I have to admit it now: that August title I’d been dunking on for ages, Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), is actually a really, really goated game. What makes it so good? The good part is that its setting is absurd on the surface, yet still rings true. Back then I was shitposting about it: “How can a world have a theocratic feudal monarchy on one side and a republic on the other, living side by side in peace, with the monarchy’s upper-class kids even going to school in the republic? That’s complete bullshit!” Obviously I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t think you do either. This kind of arrangement really does exist in the world.

I’m not really a fan of “guns, cars, and balls” games—I find they get old fast. After all, run-and-gun always boils down to the same few formulas, so even during the years when CS was huge, I didn’t play it for long. If I had to name what I genuinely enjoyed playing the most, it’d be Chinese RPGs. Like everyone else, my first was the Xianjian series. Before RPGs I never read the story — the run-and-gun stuff wasn’t translated back then anyway, but it had GPS-style navigation: open the map, follow the route, kill whoever you run into. RPGs don’t let you skip the story, though. It’s a narrative, and no walkthrough is gonna sit there and recap the plot of every game you’ve played the way I stupidly do. So starting with the “Xianjian” series, at first I was mashing Enter to skip every conversation with anyone in Yuhang County, until I got to Suzhou City, where I started actually reading the story properly. Bit by bit I settled into it, and felt the pull of “game plot” for the first time. Of course you can’t say the “guns, cars, balls” games of that era had no plot — it’s just that games back then didn’t say much about their plots. How was I supposed to know that Delta Force 3 Land Warrior had a cute little sister character named Mako who nearly got killed off… the game didn’t mention a damn thing about it. What I’m actually getting at is this: riding that wave of Chinese RPGs, I started playing games “as stories to read,” and somewhere along the way RPGs drifted apart from the whole “guns, cars, and balls” crowd. The latter chases a “rush”; the former chases a “read.” Chinese RPGs had a golden age once. Plenty of them, even now, could wipe the floor with a lot of Japanese visual novels — China’s history is longer than Japan’s, after all, and there’s a lot more material worth showing off. Even if the cultural climate on the mainland keeps getting worse, at least the Chinese-speaking world still has Taiwan. The Xuanyuan Sword (轩辕剑) series counts as a pretty unique presence in Chinese-language RPGs: it was the first to fuse “history” with “mythology,” and the side stories in particular weave “emotion” into the mix.