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Shuyan Saga tells the tale of Shuyan, a princess of Nan Feng whose country has been invaded by the evil Ganbaatar in his conquest of the known world and search for the Guardian Spirits of each realm in order to subdue them to his will and increase his ever growing power. The game is steeped in Chinese mythology and with the inclusion of Daoism, reads very much like a Wuxia novel.

Gameplay

Shuyan Saga is half a visual novel, half a clicky action game. The game has fairly simple mechanics that don’t offer much depth, and the controls can be erratic at times.
The visual novel component of Shuyan Saga is pretty basic, it doesn’t offer the normal features such as rewinding text or auto skipping to choices. It does however offer timed choices (to add additional tension during scenes) and the ability to quickly skip dialogue if you want to rush past the writing to get to the action.
Being a game based on kung fu and martial arts, the game takes a careful stance to include this in its mechanics. Action can occur in two areas, the first where you are surrounded by enemies, and the second where you can face off against a single opponent.
Shuyan also has something of a roleplaying game mechanic where you unlock additional skills as the narrative progresses and the game has tutorial lessons for Shuyan to explore her newfound abilities and direct the player into how to use them.
The game relies quite strongly on the mouse. High or low attacks are determined by your aim and hard or soft attacks determined by how long you hold the left mouse button for. The right mouse button will place Shuyan into a defensive stance. At later stages swiping the mouse in various directions allows you to evade and counter powerful attacks.
Each opponent has stances which you can study to learn where you need to strike them, their animations are usually quite obvious to show where they are guarding and where they are vulnerable. In addition each character in single combat will glow when they take certain actions further aiding you in adjusting your own combat choices to meet them. Yellow glows indicate a hard strike, and red glows indicate superattacks which cannot be blocked only avoided.
Multiple attackers are targeted with the mouse and double clicking the ground encourages Shuyan to dodge, and roll to evade groups and place herself in a more favourable position.
The main story blends various modes out of the 3, (story, area and single combatant) and switches between them dependant on what Shuyan needs to accomplish.
The game also has two separate modes, a tournament mode, which focuses on single combat and an area exploration/puzzle mode featuring Jade entitled Jade’s Temple Adventure.
The tournament mode is very forgiving at lower levels but quickly becomes less so as you climb the ladder. By the end, the game is quite punishing. Attacks are more frequent and unstoppable attacks are common, requiring careful responses with very little margin for error.
The Temple Adventure actually allows the game to showcase some of its environment interactions. It is only unlocked after the 3rd chapter and requires you to dodge traps, use dart towers to damage opponents for you and can be frustrating due to the awkward top down camera. The puzzles aren’t particularly difficult to solve, but the sometimes unresponsive controls and cursor that is sometimes hard to spot can make for an annoyance when unintended interactions occur.
Depending on your focus in the game, you can skip action sequences using the drop down menu which can be important for those who prefer the narrative side of the game.

Narrative

Shuyan Saga has a fairly simple good vs evil story. There is little depth or nuance to the villains and the plotline itself is standard and formulaic varying from crisis to adventure and slowly escalating and deescalating the tension until it reaches the grand finale.
Shuyan does progress somewhat as a character but her development doesn’t seem nearly enough compared to the odds she faces, and the side-characters are never quite given enough time to fully develop to stand on their own, except perhaps Jade who acts as a foil to the search for enlightenment that Shuyan is on. It’s quite clear that the narrative focuses on Shuyan and as a result she feels much like a Mary Sue character.

Graphics

Shuyan has a mix of graphics. The cartoon style is quite entertaining and it’s clear the artists were quite skilled at displaying action from a variety of interesting angles, something that is incredibly difficult to achieve. However the character’s expressions are poorly done, the faces almost seem to morph from scene to scene and would not be consistently recognizable, if it were not for their costumes.
The 3d graphics used during combat are a little chunky and whilst they fit the cartoonish theme they seem a little dated compared to the rest of the game and will likely not age well. They are clear enough however to reliably convey the information needed to effectively fight your opponents.
The UI is not particularly user friendly, the menu is somewhat irritating in that it is not visible and located at the top of the screen, rather than comfortably at the bottom and the pause button must be pressed before the menu will pop up.
The text is quite clear to read, and fairly large allowing for quick scanning to gain the gist if you aren’t a reader, and prefer the action elements of the game.

Music and Sound

The soundtrack to Shuyan Saga is quite lovely, it is fully orchestral and has a definite Chinese ambience with the different tonal structure that is characteristic of Asian music. It’s melodies are quite soothing but can quickly escalate as you enter combat.
The game is fully voice-acted, and despite the name of Kristin Kreuk as Shuyan, I wasn’t always impressed by her performance, likely due to some poor directing, where the tone she uses doesn’t quite fit the emotions of Shuyan at that point. I also found the anglicized pronunciation of Chinese names quite jarring. However playing in Chinese you can hear the more accurate pronunciation, unfortunately you can’t use alternate subtitles, the language you choose is used for both voice and all text.

Overall

Shuyan Saga is a light visual novel with some elementary fighting game mechanics to add to the theme of kung fu. It’s meld of genres is interesting but not always effective, and although the artwork is quite amazing the poor portrayal of facial features mars what might otherwise be a truly excellent casual game.
Recommended to: Those who enjoy a little bit of Kung fu action.
Not recommended to: Anyone looking for more depth in either storytelling or fighting game mechanics.