izigame.me

I really enjoyed Xuan Yuan 7. This was my first game in the Xuan Yuan franchise.
I am a huge fan of linear action games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. While Xuan Yuan 7's combat is no where near as fluid as Ninja Gaiden and has no where near the combo potential of Devil May Cry, it still felt more like an action game than an RPG to me. Yes there are RPG mechanics like character leveling via experience points, but your stats don't scale as high as in most RPGs so in the end this game rewards skilled gameplay more than any of it's RPG mechanics. I played Xuan Yuan 7 on "Nightmare" (hardest) difficulty; if I had played on an easier difficulty I probably would have found it too easy to enjoy.
The combat is entirely melee focused. Your main character does not have a ranged weapon or spell. You have a basic attack combo, a dodge that give you brief i-frames, a block that can trigger a parry if you time it just before an enemy hit, a camera lock-on, a finisher move when an enemy's posture is broken, a manually triggered time slowdown, and you choose 2 (out of 7) stances that provide unique heavy attacks and special attacks. You can also trigger your 2 AI allies to perform a special attack. Not the deepest combat system, but enough for you to tinker to keep your entire first playthough feeling fresh.
I do want to warn you that there is a healthy dose of jank here. Boss patterns, hit boxes, the camera, and physics can all give you a headache. Some animations can be canceled and some cannot. Some attacks will give you I-frames againts certain enemy attacks, but not give you I-frames against other enemy attacks. If you are the type of gamer that wants games to be extremely intuitive, then you may not enjoy Xuan Yuan 7.
I really enjoyed the story. This is not a typical JRPG story line where you end up killing God. This is a smaller scale story about a brother trying to take care of his sister.
Quick Positives:

Linear With Waypoint. You will not get lost. :)
Skippable Cutscenes (although I genuinely enjoyed the story and didn't skip them usually)
Multiple Save slots (like 15ish)
New Game+
The game performed well on my hardware.
Controller support worked great. (I played using an X Box controller)
The music was very pleasant. I don't think I will listen to the soundtrack much outside the game, but it works well in this game.
Aside from some puzzles, I thought the game had really good pacing and didn't overstay it's welcome.

Quick Negatives:

The loading screens can get annoying. The game will give you a loading screen after every death, including if you retry a boss fight.
Numerous slow sections like climbing, crawling, shimmy-ing, etc. This game also suffers from "yellow paint syndrome" but it is white paint in this case.
Puzzles. There are a handful of puzzles and I think the game would have been better without them personally.
Fast travel can only be done between fast travel points. I would have prefered being able to just fast travel from the pause menu to avoid backtracking.
The side quests are pretty forgettable such as a tic-tac-toe style board game.
The camera can be very frustrating and cause you to die because you can't see.
I did experience a few crashes when I alt+tab-ed to access other apps on my PC. This only occured about ~5% of the time, but still worth noting. The game never crashed while it was the focused app on my PC. I only experienced crashes after alt-tab. I experienced crashes on both the Windowed and Fullscreen settings.
Unless I missed it, you cannot pause cutscenes and you cannot pause during certain animations like shimy-ing along a ledge.