Feixing, Faith of Danschant’s kindhearted hero, has a big problem: he’s cursed. For as long as he’s been alive random objects—even sacred ones that must never be touched by anyone—inexplicably break or collapse whenever he’s around, even if he’s not gone anywhere near them. It’s this supernatural dose of bad luck that’s caused him to be exiled to the mountains near his old village home, in the hope this will prevent his unholy misfortune from spreading to others.
The twist is he’s not cursed at all—he’s blessed. So very, very, blessed. The young man’s minor god catnip, utterly irresistible to any lower deity in the vicinity. They just love him so much they long to be near him no matter how much damage they end up causing, and it’s been this way ever since he was born.
Unfortunately for us, and like far too many other promising plot points in this RPG by Beijing Joyfun, this fascinating idea becomes virtually irrelevant almost as quickly as it’s introduced. This is a game that has no issue offering ten great plot threads and then only weaving a bit of a tale out of one of them, a discordant splatter of a story in place of a carefully planned drip-feed. Some very interesting faces are introduced only to then fade away, not seen again for hours and hours (and hours, in some cases), at which point they become very important again… for a few scattered conversations. There’s a sort of awkward impermanence to the world and the people within it, everyone and everything only existing for as long as the plot’s looking directly at them.
It doesn’t help that this is all happening in a game that’s busy straining every story-muscle it has trying to be a big heartrending tragedy for the ages either, a misguided task it tries to accomplish by manufacturing as many sorrowful hardships for the cast as its writers can imagine. The earliest example is the moment Feixing’s home village is destroyed by a celestial disaster that he is unfairly blamed for by the remaining survivors. There’s no doubt his voice actor absolutely gives the scene his all, but even in the context of a village-wide wipe his deep sobs feel overwrought. Everyone else’s grief is more focused—a child, a mother, a friend—but Feixing ends up hysterically running from corpse to corpse in one sequence, the bodies of small gods and villagers alike lolling on the ground, waiting for him to notice them just so he can feel even more sad about it all than he does already. His parents survive but his cute little sister dies, purely because the most emotionally heightened version of that event is one where his mother’s still around to suffer the loss of her adorable pink dressed girl, and his father’s still around to blame Feixing for it.
As wearily forced as this swiftly becomes, Faith of Danschant insists on returning to the same well whenever it needs to drum up some sort of emotional response from the player, the characters… pretty much anyone. Sadness is the only mood worth shooting for as far as Faith of Danschant’s concerned, which is why the game ends up tying itself in ridiculous trauma-knots, to the point where people can die then come back so they can feel sad someone else died but then… ah, it’s exhausting. Someone literally shows up in one cutscene just so they can expire in it a few seconds later and then be revived thanks to Feixing’s mysterious magic ring, and that life-giving ring of course has a dark secret that this young hero doesn’t find out about (and isn’t hinted at) until much later on: it can only give life by silently taking the life of another random innocent person. A certain amount of dramatic tragedy is to be expected in this sort of setting—it’s not as though Sword and Fairy was short of the stuff—but it needed to be included for a stronger reason than because other highly regarded games did it first.
The quality of the animation used to convey these scenes is all over the place. Body movement has been motion captured, and has all the fluidity and subtlety (including almost off-camera reactions to the dialogue from background characters during some cutscenes, à la Final Fantasy XII) you’d expect it to. Faces however are another matter entirely, often veering between passably emotive and crude puppet-like wagging jaw motions in a single conversation. It’s bizarre, especially as other parts of the game flow so well. Lots of dialogue is seamlessly delivered as you walk around, party members chatting to each other and NPCs animatedly (and audibly) emoting as you go rather than standing rigidly on the spot, waiting for you to prod them with the “Go on, say something” button. It all helps to make the game feel much more natural and alive than it would have otherwise, and I hope I get to play more RPGs with similarly frictionless delivery in the future.
The way you get around is just as enjoyably effortless. There’s no overworld to run across or large map for you to select locations from, just a string of interlinked areas for Feixing to traverse. In these places he’s regularly given the opportunity to jump, climb, sidle along narrow paths, squeeze through tight spaces, leap from one floating platform to another and even dodge magical attacks raining down from the sky, and it all helps to make his adventure feel more organic—you never find yourself in a position where a mighty hero’s quest is stopped by a waist-high fence, or an ancient mountainside has an obvious pancake-flat path cut through the middle of it.
And what a beautiful adventure it is. To my eyes the magical places and shining kingdoms in here are only outdone by the more recent Sword & Fairy 7. In Faith of Danschant you’ll see magical fish swim through the sky, a giant phoenix gracefully flying over a bustling city, and giant island-turtles. Even the most “ordinary” areas are rendered beautiful by the way artistic fog wreaths distant mountains, flowers bloom in the swaying grasses, and foamy waterfalls spill over the edges of their rocky homes into the crystal clear waters below, and I happily lingered in many locations just to take a few more Nvidia-assisted screenshots (the game officially supports GeForce Experience’s photo mode).
The battles that pop up along the way are often just as impressive. Heavy attacks may cause the screen itself to temporarily crack under their weight, spells fill the screen with their explosive might, and larger bosses seem to relish every blow they inflict as they menacingly loom over your party of three. The core of the battle combo system reminded me of the Fantasia Sango series: you need to time your limited selection of hotkey’d attacks (swappable in the equip menu whenever you’re not in battle) so they land together, becoming more powerful when chained than a series of disjointed single attacks would be. These are also on a turn-based cooldown timer, encouraging you to strategise and consider your options—if I heal using this character now I won’t be able to do so for another two turns, so do I hold off for a bit? Do I save this attack until somebody else has a more complementary move ready so I can easily combo them together, or is it more important to thin out a large group of enemies at the earliest opportunity even if it’s the less “optimal” play?
Whatever you choose, each attack is colour coded—white, purple, red—which is used by a rather neat build up/burst attack system. Some skills and spells are far more damaging if you’ve stored up energy of the relevant colour beforehand—it’s even possible to spend this energy the same turn it’s been accrued, allowing you to construct chains where for example two people use attacks that give the party red energy, with the third’s skill then using it up. You do have to be careful though as some bosses can use your own reserves against you, making it a good idea to perhaps avoid attacks of that colour entirely—or maybe take a risk and try to use up the energy before they do. If your opponent can do this the game will mention it in the top-left corner of the screen, so you’re not left guessing or dealing with a nasty surprise.
This area of the screen will also mention if a boss is going to unleash a devastating and probably fatal technique if you can’t deal enough damage or get out of the way in X turns too (Faith of Danschant has a fun repositioning mechanic in some battles), one of several initially interesting combat ideas that end up wearing out their welcome thanks to the way later bosses tend to be lumbered with vastly inflated health pools and, as if calculated to make these encounters as tedious as possible, also give many of them the ability to regenerate significant chunks of their life bar. What’s exciting for five turns or so becomes tedious after fifteen, and you can’t go and grind your way out of these ruts either as the game’s general linearity combined with a deliberate lack of endlessly regenerating enemies anywhere you can gain experience (or the materials the power up your group’s supporting gods) means you either have the party and the patience to see these battles through or you don’t, and have to choose between giving up or start adding words like “cheat” and “trainer” to your online searches.
There is a thin silver lining here though: if you do lose a fight you can restart from either the current autosave checkpoint (these persist even if you turn the game off and come back later) or from any manual save of your own choosing. It’s one of several features designed to create a comfortable experience for the playing, alongside a convenient difficulty level toggle in the options menu (although easy isn’t the “story mode” switch it perhaps should have been), an on-screen current main quest reminder, re-readable tutorials, and a heavy linearity intended to give the game a persistent forward momentum—if you’re playing, then you’re almost certainly making progress.
So considering they went to all this trouble it’s a little odd there’s no minimap, even though they’ve been a practical and basic staple of the genre for about as long as it’s existed. Faith of Danschant uses a translucent white marker hovering around the place you’re supposed to go instead, although as an alternative to just showing you exactly where you need to go it only kinda works. At first I appreciated the idea of having to go and explore a little rather than being constantly led by the hand, but as the game went on and the towns became more complex (making it more likely I wouldn’t see these markers until I was standing on top of them anyway) I would have appreciated some sort of waypoint system between me and my goal, or more NPCs dotted around that just so happened to be blocking all the paths I didn’t need to take.
Still, at this point we can see this is really just Faith of Danschant being Faith of Danschant, isn’t it? It’s a game that has a habit of almost doing a lot of things right only to then go and make sure it finds a way to make sure whoever’s playing feels let down by it, where every promising peak is followed by a deep, dark, valley. Still, in spite of its numerous own goals there are a few bright moments in here I’m glad to have seen first-hand, and I do hope the team do get the chance to address these problems in the announced Faith of Danschant: Hereafter.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 