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Since I had this saved in my drafts, I guess I'll share it: a link to freely and legally download and patch to English the awesome Chinese RPG The Legend of Sword and Fairy 1.

I've seen a fair share of people around playing classic turn-based JRPGs, like the first Final Fantasy games, the first Trails games and such. To those people (and to anyone curious about the story of the genre), I beg you: give this game a try.

Trust me, I wasn't very convinced when I started this game. But it has so much going on from the start that by the end of the first hour playing, I was completely hooked by it.

Even if there are things to improve in the formula (the inventory and shop system requires a bit of trial/error to find the best items to equip, for example), and there are some eyebrow-raising moments in the story, the game positively surprised me with some very interesting decisions in his mechanics and narrative.

I understood why this was a massive success in China, sparking a love for this saga that is still alive almost 30 years later, and I think it would have also been a well-regarded game in other countries if it had been localized at his time. It felt really different from anything else that I had played before.

Hope you enjoy this journey into the Chinese mythology!

Update: the web I posted previously doesn't work anymore, this one should do! Thanks @PlushMayhem for noticing and providing the new link!

I’m gonna mention again that I made a patch for the game client to render English text at a more reasonable size and I’ve been editing the English script (with reference to the original Chinese) to be more fluid and nuanced with all this new free real estate. It’s a long term project with no promises on when it’ll be done, certainly not by the time cohost goes read-only, so, check my mastodon 0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange or my website https://0xabad1dea.github.io I guess

I might have acquired a Project

This is Sword and Fairy, the Chinese equivalent of Final Fantasy or Baldur's Gate 1. There's an English fanslation, but it's very awkwardly brief in its wording because English forcibly rendered in the game displays at a large font size that only allows a few words per message. I've patched the game's modern SDL renderer to fit like 3x as much English per dialogue window. It'd be a long term project, because there's like 13,500 dialogue windows, but I'd like to rewrite the translation to be more fluid, idiomatic English that better reflects the original script.

behold, idiomatic English unbeholden to character counts calibrated for Chinese

I might have acquired a Project

This is Sword and Fairy, the Chinese equivalent of Final Fantasy or Baldur's Gate 1. There's an English fanslation, but it's very awkwardly brief in its wording because English forcibly rendered in the game displays at a large font size that only allows a few words per message. I've patched the game's modern SDL renderer to fit like 3x as much English per dialogue window. It'd be a long term project, because there's like 13,500 dialogue windows, but I'd like to rewrite the translation to be more fluid, idiomatic English that better reflects the original script.