Wandering Sword
Wandering Sword is a Chinese martial-arts RPG where you play a young swordsman caught up in a feud and nearly dies. Escaping the event puts you on the path of pursuing the highest form of martial arts and exploring the pugilistic world to become the great hero you are always destined to be.
Wandering Sword is a rpg, martial arts and pixel graphics game
developed by The Swordman Studio
and published by Spiral Up Games.
Released on September 14th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 3 languages: Simplified Chinese, English and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 25,243 reviews of which 23,844 were positive and 1,399 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.2 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 20.82€ on Steam and has a 15% discount.
The Steam community has classified Wandering Sword into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
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Windows
- OS *: Windows® 7 SP1 / 8.1 / 10 64-bit
- Processor: AMD FX-4350 / Intel® Core™ i3-3210
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: [Integrated graphics not supported]AMD Radeon™ RX 560 (4GB VRAM) / NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 (4GB VRAM)
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Card
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Wandering Sword Review An Impressive 1st Game from a New Developer! I love the martial arts genre since the first time I watched a Bruce Lee film as a kid. I have watched a lot of kung fu, wuxia and even a couple xianxia movies, and read a couple of comics, but even then I’m no expert. When I saw the trailer for Wandering Sword, I felt a rush of excitement. I have always wanted to play a martial arts RPG and how better than with an HD-2D retro style, like Octopath Traveller? Ok, Let’s see what Wandering Sword has to offer: A Different Type of Fantasy Wandering Sword is a RPG of the Wuxia genre. Wuxia is a Chinese fantasy genre with a couple of peculiarities: It happens in Ancient China (the period may vary), it features the martial arts underworld with its many organizations, martial arts have a very prominent role, and humans are the main antagonists. Usually, martial arts ARE the magic of the characters. Wandering Sword has everything I mentioned in spades. Wonderful Presentation: The graphics of Wandering Sword are one of its strengths. Like Octopath, they go for a retro look but with many modern effects (like shadows and illuminations), and the scenario design transport you to a beautiful Ancient China setting. But not everything is retro; the actual character art, is magnific and uses manhua style (Chinese comics, which have expressive faces like in manga but with more believable proportions, and they have fit bodies like in western comics), and all characters have a very unique look. The music goes from adequate to outstanding. Some of the songs are stuck in my head! The soundtrack is available as part of the deluxe edition of the game. Novel Progression System While many games out there emulate the stablished RPG genre, Wandering Sword doesn’t. You wear one weapon, an armor, a helmet, boots and an accessory, each with ten tiers of power (plus rarity), and you get a lot of power from that. There are 5 categories of weapons, each with their own specialties: swords (the most versatile, good range), polearms (specializing in areas around you), sabers (specializing in areas in front of you), fists (specializing on damaging one target) and hidden weapon (specializing at ranged attacks). Most characters only master one category, with the exception of the MC (who can master all weapons, but that is not recommended) and one other character (who uses either fist or hidden weapon). There are no classes or levels here. Instead, you progress with two types of experience points: martial points are used to learn and improve the many types of martial arts. Each weapon type gets its own secret moves, which are divided in 4 tiers of power: normal, special, mighty and unique (plus rarity). Apart from them, all but one character learn Lightness skills (which buff your movement but with a couple of damaging ones), and Cultivation skills (which includes heals, buffs, debuffs and damaging ones, with some doing more than one of these). Unless learning from a manual or taught as part of the story, you use your martial points to learn each martial art, and you can also level them up to 10 levels (although some story-related skills can’t be leveled up quickly). Each weapon skill learned adds up to your mastery skills, which affect your attack and defense against other characters using them. Lightness skills are very important for the MC since they give you more stamina for doing things between resting. Cultivation methods are EXTREMELY important for ALL characters, since each one learned and leveled give you the other type of progression points: meridian points. Meridian points improve your base abilities, and are divided in 6 categories, each with a mini upgrade tree. You can reset these at any time to try other possibilities. While they aren’t named Strength, Dexterity etc., they each specialize in a particular category. Story I have a lot of experience with fiction, especially from Asia, and even then, there were parts of the story that really surprised and moved me. I became an instant lifelong fan of some of the characters! While the core of the story is very common, from zero to hero, the trip is where it’s at. We follow the MC from very humble beginnings and watch him grow, train, learn and overcome many trials, and depending on some key decisions, we see his, and his companion, fate. As this is a wuxia tale, we see many well-known, powerful organizations, like Wudang mountain, Shaolin temple, Beggars’ Sect, and some that I haven’t met (maybe they are original) in Liushan School, Minjiang Manor and Bibo School. Characters from these organizations are the meat of the story, and there are many surprises here and there. As I mentioned, the MC is joined by many powerful figures, with at least one from each of the 6 major organizations. Some characters play a VERY important role in the story, while some are merely an afterthought (which is sad). One thing I really liked is that there are MANY women, which aren’t normally featured that much in wuxia (at least the one I have read or watch); there is even a eunuch! I’m surprised because they normally are the bad guys. Combat System The fights in Wandering Sword are an interesting mix of tactical turn based, with the characters moving and using skills, and there is also a “real-time” battle system, though I confess I don’t have as much experience with it. Each turn you can move, then use a martial art. All martial arts but normal-rank ones have a cooldown period, with the most powerful ones starting on cooldown, so you can’t just spam the most powerful ones right off the bat. As mentioned before, there are 4 levels of martial arts, plus lightness and cultivation skills; of each type, you can learn almost all skills in the game, but you can only have 4 ready of each type. There are MANY types of buffs and debuffs, so read carefully your martial arts to see which one you want. You can add up to 4 characters to aid you in combat, but sometimes there are more people helping you. Some of the most memorable battles have your party of 5 aided by an equal or greater force, and with the enemies there can be like 40 characters in combat! Exploration Apart from combat and story cutscenes, there is quite a bit of exploration. There are 6 “life skills”, 2 of them used for gathering resources (fishing and gathering), and 4 craft ones (weapon, tailoring, alchemy and cooking). Each of these life skills have 10 levels of mastery, with higher mastery letting you craft better. During these sections, you can find chests and interact with NPCs. A lot of NPCs can receive gifts to increase your relationship with them, and some can be challenged for their items, consulted for their life or martial skills, and some can even be recruited. I already mentioned that the game doesn’t have levels, but your character does have a kind of “rank”, and you must be at least one level below an NPC to challenge them. Challenging NPCs cost you stamina. Conclusion I really, REALLY enjoyed my 100+ hours with Wandering Sword, and will return to it to get some things I missed. But to be objective, for people that don’t like to use guides and prefer more lineal experiences, maybe Wandering Sword will not be for your liking. For me, it checks all of my list of wants in an RPG. I would give it a score of 8, but knowing the devs, it will probably become a 9 soon. NOTE: I will write my full review in the forums since there is a character limit in here.
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---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☑ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS Octopath Traveler esque 3D meets 2D pixel ---{ Gameplay }--- ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't While it seems like a turn-based grid tactical game, it involves a lot more depth with attack areas, combos, different ability/condition interactions. Not to mention there is also a real time mode. ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf While the ambience get repetitive after a while, it is very on point for a wuxia world. ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma All age friendly, very good accessibility. ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☑ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer Easy to run even on a toaster. ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data 4GB, nuff said ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls On lower difficulty it is fairly easy, but to master the martial arts you really gotta "meditate" on them, give it careful considerations. ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding Grind is needed on higher difficulty, easy/normal mode not really required. ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life Great story, while it seems like an ordinary wuxia plot, the characters resonate with you and you feel what they feel, experience what they experience. ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond My average playthrough time is about 65 hours if I read everything slowly. For a game of this price it is really worth it. ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money Worth every single penny. ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs Some abilities might have functionality issue but they are barely noticeable unless you look around every single nook and cranny. ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☑ 9 ☐ 10 Would recommend even at full price, looking forward for future updates or their next project.
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This is a very good game, a lot of contents. 1. A lot of characters to join which is I like the most. 2. A lot of skills to collect. 3. A lot of side quests to do. 4. Crafting system is interesting but time consuming to grind the materials and skill proficient. 5. Map is large and A lot of places to visit. 6. Some side quests are long and the story are interesting. Cons: 1. Some companions would be missed pretty easy, if I didn't visit them in certain point of time or generated enough point of friendship, unless I had googled some walkthrough beforehand which is I hate the most.. 2. Battles in the early game is a bit hard, and it becomes too easy in the mid to later game. Overall, this is a very Good RPG game with a lot of ancient Ku-Fu contents. Definitely will do a second round, as this game offers a point system to purchase skills ahead for the next run to challenge the higher difficulty.
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I don't remember the last time I have completed an RPG and felt the urge to re-start a new gameplay. In fact, most of the recent games I've tried, I've not even bothered to finish. Dropped both Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2 at around 80%, finished BG1 but didn't feel the urge to play BG2, dropped BG3 at 80% (yes, Baldur's Gate 3, who everyone seems to jizz about); Marvel's Midnight Suns at 80% (good game though). They all got predictable and inevitable at that point. After a long time, I feel like I've genuinely stumbled upon an unpolished gem, but what a gem it would be. There are side quests in this game with such complex story that you have to read everything carefully, and sometimes twice to grasp what the game wants to tell you. Well it doesn't really help that the translation is not professional grade, but we'll get to that bit later. There were minimal amount of fetch or kill quests, which funnily enough actually felt like a nice change of pace due to to the previously mentioned intense nature of much of the story line related main or side quests. When was the last time you've thought, "Oh fetch quest! Great, let me chill for a bit." It helps that the game provides you with some anti-grind features. There's a very decent auto-battle mode where all characters act on their own, and its a lot better than any of the auto-battle options I've seen in other RPGs. Here I could even do certain boss battles on auto after I had gotten the characters strong enough. There's no inventory weight systems to bog you down unnecessarily, I never seriously had to grind for money, you get decent items (sometimes end game level items) just as quest rewards, and best of all martial arts skills are meant to be either gotten as loot from enemies, or "learnt" from characters who you have a good relation with. That is such an excellent system, and it makes it so that you can plan certain builds very properly as long as you do a bit of research. Much preferable to just mindless grind! Although you might feel that research material is very lacking. Being a non-western or Japanese game, it doesn't seem to have gotten much exposure. There's no serviceable wiki to speak of. But the Discord will have a lot of information of what you'll need, put together by the players themselves. Gameplay is also fun. It helps that there are options of so many builds. By the end of the game, I had around 15 companions, and all of them were on different builds, and they are all fun! I'm already thinking of how I want to play next. Its also not necessary that the rarest skills are the best. My best companion had not a single top tier move, but dealt insane damage due to how all of her skills synergized. Its also not very difficult to identify this synergy. You won't have to read build guides or anything. Just reading skill description will tell you what skills you need to put together to get the best effect. Also, in true martial arts fashion, there is no cap on how stronger you can get. If you've exhausted normal ways to strengthen your character, you can simply turn to alchemy. Alchemy, weapons crafting, armour crafting or 'tailoring' as this game calls it, are three crafting mechanisms. You can collect resources and craft top tier gear through this method as well. Apart from that there's also fishing and predictably enough, sparring as a side activity. But over here, sparring actually serves a purpose. You can spar a lot of NPCs and if you win, they will give you one of the items in their inventory! And you can specifically see NPC's inventory, so if there's something you want, you can simply spar with the person who has it enough times and get the item. There's also an affinity system tied to this though, you need to raise NPC's affinity high enough for them to spar with you. And the same affinity system can sometimes affect how quests turn out! Yes, this is not a linear RPG as you might have read from the description itself. There's also a modding scene that'll make your life in game easier, and more varied if you so choose it. So after all this wall of praise, why "unpolished"? Two things were my own main detriments. One is translation as I've mentioned. It feels like a mix of fan translation. You have ancient wuxia masters using phrases like "gotta go", "asap", "sod off", and many other phrases that you'd have never heard in medieval periods. It ruins the feel of the game slightly. Sometimes it even felt like the translator was trying to mock the wuxia theme of the game, which should be bizarre. The second thing is the music. Being an obviously low budget game, there are not many soundtracks in it, and lot of the tracks are repeated. The issue happens when there's a serious, dark storyline being presented and a cheery casual score is looping behind. Not just takes away from the feeling the story should invoke, but in fact reduces the impact. On my rerun I'm just going to turn off the music and see how that works. Some of the scores are quite nice though, so its not entirely bad. These two for me are the main issues. Apart from that there are still things like a repository for dialogues, characters, factions, enemies, materials, recipes etc. etc. that are missing, but the lack of those does not severely hamper the game. Oh also the final main story quest is being reworked as I write this review. It is quite underwhelming compared to everything that comes before. But they are re-working it, and I will go out on a limb and say that afterwards it will be triple A spanking level. There are so many other things that I could talk about, like companions who are known to be smart, actually have dialogues breaking down the events for you, and guide you to what is happening and how your actions should be, which you'd never see if you didn't recruit those companions! How many times have you played a party based game and only felt that companions are there so you get to play extra classes? The companions here will sometimes leave you because they feel they need to be somewhere else to best serve the final outcome. Or sometimes one of them will stay back and allow you to escape, and rejoin you later. There are so many seemingly simple things like this that make the characters, and in turn the game feel fleshed out. Final word, if you are an RPG fan, and you don't play this, you're a criminal! Cheers.
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One of the best Cultivation games I've played so far. Finished the game's perfect harem ending and acquired all companions. It was definitely fun and will re-play it again from scratch once Southern Chronicles DLC and Difficulty Feature comes out on March! Hopefully, game devs could also add the freedom to become a Sect Leader or add more Sects in the game (Mount Hua, Namgoong Clan, Tang Clan, and etc.) eventually as this game has so much potential to be better than it already is.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 22 November 2024 06:19 |
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| SteamSpy data | 18 December 2024 19:09 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 13:58 |
Online players
5,277
Developer
The Swordman Studio
Publisher
Spiral Up Games
Release
14 Sep 2023
Platforms
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