Shuyan Saga Review

Shuyan Saga, a Wuxia-themed hybrid graphic novel and beat-em-up from Lofty Sky Entertainment, follows Shuyan, the princess of Nan Feng, as she attempts to protect her kingdom from the vicious invader and conqueror, Ganbaatar. The story is split into three Episodes, each covering roughly a third of the overall story, and it is told by alternating between beautifully drawn comic panels where you can shape the story as it unfolds and mostly top-down action segments. Overall, I rather enjoyed my time with this little gem, though a few details kept me from being entirely satisfied.

To begin with, I absolutely adored the basic idea. Mixing beat ‘em up and slight fighting gameplay with interactive comic sounds entirely up my alley. One of my personal favourite hidden gems in years past, h.a.n.d.’s breathtaking and sadly unfinished Imaginary Range, had a similar concept, though that was more simply an interactive comic with a static storyline and a few mini-games. In both that game when I was younger and Shuyan Saga today, I have found art that pops off the proverbial page and sells awesome spectacles and set pieces through the magic of art and limited animation. In a way, my experience playing this game has transported me back to those days of staying up late playing through Imaginary Range on my iPad over and over again.

Even then, with its “choices matter” approach to storytelling and surprisingly fun combat, Shuyan Saga has some noted differences and improvements over that old favourite, surpassing those equally old memories. However, beyond the basic interactive comic idea, it also features some similarities, and not all are entirely appreciated. The most concerning is how, despite my playing it on the Xbox One, it very clearly appears to have been designed first and foremost as a mobile title. Looking at the pause screen, there are a handful of buttons to click on, all represented by easily visible and understandable symbols and all lying around the edge of the screen to be easily tapped by someone holding a phone sideways with one or both hands. Similar measures are taken with most of the controls, where buttons with text are large and easy to read and a lot of the most significant action appears to take place via swiping at the screen.

Playing it now on console, it is very nice to see how clean the port is in most regards, with a greater focus on buttons that bring together a fine set of battle mechanics that do develop nicely and entertainingly across Shuyan Saga’s runtime. However, time and again, I found that the buttons didn’t always respond as I’d hoped they would. Sometimes, I would have to jam an attack button down over and over for Shuyan to even consider throwing a punch. Other times, combos would be interrupted because the game thought I’d hit a button three times instead of two. I’m no stranger to occasional hardware issues or even my own human error, but that it happened multiple times throughout Shuyan Saga’s relatively brief runtime makes me believe it’s not entirely the fault of either area. Additionally, while using the analogue stick instead of a touch screen for the swiping sections absolutely works, and even does so nicely more often than not, there’s still an element that looks sloppy or delayed. This is fine on a mobile device, where you might need some time to pull your finger back and make sense of the screen, but I feel a lot of tightening up could have been done here on this console release.

All that being said, I did genuinely enjoy the combat throughout Shuyan Saga. It’s split into two different types of situations, often moving between the two in a single encounter. In the first type, Shuyan, seen from an over-the-shoulder angle, can fight against enemies one-on-one, with a focus on blocking or redirecting her opponent’s attacks and delivering her own combos to bring their health down. In the second, Shuyan is surrounded by multiple assailants in an overhead view and must use a slightly more simplified moveset and a dodge roll to manoeuvre around her foes and deliver upon them swift defeat. While in this wider, beat ‘em up-esque mode, some enemies will close in and initiate a one-on-one battle for a round of attacking and blocking and Shuyan can also move an opponent into this mode by unleashing a devastating special attack once one of her meters is full.

The combat stays simple, digestible, and understandable throughout the storyline thanks to how each element is slowly introduced and incorporated into the gameplay. Admittedly, by the end, a fair few details of the combat that mattered at the start, like blocking, are essentially irrelevant because more recent additions are so much more effective, but this not only works well with Shuyan’s story of accepting her gifts and learning how to control them but also leads the player into a constant stream of fresh gameplay that never has a chance to get old.

What did get a bit old, however, was a bug I noticed around halfway through my playtime, right around the introduction of one of my favourite mechanics. A large focus of both the story and gameplay in the game’s back half is soft martial arts and redirecting one’s opponents’ attacks. In the overhead sections with many enemies to face, this is represented by a new ability to grab and push attacking foes away from you, usually either into a wall or another enemy. This was great fun and really helped make me feel like a badass, but it occasionally also led to some enemies falling through invisible walls and being unable to return. Instead of dying, they would stay outside and prevent me from making progress, as I had to defeat all enemies in each encounter. Heck, there was even one fight with an enemy who could dash forward to attack me; she even got herself trapped out of bounds twice, managing to squeeze her way back in the first time somehow. This only happened a few times, but it required a checkpoint reset each time, which was frustrating. After the second such occurrence, I tried to be more mindful of the borders of whatever room I was in, focusing on aiming my attackers at other foes instead of the edges of the play area, so this bug was still very much on my mind for the rest of the game.

The other half of the game, where you can enjoy beautifully drawn comic panels and skilful voice acting as you follow Shuyan’s story and choose some of her actions, is blissfully bug-free and plays nicely. Like many other choices matter titles, the story plays out on its own, occasionally stopping for a moment to allow you, the player, to make a choice for Shuyan. At first, it appeared as though I had infinite time to decide what to do, though I did eventually notice that the options on screen — represented here as large text boxes — slowly shrunk the more time went on; presumably, this meant there was a timer for each decision. However, I always had more than enough time to decide what to do, so it never really added much urgency for me.

In regard to how the choices work in the game, beyond some measures of tone, there are a few things that can be manipulated, including whether or not certain characters live or die. However, much of that tone doesn’t carry on through to later scenes and the story has its own conception of Shuyan as a character that it wants to show. This isn’t really all that awful admittedly, and most available decisions do a good job of feeling in character for this version of Shuyan, so many of the choices made just feel more subtle or in the moment.

There are, however, other choices you have to make that don’t wind up going very far despite feeling like they should. To briefly get into spoilers, Shuyan Saga pulls a somewhat annoying videogame storytelling trick that I’ve noticed in many a choices matter title: characters dying or getting written off. It’s really very simple! You can put together an intricate scene with many different ways to progress and set up different states for your main character’s relationship with the people in her life and then you can just kill off some of those characters in a dramatic scene or otherwise write them out of the story if the player manages to save them. That way, none of that has to matter going forward. In Shuyan Saga’s case, this works out somewhat okay in that the majority of these deaths and write-outs occur at the tail end of the first episode, where Shuyan also begins her journey away from home to seek aid and eventually learn a new path forward in a very classical fashion. However, I feel it goes a little too far.

One character, a past survivor of Ganbaatar’s brutality and a former foe of Shuyan’s named Jian, is set up as an unlikely friend and travel companion that Shuyan winds up stuck with on her travels, but they wind up separated going into the meat of the game’s second half. Even when we learn Jian is safe and sound, we don’t get to interact with him again and see that relationship develop onscreen, whether through our decisions or Shuyan’s own words, until we near the end of the game. Overall, Shuyan Saga could lose its focus on player decision-making and the only things it would lose are a small layer of interactivity in otherwise very long scenes and a few moments where the decisions do genuinely make you feel closer to Shuyan. I mean, I do always enjoy seeing decisions in games and this one does indeed let a few of your choices actually matter, but many of the ways that it tries to deny certain actions mattering feels rather hamfisted in retrospect.

Thankfully, however, there is still so much to love about these scenes. The comic book style art is stunning, the character design for the important people is distinctive, and both the emotion and action comes through beautifully. The spirits look both beautiful and terrifying and the environments are always a pleasure to witness. The music, while not jaw-dropping, was consistently very pleasant, easily selling a sense of mystical adventure with sweeping strings and a delicate piano. I was particularly a fan of the theme playing over the main menu. The vocal work was also impressive. A few characters came across hammy, but everyone felt sincere and I found it easy to grow attached to the characters, particularly when Shuyan meets other martial artists with strange abilities in the second chapter. In comparison, the action portions of the game are rather pale. They use 3D models of the characters in a 3D background and it all looks okay. Definitely a step down from the 2D art, though a lot of the detail in the character design does remain, especially in the outfits. It doesn’t really bring down the game at all, but it doesn’t really do much to lift it up either. There isn’t even any voice acting, even when there is still dialogue.

There was, however, one very odd decision with the art sections I couldn’t help but notice. Outside of a few action setpieces where the visuals were split into three panels, every shot was of a single rectangular panel. There is no clear thought present on how Shuyan Saga’s page layout might look if it were an actual physical comic book. The action is still easy to follow, so the panels definitely lead into each other, but they do so as a movie or a cutscene would, not a comic. This was personally disappointing because dynamic layouts are normally very important to a comic, both for pacing and readability. There’s certainly no requirement for Shuyan Saga or any other title with comic-styled artwork and scenes to mimic a comic book’s layout, but it was certainly something I expected going in. Plus, while what’s there is readable and the art is gorgeous, I still feel that at least making it at least look like the panels existed around each other and didn’t mostly have the same shape would’ve helped amp up this dynamic story.

There are also two other modes to play beyond the main story. First, there is a Tournament Mode, unlocked by completing the first chapter. In this, you, as Shuyan, face off against an onslaught of enemies growing in power and health, forcing you to use every tool in the princess’ arsenal that you’ve unlocked in the plot thus far. If you go into it right from when you unlock it, the final stretch of opponents can be genuinely quite hard to deal with, but thankfully, you can instantly restart any battle you lose, so long as you don’t leave the mode entirely. It’s a fine mode for anyone who wants to scratch that combat itch and play a little more with Shuyan’s fighting style, though it stops being difficult once you’ve unlocked everything and know what you’re doing.

The other mode, unlocked upon clearing the whole story, is Jade’s Temple Adventure, where you control another character, Jade, as she explores a temple in search of a serpent spirit. This event mostly happened in the main story offscreen before Shuyan had to go into the same temple to save Jade, but it is still interesting to get to see this from Jade’s perspective. Admittedly, the plot here is bare bones and doesn’t really delve into Jade as a character much at all, but it does at least show off a more gameplay-focused version of Shuyan Saga, filled with a handful of puzzles between a variety of fights. It’s mostly pretty easy, though it is at least interesting to use some different special abilities, like Jade’s Iron Skin, which drastically reduces the damage she takes. It’s a decent addition overall, but I don’t think I’ll revisit it.

Overall, Shuyan Saga has a lot of positive qualities down, with stellar art, good vocal work, stirring music, a decently interesting plot with fun characters, and gameplay that progresses nicely to keep everything fresh. However, it also comes with some disappointments that keep it from feeling like a perfect hidden gem like occasionally buggy controls or a lack of willingness to keep characters around. If you’re looking for a fun, comic book-y action game, Shuyan Saga should be right up your alley, especially as inexpensive as it is. All that said, it still falls short of where it could be. I do hope to see more of this and see this genre develop further and deliver better games, either with a continuation of Shuyan’s story, or another attempt at the overall style at least. For now, though, Shuyan Saga is easy to enjoy.