Swords of Legends: Inside Gujian's Mythological Action RPG

If you've been tracking every action RPG announcement lately, there's a good chance Swords of Legends slipped past you. With so many games in the genre competing for attention, it's easy to see why. But once you dig into the latest gameplay footage and interviews, it's clear there's more going on here than a first glance suggests.

At Summer Game Fest, Swords of Legends got a fresh spotlight and was packed with new information. You can capture wandering spirits and call them into fights, use magical artifacts that go beyond simple attacks, and slowly unlock more than a dozen weapons, each bringing its own fighting style to the table.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions around the project. 

At its core, it's a premium, single-player action RPG, not a free-to-play title, built by Aurogon Shanghai. The game belongs to the long-running Gujian universe and continues the story threads found in earlier single-player entries in that series.

You might also recognize the name from the connected MMO, but this new release stands apart from that. According to the developers, you don't need any history with the earlier games to jump into this one, since every entry has its own self-contained story and cast, similar to how Final Fantasy handles each numbered release.

Development on Swords of Legends has been underway for a while. The team has said that early research and planning began in 2021, with full production picking up a few years later. Right now, it's set to land on PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S, and PC, though there's no release window yet. Given how far along things look, though, it wouldn't be surprising if news comes sooner rather than later.

Swords of Legends is not a Soulslike, and it's not a fully open-world game either. Instead, the studio describes the structure as "wide linear," meaning there's a clear main path running through the story, but the areas around that path are built to be explored, with side content tucked away for players who want to wander off course.

That phrasing might sound familiar if you followed Stellar Blade's build-up, since it used similar language to describe its own pacing.

If that comparison holds, you can expect a story-driven throughline with pockets of open space to poke around in, rather than an endless map. That approach is the right call, since not every RPG benefits from a massive open world, and a tighter structure often gives developers more room to craft focused encounters and a story that doesn't drag.

The world of Swords of Legends draws from classical Chinese literature, mythology, and folklore, and it's set in what's described as the primordial age, a time when humans, gods, and demons all share the same space. You play as someone pulled back into the mortal world by Yama, the ruler and judge of the underworld, and you're given the role of a Si Pan, essentially an enforcer who keeps order between the living and the dead.

Your job involves traveling between both realms, tracking down spirits who refuse to move on, and guiding them to where they belong. Some of the souls you defeat along the way can join you as companions, which ends up being one of the game's biggest hooks.

Visually, Swords of Legends is built in Unreal Engine 5, and it shows. Certain moments, like a glowing lotus pond scene shown in the trailer, look genuinely striking. Of course, plenty of games have looked great in pre-release footage only to fall short later, so how the finished product performs is still an open question.

Combat is the biggest talking point after the latest footage, and it's easy to see why.

The animations maintain a smooth, satisfying rhythm even amid more hectic boss encounters. Based on the UI shown in the trailer, landing hits and dodging successfully seems to build up a resource shown as notches in the corner of the screen, which then gets spent on stronger abilities.

The exact mechanics behind that system haven't been fully explained yet, but it looks built to reward players who stay aggressive and engaged rather than playing passively. From what's been shown, your combat toolkit includes standard weapon attacks, magical artifacts for more specialized moves, and the ability to call in a spirit companion for backup.

The developers have mentioned that different enemies come with their own strengths and weaknesses, so you'll need to mix all of these tools depending on the fight. There's also a broader trend right now of studios easing up on difficulty to make games more approachable, and this one seems to follow that pattern, aiming to let players of all skill levels enjoy it through exploration and flexible builds.

Hopefully that still leaves room for a real challenge, whether through the base difficulty or an optional harder mode. Weapon variety is another major piece of Swords of Legends. There are reportedly well over a dozen weapons planned, each with a distinct move set and combat style, and you'll unlock them gradually as you play, giving you new tools to experiment with over time.

In the trailer, the main character swaps between a sword and a heavier polearm mid-fight.

It's not totally clear yet how freely you can switch between equipped weapons outside of scripted moments. What has been confirmed is that your overall setup depends on both the weapon you're using and the specific skills you choose to pair with it. Then there are the artifacts, which add another layer to combat. Since your character can move between the world of the living and the dead, they're able to use items and abilities that regular people can't access.

One artifact shown in the newest trailer is a magical umbrella, first seen blocking an incoming attack in a pretty stylish way. But according to the developers, it's not just for defense. That same umbrella can also close the gap between you and an enemy, suggesting there's room to build strategies around how you use these artifacts rather than treating them as one-note tools.

On top of weapons and artifacts, you also get spirit companions to fight alongside you. The one featured most in the trailer is Oxhead, a guardian pulled from Chinese mythology. These summons aren't just for show either, since they attack, block incoming damage, and team up with you for flashy linked finishing moves.

At multiple points in the gameplay footage, Oxhead physically steps in front of the player to soak up a hit, which looks especially good during boss fights. Taken together, Swords of Legends is shaping up to be a genuinely strong entry in a genre that's currently packed with competition.

The combat feels smooth, the spirit system adds a layer most other games in this space don't have, and the whole package has more personality than a lot of similar titles right now.

That said, it would be exciting to see more Eastern studios branch out into entirely different genres, given how much talent is clearly behind projects like this. Something in the style of Assassin's Creed, a large-scale turn-based RPG, or a narrative-driven single-player game closer to The Last of Us would be worth seeing from a team like this.

Interestingly, Aurogon already has something like that in the works. It's currently called Lucky Day, and it's shaping up to be a cooperative ruins-exploration game where you and a group of friends essentially play as tomb raiders in the vein of Lara Croft or Nathan Drake.

The developers describe it as an adventure built around traditional Chinese folk customs, taboos, and the unwritten rules people are expected to follow when entering places like ancient ruins. The idea is to take the tension and superstition baked into Chinese folklore and turn it into actual gameplay systems, all while blasting the occasional monster in a way that feels straight out of Resident Evil.

What makes Lucky Day particularly interesting is that it's built as a full co-op experience, with you and your team exploring dark ruins using flashlights and torches, watching each other's backs while solving puzzles and dealing with whatever's lurking inside.

There's also a single-player option, where an AI companion steps in instead of a human squad. The overall vibe leans closer to Resident Evil 5, which is a formula a lot of people have wanted to see revisited. It's still very early in development and is being built in Unreal Engine 5 for PC and consoles, just like Swords of Legends, but even in its rough early footage, it already looks like a project worth keeping an eye on.