I tried Sword and Fairy 7 at half-off ($18 with DLC) figuring “could this be an interesting snippet of a branch of gaming that didn’t quite resonate with the West” – we all know the JRPGs, German Industrial Sim Games, and Korean Grindfest MMOs so I wanted to see what 1.4 billion people were playing.

Two or so hours in, the game itself has some frustrating control aspects (if you enter an “indoors” scene you slow your walk to a crawl, and the maps are often surprisingly narrow), but the combat is very fluid and the graphics quite pretty.

However, it seems like compatibility is a mess. You can’t tell it “fullscreen at a different resolution than desktop”, and at 4K with all the pretty stuff on, it does pretty intensely tax a 6900XT (I saw the hotspot temperature top 100C). So I tried it under Linux and it seemed to run cooler (since I use 1440p there as “real” desktop resolution instead of 150% scaling) but there’s some weird glitch on the cutscenes where it shows a literal TV-style test pattern instead of a cutscene.