"Shi Dao: The Sword God" review: The Lone song under, the moon Ming light, the end of the Wu Shi Qi Tan

Released in 2002, the original "Service Road" was not a game that most people liked, and until the release of "Service Road 4" on the PS3 in 2011, the "Service Road" series has been in a somewhat awkward position. Players who like Japan and samurai culture will like it very much, and if you ignore the unique narrative and high degree of freedom that will be found only by patient experience, even the "latest" "Shido 4" was only a work of picture quality and technical force at that time.

Developer Acquire has made a very free dive game series "Tenchu", also has a different kind of edge IP "Akihabara Journey", in recent years, the most famous game is the Japanese RPG masterpiece in collaboration with Square Enix, Eight Eight Travel. In 2019, the 25th anniversary of Acquire's founding, Master Endo Takuma interviewed Famitsu, in addition to talking about the information of "Shi Dao 5", but also showed the upcoming work "Shi Dao Biography: Sword God" - based on the "Shi Dao" world view of the oblique view of the action game.

Published by Spike Chunsoft, the game is released for PS4, NS, and PC on February 20.

The story background of Shi Dao: The Sword God synchronizes with the end of Shi Dao's orthodox work in the early Ming Dynasty, and tells the life of an unknown warrior. However, the gameplay of this game is not a semi-open world with the main freedom, but instead an action game with randomly generated "dungeon" Roguelike elements, and the capacity required for the game installation is only about 2G, the expectation of the content of the game can be appropriately lowered.

The story begins in the early Meiji period of a mountain blacksmith shop, the player plays the protagonist passing by here, coincides with the boss's daughter was arrested by the rich in the village to pay the debt, so in order to save the boss's daughter (when the wife), the protagonist Yibo Yuntian began to help pay the debt...

There is no need to question how reasonable this opening is, and whether there is logic, but the game has begun. The creditor has a system of debt planning, obviously the old creditor, the player needs to repay the amount from a few hundred to tens of thousands, almost all the time in the upper right corner, reminding the repayment date and amount, the sword of Damocles hanging over the head also provides the player with the most direct game goal - to make money.

The way to make money is very consistent with the setting, which is divided into "making money during the day" and "making money at night", first of all, during the day.

"Making money during the day" is to help his future father-in-law, Dojima, run a blacksmith shop. There are three forces in the game, Kurosei, Akama Party and Shuba Machi, who are also large customers of the blacksmith shop. The three forces will place orders every day, and depending on the degree of order completion, players can get money and goodwill. But Acquire's emphasis on freedom makes this attached business system less simple than it seems.

Logically, the person selling the umbrella is most afraid of drought, and derived from the understanding, he may most want to have the ability to "rain in a sunny day when no one carries an umbrella on the street." Therefore, according to this logic, players can provoke three forces to fight in the game, thereby increasing the revenue of the forge, and there are forces to increase the revenue of some kind of "customer profit" buff achieved after meeting the combat effectiveness requirements.

The fly in the ointment is that this additional simulation business play lacks guidance. Business gameplay once there is no design of good guidance, it will lead to players playing confused, coupled with the limited operation of some players during the day, resulting in ten hours of play, I still do not understand the blacksmith dialogue year-round existence of increase or decrease energy options why there is no guidance, and why in the end, there are many similar lack of guidance.

The plot moves in a confusing way, with the daytime map showing three "no-go" locations in addition to the location of the blacksmith shop. As for what these places are for and when they can be visited, there are no hints that should have appeared after the player cleared the first "dungeon" and paid the first debt.

The "dungeon" is the highlight of the game, and it is also the place where "making money at night" was mentioned before. There is a tree around the blacksmith shop that will glow at night, and players can go underground through this tree and fight with various demons and ghosts, which is the main gameplay of this game.

The replayability value of the Roguelike elements is reflected in this game, but in comparison to the top titles such as Dead Cells, the cultivation of the elements is too simple. Night into the "dungeon" after the battle, until the player "exhausted" or hit the "return to the city point", the only thing that remains is the weapon level and props, money.

This is in contrast to the player character's own "level" in "dungeon" combat, which increases the character's health, vitality, and stat cap. The deeper into the ground, the more types of enemies, the stronger the attributes, the seemingly too powerful "upgrade back to full state" is just convenient for players to fight without filling consumables, so that players only need to concentrate on practicing combat skills, without thinking too much about whether consumables are sufficient.

Although the cultivation elements that can be retained are only weapons, because this game has a large number of weapon types, and different weapons are equipped with different moves, it is more attractive to cold weapons culture lovers. At the end of a battle, in addition to picking up a large number of inferior weapons used to operate the forge, players also have the opportunity to obtain some rare weapons with allusion, only the digital version of DLC sent "Boy Che An gang" and "Long Zen Mi tiger Che" and so on.

Good weapons not only have good attributes, but also have their own new moves with the rise of the knife level, the importance of needless to say. However, when the player is exhausted in the battle, he will lose all equipment and items, which can only be retrieved by buying expensive insurance in the early stage or returning to the place of death by clicking "Pay the ghost".

The design of the death penalty has two sides, on the one hand, successfully let the player face each challenge, and make the choice of "fighting the bicycle to continue the adventure" or "stop the flow of water when the" return to the city point "appears, on the other hand, it also hit the enthusiasm of players who have worked hard to develop weapons, but lost their weapons because of accidental deaths many times. This punishment for weapons as the only training point of the game, obviously a bit large, the protection mechanism is not necessarily more reasonable - the early too difficult, the later too easy.

There's not a lot of design around weapon development, but it's also shallow. The "title" design is nothing more than to add labels to weapons to obtain passive skills, and the durability only tells players not to be obsessed with developing a weapon, but the "knife carving" system and the "polar" system that correspond to "opening peerless" are both beautiful and practical, and constitute the most lively part of the combat system.

As a work of external nature, suitable for IP fans naturally needless to say, "Shidao External: Knife God" is also suitable for players who like Japanese culture and cold weapons. This is also never a "serious" work, the "earth seat" is designed solely for a button, even if the battle can also kowtow to the enemy can be seen. However, for those who just like the freedom of "service Dao" and experience the life of samurai players, obviously, there is no news of "Service Dao 5" is more worth looking forward to.