I still remember saving my breakfast money during my student days just to secretly spend some time playing 'Zhu Xian' or 'Fantasy Westward Journey' at the internet café. Back then, in the world of martial arts games, you would run off your legs across a map, fight a wild monster for half the night, hear your friends shouting 'heal, heal' over voice chat, and feel upset for a week if your equipment dropped... That kind of slowly cultivated sense of accomplishment seems really hard to find in today's mobile games.
Recently, a friend insisted on getting me to play 'Qing Yun Zhuan', saying it was the 'top national xianxia game'. When I heard the name, I first raised an eyebrow in my heart—are mobile games nowadays really this bold with their names? But since it was installed, I still opened it with the mindset of 'let's see what tricks it has up its sleeve'.
The graphics are indeed impeccable. With the freedom of a 3D perspective, skills unleash full-screen explosions, and the special effects seem like they come without cost—it's full of 'whoosh whoosh whoosh' and 'boom boom boom' across the screen. Compared to the pixel-level character designs back in the day, it feels like a completely different world. I remember playing 2D side-scrollers in internet cafes; when you cast a skill, at most the screen would shake a little. There was nothing as dazzlingly flashy as the current level of light pollution. Strangely, while I stare at the sword arcs and light trails flying across the sky, my mind involuntarily recalls the tense moments of PKing with others in outdoor maps back then, positioning, maneuvering, and calculating skill cooldowns. Now in 'The Legend of Qingyun', you have one-click auto-battle, auto-pathfinding, and auto-fighting, which does free up your hands, but that hands-on, step-by-step 'xian cultivation journey' seems to be gently passed over by the automatic combat.
Let's talk about this 'Sixfold Career Fantasy Job Change' and 'Millennium Giant Kun'… wow, back when I played games in my youth, changing jobs was a huge event. You had to complete a long series of quests and defeat a super difficult boss. After the job change, you really felt like you became a 'Sword Immortal' or 'Demon Lord,' and even walking gave off a heroic aura. Now? Just click a button, and you can change your job freely, with outfits changing endlessly and wings so majestic they cover half the screen. And that 'capturing the Giant Kun'… I stared at the glowing giant beast on the screen, but in my mind, I was thinking about back in the day in 'Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire,' furiously pressing the direction keys in the grass, trying to encounter a rare Pokémon. The obsession was all about catching that rare creature. Nowadays, 'capturing' feels more like popping up a window to draw a card; if you get it, it's a surprise, if not, just spend a bit more money… sigh, I shouldn't say more, don't want to seem like I'm bashing this game.
Actually, I'm not saying that "Qingyun Legend" is bad — its visuals, systems, and social features are indeed much more refined than the 'mosaic' games we had back then. Couple cultivation, gang gatherings, so many features they make your head spin. But this is precisely what makes the modern remake different from the classic old games: back then, we played for 'adventure,' for unknown exploration, for clumsy but sincere teamwork; now we play for 'management,' for stacking numbers, for faster-paced growth beneath a flashy exterior.
It's like when I was a kid eating spicy sticks, one for a dime, sharing bites with the classmate next to me, feeling that it was the best delicacy in the world. Now, supermarkets are full of expensive snacks, and the taste may be more refined, but I can no longer taste the anticipation of that moment when the school bell rang. In 'Legend of Qingyun,' I can kill monsters with one click, ride divine pets, and wear the flashiest outfits, yet I always feel like something is missing. What is missing? Probably that silly joy in youth, when leveling up in a game could make you happy for half a day.
However, that said, even if we go back and replay those old games now, we can't find the feeling we had back then. Perhaps what we miss is not the game itself, but the version of ourselves at that time—patient, passionate, willing to grind all night for a 'high-level gem.' So occasionally playing 'Qingyun Legend,' or revisiting an automated martial arts game on the phone, is actually quite nice—at least it reminds me that I too was once a young person dreaming of being a hero in a martial arts world. May every old player occasionally find a trace of their own youth in today's colorful mobile games. 😌
(Alright, enough talk. I'm going to see how the 'couples cultivation' works in this game... maybe I can even rekindle some of the old excitement from back then 😏)