ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 147.
Johnny Liu schools us on the history of Chinese RPGs in general, and the long-running, massively impactful 仙劍奇俠傳 series in particular. It’s been called Sword & Fairy in the West (when it isn’t being called Chinese Paladin), but that title doesn’t fully capture what these games have to offer—and that simple fact serves as a great jumping-off point to talk about translation, cultural specificity, cultural exchange, and a whole games canon that has remained largely invisible outside of the Sinosphere, even after the immense success of Genshin Impact.
Path of Wuxia is currently in Early Access on Steam.
Marvel Puzzle Quest is out now on PC, Playstation, Xbox, iOS, and Android.
Sword & Fairy 7 is out now on Steam and Playstation, and coming soon to Xbox.
You can get the original 1995 release of 仙劍奇俠傳 as freeware, with a fan translation.
You can also follow Johnny on Twitter, and see his archived Twitch streams on YouTube.
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• Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is indeed a trip.
• Here’s that piece that Drew mentions, about the history of Chinese RPGs.
• Between the Internet Archive and ROMHacking.net (two of the finest sites to ever exist), you should be able to get the original Sword & Fairy running in English with minimal effort and Johnny’s Let’s Play videos do indeed make for great supplement, filling in the nuances that the (nonetheless commendable!) fan translation will tend to elide.
• Here are our referred-to talks with Jessica Gonzalez, Aaron Nemoyten, and Aidan Moher.
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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Fairy Dance” performed by Teddy Edwards, Robert “Iggie” Shevak, Roy Porter, Hampton Hawkes, and Herb Harper, supervised by Morrie Rapoport.
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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.
Everybody's Talking at Once 