The Last Soldier of the Ming Dynasty

My first few minutes with The Last Soldier of the Ming Dynasty felt like finding a handmade zine tucked between glossy magazines - the intentions are sincere, the craft is uneven, and the whole thing carries a kind of earnest stubbornness I find hard to dismiss. Circuit_Art's debut drops you onto Fuling Island as Feng Haiping, a Qi army soldier shipwrecked in Wokou pirate territory with nothing but a sword and the unenviable task of dismantling five pirate warlords on his own. It is a focused, linear premise, and the game is better for keeping its scope honest. The combat is where this one earns its keep - and where the conversation gets interesting. The system is built around three basic attack types: stab, cleave, and sweep. That trio isn't just offensive; it defines your defense too. Each enemy telegraphs which of those three moves they're launching, and your job is to parry with the matching input at the right moment to break their stamina and open a counterattack window. Early enemies are forgiving enough to let you learn the rhythm, while later encounters layer in speed and combo complexity that genuinely tests how well you've absorbed the language of the fights. Community players who stuck with it compared the feel to Sekiro's parry loop - high praise for a first-time studio - and several noted the hit detection holds up better than the rest of the package might suggest. A ranged option exists too: bows and a musket round out the historically-sourced weapon roster, alongside upgradeable armor and skills unlocked through a "Dream" training space at checkpoints. Here is the honest accounting, though. The localization is a genuine obstacle. Sections of the UI and menu screens remain in Chinese even on an English install, and some in-game text mid-scene slips back to Chinese without warning. The camera is entirely manual with no lock-on, which punishes you most during the technical boss encounters where you most need spatial clarity. Environmental design is sparse and the character models carry the exaggerated proportions of classical Chinese ink paintings - big torsos, short legs - which is an intentional artistic choice but takes adjusting to. Performance stutters have been reported, and some ability bugs required full restarts to resolve. These are first-game problems, not malice, but they are real friction. The art direction, though, deserves its own paragraph because it is genuinely distinctive. The world is rendered in a muted ink-wash palette, with heavy calligraphic linework across landscapes, menus, and world map alike. Splashes of colour erupt during heavy attacks and special combos, which gives the fighting a ceremonial weight. It is the kind of visual signature that a bigger studio might have sanded away for broader palatability, and I'm glad it survived intact. Two DLCs have since expanded the game with new maps, bosses, weapons, costumes, and a roguelike mode - so the developers have continued investing in the world past launch, which matters when evaluating a rough debut. This is not a game for everyone, and it knows it. If you need a polished UI, crisp English throughout, and a camera that behaves, this will frustrate you quickly. But if you have patience for a scrappy first effort with a genuinely original visual identity and a parry-based combat loop that punishes sloppiness and rewards attention, there is something real here. The Ming Dynasty deserves at least a scouting report.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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