UI Matters

 So...lately, mostly due to MDZS/The Untamed, I have lately been quite into Ancient China as a setting.

Thus, when I was looking for an additional title to fill out a Play Asia order--

Wait.  Let me start further back.

The trend, at the moment, among the larger Asian game companies, is to release their games digitally worldwide, and to release them physically in Asia with multi-language support (and no region-locking), and only to release physical copies in the rest of the world if they feel guaranteed sufficient sales to justify the expense of the physical release.  (Thus, for example, there is a US physical release of Final Fantasy XVI, but not of Various Daylife.)

While there's certainly financial logic to this policy, it's definitely frustrating to older gamers like myself who like the old-fashioned comfort of owning a physical copy.  And that's where Play Asia comes in.  Their online storefront has a huge selection of these multi-language console games that they sell directly to the Western audiences who want them.  Some of these are so very intended for sale to the US market (like the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection) that their boxes are printed entirely in English.

Anyway, Play Asia offers free US shipping if your order comes to $100 (or more), so given the cost of international shipping these days, when I make an order there, I want to take advantage of that offer.  And that brings me back up to where I started this post:

So I had gone to Play Asia to get a physical copy of the Etrian Odyssey I-III HD Remaster collection (ridiculously, about $10 cheaper than the digital bundle!), and was looking for something else to fill out the order and reach that $100 for the free shipping.  There were the physical copies of some old Squaresoft titles that have recently received HD remasters, like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana, but I admit that I'm still trying to find a decent justification for spending $40 on a game I pre-ordered when it was brand new back in the PS1 days, especially one that I then replayed so many times I practically have it memorized even all these years later. 😅  (I justify buying the Etrian Odyssey collection because evidently I skipped III when the 3DS remakes were coming out (which was my introduction to the franchise, having somehow missed the DS versions when they came out 🤷🏻‍♀️))  Anyway, so I'm browsing around to see what else is available, and come across Sword and Fairy: Together Forever, which is set in a fantasy version of Ancient China.

Now, I had heard of the Sword and Fairy series because of its merchandising:  several characters from various installments have had Nendoroids made, and given my interest in the setting, they had of course garnered my attention.

Anyway, since the game page looked interesting, and since I figured there was no chance it would get a physical release in the West, I went ahead and ordered it.  (Then about a week after it arrived, I went into a Gamestop and saw a domestic copy sitting on the shelf there.  😰  At least there wasn't a significant price difference between the domestic copy and the import I bought, but I still felt effin' dumb.  😭)

Now, while I was waiting for it to arrive, and knowing that what I had ordered was a later game in the series, I went looking in the PlayStation store (sadly, the originally PC-only series has only seen ports to PlayStation and not to Switch (except for a spin-off about restaurant management)) to see if there were any of the others available in English.  And, sure enough, Sword and Fairy 6 (the previous game in the series) was available in the PlayStation store, and when I happened to look up the series, it was even on a massive sale that reduced its cost so much that it was only a bit over $5!

Obviously, at that price, I felt no need to hesitate, and went for it.  🤣  Fortunately, the series is very much China's answer to Final Fantasy (to the extent of having very Amano-like game logos for both 6 and 7, with 6's logo being particularly reminiscent of Final Fantasy X's logo, appropriately enough, since the game itself had a lot of Final Fantasy X vibes to it) so not having played 1-5 is not problematic, except that it means I haven't met the character with the most epic Nendoroid, Zhao Ling'er.  (I really want to know what game she comes from so I can hope they bring it over, 'cause I'd rather not buy a Nendo of a character I don't know yet, but I'd love to get that one...)

And this is where the title of this post finally comes into it.

Because Sword and Fairy 6 has some serious UI issues.

I mean, really, it has a lot of technical issues, to be honest, most of which I suspect are programming things caused by the port.  (In-engine cut scenes crashing is a new one on me, though, I gotta say!)  And translation issues, of course, because they did not have a native speaker look over the English to make sure it was, you know, comprehensible.  Though mostly the problems with the translation were just awkward, not anything that would actually stop you from understanding what they were trying to say.  (Sadly, one of the worst was right in the opening movie, where--among other problems--they accidentally used "peach" when they meant "peace.")

[EDIT:  the bit about the in-engine cut scenes "crashing" is something I feel like I ought to explain.  They didn't crash in the sense of failing to run or causing a forced stop to the game.  It took me quite a while to figure out what was actually going on there:  basically, the only thing broken about the in-engine cut scenes actually seemed to be the commands given to the camera.  This was particularly jarring on one occasion, where you fast-travel to a location and see the spot where you land from fast-traveling there, and then you hear the cut scene playing, but all you can see is this empty stretch of cliff face.  Which I thought at the time was just the game crashing, so I quit out to the Playstation menu and tried again.  But then, much later in the game, it happened in a way that let me understand what was actually going on:  again, it happened after a fast-travel, and the camera simply stayed in the base arrival position for the location, while the models for the cut scene did their thing....which included appearing and disappearing, rapidly jumping from one side of the screen to another, etc.  Because it was an interior scene, the characters had to move around a lot to have them be in the right place for various close-ups where they were or were not supposed to be visible.  (I really wish I had been able to record that somehow, because wow was it wild to watch!)  But lately I've sort of been thinking about that for some reason, and I kind of wonder just how many of the earlier cut scenes had been ignoring the camera commands like that and I never noticed.  For example, there's this one minor character who was several times shown "walking" on screen when his model seems to have been rigged at all, so he's just sliding around unanimated.  I can only think of a handful of times that happened, and in all of them I seem to recall the camera being completely static.  So it may be that those were other cases of the camera commands being ignored because of whatever the heck was causing that, and so if I had been seeing the cutscenes as they were meant to be seen, it wouldn't have been apparent that that guy's model wasn't rigged, because if he was shown "walking" it was from a higher angle where you're only seeing his face and shoulders or whatever.  Now, this is all still a new one on me, keep in mind.  In fact, having the cut scene play properly while just the camera commands are ignored is probably even more unusual and weird.  I suspect it's an issue with porting the game to the PS4, but having pretty much zero knowledge of the workings of the kinds of engines high end 3D games are made in, I have no way of knowing if that's likely to be the case.  I am quite certain about it being only the camera commands that were being ignored as the cut scenes played out, though.  Whatever was causing it, I got around it by saving basically every time I thought a cut scene might start up (the map helpfully gave you a marker to show where you needed to go, so I just got in the habit of saving right before reaching said marker, whether it seemed likely there would be a cut scene or not), and if it was obviously broken, then I'd quit out and start the game up again, which usually fixed the problem.  So it must have had something to do with having too much in memory at once, or something? 🤷  Sometime I ought to look up a playthrough on Youtube (if there are any) and see if some of those cut scenes I remember as looking sort of weird with their static camera were actually bugging out.  Actually, just watching the game would kinda be a better experience anyway, in that I could go back and see what any subtitles I didn't manage to read had said...]

But the UI is the biggest problem, or rather, the accessibility of the whole program is.  Because everything is tiny.  The entire UI is minute.  Including the subtitles.  Which have no background behind them to make them easier to read.

And I have a really small TV.

I had to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the TV just to be able to read the subtitles.  And even then I often couldn't finish reading some of the lines between the poor contrast and the fact that Chinese is a more efficient language than English (at least sometimes) and so things that are said in just a dozen words or so in Chinese then need three lines of text in English, and there just wasn't time to read all of them before the words went away as the cutscene continued.  (And after about the halfway point of the story, the gameplay loop was like 80% cutscenes!)

Still, I did soldier through and finish the game.  I was able to catch enough of the dialog to know what was going on, thankfully.  (There is at least a story section in the menu that sums up the story as it goes along...though the text there is just as tiny as the subtitles.)  Never really grasped some of the finer points of the combat system, though, as the battle UI was just too small to be comprehensible.  😰  Maybe it's better on a computer, where the screen's supposed to be really close to your face, but since computer monitors are even smaller than my TV, I don't know how much that would actually help?

Anyway, on the whole, the game was a positive experience, in my opinion.

Xian Qing is best boi.

Luo Zhaoyan suffered a humiliating costume change in the late game that needed to be reverted as soon as possible and never was.  😖  (Even with the humiliating new costume, still second-best after Xianqing.)

The graphics were sorta late PS2/early PS3 level, but very pretty anyway.  😁

Anyway, I was super excited (after having dealt with the previous game's itty-bitty subtitles) to see that Sword and Fairy 7 had in its settings menu a "Subtitle Size" setting! 😁

I was much less pleased to see that it didn't increase the size of anything else in the UI.  So I can read the subtitles (usually; there's still nothing behind them, so the background can make reading the text difficult, and it still often vacates the screen before I can finish reading it) but I can't read the messages in the upper corner that are telling me what I'm supposed to be doing next. 😭

So, yeah, maybe I should have called this post "Accessibility Matters" or "Subtitles Need To Be Legible, Guys!"

Or something.

I dunno.

.

..

...

(Actually, maybe I just wanted to make a post that allowed me to say "Xianqing is best boi.")

(This is Xianqing:

I rest my case.)

Anyway, as to Sword and Fairy 7, I'm not really far enough in to have much to say about it yet, aside from the even more eyestrainy UI issue.  The translation still has problems, but they're not as bad.  At least they're trying to be more naturalistic with the honorifics; the previous one literally had people addressing each other as "Brother Yue" and "Brother Luo."  Which is, technically, accurate in translating the honorific -xiong, but it's not how people speak in English unless they're Pilgrims and it's the 18th century.  (If you have any familiarity with Japanese honorifics, the Chinese ones are at least twice as complicated.  Three or four times more if you start getting into the extended family stuff...though one of the guides on AO3 pointed out that some of that is so complicated that even native speakers have trouble with it!  I've barely scraped the surface of research on honorifics and other forms of address for my MDZS fanfics; I figure as long as I'm able to reproduce the level the official translation uses, I'm probably okay...)

I did have a couple of double-takes last night, though!  We had to get some rubbings of ancient musical scores for a side quest, right?  Only when I looked at the menu for more information on what we were looking for, it said they were "Xianle rubbings"!  I couldn't stop myself from laughing and saying "I didn't know this game had a crossover with Heaven Official's Blessing!"  And then not too much later, we met an innkeeper whose name was Wen Mao.  Probably spelled with different characters than the founder of the Wen Clan in MDZS, but still!  Given that at that inn we encountered poor unfortunates being worked to death like the Wen remnants, I can't help feeling that wasn't a coincidence.

Especially since the all-white-wearing Xiu Wu is really trying very hard to be a heterosexual Lan Wangji.  Uh, probably with less tendency to jealousy, though. 😅  And almost certainly without the secret massive horniness.  So, yeah, maybe I should say more that he's trying to be Lan Wangji's public image. 🤣  Only not as taciturn...though he does say "Mn." a lot!  🤣  (Which they always translate as "Sure." even if that's completely the wrong tone for the context.  😰 )

But there's almost a poetry to there being obvious references to MXTX's work in game 7 considering that something in game 6 seems to have influenced one of the changes made when MDZS was adapted into the live action drama The Untamed.  (Specifically the strange urukhai-like things the "puppets" could be turned into.)  Though that could be both things drawing influence from an older work/tradition, though; as I only discovered the genre last year, I'm obviously not very knowledgeable about it!