Sadly, while the text in Sailing Life is legible, and you’ll be able to follow along with the characters and plot line, it’s also so stilted and clearly too literal, meaning that it’s not particularly clean reading. It’s a pity because it can undermine some otherwise excellent work. Another good example is Banner Of The Maid, a game I otherwise adored.

The country is rapidly growing as a game development centre, but localisers seem to have a way to go to catch up – it’s a little like how a lot of Japanese game development was back on the SNES. This continues to be a problem that plagues Chinese game development. It doesn’t help that the translation is poor. It’s quite possible for Sailing Era to become stressful, because in-game “days” sail (hah) past very rapidly, and if you’re not efficient then you’re going to struggle to feed and pay your crew. Things didn’t get any better later in the game, when I needed to travel to places in the world that I’m less familiar with, and the developers seemed to decide that their difficulty curve was going to be delivered through increasingly vague hints. The combination of poor directions and an abstracted scale really got me. Unfortunately, the scale of the map is heavily abstracted, and so, even though I’m very familiar with Japan’s geography, I was thrown a bit when I sailed past a Taiwan that I didn’t expect to see where it was, and then momentarily struggled to find the town in Japan that I actually wanted to get to. The problems are apparent almost immediately, when your very first quest is to “follow the direction the wind blows” from the Chinese port that you start (at least, that was the case in my play-through, as the game gives you a couple of different characters to choose between) and make your way to a specific city in Japan. Unfortunately, the concept is far too ambitious for what the developers were able to actually deliver.

With some truly beautiful character art, this promised to be a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, combining JRPG mechanics with buy-low-sell-high trade systems, and even inland exploration.

Given that Koei Tecmo won’t do anything with its Uncharted property (no, not the Sony one), Sailing Era was something worth paying attention to leading up to its release.

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