Water Margin - The Tale of Clouds and Wind

So this started off as an unlicensed Mega Drive/Genesis game sold only in Taiwan, using a bunch of stolen assets (including, amazingly enough, music from Final Fantasy VI.) A few years back it got picked up by Piko, which localized it and replaced the stolen assets with legal versions, and here we are. In short, it's your basic GoldenAxe/Knights of the Round clone, maybe a little jankier, but still quite playable. But of course there's technical issues, right? As it turns out it's literally just Mednafen running a ROM. It's a decent game, but a lot of the technical issues people are complaining about can be solved by stripping the ROM and throwing it into an emulator that doesn't suck, unlike whatever jank-ass copy of Mednafen the game ships with. Go into the game folder, then the 'res' subfolder, and look for a file named "game" -- no extension. Slap a .md extension on it and load it up in Retroarch or whatever and you're good to go! And yes, you can move diagonally if you do this.

It's as generic as beat em ups get, which doesn't make it bad by itself. But it's also horrendously long, repetitive, and the enemies have ridiculous amounts of health, even when you play as the strongest character. There's a lot else that's wrong or just plain baffling, like the disappearing pick-ups and the overwhelming surplus of continues, but I just finished it and I'm very tired.

Game itself: A great, Chinese version of Golden Axe. Piko Version: Horrible emulation that doesn't even let you move diagonally. Seriously. Unfortunately the emulation ruined this game. Find the "game" file in your steam folder, add .md to it, and load it up in a decent emulator.

It is good. It feels a lot like a Golden Axe game taking place in an Ancient China story. I would recommend this to fans of Golden Axe. I finished the levels as is, without encountering any issue whatsoever, and without having to resort to using a third party tool or emulator.

6/10

a game than seems inspired by golden axe and knights of the around with chinese culture on it i like that is neat and the gameplay is pretty solid this is a good game