At the foremost, I have to be frank I am a fan addicted to The Gate of Firmament and its gaming series. But in this review I will try to elaborate neutrally the pros and cons of this game alongside with things you might be interested to know about.

• Languages Supporting. You attention here please, this game only supports English, Japanese, Chinese, Traditonal Chinese with the corresponding UI, menu and subtitles. So feel free to play if you are English or Japanese players, but unluckily for players in other regions, whether waiting for mods( or official translations, donnot be expecting on that ) or choosing not to buy is at your discretion.
  
• This game requires free disk space of appropriate 15GB , made by U3D (have been optimized several times since its first release in Feb, 2015 in China ), this steam version gladly has been given huge optimizations. In fact, my gt650m notebook with 8GB ram could run it quite smoothly in 720P, the highest resolution supported is 1920*1080.
  
  Technical notes here: should you have problems in failing to initail(black screen or whatever), try starting in win95 compatiable mode, hope it helps.
• Gate of Firmament and its gaming series. Gate of Firmament is the 12th work in a row of the prestigious Xuan-Yuan Sword RPG gaming series(better be compared to the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest gaming series in Japan, so you could get distinct understandings) with 25 years of history in China. As mentioned, there are twelve works from DOS to 2D to 2.5D to 3D with the first work released 25 years ago forming this Xuan-Yuan Sword game series. Each game have a separate story told so if you are a novice to play Gate of Fimament, there is no affecting your gameplay experience at all. (Somewhere through your play, there may be plots or concepts linked from previous works but believe me most are the surprise type for fans and have little to do with the gameplay).
  
• About the game itself.Now let's get down to our main business, how is the game?
  The Gate of Firmament is a typical oriental rpg game or more specified, a Chinese martial arts rpg game in the sense that the game put great emphasis on the long moving story you gonna experience rather than the elements of a game, or put it in a another way, it is actually more like a movie than a game. The core spirits of this gaming series is its decent, impressive, beautifully written story.
  On a scale of 0 to 10 I would like to rate as follows:
  1.Story 9.5 points, highly recommended if you are fond of Chinese culture and this loving story with the elements of divinity(of course Chinese myths). Must say again here, it's more like a movie, you have to get around villages, towns investing and talking to different people, if you previously had any Final Fantasy experience, it would be ez.
  2.Music 9 points, music and sound effects are composed by outstanding musicians, but mostly oriental style.
  3.System/Combat 7 points,actually turn based, you learn and upgrade your abilities, not much to talk about. One thing worth to point out is its Lian-Yao system(mainly you can capture the monsters after you defeat them as pets and combine different ones to a strong pet ) of this gaming series which may fascinates you. Also, there are mini-games included for instance you need to solve some puzzles to get treasures.
  4.Video 6.5 points, made by U3D engine, modeling of characters and scenes may seem a little rough sometimes but much better than those 2D or 2.5D babies. Modeling are oriental aesthetically.

At the very end, I would like to say if you are looking for extreme "play" experience such as RTS or acting , this is definitely no choice for you. But if you are a RPG lover or somehow just wondering what our Chinese game is, this game is a perfect choice for you. It won't let you down for such a fair price.
If you have any questions during your game play, be free to leave a message, I would be glad to help.

This is a pretty decent game for a reasonable price.

Here are a few points I would like to mention.

No. 1 - Game graphics is definitely good no matter how you look at it, ( 8 / 10 )
Pros - Character design and background is fantastic. Game reminds me of Blades and Souls from character design.
Cons - Probably needed some facial expressions on characters as I could see that there is no shock factor there and no frowning from the character even though he is fustrated. Probably some parts where characters are too stiff and parts of the clothes could pass through character limbs during cutscenes. Hair does not even move when brushed against by their hands. Just an opinion.

No.2 - Gameplay is user friendly. ( 7.5 / 10 )
Pros - Easy to maneuver, Skill tree seems legit to me and able to assist my gameplay. They have gears items crafting and wow just wow. Game reminds me of Magna Carta in a simpler form. Multiplayer game to be converted into RPG for single player. Brilliant idea. Chibi mode when walking from town to dungeons? You got to love those.
Cons - I was hoping for more action wise from the gameplay but maybe it is just me. I was expecting more reactions that would affect the enemy as I was using the skills to attack them.

No.3 - Background Music/OST is beautiful ( 10 / 10 )
Pros - I like the overall synchronization of background music and atmosphere. It is really well made and I am really impressed with the arrangements. Got to say that this gives me a really smooth experience in the game.
Cons - Nothing from me so far but an english version of the song would be really pretty.

No.4 - Story Wise is intriguing. ( 9 / 10 )
Pros - Story is really pretty and great to experience. Not gonna spoil you guys but experience the fun yourself haha. You will love it when you see the little boar or piglet at the start of the game. Nuff said.
Cons - Deserves more series to come.

No.5 - Voice Acting/Subtitles/Language ( 7.5 / 10 )
Pros - I would say that the voice acting is decent. It was in sync with the character's lips, you can feel the emotions from the character. Subtitles are well made and I really appreciate for the developers to put effort to the subtitles. You got to give it thumbs up for this definitely. Otherwise, most players would not be able to understand the story.
Cons - Maybe I might be more demanding, I would hope that the developers would consider english voice acting as well. It would really really be so wonderful if there is also language for english voice.

Overall Experience ( 8.5 / 10 ) - I would buy the game even if there were no discount for this game. Improvements is a must but definitely brings you to another world of excitement for RPG players.

Brief first impressions. Since english subtitles+UI are available, why not!. Standouts are the beautiful cutscenes and soundtrack. Game itself seems decent but a little rough around the edges, examples being collision meshes missing and some npc pathing issues, Nothing gamebreaking. Translation wasn't a problem though you will find some humorous 'oops' moments. Initial gameplay was your typical jrpg affair, fetch questing around the village while learning the story of your existence.

Completing that, then sent to a nearby bamboo forest which introduced combat. No random encounters so far, needed to walk into enemies that roamed about. While I'm still learning the systems but any recent final fantasy player should feel at home. Talent trees were available for characters and equipment system looked deep. Will give it the thumbs up as it's a lovely game for the price. Cheers.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=632178136
No english audio, just UI/subtitles. Runs @ 60fps and max resolution is 1080p.

This is actually a great game.

7/10 Battle system. Boss fights actually requires strategy and may need multiple tries

8/10 Story. It's actually surprisingly good. I did have a low expectation before I started but the story does not treat you like an idiot. The things main characters say actually seem like they have thought about it and have reasons behind their decisions.

It's very different than games like Fallout or Pillar of Eternity where the game is about player decisions or different choices. Instead the story in this game is set and smoothly unfolds before the player, much like watching a movie. I normally enjoy making my own decisions in the game but it feels nice to take a break and just watch a well orchastrated show.

9/10 Music. Some good tracks and some great tracks.

Annnnnnd Voice Acting. One of the best I've experienced in a game. 10/10 will not skip cutscenes.

This game is good (i think it´s the first game on steam in this style of artwork).
Pros:
- Excellent OST/BGM
- The graphic and artwork is beautiful
- Easy play game
- You can forge your own weapons and capture monsters
- I recommend buy the sound collection

Cons:
- Even if you play in english, the game isn´t fully translated (hope they will improve the english later)
- In game has few orthographic mistakes (for english language)
- The Steam version and non steam version are different. In steam version, as far i already played, you can´t disable companion AI to stop using items, so if the HP is running low, they will use items.
- Since this one is the sixth game from the serie, will be good if other titles come to steam as well
- You need know Chinese to enjoy fully, since even if you play the game with english subtitle, the subtitle is only a small part from their voices; in another words, if you know Chinese (at least conversation), you will have more fun with their chit chat. And this helped me in untranslated parts.
- The main character sister is a nuisance
- If you hate betrayal, don´t play this one

In the end, i recommend this game. If they fix the problems above, will be a great game.

I don't buy a lot of games with zero prior knowledge of them, but the screenshots looked nice and the price was appealing, so I gave it a shot. And so far, I'm very pleasantly surprised. It's very good looking (especially for the price), and despite some rough edges (weak animations, rough translation), it's a shockingly well-made game, with a lot of nice presentation throughout (nice looking UI, full 3D model viwer for evey item/equipment/enemy in the game, great OST, etc). And it runs well too.

Just in case the trailer didn't give enough info, this is a very by-the-numbers JRPG (or CRPG to be more accurate), with semi-turn-based battles with some combo/timing based inputs. Encounters aren't random though, and you can see all enemies in the world before hand and attack for preemptive strikes. Everything else is pretty typical RPG fare: decent amount of exploration, chests with loot (and you can actually dismantle the chests for more loot!), tons of battling, and I think even a sort of Pokemon-esque element later? Mostly what you'd expect, but with some nice twists as well. Definitely not regretting the purchase at all, and will probably buy future installments if they get English localizations (it seems like a small miracle, or at least an anomaly, that this one did).

This game has probably the best plot/story development of any game that I've played in the last 10 years. It's as if DOMO Studio invested 90% of their budget into developing the story, voice acting, and music. The atmosphere of the game, the interactions of the different characters, the personal growth that each character experiences and presents, all come together to bring the player a unique perspective into Chinese mythology.

With that said this game is not without its flaws: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1215941852

Xuan Yuan Sword (XYS) game series are like the Final Fantasy games in China/Taiwan (though Final Fantasy is also quite popular in Asia). The parallel game series to XYS is called Chinese Paladin (or Legend of Sword and Fairy, LSF; the names are interchangeable, just translation differences). XYS is heavy on mythology/history, the main character is usually inserted into previously established mythology/history, and DOMO developed storylines/supernatural events are added. LSF is generally original story lines with much less emphasis on history.

The XYS games have a "core" series, titled XYS 1, 2, etc..., and a spinoff series, titled XYS 外傳 (wai zhuan). Some of the spinoffs are sequels to the core series, and some are completely independent games that are unrelated to the rest of the XYS series entirely. Gate of Firmament falls into the latter category (for the most part). You don't need to play the others to understand this game.

This game is about the things that happened to Earth when the Yellow Heavenly (thanks Mew) Emperor decided to open the gates of heaven for all mortals to obtain divine power. The reason why he opened the gates was so they could find his "dear missing daughter". This led to tons of chaos since now you've basically got a supervillain fountain. To stop this from happening, a tribe/civilization with divine power along with some other tribes + gods decide to seal off the gate, which leads to the story in the game. All of this is rendered in the prologue's intro video.

The game is built on the Unity engine, so stuff looks pretty dated, however the game came out in 2015 so that's sort of expected (for a Chinese game). The characters are a bit stiff, since there aren't that many facial expressions that can be modeled; however some things are animated such as: eyebrow furrowing, sadness/tears, joy/smiling/laughing, agreement/disagreement, and "sighing".

Though the character models are so-so. the environment is great, you can just google for background images of the game and they look pretty amazing. It's unfortunate that some of the backgrounds are only used a few times in the game, but they truly look amazing in the 3D world. A significant portion of the game is also done with hand-drawn art (a XYS tradition), such as the UI portrait photos, loading screens, some of the Steam card backgrounds etc.

The game runs at 60FPS for the most part, turning down AA + shadows should fix FPS drops.

6/10

Beautiful music, that's why they have a separate soundtrack for you to purchase. It's also part of the XYS tradition to have a great soundtrack, sometimes performed at concerts (like Nobuo Uematsu concerts). You can probably scope out the music on YouTube for more info.

Voice acting is fantastic, I have no complaints here. Originally people were really frustrated because of the awkward pauses between conversations, since the engine would load the 2nd person's response a few seconds slower than expected. A patch was introduced so you could just press "confirm" and end the first person's pauses, this (though requiring a bit of manual labor) sped up the pace of the conversations to feel more natural.

Sound effects are "not bad", I say this because as per XYS tradition, some of the sound effects are reused (from as far back as games in the early 90s). But that's not all bad, they've all been re-done to sound "modern", and if you haven't played the old games you wouldn't notice.

9/10

The game is a mix of Tales style and Final Fantasy ATB. You walk around a 3D environment map, and there are monsters that randomly spawn. If you walk into them or are detected by them, a fight occurs. You can initiate the fight early with your map ability which causes specific effects.

Once in combat, it's an ATB style system (however your bar is a cooldown timer that doesn't really change unless you're slowed). Your physical attack/supportive attack is hotkeyed, health/mana pot is hotkeyed, and you can shift to 4 different spells. At the start of the game, you can only hit enemies once (no combo'ing), as you level up, additional attacks are added.
There is no "limit break" like in other XYS games (or Final Fantasy style games), though at level 20 and 30 you do get different combo finishers.

For most of the game it's just button mashing, because there's a ton of trash mobs, so I completed 70% of the game just button mashing my AOE nuke.

Towards the end of the game you have to do some micro management since the AI isn't very smart.
Example: Switch to defense hero, cast buffs, switch to healer, cast debuffs/buffs, switch to physical, cast buffs, switch to each character to attack, switch to healer, etc. Some people describe this as FF13 style (since you constantly switch characters to change spells/buffs).

For that matter, the AI is TERRIBLE. If you skill spells on your non-main, the AI will constantly spam them, and eventually consume all your mana potions (called powders in this game). However this can be worked around by the weird money glitch (which is listed in the Steam guide section).

5/10

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that the story is fantastic. However you're gonna need some patience as this game is nearly 70% cutscenes/voice acting conversations/FMVs, 30% combat. Some of the cutscenes/FMVs are nearly 20 minutes, so treat it more like a long movie/TV series/soap opera. It took some getting used to in the beginning, but towards the end, I felt it really was necessary to set up appropriate ambiance.

10/10

It's not very good, a lot of the clever puns and alliterative conversations are lost in translation. I could do a better translation, but at the number of lines per character, that might take quite a while. I'm fluent in English/Chinese, so I played the game with English subs to see what the translations were like. Often times they misrepresented the reason/emotion of what a character was expressing. Even so, I feel you can still understand the story and challenges faced by each character; (some of the best character-character sequences were non-vocal).

4/10

This game has a lot of flaws, but the plot alone is worth a playthrough. For the last sale price ($4.49!!!) it is 100% worth it to give it a shot. I bought it on release for $15 (which is still worth it!). Expect around 25 hours of main story (without skipping cutscenes). Probably 40 hours to do all the sidequests + side bosses. A 2nd playthrough is required to 100% cheevo the game.

7/10

The save system doesn't work offline. On a many hour long RPG, this makes the game unplayable offline. Which boils down to a soft kind of online only DRM. Which is unacceptable for me.

Still don't know whether this is a bug or an intended "feature", but since it's not the only game from these devs with this issue, it seems it's either intended or not important enough to fix. And this is a big enough deal that I'm posting this review to make it known to potential buyers, as there's no warning of this online only requirement on the store page. None that I can see, anyway.

I'll remove this review (and rebuy this game) once this issue is solved.

Just got the game and it runs in full HD @60FPS. Only one hour in so I haven't left the starting town, most time was invested in talking to townspeople to get the story of who you and your family are.

Game looks nice, a bit like an unmodded Skyrim so don't expect 4K textures all around. The setting is truely Chinese which is a nice for a change. You get a few nice errors in the english translation but that isn't a problem. All voices are in Chinese but that makes the female characters even more cute than they already are.

Hard thing is to remember all the Chinese names being thrown around in the story and it's not easy to understand sometimes what they are trying to tell you in details but I do get the general picture.

Haven't been in a singly fight so the 'action' still has to start but what I've seen so far and specially for this low price a true recommendation if you are into these kind of games. (If it's possible to edit this review later I'll try to give some updates)

Edit1: Works perfectly with mouse+keyboard, PS3 controller (DS3 motion in joy) and PS4 controller (DS4Windows).

UPDATE: A patch was released that fixed one of my biggest gripes with the game, so I have now revised the review to reflect that, plus other additions now that I’ve played the game more.

Gate of Firmament might be a 3D game, but it feels like a retro 2D RPG. There’s nothing in the game that makes use of 3D, apart from giving the developers the ability to place the camera wherever they want.

Every detail from how you move, how environments are laid out, how the combat system works, how cutscenes and dialog scenes are paced feels like a 2D RPG. For example, you can’t jump, and the combat system is most optimally played if you only use the keyboard. This isn’t a negative, just a stylistic choice that shows the series origin as a long running traditional series.

Compared to western RPGs the cutscene quality is on the level of Knights of the Old Republic. There’s long pauses after every spoken line where you wait for the character animation to stop playing before the next line is spoken. So it’s cheap, but good enough that it gets the point across of what the scene is trying to convey. But it’s a far way off from Mass Effect, Dragon Age or Witcher 3. Luckily you can click to skip to the next line of dialog, a feature that was patched in after release. This is big, because now and then you get cutscenes where the pacing is particularly slow and stilted. Being able to manually raise the pace by clicking is a huge improvement. Very appreciated that it didn’t take them long to patch that in.

There’s something likable about Gate of Firmament. It has the charm of an underdog trying their best to create an epic masterpiece, despite only having a fraction of the money or manpower to achieve that goal. It looks older than it is. But thanks to the vibrant colors it’s good enough. If you have the patience for it, this is an alright game. It might even be great once the story kicks off in proper. I liked the characters, and the humor had a nice off-beat quality to it. It’s very far from perfect, but I find myself returning to it again and again, giving it another 30-60 minutes here and there. It isn’t amazing, but it doesn’t matter. It’s enough to be likable.