Wuxia RPGs on the Steam Summer Sale, a thread!🧵

Wuxia RPGs have been going through a revival this past few years - some are real masterpieces, others are a bit janky or confusing but still very interesting.

Here's my favorite ones - all available in English (officially or not)





There's various Wuxia-inspired RPGs but IMO the most iconic are the open-world ones - create a character and go out learn martial arts, make choices & forge your own path!

Hero's Adventure is precisely that - easily one of the best RPGs of the past years: store.steampowered.com/app/1948980/He…

A lot of people asked me for tips on how to play older non-English games, so here's four amazing resources (besides DOSBox & emulators):

1 - MORT:
An OCR tool to automatically translate on-screen text, IMO it's easier to use than Ztranslate. A must-have! github.com/killkimno/MORT
2 - Locale Emulator:

Allows you to fake the system language / time zone you're in. Many older games REQUIRE this to display text correctly and sometimes to even run at all (especially Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian games). xupefei.github.io/Locale-Emulato…

I'll start with a disclaimer: I do not speak Chinese.

That said, it's absurd there's no info in English on this, so let me tell you about 橙光/66RPG.

AKA how an RPG Maker forum became the "Roblox of Visual Novels", with 80M active users, 8,000 paid developers and 100,000+ games It all began in 2005, as 柳柳/LiuLiu, a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, created 66RPG as a forum to share RPG Maker info.

It soon became a hub for China's indie dev scene, where people could share game design tips, learn how to make/rip art and play each others games

First demo of Steam Next Fest I've tried was MULLET MAD JACK, an insane first-person Hotline Miami roguelike with a time limit - kill something every 10 sec or die lol

Love the aesthetics and humor, really worth a try: store.steampowered.com/app/2111190/MU…






Second demo is Dungeonborne... god, what a flop.

I like the idea of a co-op first-person dungeon crawler, but:
1- It's the slowest & least satisfying melee combat I've ever tried
2- It's so aggressively a "game as a service" that I was tired of it in 5 min store.steampowered.com/app/2448970/Du…

Ugh, every outlet is doing that "Steam had 14,000 games!" news from SteamDB in an alarmist tone.

Pls remember itch,io also exists, and that this ship has sailed - you'll never play all games, like you'll never "consume" all books, songs & movies. Move the discussion forward, FFS I think the "consume" perspective is what gets people so anxious... in the 2000s it felt easy, you had like 5-10 AAAs per year that were "the big video games", only weirdos cared for Flash, RPG Maker & indies.

Now you can't "consume" all big games of 2023, so FOMO goes crazy :P

I want to talk more about these books (both freely available), I think they're great conversation starters
-The 1st has two journos examining why games & games journalism aren't mainstream
-The 2nd shows how games are a cultural field and "the games industry" is a tiny part of it

IMHO, The Videogame Industry does not Exist is brilliant. It lays out how silly it is to focus so much on AAAs and big studios when more and more games are made by small studios or as hobby - like garage bands or hobbyists. It's how it all began, with hobbyists sharing free games

Hand-drawing dungeon maps may sound terribly dull, but it was a core feature of some of the biggest RPGs of the 80s.

I also wouldn't want to play most modern RPGs having to draw my own map, but there's a good reason why some dungeon-crawlers are still designed around that idea🧵 In these type of games, each dungeon floor is roughly a 20x20 grid. It varies with each series, some games even came with branded graph paper!

It is limiting, but that's the point: you know you are in one of the squares. And spells like Wizardy's DUMAPIC gave you X,Y coordinates

People liked the thread on Chinese/Taiwanese RPGs, so let me tell you about another overlooked region: South Korea!

Yes, Korea is a gaming powerhouse, the land of MMOs, e-sports and mobile. But during the 90s they also had a huge PC RPG scene! Let's talk about those! 🧵 Korea got computers early, thanks to local giants like Samsung. And they also began by copying foreign classics, but with a twist: due to the brutal Japanese occupation, their culture was banned - you couldn't sell Mario there.
But you could sell local clones/ports/pirate copies!

Of all the research I did, the history of Chinese RPGs is my favorite. It blew my mind how over 200 PC RPGs were created in the 90s and early 2000s, an output rivalled only by Japan and the US!

And yet, we never talk about these games... So let me give a very brief overview🧵 In Taiwan in the late 80s, people began importing foreign PC games and localizing them - first translating manuals, then fully translating or even porting them, like their Dragon Quest for DOS. These groups grew and even made publications like Jingxun Computer Magazine/ 精訊電腦

Reading some takes on the recent "JRPG" discourse, I wanted to talk a bit about about "Western RPG x Japanese RPG" history.

Mainly about how they evolved, each going thought many crises, "influence gaps" and learning from the other. It will be long, and take a while...🧵 Ok, so D&D comes out in 1974 in the US, people immediately start making adaptations of it for mainframe computers.

These were purely about exploring dungeons & killing monsters, but quickly grew more complex, supporting multiplayer, rankings, secrets and first-person combat:

Since Steam is having the roguelike sale, let me recommend some amazing and EXTREMELY CHEAP games you can enjoy for dozens or hundreds of hours ↓ Tales of Maj'Eyal: store.steampowered.com/app/259680/Tal…
One of my most-played game of all-time, it combines an extremely deep roguelike with a more CRPG-like main quest, dozens of classes and races that play totally different and hundreds of secrets to uncover.

Today is the 20th anniversary of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game I absolutely love.

There's RPGs with better gameplay or more charismatic heroes, but Morrowind has the deepest & most fascinating world you can immerse yourself in. It truly offers a journey into another life. I really love its setting. It abandons Tolkien & medieval fantasy to offers a fantastic mix of Dune, Moebius and epic poems.

It's an alien world full of exotic creatures, epic feats, conspiracies, deceitful gods... yet all consistent, with social classes, laws, government, etc.

Oh yeah, struck a gold vein!

There's NOTHING in English about Chinese RPGs, but I found a gigantic rant/retrospective from a Chinese gamer on the entire history of the genre: gameres.com/860469.html

I feel a special kinship with someone that goes "2005-2008 was decline" 🥲 I'll try to give an overlook, butchering the names since they it REALLY hard to read:

It begins in 1990-1994, with simple Dragon Quest-clones like "Xuan-Yuan Sword 1" and "Legend of Hero", then quickly evolving with "Xuan-Yuan Sword 2" and "The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber".