In a lot of ways, this game is a janky Chinese budget unity pile. It's also one of the most ambitious, complex, and engaging RPGs ever made.

He Luo studios has been making open-world RPGs since 1996, apparently. Their first game, Heroes of Jin Yong, looks and plays like a contemporary to Ultima 7 or something, and apparently it was a Big Deal over in that part of the world. It has spawned multiple fan games, gacha crap, been ported all over the place and remade twice. The general plot and setting are based on the wuxia novels by, you guessed it, Jin Yong, which have apparently sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Whatever, I'm never going to read them and neither are you, this is just the part of the review where I talk a little about the game's development and history. I was first exposed to He Luo studio's games through Tale of Wuxia, their 2015 remake of Heroes of Jin Yong, and I loved it enough that when a friend told me they had a sequel with a janky but playable machine translation available on steam, I slammed that mother-f**cking buy button.

The general premise of every He Luo game is that you create and play your own xia, a chinese word that can be translated as ronin, knight-errant, hero or what have you. Basically, you are a warrior finding your way and cultivating your own set of ethics and morals and then imposing them on the world around you through the power of kung fu. Every one of these games has a good and evil system of some kind, but HTLS is the most open-ended and customizable, giving you three separate personality meters to determine what kind of guy you're building: good and evil, decorum/politeness versus recklessness/impetuousness, and the energies of yin and yang. Each of these things affects and is affected by your decisions in the story, which NPCs will interact with or join you, what kind of martial arts you can learn and how effective they are. You develop your xia in a traditional open-world fashion, running from town to town, accepting quests and resolving them by either helping people or making things worse according to your whims. You can run around the entire world from the word "go," pickpocket nearly any NPC in the game or challenge them to duels (which are essentially muggings, because you often get to take the items you would have pickpocketed from them anyway). Your character has an overriding plot goal all the while - it's an isekai thing, naturally: he fell through a portal and woke up in kung fu world - but it doesn't matter very much and your real goal is to track down esoteric martial arts secrets and recruit cool party members to become strong as heck.

Rather than an annoying, perfunctory afterthought like it is in most open-world RPGs, combat is the focus of the kung fu game. Your party spawns in behind you and each person takes a turn with an initiative order determined by their qinggong (agility, essentially) stat and uses a limited number of action points to unleash moves. You can bank some (never more than half your max) for the next turn, delay your action, buff yourself, heal your teammates, pretty much the standard suite. Attacks do more damage from the side and more again from the back, with a little arrow on the targeting reticle conveniently showing you the enemy's facing, since when someone is standing in a weird serpentine kung fu stance it can be a bit hard to tell where they're looking. Attacks cannot miss, per se, but they can be dodged, deflected, or countered, and these systems are all part of the game's talent/attribute calculus, which I'll talk about next because I've never seen anything quite like it in an RPG before.

Your character's only stats - aside from their ranks in individual martial arts styles, the three personality axes I mentioned before, their spiritual power, their qinggong, and HP/MP, of course - are in a constellation-looking menu of martial arts characteristics. There are six, each two of course being paired: Hardness (critical hits) versus Softness (damage mitigation), Speed (combos) versus Tranquility (counterattacks), Cleverness (debuffs) versus Simplicity (core stats). Each point invested into any of these trees increases the percentage chance of its related effect per turn and action, while also having traditional RPG perks/talents interspersed that change your character in more dramatic ways. So when you invest 5 points into the Hardness, or crit-focused talent tree, your character then has a 5% chance to critically hit, and it builds each turn by 5% until a critical hit happens and it resets to 0. You have to pick one of these trees to start in, and from there you can only branch into the others by tracing a path through the tree until it physically connects, making some builds obvious and others almost impossible. Even if you beelined for it all game, it would take you until like level 33 to give a Simple character even a single point of Cleverness, but you could develop a thorough Simple/Calm guy in that time. It's a surprisingly deep system, with the full-investment perks at the bottom being appropriately powerful game-changers that totally define your build, although a jack of all trades is still viable.

Next up is the writing, the characters, the story, that kind of thing - and I'll start by describing a very unique scenario. After receiving a quest from the Qingcheng sect, a group of do-gooders famous for their healing and defensive arts, the player finds Zhang Fei rescuing a daoist nun named Bai Sun. You encounter the two of them fighting off some mongolians, and you get a side quest from Zhang to clear the disgusting foreigners out of some neighboring villages with him. If you do so, you can return with him to the Qingcheng sect for a reward, and overhear a conversation between Bai Sun and the Qingcheng sect leader, where she begs him for help with a lethal disease she's suffering from, something that can only be cured with the sect's most treasured secret art. The leader refuses to give her this knowledge, instead merely offering to sequester her in the sect and treat her injury himself. She runs away dejected, and the white knight Zhang chases after her.

Now it gets a bit psycho. The player can - and, if you didn't read guides and stuff first, almost certainly would - just let the matter drop. Zhang would come back in 3 days and you could talk to him to get another quest to clear out a nearby nest of evil poison cultivators who are responsible for Bai Sun's injury. But if you sneak over to their cottage when they're both asleep, and you try to pickpocket Bai Sun, she wakes up while you're rifling through her pockets. She is so turned on by the situation that she allows you to ravage her if you so choose. Go along with it, and she reveals that she's actually a member of that same sect of poison cultivators, and she fills you in on her scheme to rob the Qingcheng of their treasures, use Zhang to usurp the sect elders who exiled her, and then murder the hapless rube when she's finished. Once you do this she can be recruited as a party member, one of the three women in the game's harem ending.

Ho Tu Lo Shu is jam-packed with insane nonsense like this. It has some of the most wild and whimsical writing I've ever seen in a game, and the janky machine translation only adds to the sense of looking into the mind of an alien species. I hope it's obvious from my writing how much I love this game. There's simply nothing else in the world like it. The translation is barely-intelligible nonsense, it runs like ♥♥♥♥, even after three years of constant patches it's still pretty buggy, but I can't wait to replay it in a couple years. If you have any interest at all in martial arts, RPGs, or oriental stuff whatsoever, it's simply a must-buy.