Moonlight Blade Game Review

Moonlight Blade is one of the very few Wuxia themed MMORPGs left. It is a beautiful, Asian-themed Wuxia inspired free to play MMORPG that has yet to launch in the West, but has a confirmed Western release date. Featuring a mixture between action combat and tab-target, along with some of the most beautiful flying visuals, Moonlight Blade is sure to please any Wuxia enthusiast.

Moonlight Blade is a wuxia themed free to play MMORPG that has a confirmed Western release date set for possibly 2019.

It is one of the most breathtaking, gorgeous MMORPGs to come out of China to date, and has some of the most engaging story and combat in a Chinese MMORPG.

Moonlight Blade is a free to play Wuxia themed MMORPG set in a fantasy version of ancient China.
Although not officially released in North America or Europe as of 2018, Tencent did go ahead and formally confirm a Western release is slated for 2018, possibly 2019.
No further information has since been given on an exact release date other than they are “working on it” and it will be “coming soon”.

With that in mind, I want to do a review of what I think of Moonlight Blade in 2018, whether I believe it’ll be worth playing going into 2019, and what my hopes are upon its inevitable release sometime in the future.
Do note that we have played Moonlight Blade on the official Chinese servers, so my experiences thus far are based off of a game that has 0 English translation whatsoever.

One thing that really, really entices me about MMOs is their character creation.
You can’t say you don’t spend hours trying to craft the perfect character. That’d be a lie. I spend a while, granted, but my wife.. don’t even get me started on her. She gets ready to go out faster than she creates a character, and man..
Now the character models in Moonlight Blade are absolutely gorgeous, and the game gives you a lot of options to choose between when crafting your masterpiece.
You’re given quite a large selection of hairstyles to choose between, and a character creator tool similar to Black Desert.
You have the ability to grab each piece of your characters face and drag it around until you’re comfortable with what you’ve done.
However, you don’t have the ability to craft the body the same way. Character creation only allows the customization of your characters face, not the entire body.
Which is fine – trust me, you can do so much with your characters’ face that it’s probably one of my favorite facial customizers in an MMO outside of Black Desert.

Gameplay in Moonlight Blade is very high quality.
Movement in the game is very fluid, skill animations are very high quality but not very flashy due to the game being martial arts themed as opposed to fantasy.
I’m a sucker for flashy animation though – so thankfully, flight – which is a feature in Moonlight Blade – is quite ostentatious.
Mounts are high quality and they move about as well as in any other MMO.
Fortunately, and unfortunately, Moonlight Blade offers an auto-pathing system, similar to that in Perfect World of more recently, Revelation Online.
Now, fortunately for us, that made it possible to find what we needed to do while questing.
Unfortunately, that means you can in essence just click where you need to go, AFK, then come back once you make it there.
This is a poor model to take as it diminishes any need to explore or go off the beaten path because – honestly – you don’t need to.
Yes, I know, you don’t have to auto-path if you don’t want to, but be honest here with me.. when was the last time a game offered a quality of life improvement to your gameplay that you didn’t take advantage of? Yeah. Same here.

Combat is a strange beast to tackle.
You have the ability to make it action combat or semi tab-target combat.
The action combat still locks on to a specific target, but you’re not required to be within attacking range like tab-target games. So while technically action combat, it’s unusual to still require a target.
Tab-target mode though allows you to fight like you would in a more traditional combat style, while giving you access to large AoEs that hit multiple targets at once, making it semi-action oriented.
All in all, the combat is definitely strange, as it’s neither action combat nor is it tab-target. Opting to offer the option for either, and not allowing either in its true form is an.. interesting route to take.

I will preface this with a warning that I may very well butcher the pronunciation of these class names.
They are not basic sounding classes like “Warrior” or “Priest”, so I apologize in advance.
Now, there are a large variety of classes in Moonlight Blade to choose from. You have the Zhenwu, Taibai, Tangmen, Begger Sect, Shenwei, Tianxiang, Shendao, and finally, the Wudu.
Each of them offer a vastly different playstyle than the other; something I often find lacking between classes in MMOs.
I can’t stress enough how irrirating it is seeing something like “Warrior, Berserker, Guardian, Paladin, Lancer” all essentially being the same damn thing, minus their weapon of choice.

Unfortunately, even though I’m part Chinese, I understand literally nothing of it.
I can speak like.. two words in Chinese, that’s it. Don’t get me started on attempting to read it though. That shit looks some kinda alien hieroglyphic to me.
But, the game is very story-heavy. Every zone I went to, every hub I went to, every town or city I went to had some backstory to it and that is minus the main scenario.
The main scenario is the main driving force behind everything you do in the game. There are so, so many important NPCs involved in your story that it became a little daunting just attempting to keep up with who was good, bad, or even if I’d seen them before.
Which isn’t a bad thing.
I love story in my games, and the fact that there is so much in this game gives me high expectations for its Western release.
Unfortunately, though.. with how often translations of Eastern MMORPGs turn out well, my expectations for even a semi-comprehensible story is low.

Graphically, Moonlight Blade looks beautiful.
It isn’t a fantasy themed MMORPG but that doesn’t mean the world the game is set in is anything other than gorgeous.
From the huge forests, to the large valleys, to the giant mountains you get to scale and fly over..
I haven’t ever seen scenery this expansive nor breathtaking in an MMO before.
Then the character models, the outfits your character progresses through.. everything is so detailed, right down to the individual strands of material.
Outside of Black Desert Online, I would dare say that there isn’t an MMORPG at this point in time capable of matching Moonlight Blade, graphically.

This is going to be difficult to guage.
See, the Chinese version of the game has multiple servers and I swear you can’t go two feet without seeing two hundred other people all questing with you.
If Western MMORPGs had even a fraction of Moonlight Blade’s population in their games then I don’t think we’d see nearly as many shutdowns as we have over the years.
Experiencing a Chinese MMORPG has definitely been an experience in terms of how populated each of their zones are.

Moonlight Blade has the largest game-world I’ve probably ever seen.
It is huge. Absolutely, insanely huge. The fact that when I mounted up to get from one quest hub to another it actually took minutes – and how little over the map I moved, was just ridiculous.
How you travel the world is comparable to Revelation Online. Mounted, flying. Regardless of the mode of travel, the world is large, open and filled with content.
I honestly don’t see the English team finding this an easy task to translate completely.

With such a large world to explore, you’re no doubt wondering about all the varied options you have for PvE activities, am I right?
Dungeons – Traditional dungeons that you group together for.
Raids – Traditional raids that require you form a larger party and tackle much more difficult encounters.
Questing – Like most MMORPGs, Moonlight Blade offers both the main scenario and side quests to tackle. The main scenario is quite expansive, and there are side quests seemingly around every corner.
And.. outside of that I honestly cannot say what will or will not make it through in the official English release of Moonlight Blade. But as of right now, these are at least the PvE activities that are confirmed.

PvP in Moonlight Blade functions similarly to World of Warcraft. Like the Horde and Alliance in WoW, Moonlight Blade has 4 distinct factions each with their own differing storylines.
Like in Blade and Soul, you can only join a guild of the same faction. So keep that in mind when choosing.
There are two separate modes to participate in: Instanced PvP like arena matches between a small group of people, and Open World PvP.
So if you’re a fan of exclusively instanced-based PvP, I assure you that you’re going to get ganked in the open world. You find those ass-hats everywhere and this will be no different. Especially when three other factions are capable of killing you.

The Chinese version of Moonlight Blade is an absolute blast. It is ridiculous fun, but being limited in what you can do based off of your inability to understand anything going on makes it difficult to enjoy anything but exploring or fighting.
So, I recommend instead opting to either wait for someone to offer an English translation, or instead wait until the official release.
I know I’ll be there at launch, as will Wiggy and my wife both!

Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit
Processor: Pentium4 2.0Ghz or similar
Graphics Card: GGeForce 6600 or above
Ram: 2 GB

Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit
Processor: Core E8400 3.0Ghz or above
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800GT or above
Ram: 4 GB