Dos Maddnes SFG | 楚留香傳奇:血海飄香 (1995) Interesting Rare Adventure with Broken Combat
3The Legend of Chu Liuxiang: The Fragrance of the Sea of Blood is interesting "adventure game" based on literary works written in the wuxia (武俠) genre. This is a series of short novels and short stories written by a Taiwanese writer with a pseudonym Gu Long (古龍), whose real name is Xiong Yaohua (熊耀華). The series includes three collections. One of the books (楚留香傳奇) is dedicated to the adventures of Chu Luxiang (楚留香). In particular, the described game, developed and published by the well-known Taiwanese company Acer TWP (第三波), is based on the story "Breath of the Blood Sea" (血海飄香) from the mentioned collection of works. But it’s probably not worth delving into the literary jungle - let’s better take a look at the gameplay as soon as possible ...
The plot is beautifully presented in the intro, made up of good animations. Four martial artists strangely died on the same night. Obviously, they were poisoned, because to kill each of them in a duel is, by definition, unrealistic. The bodies were thrown into the sea. At this time, Chu Liuxiang, traveling on his houseboat along the coast, discovered those same corpses. Now you, the player, in the role of Chu Liuxian will need to investigate this mysterious incident…
According to the plot of the book, Chu Luxiang is an outstanding martial artist. As a weapon, he uses a metal fan and uses it only for self-defense. Despite his excellent fighting skills, one of his characteristic traits is that he has never killed a person in his entire life - not even an enemy! He usually relies on his wits, experience, and calmness to solve mysteries and defeat enemies that are much stronger than him. Chu Liuxiang lives in a houseboat called Xiang Pavilion (香榭) with three young beauties.
The gameplay mechanics are extremely simple. You will move from location to location, as is typically done in quests or adventure games. All control - only "mouse". You need to “listen” in text dialogues to what the characters you meet or talk to each other are talking about, and you also need to collect quest items by placing them in your “inventory”, which is located at the very bottom of the game screen. In different situations, any of the wearable items, being pointed and "dropped" at the game object, will open the passage further. This will take you to the next steps. The transition indicator is a fan pointer, which opens if you can go further to the next location ...
At the beginning of the game, you must go down into the hold of your houseboat and change. To do this, click on a strictly defined drawer of a large chest of drawers. After that, you will change into one of several characters (depending on the selected box). In the story, you have to turn into a bearded Zhang Xiaolin (張嘯林), dressed in a purple robe. To do this, click on the box in the upper left corner of the dresser. After changing clothes, after leaving the hold, you need to take three items from the box to the right of the door: steel balls, a ticket and a handful of silver coins. Now you need to jump high from the ship (just point the fan pointer at the sea), and you will instantly find yourself on the shore (after all, about martial arts ...). Next, you need to go to the coastal city of Jinan. There you will go to the hotel, then to the gambling establishment located next door.
The graphics are beautiful and bright, the screen resolution is 320x200 - and I would like more to display all the ancient beauty that is embedded in any Chinese novel written in the wuxia genre. Dialogues appear at the top of the screen in the form of large, well-read white characters. And they are not in the game menu - only pictures, according to the meaning of which at first it will not be easy to guess what they mean SAVE, LOAD, SPEED, etc. Musical themes in the gameplay change from location to location. Of course, all of them - with a national Chinese flavor. The intro animation is accompanied by digitized speech in standard Chinese (Guoyu).
The game is definitely good and "catchy" with the extreme simplicity of its gameplay mechanics. In fact, here it is - a universal tool for visualizing ancient Chinese literature. The hieroglyphs that appear in the dialogues will be a serious obstacle to understanding the plot of the game. But there are no branches in the dialogues, so the gameplay here is straightforward - "our brother" can try to go through all the locations. Happy gaming everyone!
Reviewed by WERTA
Game footage by Hfric
IMO : Could have completed it , but the broken combat is a mess ... not to mention when you dabble in trying to make it more fair for you the game can break ... so :/
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