Sword Master Story – 2020 First Impressions and Thoughts

This is actually a pretty highly rated new game. 4.6 stars out of almost 30,000 reviews? That sounds like a solid game worth trying out, right? Well.. honestly.. there are some good and some bad aspects to the game and I plan on talking about both.
So, you begin Sword Master Story off with some story. You’re the final sword master left in the world and you meet this girl who saves you after being turned on by your country.
This is.. kinda like how Mrs Stix and I met. She was the healer that saved me, and I was the greatest sword master to have ever lived. Yup, the game is a story depicting our life.

After sitting through some story you’re thrown into a tutorial battle that explains some of the features of the game.
Or at least I think it was a tutorial battle. The battle auto-played as you moved horizontally across the screen 1-shotting all of the enemies.
However after playing the game for a half hour, I was still slashing horizontally across the screen with zero control over my character.
I had the option of clicking through some skills down the bottom of the screen but at the same time I honestly felt there was absolutely no need to.
Now I want to state that the encounters definitely get more difficult. At one point I went up against this spider boss that we did 0 damage to and forced me to level my characters, equip them with new gear and upgrade their skills.
That was something I didn’t expect considering how easy the combat had been up until that point.

There’s a story present – you’re trying to… well okay. There’s definitely a story present but the translations feel as though they were run through Google Translate, meaning it was definitely possible to discern what was going on, but not with any kind of definitive accuracy.
Interestingly enough, where most RPGs have you run through missions and chapters to progress through not only the game, but also the story I feel as though Sword Master Story didn’t.
You’d just click “next stage” and proceed to move to the next fight, which had maybe a few small lines of text and more horizontal auto-slashing.
This was kind of disappointing for me because I’m a huge fan of story in my games.

Graphically the game looks great. Both the environments and the character models. Combat is fast and smooth and overall the game looks and plays great. My issue is the auto-play and the poor translations but both can be overlooked if they don’t bother you.
I was surprised that this was as highly rated as it is though.