Nostalgic Game Review
Welcome to a new episode of the Nostalgic Game Review, where each month I muse over an old game I played long ago. Other than indulging my own nostalgia, this column also hopefully shed some light on game design and reflect on how gaming technologies have evolved.
Without further ado…
金庸群俠傳 (Heroes of Jin Yong)
What is it?
This is a RPG game with a unique story created from the ‘Jin Yong’ universe. And to fully appreciate the context of the game, I should talk about who ‘Jin Yong’ was. Jin Yong (金庸) was one of the most famous (if not THE most famous) Wu-Xia (武俠, roughly translated to kung-fu, paladin…) novel writers in the Chinese language. Almost all of his work are closely tied to the actual historical events around the Song, Yun, Ming, Qing dynasties(宋,元,明,清) , and bland in to fill the gaps in the blury/undocumented parts of the historical events, with romancized naratives.
His most famous work are the 14 stories that’s weaved into the fabric of this game, further enriched by the vivid characters and their special kung-fu styles, the player get to interact with these characters previously only accessible by reading through the novels (ok, or their TV/Movie/comic adaptations). What’s even cooler, is the 1st words from each of these books’ name gets arranged [by Jin Yong] into a poem drawing a beautiful visual:
飛雪連天射白鹿
笑書神俠倚碧鴛
(My rough translation would be this draws a picture of: a mysterious, well read, paladin, carrying two legendary weapons, one a sword, another a knife, hunting a white deer under a bright sky filled with falling snow)
Back to this game, the main character is a guy from our world somehow got transported into this world, and soon he realized that his mission is to gather up 14 epic books (sharing the same names of the 14 Jin Yong novels), learned all the best Kung-fu (styles mentioned in these 14 stories) and become the best master of the world to bring peace to this world. (if you’ve also played Ultima VI, this may ring a bell? :p)
My impression
The game world is in a beautifully drawn, isometric view. There’s a ‘world map’ view when player travels in larger area:
And the size of the world is so huge that it could be considered an ‘open-world’ game at its time:
But there’s also another more closed-up view when player is in town or in dungeon, a lot of time involving battling as well as solving puzzling or finding hidden objects:
The play get to tag team with well known characters in the Jin Yong’s stories too:
Humorous dialog also plays an important role to keep the players engaged and entertained:
The combat system is critical to this game’s success since, hey it’s a game filled with kung-fu!
All in all this is a super fun and memorable game, and I won’t mind replaying it from time to time even now.
I should probably mention that I did not read any of the novels before playing the game, and did not like Chinese history as a school subject either. But that all changed after I played the game. I went through the books quickly and absolutely loved them. And also found myself flipping through more history books and stories to learn about Chinese history.
Perhaps this is something for the educators and the EdTech companies to consider on how to make subjects more interesting?
Here is a recent youtube video that reviewed this game:
This game is available to be played online (disclaimer: not sure how legal it is though…)
That’s it for this episode of Nostalgic Game Review! Thank you for visiting! I appreciate any comments/feedback or if there’s a game you would like me to cover 🙂
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