Worst MMO Ever? - Swords of Legends Online 

"As a player character, you have subtitles but no voice" I think this is one of the few games where that is a blessing

If you ask me, the voice acting is the most realistic in any MMO I've ever seen. No one is coherent, everyone talks over each other, their own idea of what was said doesn't even line up with what they articulated; it's refreshing to see an MMO be so ambitious as to perfectly capture your average trip to a Wal-Mart

“Those people are all headed straight into their own graves. We could also do that later” What an icon

"Something exciting happened... I finished a pen." This writing is substantially better than that of the game.

The audio balancing literally managed to scare someone just walking past the TV. This game is top tier entertainment.

It's so refreshing to see an MMO be bad for reasons other than being highly P2W.

Just a note about the strange story: this is straight up a Xianxia novel transposed to videogame medium. That's why every somewhat important character is considered a massive badass with "super powers"; every character worth giving a shit in a Xianxia novel is super awesome and powerful and talented. So for a eastern, most likely chinese audience, this kind of story is more common, and therefore more acceptable, than to a western one simply due to cultural factors. The 70s martial arts movies you reference are in fact based of Wuxia novels, which share many tropes, but are more focused on real/martial arts aspect of awesome heroes (similar to the western Arthurian Tales or The Song of Roland) rather than the spiritual aspect.

What's weird about the voice acting being so bad is that their pronunciations are all consistent with each other, so there was clearly active direction of the actors.

Josh, this is completely unfair. The voice acting gets good in the end game.

"To avoid embarrassing himself, he jumps towards the moon." Is a great line and well-delivered.

To be fair to this game, this is a really good representation of the wuxia/cultivator style of manhua/webtoon/story. It's utterly incomprehensible, throws around nonsense at every moment, people refuse to do any work when they can pass it off to a subordinate and nobody who's actually anybody shows up or does anything because they're all busy doing something else. To note on the classes being gender specific as well, though not really discussed in the video, in wuxia stories, men contain Yang energy, which is typically associated with fire, aggression and combat type abilities, while women contain Yin energy, which is usually more esoteric like healing, ice or sound. Normally in these types of stories, males can't learn Yin powers and vice-versa because it's incompatible with their energy. So while weird, it does make sense for the genre for classes to be gender locked.

"Why are the demons from Yorkshire" easily my favorite thing said in the entire video 😂

Game: "he grabs his shoulder" Josh: "if you write it out, it should be a book." game: gives you books to read Josh: "... alright"

Perfect villain quote doesn't exis--- "They are headed for the grave. We might also do that later".

This is the first "Worst MMO" Josh has reviewed that I actually want to try. The too funny voice acting, beautiful graphics and the fact the game isn't pay to win was enough to try it.

"Have you ever gotten so angry you spoke Chinese?" Josh, my dude, swear words in certain Chinese dialects are the BEST.

To me, it sounds like this game would have actually benefited to just having all voice acting be in Chinese and had English subtitles throughout the game. It also seems this is what happens when you accidently miss a few 0s on your budget and spend way too much on advertisements before you realize how little money you actually have left.

"Now the bad guy shows up and attacks a tree, because that's a totally rational, evil thing to do" WoW writers: Seems legit

How did the Devs get away with this? Everyone involved in and in charge of the voice acting, translation and subtitles should never be allowed to work in localisation again

1:14 I speak Chinese. It still sounds like a high school drama club trying to out-act each other.

"Have you every get so angry you spoke chinese?" I'm fairly certain most chinese parents do that to their kids. My mother can vouch for that lmao

I was watching this on my laptop and when you said, "I talk to this character's boobs..." my wife looked up from her Switch and then we both started laughing when you called her out on it. Thank you for that moment, Josh. :)

I played a bunch of this game at launch and really enjoyed it, mainly because of the visuals. I also played the game with fully Chinese voices and relied on the subs to get everything, it's a lot better that way, unfortunately. I agree with pretty much everything you said here, there's a reason I'm not still playing. But I did want to point out one thing you said that was wrong. In the first dungeon it changes your visuals, not your gear. It's a purely cosmetic thing. I still hated that part of the dungeon, especially since I picked up a few costumes and those get overridden as well. But you do go through it using the equipment you have earned unlike what you said. Also, it is the only dungeon in the game that does this. Still a really bad way to introduce players to dungeons because it doesn't just change your gear visuals, but your face as well, and in a game where visuals are the main selling point... That seems like a bad idea.

This MMO plays like a D&D campaign I was in, years ago; The DM was so scared we'd win any boss fight against her precious boss NPCs that **every boss fight** had excuses and railroaded mechanics to sideline us. Then we got to sit back and listen to her loving describe some other NPC she made coming in to save us, every time. It was the equivalent of a combat cinematic for D&D. At one point, we told her we were fighting the boss ourselves, or quitting. We ended up winning and, as I am about to kill the biss (Who was a minion to the real Big BNad, not even the Big Bad himself); She vetoed it. Just 'No, you find you can't kill him. Your body won't move.' Then the minion (It was not his turn yet): Knocked me out (No save allowed), cast a spell that pushed the party 50 feet away (No saves allowed), and teleported away. All in the same round of combat, while it was not his turn. You stopped playing in that campaign.

It looks so beautiful but also painfully generic at the same time.

I loved the "I will not accept gifts from enemies!" "You will" "Understandable, have a nice day"

One big problem I have with a lot of chinese wuxia themes (anime, manhua and games) is there is often this idea of, "special people are special and ordinary people are not, unless they were but it was somehow hidden, so technically they were special all the time." I'm from Taiwan, and this kind of thinking seems kind of insidious to me. Almost like they want people to think people who are well off were always chosen to be special etc, and the normal peeps can just be background characters in their own lives.

JOSH KILLED THIS MMO

The overlapping cutscene dialogue is most likely due to the lines being shorter in Chinese but the cues for them not being adjusted to compensate for the new length.

Quest: "grab healing herbs that are only 10ft away" Me: "oh, is this lost ark?"

I remember the one time I finished a pen. It felt amazing. I looked back at all the ink I had poured over many notebooks. Years of constant writing and impeccable reporting. Truly, one of the greatest achievements of my life. You must be proud.

What if you did the whole descriptions-of-actions-in-text thing but then also animated really detailed scenes where they just do something different. Like the narration says "he slaps you on the shoulder" and instead you two shake hands. I feel like you could have a lot of fun with that as a designer.

16:07 Josh: Can everyone fly the moment it suits the plot?! Me: According to every modern chinese martial arts/sword fighting show. Yes.

The overlaping audio is actually a feature to get you through the story even faster

The voice acting layering over eachother like this reminds me a lot of when I visited a supermarket in Japan, where they had little speakers all over the place to advertise all sorts of products. Sensory overload - but it seemed normal to everyone else °-°;

Tinfoil hat theory: The reason they did not bugfix, is because they were forbidden to do a more intrusive cash shop. Totally would expect such petty behaviour.

I am a voice actor that gets cast in these kinds of projects. Can say, they give you little or no direction, and around 80% of the info given is in Chinese. The people involved are mostly young actors that are extremely excited to be a part of a videogame, it is a really positive community :) If you want a primary source about eastern localization VO feel free to hit me up xD

"Then this voice actor delivers his lines with so little energy if he were any more relaxed he would be medicly dead." This line made me laugh so hard i almost died

15:28 I finally figured out what is going on. They not only spent 5 bucks on the dub people but the translation from Chinese is literal. That is the reason Baiqian says "we can't control that guy anymore!"

The rating out of 10 for this one absolutely killed me. This was a great episode all around.

"you ever been so angry, you just spoke chinese?" I felt that 😂

I opened Josh's Twitch in the background while I was watching this because he popped into the premiere chat to say he'd be going live soon. It started autoplaying the vod from his last stream. It took me a good few minutes to realise the two overlapping Josh voices weren't just a joke about this game's sound balancing.

I feel I can add here something. I was hopelessly addicted on release, spend way too much money on cosmetics and leveled 3 characters over about two months of gameplay. I skipped the cutscenes and texts on all 3 characters, because that first cutscene already bored me to death, but my god I loved the combat, the five dungeons have a hard mode where, if you clear the bosses in a certain time, a secret, very demanding boss spawns. There was one raid at the time for up to four groups i believe. BUT normal mode rewards were only available once per day and hard mode/raid rewards once a WEEK. Soon they released an eventdungeon where you could enter once a day which was a minigame like bomberman or pvp snake. Yes snake. So besides daily chores like fishing and playing cards, you had 6 dungeons a day and 6 "hard instances" a week. all of which played amazing and needed attention and focus, but there was little to do. They also took forever to release actual content like new dungeons. My entire guild had max gear (not counting that +3 rng bullshit where you could drop better gear that had a little better stats) within the 2nd month of launch. We quit soon after because we found nothing new to do, yes hardmode was awesome but you can only do so many weekly dungeons (mind you, it took about half an hour for each of the 5 dungeons) before you find a more stimulating game (and normal mode became a walkthrough somewhere along the line). There is also alot of exploring, where you find "hidden treasures" like a wooden hairpin on a wooden bench you have to click on, a ring inside a shoe on a shelf and an alcohol bottle in tall grass. or the hunting quests for evil spirits which have no reward except for the daily/weekly challenge and are nowhere near a normal dungeon in difficulty. tl;dr amazing dungeons and in theory endgame content, but so little and timelocked actual content that SOLO was dropped soon after launch, haven't revisited it ever since. Just wait until the endgame and it gets good...totally, trust me 100% Also i think the standard mount has 70 or 80% movespeed, but dont quote me on that

I’ve played quite a bit of this game! You said this game is for people who are “digital tourists” or “cutscene enjoyers”. I am both of those. (Yes. I AM a gw2 player.) I’m also a casual xianxia fan, who… cannot speak a word of Chinese. I’ve suffered through some BAD localizations, and this is… one of the worst I’ve seen. I enjoyed my time with it, because I burned a bit of cash to make my handful of characters look pretty- I am big into developing characters and backstory and making them look like they do in my head (it’s uh… a bit of a problem. I have 50 characters in gw2.) And, the best decision I made, by FAR… was to switch the voice lines to Chinese. Which I did within three minutes of booting up the game. Do I know what they’re saying? Nope. Do I understand the plot? Only through previous knowledge of xianxia tropes and a VERY strong suspension of disbelief. But it sounds a LOT better. Overall, I definitely had a better time than you did, but I agree wholeheartedly with the review. Great watch!

"The classes are genderlocked and you have access to the 3 genders: Man, Woman, and Small Girl." If I had a nickel every time I saw an Eastern developed MMO that could fit this exact description, I swear to god.

"...and make everyone in the background start paying attention." Well played, Strife. You win this round.

It's kind of sad, because I feel like there was a lot of potential for a decent game, maybe even a good game, but some people along the corporate chain dropped the ball or made some whacky decisions. I bought this on Steam when it first came out and I don't even think I played a second day before uinstalling and never touching again T_T Love this series by the way, been enjoying it while semi-afk horse training in BDO on a lazy Sunday. Cheers Josh! omg your "out of 10" outro was so good for this one I literally laughed out loud.

The Line Furrys and Gene-Stealers killed me XD Also for the non-sensical Plot, if you have read enough Wuxia Novels or Xianxia Novel this Plot line is as common as the European "Aktion hero go shoot guys" or any other well known cliche plot line. It was honestly neither suprising nor new in any shape way or form. The way they just throw stuff at you is like they expect you to know all the Wuxia terms and tropes already.

Let me remind everyone of something. We pretty much had to BEG the devs to let us change to the original Chinese language because, originally, it was going to only have English for our version and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTED IT.

"the furries have joint up with the genestealers" damn, that's some nightmare stuff even the chaos gods have nightmares about.

I've been watching all of these videos as I grind out Grand Chase Classic, an MMO you should definitely do a video on. This Wednesday (May 24th, 2023) they will be releasing an update making the new player experience much quicker, easier, and with more loot making it the perfect time to check it out! Elsword was technically a sequel to Grand Chase, but I never personally got into it. It would blow my mind to see this game get some attention! I even named my son after one of the main characters! Those voice lines... thats all of the video for me... those voice lines

16:10 really got me, happy to have experienced that for the great laugh that it was. As to the voiced lines I can't help but feel like they took voice clips from the internet and put them over some characters like that mini boss in the dungeon. For ambient dialogue I think it's a great touch to a game, but they do need to time it and also localize it to an area around the character so it doesn't feel like they have you surrounded and yelling at you.

Whenever I see games like this I feel really bad for the 3D artists who've spent thousands of hours carefully modelling, texturing and building the world, having no say on how the game should play.

I was fully prepared for 'have a great day' to be spoken in Chinese, with a subtitle informing me that Josh Strife Hayes drinks from his cup.

I cried when Josh said "We can devour the gods together" 😭😭 33:04

36:16 I think that might be the same VA for Grave Warden Agdayne from Dark Souls 2? The line was delivered like "put down by his own Guards" I think??

The intro cutscene voice acting wasn't that bad, it's mediocre at worst. Perfectly serviceable compared to the rest of the voice acting.

The fact that he never breaks out into a laugh or even a giggle while explaining any of this shit is a super power

Ooomg I legit thought the voice acting you showed at the beginning was made by a RU-vidrs playthrough or something like that, just reading out loud the text on screen! That this is the legit voice acting of the game is insaaane :D

19:55 Was there a voice actor change right in the middle of the dialogue? It's so camp. I love it

You know what, I pre-ordered this, then before launch refunded it to purchase at a later date. During the refund, the support team said "Once you refund you wont be able to rebuy the game", I lol'd and said okay that's fine. I think support team was helping a homie out.

when this game came out 2 weeks prior i lost my left tumb and index finger, one of my buddy's bought this game for me to cheer me up, i no lived like mad the first the 2 months i was in the top 100, it gave such a rush. during that time period i was pretty depresed lost my job, felt worthless thought about suicide alot those days,couldn't use my left hand anymore but this game gave me new friends and some of them helped me see the bigger picture again, i quit the game and came outside again this game saved me in a weird way.

God SOLO. I played the closed beta and then for a good chunk of a year after the release, and the most memorable thing for me was the utter mindbreak I experienced as the game itself just broke the concept of translation itself. This is coming from someone who regularly Google translates Chinese novels. It got so bad that I was screenshotting every line of dialogue because I was in stitches from howling too hard. There were multiple instances where *people's names* in *the name box* got translated. To different degrees. I remember going back to Cloudrise to talk to Lushu Zidu (whose name is occasionally partially translated to Lushu Purple City) and Kunwuzi (whose name is occasionally accidentally partly Japanese-read...? to Kungozi. I have no idea how) to unlock Baxian area. And. I was greeted with this: "(Suddenly discouraged) Even you help he ...Well, if you can please take out the Wuxianzhan on the top of Sendaitai and drink a sip of the Xia Niu, I'm afraid there is still a glimmer of life." The devs asked for people to "be respectful" when bringing forward criticisms but frankly for a game that I had to pay to play, the fact that this level of """"translation""" that makes less sense to read in "English" than in Chinese is in of itself disrespectful-- and I can't even read Chinese. Actually, I have the game to thank for my better Chinese now, because I WAS invested enough to just look up the original Chinese texts to better understand the lore. That said, now that the game is dead, I wish there's a game with similar aesthetic and style to fill the void... I really do adore the atmosphere, though I wished there were places for me to actually appreciate the gorgeous areas without always attracting mobs.

Props to Mengbo for actually matching his subtitle lines.

"I'm now having a conversation with this characters boobs making everyone who was listening in the background pay attention now." Never been so called out in my life.

I remember a time when MMOs were first starting to be voice acted, and a lot of the dialogue you still had to read because they didn't pay enough voice actors. But then I hear this game where they got so many of them talking at the same time. We've gone full circle. I guess I prefer quality over quantity.

Mengbo's voice sounds very familiar to me. If you look up Magusar from the game Soul Sacrifice, he is a similar sound and voiced by Blake Ritson (apparently he's also goddamn Aeymeric from FFXIV, so wow! I couldn't tell that similarity though).

As a reader of the genre this game is imitating, I find your comment about bloated skill sets rather amusing, as I have read SEVERAL stories where the MC makes that exact point: It is better to train 2-4 skills/techniques to perfection, than to just KNOW 30+ techniques. Of course on the other end you have the stories where the MC has so many techniques in his brain that he spends a week sorting through them what to teach when someone asks for help improving... lol. Those are usually cases where the MC was some millions of years old superpower who was betrayed and killed by his supposed friends/disciples and reincarnated into the body of some recently killed 14 year old with a physical problem that makes it 'impossible' to gain strength, but is actually some rare super powerful special physique that was just unknown at the low level the area he was reborn in was at, but since the MC knows all the special super secret training techniques it will allow him to become the strongest and grow to become a GOD! And yeah, those almost ALWAYS start off with the MC in the weakest city, of the weakest county, of the weakest country, of the weakest empire, of the weakest region, of the weakest continent, of the weakest planet, of the weakest realm:D So of COURSE the MC has to bring EACH of those up to become the strongest of that group instead by providing them the knowledge he gained while being a multiversal overlord, lol. And WOW I did not expect to suddenly find I had written a short essay...

It's startling to think that this game may have actually done better in sales and player retention if they had removed the voiceovers in their entirety.

17:48 - “they are already headed to their graves. We should do that too later!” hahahahahahhahahaa oml did the voice actors become self aware?? Seriously this script is like the Oblivion NPCs became semi-sentient, read a whole bunch of google translated Chinese literature, and then randomly wrote up a game based solely on that. amazing

I also noticed that every time a dialog scene come up the character's clothing will shakes violently like it was just loaded into the scene.

The problems with the voice layering is the reason why my first step when implementing sounds is an actual sound manager where ALL sounds gets funnelled through. It's so easy to handle when you don't play the sound on the actor that does the sound xd

"Why was it not the hottest new MMO?" *shows the horrific voice acting* I fail to see how this is a downside.

At least one line of dialogue was spot on. "Everything is complicated today." ... I felt that.

As a player that played at launch until the first raid released, I can tell you, later down the line, the game does get a bit more difficult in terms of open world content, the story stays confusing as all hell, the voice acting stays the same, and there is many many other female npcs with male voices. The raid content is... fine, it wasn't some mega giga experience, but was far from bad, it took my guild a couple attempts for each boss except the last one it was an enrage timer boss that we just needed to push harder dps for and it took time to practice out when we want to pop our cds for what phases and when we can do good dmg as it became a bullet hell at some points and dps became secondary to survival, but some big cooldowns would pop at that same time. the housing, crafting, pets, mounts and all that seems to be just flair in terms of progression, pve and pvp gear in the endgame was separate from what i can remember and was grinded in similar fashion to wow with you spamming rbg to obtain currency and gear boxes. All in all it wasn't an ultra bad experience, but it didn't really excel at anything other than perhaps doing combat a bit better than it's competition in terms of pvp balance.

I'm sorry you had to go through that and thank you for this. Such a waste, wonder how much they actually spent on this.

"I have severely damaged the Lunar Crown Tree. Father's mission was already completed. Those people are headed straight into their own graves. We could also do that _later! :)"_ I give this game a bad qi out of 10 To be honest if they doubled down on the goofy dub it would probably improve things a lot, how many _intentionally_ comedy centered MMOs can you think of?

18:00 reminds me of one of the first quests in Blade & Soul where a healer says one of his patients will be paralyzed for life because he doesn't have the medicine he needs and no one is available to help. But the medicine is obtained by running to the beach less than 200 feet away.

20:30 - This cutscene seems like they took the line timing from the Chinese version where the lines took less time to say. I guess the alternative would be to edit the cutscene to add more time for the characters to finish speaking but the translation team probably wasn't given that option.

Playing Japanese RPG's always gets me with the voice acting.... In school with my parents or even now with my wife, out of context they seem think I'm watching or playing something sexual. Then they ask why my character is making moaning noises swinging a sword 😭

Its clear the animation was timed for the original voice actors and they didnt go back with the dub to retime anything. Its the reason a lot of chinese games just dont get western dubbing because the time span for speech over the amount of information is RADICALLY different.

"Have you ever been so angry you just suddenly spoke Chinese?" What, you think I haven't seen Firefly?

This was great loved the entire thing and the overlap finale was funny. Have a good day as well

Not sure if it was intentional but the overlapping of your voice at the end was funny. :D

In the middle of the "cutscene that does everything wrong," my computer froze and made a constant high-pitched noise. It took me several seconds to realize that it wasn't just another problem with the cutscene.

Devs: "We made an mmorpg with no pay to win! You're welcome." Players: "Awesome! Does it have good storywriting?" Devs: "No... but lots of cutscenes!" Players: "Oh, ok, but is the voice acting decent?" Devs: "Oh god no." Players: "Hmm, how's the combat?" Devs: "You one-hit bosses." Players: "...and the quests?" Devs: "You'll get to fetch stuff, and it's only 10 feet away!"

The voice acting sounds like a bunch of teenagers LARPing.

As a person who has a ton of trouble with processing multiple conversations at once, this sounds painfully realistic to me

I feel like Gameforge will see this financial failure as affirmation that p2w is the only profitable model instead of realizing that this game failed because of poor execution. Plenty of people will pay loads for only cosmetics if the core game is actually good. Just look at Path of Exile. Edit: To be fair, PoE's stash tabs are debatably p2w.

If I were to guess, I'd say that the VO and the subtitles are different because two different teams were localising them with nobody cross-checking the result. This genuinely makes me wonder whether MMOs like this are a laundering scheme...

It's a shame how genuinely gorgeous this game is visually. One of the best looking MMOs I've ever seen when it comes to environments.

24:00 This is why I love your channel, I have almost played no MMOs in my life but your videos are hilarious and entertaining

This is the first game in your entire series that actually made me _angry_ during its cutscenes. I'm honestly kind of impressed that it managed to transcend simple mediocrity and low effort and instead create something so unexpectedly and genuinely irritating. I would have probably alt+F4'd the game midway through the cutscene at around 20:00 and immediately uninstalled it on steam, and then removed it from my library. What an absolute atrocity. Forcing someone to watch all these cutscenes should be classified as torture.

I had such high hopes, I love the Chinese fantasy setting and those games rarely get translated to English ... I was so disappointed. Feels like the game would've been much better if they skipped the English VA and used that money to do a better job at translating instead.

The Standard edition is currently free to play on Steam. If it was around $20 when it came out I would have given it a shot back then. But since it's free I don't have to worry about losing any money if I don't like it. I like games that are set in Imperial China, especially if they have fantasy elements woven into them. Like Swordsman Reborn and Jade Dynasty Reborn, those are fun to play as well as Jade Empire. I'm waiting for the price of The Wind Road to go down in price and for them to fix the English subtitles before I get that one.

Uhh... How does that first line not match the subtitles? Please explain. The audio in the clip you showed matched the caption exactly...

If I'm ever rich enough to buy Gameforge I am replacing every team leader, manager, etc then rebuilding all these games that deserved so much better.

In a moment of weakness in my life, I applied as QA tester for this game. Luckily, my salary expectations were apparently too high, so when they realised how much a professional tester costs, they changed the advertisement from "senior QA tester" to "internship". I'm sure that whoever they hired, they reported some of these bugs (they are impossible to miss), but GF simply didn't care to fix them. It's a pity when years of development are ruined by a very poor QA. This is not Cyberpunk 2077 or New World, but still, it could have probably been a better game.

How did you get rid of that bar above your health and soul force bar I want it gone

24:01 Well played good sir... Well played. In other news, omfg the multiple people dumping exposition at the same time shit would anger me soooo much. As far as getting so angry I speak Chinese, nope, but I know that in Firefly's universe that's a common thing.