As a Chinese who grew up watching the story of "Journey to the West", before experiencing the game, I had set a most acceptable lower limit for this game, but I did not expect that it still refreshed my understanding of "bad games".
What is "Journey to the West", I don't need to say a few more words, this Ming Dynasty "blockbuster" has been on fire for hundreds of years, and will be passed down forever with the lives of the people in Shenzhou. The "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" movie is a dark horse domestic animation film in 2015, and the pleasing adaptation coupled with good quality has made this work earn 950 million at the box office, and it has also made countless audiences who only see European and American animation films marvel that "the original domestic animation films can still be done like this."
In the middle of 2017, sony ChinaJoy pre-exhibition conference, the gamification decision of "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" was officially announced, which may be a big happy news for Chinese players at that time, who has not had some heroic dreams in their youth? Before the Official Entry of American superhero blockbusters into the mainland market, Chinese always had a hero in his heart — the monkey who was once extremely rebellious and invincible in the world (rulai in heaven).
Playing with terriers does not play terriers, and the acting skills of old artists are beyond doubt
"Becoming a hero, even in the game" undoubtedly has a universal appeal to players, not to mention becoming Sun Wukong, many players began to think about this game, on October 17 this year, "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" was finally officially released, but my experience with this game and the satisfaction of imagining "playing qi tian dasheng" are very different.
The first thing to say is that the game wasn't for nothing, or that it was enough for movie fans and people who had never been exposed to computer games to earn a "good game." The game starts at the same time as the movie, the great sage is unsealed by Jiang Liu'er, and the two begin to take risks, but when you see the same crystal burst open with the movie, don't be in a hurry to be moved.
After the player can control the Great Sage, the first feeling to accompany the whole process comes - dropped frames. Yes, from the beginning of the game to the end, the frame rate fluctuated in a tragic way that was visible to the naked eye, which made me calm down in the excitement of the promotional film at first, and the idea of "optimizing the problem, just wait for the patch later" flashed by.
Calmly I controlled the Great Sage to come to the front of several green-skinned mountain fish, and the battle began. The general attack sound effect is a little interesting, but the judgment range looks very large, but it is obviously not so large, it is easy to attack without going to the enemy's face and then attacking, I think this is a small problem, but I did not expect that there are more problems waiting for me after that, this is only the "first difficulty".
A way of changing scenes that I haven't seen in years
The Jackie Chan action elements mentioned in the promotion do appear in the game, and some drunken fist-like actions will appear frequently, and if you are a fan of Jackie Chan, you will of course take this as a plus. But in fact, using a lot of stereotyped funny action elements in an action game is not so satisfactory. If the game itself has a high quality of action design, then the "color head" will only be as good as possible, but when the action of the game itself is mediocre, too many "color heads" will only make us feel bored.
The ability of the great sage in the animated movie is instantly unlocked because of anger, but the game gives more performance to the "unsealing" process, and each time a boss is defeated, the skills that players can use will gradually open up, which is indeed very suitable for the theme of "unlocking the seal", but the design of these skills does not remind people that this is a Journey to the West IP game, as if it can be used on any game.
Seeing this, of course, you know that I am going to talk about the skill design of this game, but before I understand these skills in detail, I will first emphasize one point. As an action game, this game does not have any shortcut keys to release skills or use props, the player can only open the entire skill menu or prop menu, and the game time is static when choosing to use, which clearly tells the player that "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" is not an action game that pursues difficulty.
There are not many skills and props in the game, and it can even be said that there are many, and there are combat skills and direct injury skills, but the setting that cannot open the B skill within the duration of the opening A skill makes the game's already small actionability become lower. As for what the relationship between the skill itself and the "Monkey King" IP, IMHO, I really haven't found it.
Most of the skills in the game have very low practical value in themselves, for example, the game skills "Kirin Foot" and "Fire Phoenix Dance". Putting aside the relationship between these skills and the "Monkey King" IP, the skill name is really cool, and the special effects are also good. However, after the "Fire Phoenix Dance" with a wide range of AOE damage in the middle and after a large number of floating monsters appeared, the early skill "Kirin Foot" was "completely exploded" and became a burden.
One skill, eight entries
Most of the Chicken Rib skills make the original ten skills more rare, except for one teleportation skill and one that turns off the Persistence skill (yes, this is also a skill!). and two skills that summon stools and sticks, respectively, are only six left. In the end, I only remembered two, a straight injury skill "Fire Phoenix Dance" and an auxiliary rush skill "Shenxing", even though the use of "Shenxing" felt as uncomfortable as a Russian child riding on the shoulder of a drunken father to show him the way home.
Looks handsome, but I only changed twice in nine hours
In terms of plot, although the game review has never been based on the principle of no spoilers, this game has no such burden at all, because the plot of this game is exactly the same as in the movie, and even a lot of emotional ups and downs have been deleted, and the monster model has a lot of repetition. More level designs are just for the player to repeat the mobs or bosses that appeared before, and it's hard to believe that this repetition actually appears on such a highly anticipated "Monkey King" IP, but it does.
Before the final level, you have to replay the boss you have played before
When I gave up finding the "Qitian Great Saint Sun Wukong" in the game, which is of great significance to the Chinese, I envisioned whether if this is a new IP indie game that has nothing to do with big IP, it will be able to reduce some of the "greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment" gap. But when I put aside my vision of "Monkey King" and experienced the full content of the game, it was still difficult for the game to get a good evaluation.
Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage, although there is a "Dream Wonderland" design that allows players to repeat previous game levels, is still a standard linear process game, but the collection elements in the game remind me of the open-world game Zelda Legend: Breath of the Wild, which is undoubtedly a conflict in design.
Leaving aside the similarity of the animation effect and the collection method that is far from comparable, the collection system of this game can actually determine the upgrade of the protagonist's health, blue bar and attack power attributes, which allows the player to pay attention to the corners around the screen at any time while "one way".
Of course, the skill "Heart Eye" can help you find these land dukes that are very similar to "Yahaha", but constantly moving and constantly putting skills is not in line with the player's normal game habits, and in the final Battle of the Great Sage, the final BOSS Chaos is far from being able to upgrade the full attributes.
However, this does not affect the player's smooth level, because the player only needs to move around the boss to repeat the "skill + props back to blue" step to defeat all the enemies of the game, this somewhat "simple" gameplay is not so much to cater to the low difficulty designed by more players, but rather a big failure in the design of "action game", after all, whether a game with no difficulty and rigid combat can be labeled as an "action game" is a question worth thinking about.
The "Skill + Blue" unlimited loop can be easily cleared
The lack of gameplay fun is not only reflected in the lack of combat experience, the frequency and meaningless black screen or animated cutscenes, and the meaningless "treasure play" story walking link in any game is worthy of being complained about. The shallow design of the large number of materials on the map that can only be synthesized into traditional red medicine and blue medicine has frustrated me, and they are too little in the game.
In the end, I could only console myself that the last three-minute "Return of the Great Sage" scene reminded me of the enthusiasm of watching the movie before the skill, which was probably the only advantage I experienced in completing this game.
The ending, both the health bar and the blue bar, disappeared very appropriately
Before opening the game, I was extremely eager to play Monkey King in the virtual world, but until the end of the game, I could only make a few laughs at the deliberately filled elements in the game, I thought that if there was no "Sun Wukong" IP, I could change "Zhang Wukong" or "Li Wukong", which is still a game.
He has almost all of the system of an action game— cool skills, multiple "sample" items, stealth sneak attacks, cross-targeting ranged attacks, a large number of collection elements, gradually improved abilities, and decryption (of course, if you let A go to B to pull the wrench to open the door and let the bridge count), but he has managed to make these gold-like ingredients cast a silver-like gun head - which is not useful.
"We have this setting"
I wanted to find out the advantages of "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" except for the last three minutes of the movie, and finally found that although his current rating on Steam is "mostly bad", when I found some reviews in other languages, I found that most of the foreign friends praised the game, and they greatly appreciated the "Chinese mythology" element of the game.
There are even Russian players who praise "localization" authenticity
In connection with the twelve languages and nine Chinese sounds of Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage, and the text setting of the "Rune Soldier" that confused me, I began to envision another possibility. Part of the value of the game itself lies in the cultural output, so that light players around the world pay for the Chinese animated movie "The Return of the Great Sage of Journey to the West" and experience the elements of "Chinese mythology" in the game that have little to do with Journey to the West itself.
"This book teaches you Chinese immortality"
But before I became the editor of the game, I was first and foremost an ordinary Chinese player, and in this position I really can't give a good evaluation of Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage, his shortcomings are too many to make people forget those few advantages, and such a game experience, I would rather not have a second time.
Incidentally, because I quickly skipped some tutorial instructions in the early stages, I didn't notice that the game had tumbling motion until the end of the game.
But it didn't affect my gaming experience at all, because in this action game, the action itself doesn't matter.
So what's important?
merit
Large IP
Twelve languages and nine Chinese tones
Some of the scenes are good to look at
insufficient
Too many to list