a branch mission in the "the Taihu Lake Lake Waterway", they will think that this place has been explored. They never thought that there was a boat hidden in the lower right corner of the scene.

When I wrote this article, the production team of Great Jianghu was still updating, and the problem of "the Taihu Lake Lake Waterway" was also optimized. But currently, the process of the entire game is still not smooth enough. In addition to unreasonable task settings, there are also areas worth discussing in the combat part of the game.

The perplexing "battle chess"

In terms of combat content, "The Great Jianghu" adopts a battle chess mode. Both the enemy and us take turns to act and attack each other. The condition for victory is generally to completely annihilate the enemy, sometimes with the request of defending teammates or annihilating leaders.

The skills of the characters are various martial arts, which can be subdivided into swordsmanship, swordsmanship, boxing, and so on. The different names of martial arts also have differences in their attack range, for example, sword and stick techniques are mostly linear attacks, while knife and fist techniques are mostly fan-shaped attacks. In theory, the more martial arts the protagonist can master, the more advantageous it is for wartime.

However, whether a character can learn specific martial arts depends on their own natural talent and aptitude. Due to the different requirements for character attributes in various martial arts, players need to specialize in practicing one or two martial arts. But when players obtain powerful martial arts from other sects, they will find that their character attributes do not meet other requirements, so they cannot practice.

So, the player's experience will fall into an awkward situation: if they want to cultivate multiple martial arts, they will spend a lot of time on leveling up; If one only cultivates one or two types of martial arts and obtains secret scripts from other sects, they can only stare blankly.

Since "leveling" is mentioned, let's discuss it further here. Some friends may wonder if there is any deliberate leveling in "The Great Jianghu"? My answer is definitely "needed". To smoothly advance the plot, one must first level up.

The improvement of 's ability mainly relies on upgrading

The game difficulty of "The Great Jianghu" is not low, and it takes some effort to cultivate the characters. As the story progresses, high-level enemies will continue to emerge, and in some battles, there may be situations where the enemy is outnumbered. If the player is not careful, they will be swept away by the enemy.

Although there are "practice points" in the game scene, the plot dialogue does not directly indicate them. Only by opening the world map can one know where to level up.

Besides, the process of leveling up is not easy either. Taking the "Golden Soldier Camp" in the early stages of the process as an example, although many Golden Soldiers can provide a lot of experience for the protagonist and his team, it is not easy to deal with them precisely because they are too numerous. If the protagonist's level is lower than that of the Jin army and they have not learned large-scale group attack skills, they are easily beaten to death.

A pile of Jin soldiers makes people's scalp tingle

In this situation, the protagonist team cannot eat the "experience pack" in one breath. They can only slowly increase their experience during the process of being abused, and after completing the upgrade, they can defeat the groups of enemy soldiers. Fortunately, the game is equipped with automatic combat function, which to some extent reduces the pressure on players.

Overall, there are still many areas for optimization in the combat section of "The Great Jianghu". If the production team is willing to reduce the difficulty of the battle and rely on other elements to increase the strategic nature of the game, then the overall experience of the game should become more interesting.

By the way, "The Great Jianghu" currently does not support controller operation, which is somewhat unreasonable for players like me who play controllers. The production team stated that they will consider adaptation in the future and hope that the game can be supported as soon as possible.

epilogue

From my gaming experience, the foundation of "The Great Jianghu" is quite good, and the character and plot are all commendable. But the issues with game mechanics and combat systems have made my experience less enjoyable and even a bit torturous.

This work is currently in the EA stage, and the production team is still frequently releasing updated patches, indicating that the official attitude is sincere. But if you want to try this work, I still advise you to wait for a while. It's not too late to experience this martial arts story after the game is fully optimized.