While scrounging around on
Ebgames, looking for something, anything to play that could captivate me for
more than 1 day, I stumbled across this title.
I decided to go ahead and give it a look...I'm a sucker for Chinese movies that
take place in older time periods, as well as the Dynasty Warriors titles,
so I figured this would interest me.
This game bases itself on the events revolving around the death of Fu Su, Crown
Prince of the lands of Qin. (By the way, "Qi" is pronounced "Chi", and "Xi" is
pronounced "She".)
In actual history, Fu Su commits suicide after the First Emperor of Qin dies.
Unfortunately, Fu Su, off defending the Northern Border does not know that his
father is dead, and that the edict to commit suicide was forged by his brother,
Hu Hai.
In Prince of Qin, you refuse to commit suicide until asking your father what
happened. On your way back to the Qin capital, Xianyang, you find out about your
father's passing, and your brother's usury, and try and exact some revenge for
his deceit.
The game is basically a clone of Diablo with some enhancements. Certain parts of
the game look entirely ripped from Diablo. Other parts look markedly different.
It seems that this is a bit of "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery."
Graphically, there isn't much that is too impressive with Prince of Qin.
Everything looks about as you'd expect it to look from Diablo II. The intro
movie (which borrows heavily from Gladiator and the Matrix.) is choppy and not
all that impressive. They ask you to install special drivers to view the movie,
but they don't seem to help at all. I'd personally recommend against it.
The first thing you'll notice is how utterly bad the voice acting and
translation is. It's honestly the worst English I've ever seen in a video game,
and that includes all the import games I play that were not released in the US.
This is worse than Zero Wing (The "All your Base" game.) because there is
just so much more horribly translated text.
The worst thing is that they actually got people who speak English to read these
lines! I would refuse to say most of the stuff in the game, just because it's so
utterly wrong.
Something as simple as "Blacksmith" has been mistranslated as "Art of Forging",
and overwriting a save game will bring up the prompt, "Overlap to the File?"
These are the minor screw-ups.
This is a big problem because the story is what draws me into this game. I'm
happier with a video game referencing places I've vaguely familiar with in
foreign lands, like Xianyang or Sendai, rather than trying to pound the feeble
designer created provinces of Stevelandia and Jamesburg.
With the translations as mangled as they are, you'll end up with conversations
where your character has one dialogue option the entire way through the
conversation, and it'll nearly fill the text box. That kind of takes a bit of
the pageantry out of the experience.
A lot of the bungling of the text results not only from the translation, but
from the localization, as well. The average player isn't going to understand a
lot of the old ways of Chinese life. Also, a lot of the things passersby will
tell you will just have no impact on the player whatsoever, because they are
just not going to understand the joke.
Sound for the game is a mixed bag. When the game is not abusing the ears with
the monotone delivery of the voice actors, it's delivering pretty good quality
background music. So, I think you may be best off just shutting off the voices,
and trying to stifle the laughter from the text.
I like the equipment building aspects of the game. Chopping down the little
creatures of the forest and using their body parts to make weaponry, armor, and
decorative jewelry is oddly satisfying.
Provided you have the proper amounts of animal tendons, skin, ore, wood, and
bone, you'll have a great time building yourself stylish wear and armaments that
the active man of the 200's would be wearing.
Combat is frustrating once you get multiple party members, basically because
they don't do what you want them to. I generally want my party to concentrate
their attacks onto one enemy, but 100% of the time, they will find someone else
to hit, incite fear, and then run halfway across the screen into a mob of
enemies trying to chase him down for the finishing blow.
This makes it hard to feel sorry for the death of your teammates, except for the
fact that they hold a lot of items, and you can't create more inventory space.
Another problem I have with the weapons of the game, is the damn stats are so
confusing, I have no idea if one weapon is better than the next. I need some
base stats to gauge whether or not the Autumn and Spring Sword is better than my
gem-inlaid Long Sword. Since I can't tell, I just end up figuring out which one
gives me the best bonuses.
All in all, Prince of Qin might be what you're looking for it you enjoyed Diablo
II and are looking for something similar. Otherwise, you're probably going to
get your RPG fill from something a bit more polished, like Neverwinter Nights.
It's got enough intangibles to keep me playing, and that's also partially
attributed to the fact that there's what...nothing else out worth playing right
now? So, if you can find this for around $20, I'd pick it up...not quite worth
$40.
6.8
