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Yesterday marks the opening of the Conqueror server also known as Red Cliff’s close beta server. I managed to get myself in front of my trustee computer as earlier as the usual to experience becoming a pugilist in an ancient china world.

Upon clicking the Red Cliff icon that lies somewhere in the slum areas of my desktop, a magnificent scarlet patch launcher appeared before me. It is decorated with a CG illustration of a prominent 3 Kingdom warrior beside him lies a Chinese calligraphy that boastfully flaunts the word “??” (Chi Bi) loosely translated to Scarlet Wall or Red Cliff. Aside from the pleasing oriental eye candy that I stumbled upon, you will also hear an epic warlike themed background music that will definitely resurrects the crouching tiger and hidden dragon that dwells in your inner self. The patcher itself is a complete package for a Chinese themed game isn’t it? ­­­Okay pressing start.

I logged in inside the game and head straight to the character creation page and a familiar virtual realm welcomed me arms wide open. I have seen this before, I couldn’t be wrong this is a recycled version of the character creation screen from Jade Dynasty aka Zhu Xian. Same faces, Same Hairstyle but instead of choosing it by “browse” and “click” all you need to do this time is to choose the face or the hair from the thumbnails they provided. There is also a 4 body built selection available. So if ever you miss your character from Zhu Xian it is easily to create a clone of him in this game.

You will be asked to choose for the weapon of your choice so choose among those available weapons according to your game style. What disappoints me in the weapon selection area is the animation of your character upon choosing a weapon, it seems like your character is overdosed with polygons causing him to imitate a malfunctioning robot. The game will also ask for your origination where in you need to choose a town from the map they provided. Up to now I didn’t really get the significant about this option, probably for the role playing factor? So I choose Jiangnan a familiar place in my ear (a major setting in Jinyong’s trilogy). Regardless of what you choose as your origination; as your starting point you will still be sent straight to Taoyuan or Garden of Peaches.

After the creating my character and the screen loads I arrived at the Taoyuan, a part of me is kind of expecting to see a welcoming committee headed by the master of peach blossom island Huang Yaoshi and his sassy daughter Huang Rong plus his mute servants performing the macarena plus some street dance but I guess I should keep that expectation inside myself because:

• One this isn’t Peach Blossom Island this is just a Garden with a lot of peach tree.
• This isn’t the Condor Heroes world.

So what I have here is Monkey’s and a Gay (?) Old Man Saohua NPC with matching flower in his right head as a head dress, a purple ribbon in his robe and a broomstick standing and sweeping the petals that falls from the peach trees. Anyway his name is literally translated to Old Man Sweeping the Flowers? Sao is to broom/sweep while Hua is to flower? So Gay!!!

I’m not expecting something new upon stepping my foot in this virtual ancient china, as we all know it is a brainchild of Perfect World the same empire who brought us Zhu Xian and Perfect World (Wan Mei). If you played the said games before then you will not be lost in this game. Same Features, Same Controls and the User interface is slightly modified but it’s still the same! We’ll one of the thing I loved with the perfect world creation is the auto path option, A feature that will not let you spend thousands of years to find an NPC/Monster or a location because it will automatically make your character run into your specific target. Sounds lazy inst it? I also admire the Camera Mode option.

As an initial reaction what I like about this game is the scenery. It is so realistic and doesn’t even contain of what you called “too much fantasy elements”. It’s simple yet amazing. It’s like a twin of Zhu Xian without those fantasy elements! Another thing is the quest, the storyline, the dialogues, scripts they are talking about real people man, real events in short history! They are educating you with what had happened during that era. You will even meet some prominent three kingdoms characters inside the game such as the uncle of Liu Bei Liu Yuanqi and the popular commentator during that era Xu Shao etc.

I’m a bit disappointed on how my character attacks the enemy or maybe I am just a newbie and I yet to see everything.