>>7163I was working on DingNing's OUROBOROS, but I abandoned it. I'll write some of my thoughts about it here:
You play as a girl Shi/Xi/夕 who goes to visit a hospitalized schoolmate in the place of your friend who turns out to be strangely similar to you. Shortly afterward, monsters begin appearing and attacking people.
The modern urban setting + monsters appearing everywhere + military lock-downs give it hard MegTen vibes.
The girl Xi/汐 who emerges from the sea appears to be a recurring element in DingNing's games, and is obviously taken up in Xiyan. Other themes are confused identity, yuri, and falling into the ocean.
There's also long infodumps about traditional Chinese folk religion which kind of remind me of the "evolution of animals" or "famine" sections in Xiyan.
Later on the story appears to focus on a millennial sacrifice which shifts the center of the world from the West back to the East, but I didn't get that far.
Gameplay is very traditional RPG. There's generally a story segment, a dungeon full of random encounters, and then a boss.
I found it pretty boring, but I'm not really into RPGs atm.
Difficulty is fairly high:
High encounter rate.
Hard battles.
Progress often depends on talking to one random NPC in one random city to set the necessary progression flag.
What finally ended my playthrough was the teleporter mazes.
A typical design is each area in a dungeon has a bunch of doors that teleport you at random to one of four places.
So there's one door that has a 1/4 chance of sending you to the next area. Everything else bounces you around the area or sends you back to a previous area.
At about the third of these teleporter mazes I finally bounced off.
Realistically, any translation would need to come with a guide. Even with the bilibili playthrough, I had to have the game open in the editor to find the correct teleporter.
Overall, somewhat interesting setting, but samey RPG gameplay and high difficulty.
It's not comparable to Xiyan or Angel Huayin.
