If you’re into classic Wuxia martial arts romance fiction and you also enjoy MMOs, Moonlight Blade Online seems to be the perfect marriage between the two. Not only does it go for classic Chinese martial arts fantasy themes, but it combines that concept with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s soulful flying thematics.
In fact, the flying is one of the key elements of Moonlight Blade Online, but it isn’t typical flying found in most other MMOs or adventure games. The idea is to utilize combination skills to string together and perform aerial ballet maneuvers. This allows you to travel quickly in the air from one destination to the next. It may sound silly, but when you see it in practice it actually looks really awesome, especially combined with the traditional Chinese orchestra playing in the background.
You can check out some gameplay footage below from this year’s G-Star 2016 event, where one of the classes named Tianxiang, undergoes some testing by YouTuber MMOJackX57.
At around the two minute mark we get to see the flying in play… it looks gorgeous. Tencent and Aurora made sure that Moonlight Blade Online has a definitively distinct visual presence to really exploit the ability to fly around at great heights.
The game uses non-targeting combat, so gamers familiar with hack-and-slash style combat will be right at home.
This is actually a cool looking, visually enrapturing MMO. They seem to be going for a relaxed zen vibe, so it has more of a romance novel art-style to it as opposed to the more gritty depictions used for other hack-and-slash RPGs and MMOs that have come out or are due to release soon. The warm saturation and moderate contrast attempts to convey what almost looks like a watercolor palette.
Tencent’s title is testing over in South Korea, but the client can be downloaded from over on the official website. You’ll need about 14.3GB free to play Moonlight Blade Online. There’s no due date on whether or not this game will arrive Westward, but it’s an interesting looking MMO with a cool flying concept, similar to Snail Games’ Age of Wushu.