Just finished this yesterday, overall its a quite nice game with good spriteworks and decent to good music. Combat is just ok, nothing special really and its quite easy but tbh until like 3/5 of the whole game it works and its satisfying. Leveling up to see how new skills will look in combat, exploring for new items and to see new monster designs is quite exciting.
Really the monster variety was for me quite astounding, almost no recolors besides mainly some elemental stuff like water frog, fire frog etc... but even then its a minority, when in late game i found myself in White Miao capital i thought that this is the moment where enemy variety drops but no, after entering certain demon infested tunnels, with every new level you encounter fresh new enemies and the deeper you go, the more new stuff you encounter. Sadly for me, by that moment i was getting really tired of those long ass labyrinthian levels made from like two tiles wide paths (last enjoyment i had from gameplay was either in that phoenix forest or even earlier in that gigantic demon tower dungeon) and every combat encounter mostly meant nuking enemy with the same aoe skills at best for 1 full round, at worst for like 3-4 rounds.
Graphics for me are one of the best parts of this game, sprites are charming and decently animated, maps are mostly colorful and insteresting (except of those fucking cave labyrinths, they all look almost the same and are boring), like i said earlier monster designs are numerous and interesting, all of them have attack animations (for me the best is that old geezer with guitar from demon tower who has this hilarious guitar riff attack), some of them have standing animations (my favourites are that bald fatman using drum sticks on his giant belly and those enemies that look like dancing piggybacking grandpas, also from demon tower). Another good thing about them is consistency between exploration and battle graphics, sprite scale is preserved both in and out of combat with combat sprites having also some additional detail (though certain enemies have weird scaling compared to map sprite), this works well with absence of random encounters (enemy groups on map are represented by various moving sprites, some are quite ridiculous, like who had this idea that giant dragon should be represented by some bat on the map).
What i like the most about this game graphics are those little details that make everything better, for example certain skills permamently leave marks on battle terrain, certain NPC wants you to take plate of food and deliver it to inn client and you have sprite animation only for that moment that shows our character taking this plate and walking with it or some NPC is drinking something and there is animation for that, in some jrpg of that era you would probably have all of that inside of text message. Of course such detailed spritework is not everpresent and probably appeared much often in games of that era that i know (or remember) but its enough of it for me to notice and appreciate.
Music was not as memorable for me though, its not bad, there are good tracks but nothing that would be stuck in my head for days, well besides one battle theme (...yeah its from some level of demon tower) and i have certain problem with it. I found it inside files (track 042.mid or 043.mid, i used version from here
https://chinesepaladin.org/download...ord-and-fairychinese-paladin-game-in-english/ since i was too lazy to learn how to build windows version from that gimp fork) but i swear that it sounded different in game than when opening music files in media player apps, though im not sure if this game uses only one track variation per battle and loops it or if it just juggles between few variations during encounter.
Story was enjoyable, maybe nothing that i will remember fondly for years but it still focused my attention and i wanted to see what will happen next. Beginning was ok but my favourite part was the time between... lets call it a prologue, when we arrive in first city and de... you know what tower, maybe its just a simple tale of the road but i really enjoyed seeing different cities and villages with their own story arcs. Sadly there is no optional location, the game is completly linear(though i read that WinXP remake has some alternative endings but i think that version is not translated), the only maybe optional thing that i found was that purple gourd we get after returning bag of antiques to certain wife during our travel, apparently you could make medicine with this but i was too lazy to bother, my healing needs were satisfied by hp and mp replenishes after each won battle (not full but like 1/3 or 2/3 maybe) and by loot found during exploration for those hp and mp sponge bosses.
It felt for me that during the late game devs were either lacking in time or ideas what to do next... 36 FUCKING PUPPET BUGS, i was lucky that i had almost half of those from loot found from whole game before that moment but still, who tf thought that this was a good idea? This is also the time when i feel like everything started to go slightly too fast, there should be breathing moment between returning from that fucking fedex quest and
attack on White Miao capital. Last boss was the only somewhat challenging boss combining both hp bloat and being a somewhat high damage dealer but i just unleashed all of my stored wine god attacks and i had tons of money for that coin toss II skill since i tought that this was the best moment to use those, I expected second boss phase but no it was it. Ending felt somewhat conclusive if slightly sad
and then i saw Yueru with Xiaoyao daughter and i thought to myself "Hey how its possible but she was... (in that moment i reminded myself puppet bug description) 36 FUCKING PUPPET BUGS!!! Xiaoyao my dude, its not going to be healthy for you, not for her and certainly not for your dong!!!"
There were only like two bugs that i found, in some areas water was invisible and it looked like dried up areas from White Miao capital even though boats were swimming on this invisible water and few times certain enemy encounters were cloned (like if some devs stuffed by accident two clone enemy sprites on the same tile) but besides that game is stable and no crashes.
