Heroes of Jin Yong is a 1996 open-world RPG created by Taiwan-based Heluo Studio. It tells the story of a modern-day gamer who gets trapped in a world composed of Jin Yong's (one of China's most famous writers) novels. To escape, he must explore this world, meeting and recruiting various characters from Yong's stories while making morally-based choices along the way.

Most people in the West have perhaps never even heard about Jin Yong, much less of this game. But it's one of the most beloved Wuxia RPGs ever made, which to this day inspires several fangames, spin-offs, mods, and spiritual successors. Hero's Adventure is one such spiritual successor, and to have it available on Steam in English is like a portal to a whole lineage of RPGs many never got to experience. It would be as if you'd never played a JRPG and someone gave you Chained Echoes or Octopath Traveller II.

The game itself plays like a mix of Suikoden and Fallout; you first create a character, then go out to make a name for yourself in the martial arts world of ancient China. The game's world is vast and reactive, with plenty of factions to help, sects to join, rulers to serve, friends to recruit, legendary items to collect, and secret arts to master.

There's also a bit of Way of the Samurai in it. The game is truly open, with no fixed playthrough path. The list of possible goals and endings ranges from retiring as a farmer to achieving enlightenment as a Taoist to becoming Emperor of China. Some endings take a few minutes, some endings will probably take dozens of hours. And each time you beat it, you unlock something new for the next playthrough.

Overall the game is brilliant. The gameplay is really fun, the graphics look kinda beautiful for a 2D game, and the music is excellent. Mandatory grinding is minimal (skip smithing/mining, it's worthless), The game is extremely different than most FF Tactics-style games but overall it's best-in-class.

There are many things I wish I knew at the start.
--For your first playthrough, I STRONGLY recommend Easy difficulty. Several late-game bosses and even some tournament fights are wildly difficult on early playthroughs.
--For starting traits, I recommend anything which increases your action speed and Effective Learner. Effective Learner doubles the effectiveness of weapons skills learned from martial arts manuals and is the best in the game.
--Starting weapons: I recommend Blades or Swords on your first playthrough. With either Blades or Swords, your most important attribute to focus on will be Dexterity.
--Mid-game you’ll have an option to join a Sect and a Faction. Sects are the most reliable way to find the most important powerup in the game, great weapon abilities. If you're on Blades, you can also gain powerful abilities by convincing the butcher to join your party or defeating your rival Fu several times. If you're on Swords, Lainya Sword Pavilion is probably the strongest Sect for you but more grindy than most. (Like, do you actually want to become a master miner and a grandmaster blacksmith? These are semi-required in their quest line).
-- I think reaching the end of the main Emperor plotline requires joining a Faction. I've only been able to join the Yi Family Battalion faction and don't know if the others are open to players at this point. If the main plot has stalled out and you haven't been asked to rescue the Emperor yet, try interacting with the members of your faction and completing any assignments they give you.
--After you've unlocked the horse from the starting village and have accumulated around $1000-1500, your first big decision in the game is which of the three cities to visit first. (Each interstate trip is very expensive early-game so it's a meaningful decision). The best early option is the Eastern city, Linan. You can earn $10,000 every 5 days in the Eastern city by winning the Underground Arena. To unlock the UA, talk to everybody in the Eastern city's hotel and then talk with the Performing Artist in the Eastern city's market (daytime only), he will give you the password to get through the Underground Arena's guard.
--There's some randomness in which enemies you draw in Underground Arena. On rounds 4 and 5, you can draw a really easy win (like a level 20-30 human enemy or a high-level animal) OR an impossibly difficult level 50-60 human enemy like the butcher or the sinister old woman. It's okay if you're only winning runner-up at the start, that still pays $5000. Or you can reload a save for another chance at $10,000.
--Most fights do not pay money. You can earn $1000 each day by training apprentices at any city's dojo where you have sparred with the dojo master on the highest setting. This is usually achievable by level 20 or 30.
--"Passive" abilities are extremely important. If you're not sure what to focus on, the Wind school's Fearless Charge and Windwalker add a tremendous amount of damage and mobility, the Earth school's Armor Build-Up adds a lot of survivability in drawn out battles, and the Yin school's Deadly Strike is useful if you're inflicting status ailments. I generally give Wind School an S-tier and Earth an A-tier.
--All of the extremely difficult fights in the game are one-on-one. I do not recommend Passive abilities geared towards groups of enemies.
--The English-translated riddles won’t make any sense unless you speak Chinese. Check Steam’s guide if you need the answers. I recommend skipping riddles unless you’re joining the Confucius Sect.
--Weapon skills are mainly improved by equipping and mastering kung fu manuals. Just using your sword a bunch won't improve your Sword stat. (Your starting traits and a few consumables also help).
--In MOST games, becoming a grandmaster blacksmith is the best way to get the best weapons. But it's usually worthless in this game. In this game, almost all equipment is garbage, and the few pieces that are notably better than using your starting weapon are obtained via quests and exploration. Unless you're a member of the Lainya Sword Pavilion, I don't recommend getting into smithing at all.
--There's nobody in the starter village that buys weapons!? So smithing is even more worthless than normal early on.
--I don’t know if they’ve implemented Craft Armor yet. I’ve played for 100+ hours and haven’t seen ANY armor recipes.
--Non-combat skills do not matter. The only ones which are actually semi-helpful are Explore and Machinery. Mid-game you can train Machinery (the lockpicking skill) with the head of the Tomb Raiders sect and one of the named characters at the Water Camp even if you haven't joined these groups. (If you've joined the Confucius Sect, the guy with the wheelchair at your sect is also an option).
--It's a bit grindy, but you can leave your one Sect and join another, though I don't think this is required for any endings or achievements.
--In the Southern city, there is a hero statue. If you bow to it 10 times (previously 100 in earlier builds), you receive a kickass sword. After you get the sword, the statue starts giving OUTRAGEOUS amounts of Luck Experience and it’ll take another 10 minutes (~125 bows) to get your Luck stat from 1 to 10.
--If you’re under 10 in an attribute, you can boost it with practice. Strength grows over time with mining/chopping/gathering, Luck if you use the statue, and Dexterity if you run around. Intelligence and Constitution don’t have any practical options at present. Except for Luck, I do not recommend spending time grinding up stats, stats which aren't tied to your main weapon aren't usually particularly helpful.
--Late game, you'll be introduced to something called the "Peak of Challenge". This isn't part of the main quest and is mainly a show of supremacy, so don't be discouraged if you try it and get instantly smoked. The game actually intends you to go through the Emperor's storyline (unlocked through your faction).
--Back attacks only trigger if you are in the ONE tile immediately behind an enemy. Side attacks only appear to trigger immediately beside the enemy. Overall, back and side attacks help but less than in most games. If you have to choose between a back-attack (+30% damage and increased critical rates) and running around the world to wreck someone with Fearless Charge, FC is usually way better. Using Windwalker, you can engineer turns so that you get both the back-attack AND a huge charge bonus. This is the way.
--A "shichen" is 2 hours. A "sky" is a day. A "ke" is 15 minutes. Stores refresh at midnight (“zi”).

Okay, developers: Hand this out to someone for proper localization. It is borderline unplayable like this, tons of grammatical errors and baffling word salads that makes no sense in english. Parts of the questlog offers location names in chinese, which I cannot read. Some tool tips as well. The mods on "Creative Workshop" is all in chinese as well, and I can understand that isnt easilly localised, but perhaps use the machine translation you have used on the rest of the game here instead as you work with a proper translator to sort out the rest of the game.

I still recommend the game, because the gameplay, customization etc is all very fun, and the single parts of the game that, although theres quite a bit of "Engrish" in the menus as well, is for the most part easilly readable. So if you dont mind the occasional head scratching at what NPCs are actually telling you to do, or if you know chinese, get it. Especially if you like "Make Your Own Adventure" type games, and martial arts themes in particular. It is a truly fun game, im having a blast even though i just started out... But I worry that the localization issues will lead to me coming to a point where I just have no way to know what else to do or where to go.

Please, sort it out. You have a gem of a game here, please divert some of the profits to hire a professional translator!

Another day, another psychotic Chinese wuxia rpg. May the good ♥♥♥♥ never end.

Hero's Adventure: Road to Passion - which hopefully sounds really cool in chinese - is an open-world wuxia rpg/life sim where you pretty much do what you'd expect. You cultivate your little man in various ways, challenging and overcoming other xia in the wulin while you journey through the jianghu, and eventually conquer the world and marry a dozen or more pixelated babes. Or maybe you just ♥♥♥♥ off and become the world's foremost scholar of confucian thought, or you marry into a northern barbarian dynasty, or something else entirely. Overall, it's pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. It is also the kind of game that will destroy certain people's lives irrevocably.

While this game has enough going on that eludes easy description, once you boot it up and try to create a character it becomes clear that RPG is as all can see. You allocate points to five base physical attributes like strength or dexterity, you pick a weapon type to specialize in, and then throw in some innate traits/perquisites like running faster or scoring more critical hits, and away you go. Combat is grid-based srpg fare, with bonuses to damage for side and back attacks and various debuffs and ultimate moves spicing things up. There are dozens of questlines and recruitable NPCs, often linked to one another (a very common formula is to meet someone, give them a few gifts to overcome an initial disposition hurdle, then receive a quest which concludes with them joining your party) and maybe a dozen or so factions you can join, depending on how narrowly you want to define that term. Time marches relentlessly and some world events that fall nearest to what you'd call a "main quest" happen with or without your involvement, though overall the game is pretty soft on stuff like that, almost always giving you an obvious popup telling you where to go if you want a piece of that action.

Developing your character - what we in this, The Chinese Century, call cultivation - is where the game starts to get a little bit psycho for my tastes. In addition to the turn-based rpg combat fundamentals, your character also develops through a variety of life-sim components which can only be described as grinding. You mine mineral nodes for ores, chop trees for wood, fish, and stick your arm to the hilt into giant anthills looking for exotic insects to consume to increase your knowledge of toxins mithridatically. All of these activities are governed by skills which level from 1 to 6 at a glacial pace, consuming a stamina bar all the while which must be restored by resting or consuming food. While doing all these things, you are ALSO gaining infinitesimal quantities of xp which go toward increasing your base stats: praying at a shrine makes you smarter (and you can use epic- or legendary-tier incense to gain vastly more, natch) and mining makes you stronger, that sort of thing. At points when I really got lost in this ♥♥♥♥ it honestly felt more like I was playing Elona than any kind of a martial arts simulator. There's an argument to be made as to whether or not you really need any of that crap, of course, but at minimum I would say you need to at least reach the soft cap in all the basic physical attributes and learn to craft yourself one of the highest rarity weapons in order to overcome the endgame bosses, or at least I certainly did.

Here's the twist, though, and this is what enables me to recommend the game rather than simply writing it off as a tedium simulator: it's Chinese, at the end of the day, so what you're really supposed to do is metagame or outright cheat. While you may only get 20 xp for forging a basic (green-tier) glove or sword, and it takes 6,000 to max out your crafting skill, you can forge legendaries for 500 xp a pop. How do you reach the point where you can even forge legendaries to begin with without grinding? That's right: you bribe someone stronger or wealthier than you and ask them to give you a leg up. Many NPCs can teach you the fundamentals of a skill in exchange for small favors, 100 xp a pop, but as you explore more and become more famous you'll find people who can give you as much as 3,600 xp in a single session, more than enough to get you over the hump and subsequently speed up the remaining progress to the point where it's no obstacle at all. Rather than simply being a fidget spinner to assuage our collective OCD, the game instead blossoms into a complex metagame of grind optimization that reveals to you the underlying secret of the Chinese cosmos: hard work is for suckers, and cheaters always win.

The game's free-form sandbox gameplay and branching faction questlines deserve special mention. This is very clearly a labor of love, and very often you'll be rewarded for a clever idea with a pat on the head from the developers. The game opens with your hitherto unknown MC stumbling upon two women on the woods, both severely wounded and locked in a mortal struggle, each asking you to intercede on their behalf. The basic tutorial choice you're offered is to help one and capture the other, subsequently ingratiating you to their respective factions and giving you a foot in the door to the martial world. But what if you decide to go psycho mode and just murder them both while they're vulnerable? Well, that gives you a special achievement and permanently brands you as a member of the he-man woman hater's club. Can you instead just walk away and ignore them? Of course, and later on you'll meet a traveling swordsman who gives you a quest to join the blacksmithing pavilion instead. If you take too long to make your choice, reinforcements show up to assist the bandit girl and kill you as a witness. If you manage to powergame so effectively (and, likely, set the game on the easiest difficulty) that you beat this ambush, you will immediately trigger a game ending whereby your character reveals that he is a forgotten martial arts master who was merely pretending to be a noob for fun, unlocking a new chievo and sending you back to the main menu. Obviously they front-load a lot of these ideas, but even very late in the game I was stumbling upon novel and rewarding stuff. There must be well over a dozen endings, not counting minor ones which don't truly end the game, and the triggers to unlock some of them are obscure while never being infuriating like "true routes" in these kinds of games can be.

My first playthrough took me just under 60 hours, and when I got the ending I was happy with I hadn't even really finished what could most accurately be called the "main quest" of the game, preferring instead to just wrap up things with my own faction and rest on my laurels in anticipation of a new playthrough on the highest difficulty in a few months when they drop the next content expansion. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: this game is also a "roguelike," (2023 definition) so each of these little achievements in a given playthrough unlocks new traits and raises your stat limits in subsequent runs, letting you grind to heights previously thought unreachable through even more blatant cheating. I really recommend this game to anybody who likes, well, exactly this sort of thing.

This game is suppose to be bad, like really really bad. Awful interface (it's very hard to spot what items you're actually acquired or take), awful translation (lazy developer hand it over to amateur or fans to handle the jobs), awful tutorial and explanation (like is Qi equal to MP and spirit to HP?), clunky control for exploration, laughable stealth function, so is it a 1/10 game? No it's a 9/10 game

The level of freedom, playstyle, story narration, random event, combat, exploration, npc interaction and relationship, the game-world, is simply mind-blowing. What the heck is this? a Chinese 1 gb Baldur Gate 3? You guys should put more love and attention to this game, put up some real work so it can gain global rpg market beyond wuxia enthusiast, you should nail the translation to English perfectly and work on the interface then slowly expand further the game content or perhaps dlc. I'm impressed, really impressed, well done!

Hero's Adventure: Road to Passion is a 2d pixel-art open world RPG set with a wuxia setting, with turn-based combat.

The game was originally written in Chinese, and currently has a community translation officially implemented and accessible from the main menu. However, while the translation is passable, there are definite oddities, such as the in-game riddles making no sense, and various grammar issues (Your martial arts start at "The Oneth Level" for example) and characters occasionally talking in third person - the 1.0 release may fix this with a better translation, but that remains to be seen.

If you're unfamiliar with wuxia, then it's very heavily martial arts themed. A big part of progression is obtaining new, more powerful martial arts. Each martial art has different stats and effects, which you can combine with the traditional levelling system (level 1 to 100), the typical RPG reminiscent stats system (constitution, luck, strength, intelligence), and equipment of various tiers and effects to make your character more powerful.

While the stats system looks fairly generic and traditional, there are some differences from what you'd expect. I'd recommend carefully reading the tool-tips, as I was rather surprised that for some reason your damage and defence stats are heavily influenced by your intelligence stat, where in other RPGs, typically those would fall under something like strength and/or constitution.

The game is "open world" in the sense that, as long as you have talked to the correct NPCs to unlock the areas - some of which have specific requirements - you can freely travel to and from those areas via an over-world travel map, accessed by talking to "coachmen", who allow you to ride a horse and carriage. This does mean that on subsequent playthroughs, you do need some knowledge of who to talk to and where they are to open up the world. In a manner that reminds me heavily of Skyrim, simply wandering around will be enough for you to encounter things, which combined with the progression system, makes this game incredibly addictive. There always seems to be something to do, a martial art to obtain or level up, equipment to get and people to talk to.

Now, the game is designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. Your first run is going to be the hardest, but as you unlock achievements you'll be able to get more traits that'll help make your next playthroughs much easier. For example, there's a trait that allows you to skip the levelling grind entirely, and a trait that amplifies the effects of your martial arts stats on your character.

The game has many different endings, and on encountering those endings you are offered the opportunity to either end your run at that ending, or to continue your adventures. There are "bad ends" (no, not that kind) where if you fail certain quests, take certain options or die in battle, your run will end and you'll be forced to reload.

The game has a lot of content, I've played for fifty hours and completed two playthroughs so far, and I'm not even half-way done with everything yet.

The game isn't perfect though, and there's plenty to criticise.
While the game has an NPC (Lewd Old Man) that you encounter very early on which gives you OP abilities and items and helps guide you through the game, the game doesn't always make it clear where to go or what to do next. This can sometimes be partially because of the translation, but sometimes the instructions are so vague you'll be scratching your head. The journal often isn't helpful either, and you'll find yourself either stumbling around hoping to find it, or looking up a guide.

While you have a lot of options in terms of progressing your character, the only character customisation is the ability to name the character, and an automatic sprite change when reaching certain points in factions. You cannot change your character's appearance beyond that. With how open and free the game otherwise is, I feel it's something that really detracts from the experience.

As far as I've experienced, there's very few ambient sound effects. There's no footstep sounds, no sound of wind or rain, no birds chirping. If you have the music off, it's eerily silent most of the time, except for when very certain things happen - entering and participating combat, or some cut-scene/dialog sequences.

If you decide to kill both of the NPCs at the very start of the game, you end up getting the "woman hater" trait and allows you to deal extra damage to women in the game. I just wanted to do an villain playthrough, I didn't really intend to have some sort of weird vendetta against women, game.

Some weapons and types of martial arts can feel lacking. For example, there's very few dagger specific martial arts I've found, and I've yet to find a bare-handed weapon/glove beyond the starting one.

It can be very easy to miss things, and even lock yourself out of certain paths, factions, or endings. This is a double edged sword of how open and how much freedom the game gives you. You can slaughter nearly anyone you come across, or steal, or betray factions. The game won't stop you. For people like me, this'll be a great thing, but for others I can see being able to screw yourself out of things being very frustrating.

So, overall, do I recommend it? Absolutely. If what I've laid out above at all interests you, buy this game! I personally love it, I can't get enough, and will probably play a lot more of it both before and after the v1.0 release. I'm very excited to see what the future of the game and these devs hold.

bro give us an estimate when is the official english sub is coming

For those who are reading reviews to decide whether the game is worth buying or not, take into account that the reviews down voting for translation problems are from last year, in witch the games English translation was still in it's early days and it was also done by people in the community. Over time the translation has improved a lot with work on both the community and developers end.

Absolutely adore the concept and execution of the game but machine translating to English does not equal out to a proper English Translation. You notice errors before the game even starts during character creation.

I love Wuxia games and being like the characters I love in those stories, but unfortunately if you are only an English speaker I would not recommend this game until it is properly translated. There are skills and equipment that have bad translations that will result to you chasing into a dead-end because it was meant for another type of gear.

Fan translated or not it doesn't seem believable to me when the errors occur so EARLY into the game, I cannot fathom how intense it is later down the line.

You simply cannot advertise the game being fully translated to English via Interface and Subtitles on the Steam Page when it isn't true.

I would safely recommend, Wuxia games like this are fun, but while everything screams play the customization and freedom are hindered by a extraordinarily terrible English Translation. I can deal with subtitles but sometimes what is said really still makes 0 sense. If this game had solid translation It would be an instant recommend, until they hopefully get that updated I would recommend just keeping it on your wishlist.