Wandering Sword Review

Wandering Sword is a fantastic shell of a game. The world is absolutely beautiful, the premise of being a growing swordmaster with a friend to rescue is immediately gripping, and the gameplay, on the surface, seems deep and complex.

Then you actually play the game.

Wandering Sword is plagued by perhaps too many ideas. An RPG stat progression system is perfectly lovely, until you introduce stats with vague use. What exactly does my ever-growing Sword Mastery stat do for me? Raising it never seems to affect my ability (or inability, as I’ll touch on later) to mow down enemies. So why should I be concerned with it?

The main progression system of striking chakras(?) (I forget what they’re called) seems simple enough, until you realize that you don’t know what exactly would be most beneficial for you. Stats like Strength and Constitution being raised in increments of two or more are fairly self-explanatory, but what does it mean to raise my Evasion by 0.3 or my Internal Power by 2? Nothing I found in the game could properly explain this to me.

In fairness, this might be because the game has an absolutely lackluster translation. Grammatical errors abound, and whatever character might have existed in the original dialogue has been stripped away such that each character comes across more or less the same. Tutorials for various mechanics that pop up from time to time can be difficult to parse, as well.

Not helping matters is Wandering Sword’s miserable UI. There are 6-8 massive clickable buttons that eat up the upper right hand corner of your screen, each of which opens up the map, one of several completely different menus, and an archive of all recent dialogue. Trying to find the right menu in the early hours is an exercise in clicking these unlabeled buttons and exiting out of the first couple because they weren’t what you were looking for. On the left hand side of the screen, real estate is bought up by quest descriptions, both for your current main quest and whichever side quest it has arbitrarily decided to focus on (usually the most recent one you started or updated, but if you go in the sidequest menu and click around, it can get set to almost anything).

That terrible UI carries over into the combat as well. Hovering over the skills at the bottom of the screen shows a massive box giving you the details for that skill, but this can obscure the other skills that show up above (for example, if you have two Mighty skills, a box for the second appears when you hover over the first) such that you fail to notice you have additional skills at all. Much of that information in the box is unnecessary, as well, making this problem stick out far more than it might otherwise.

Combat itself is where this game shines the most, and is most let down by pacing issues and poor story decisions. Wandering Sword is a grid-based tactics game where you move your party around to position them to better defeat as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible. Simple, fun, but with depth. Weapons all act differently, so if you’re a sword wielder, for instance, you’ll be attacking columns of enemies in front of you, whereas with a saber, you’ll attack rows instead. By forming your party with characters who use different types of weapons, you’ll be able to handily take out your foes.

At least, that seems to be the idea, and I’ve no doubt you get there eventually. Unfortunately, in my time in the game, I had access to only one permanent party member who was incredibly lackluster. Others would come and go, but they were clearly guests, not new additions to my team. More frustrating is how these guests are used. Essentially, the early game pits you against two kinds of bosses; one you cannot defeat, and therefore must lose against to progress the story, or one you cannot defeat, and must use the significantly stronger guest character to handle. I’m of the opinion unwinnable battles should be rare in video games, preferably reserved for the main villain of your game or a significant rival, but Yowen just demonstrably sucks for the majority of the opening hours of his game.

Other more minor issues plague the game as well. You’ll be sifting through an endless stream of loot, resources, and materials as you play the game, comparing the stats on helms to see if something you just picked up will add 5 more HP to your pool. Not that it matters anyway, as you’re quickly expected to manage HP and MP numbers reaching into the thousands. There’s an entire crafting system that I was barely introduced to in my time playing, but still seemed superfluous, as I was only finding recipe books for equipment types I had already outgrown. The major differences between sword skills are usually the debuff or buff it applies to either the enemy or you, but there is nothing on any of the characters to indicate if they are suffering a debuff or what it could be if they are.

Wandering Sword is a game with a lot of potential, that much is clear. The core concept of being a traveling martial artist, finding manuals and learning skills from the people you met is one I was interested in at once, and the world map which you use to travel to all the different locales is quite possibly one of my favorite overworlds in any video game. It’s a shame that I don’t feel I can recommend this game, because there is a lot of good here, buried just underneath the layers of confusing and hostile design and poor translation. If you find yourself loving this game, I don’t fault you. I just couldn’t love it myself.