Review: Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament Is Bland and Awkward

The Xuan-Yuan Sword series has historically been an ambitious one that aims to retell stories from Chinese history and mythology. The standalone game Xuan-Yuan: The Gate of Firmament recently appeared on the PS5 via a reworked version, allowing a whole new audience to experience this sprawling RPG. However, it does feel like this is a story that wasn’t worth retelling.

Sikong Yu is a young man living in a small village separated from the Shang dynasty’s rule. Everyone’s life is precarious, moving from place to place, although Yu does his best to keep the village protected with an array of traps. However, his peaceful life within the village falls apart when a nearby bandit tribe attempts to raid his people, and in the process he meets a woman named Muyue. This mysterious lady initially refuses to speak and shows magical aptitude. She soon shared that she is desperately trying to return to a home she can barely remember. Yu ventures out with her to help her find her way, meeting a cast of characters who aid them in their quest.

Straight off the bat, Xuan-Yuan: The Gate of Firmament is a game doesn’t do itself many favors. While I could initially accept the early MMO level of FMV that kickstarts the story, the presentation plummets in quality as soon as we’re in-engine. Character models clearly show an attempt towards photorealism, but their doll-like standing poses and awkward animations throw the game straight down the uncanny valley.

The insult “it looks like a PS2 game” is often thrown around carelessly in some circles, which I feel is an insult in itself to the PS2 games that still look excellent to this day. However with Xuan-Yuan: The Gate of Firmament, I feel that’s the best description, as it features the kind of low-poly models found in some of the worst games on the system. But it goes beyond that. The animation jank, stiff camera movement and even the excessive use of dissolve wipes in cutscenes all feel like they’re ripped straight out of the 2000s. However, while I feel many games of that era did the best they could with the tech they had available to them, this doesn’t even manage that much when better tech is available.

One of the more egregious examples was a scene where Yu receives a gift from his mother before heading out. While characters handing items to one another is a persistent problem for animators, even in blockbuster AAA games today, there is a lot of creative camera work that covers it. Not so much here. The present is visibly glued awkwardly to Yu’s mother’s arm before she lifts it to hand it over. It then pops out of existence as Yu reaches out, in full view of the camera. This isn’t a budget issue. This is just sloppy.

However, I’m not someone who will let visual presentation completely kill my interest in a game. Sometimes games are made on low budgets and have to make do with what they have. I’ve played plenty of games that have had to make those compromises and sometimes that can lead to great experiences. I’ve enjoyed plenty of games with awkward presentation simply because they’ve thrown themselves heavily into the story or gameplay. Sadly, that isn’t the case with Xuan-Yuan: The Gate of Firmament, as neither of those elements managed to win me over either.

Let’s start with the story, which I’m not sure is poorly written or poorly translated, but either way, it had some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever encountered in a game. This is a game that loves to repeat itself. As an example of this, part of the early game sees Yu venturing into the woods to check his traps while his female friend from the village follows him. Yu feels it’s too dangerous for her and tells her to go back to the village. At the next trap, she reappears, saying she didn’t feel like going back. He tells her it’s too dangerous and she should go back to the village. This happened several times in one area, with no variation each time.

The repetitiveness even cropped up within single scenes. The initial meeting with party member Feng Yu sees Sikong explain that he’s escorting Muyue, to which Feng replies “You’re escorting her? Oh, I see you’re escorting her.” It’s a level of dialogue I expect from the original Resident Evil, and at least there it was entertainingly silly and quotable. Here it’s just tedious.

The voice acting also emphasizes this tedium, as none of the voice performances seemed to display a hint of emotion or personality. It was highlighted for me when Feng was referred to as “cheeky” and a huge contrast to Muyue’s cold personality. And yet, no one seems to have informed his voice actor, whose performance was just as flat as hers.

I’d love to say the gameplay improved this drastically, but I struggled to enjoy Xuan-Yuan: The Gate of Firmament on that front too. A lot of the game’s exploration takes place in bland, featureless environments that feel like they were assembled out of the most generic assets they could find.

Combat is not much better. It’s a real-time system, where your abilities are assigned to different face buttons on the controller. After using one, there is a short cooldown before you can use something else. It’s fairly straightforward and on first glance, it seems like this might be the game’s saving grace. Unfortunately, it’s missing a lot of features that would make this a fun system to work with.

For a start, your defensive options are minimal. There is a battle formation you can employ to generally increase your defense, but for a real-time system, I was shocked at how little I could do to reduce damage as a reaction. Battles take place in small arenas and while your characters will move about them automatically, there doesn’t appear to be any way to control their movement directly. Being able to position yourself to avoid certain attacks would have made battles feel more tactical instead of relying on the random chance of your character moving themselves out of danger on a whim.

This also extends to a lack of block or dodge mechanics. Plenty of other real-time RPG systems have these basic features, but The Gate of Firmament simply does not. It just adds to the bizarre nature of the system, which is built like a turn-based system but plays in real-time. It also doesn’t help that while you can switch your active party member, the others will act freely, often wasting items and resources, with no option to direct them to act a certain way until you take control.

Ultimately, Xuan Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament is a joyless experience. I will usually try and find something to like about games I play, but it was difficult with this. The narrative is poorly written and performed, it’s visually messy and combat mechanics feel half-finished. There really isn’t much left after that. I wanted to love Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament, and the potential for greatness is there, but sadly its execution never lives up to its ambitions.

Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament is out now for PCs via Steam and the PS5.