it was crazy. f2p, p2w, buggy as shit, and the localization effort was a crime. broken quests all over. it was free though and ran on my garbage laptop, and for whatever reason the pvp allowed RPK everywhere, including in town. knock out or kill too many people in a short time, and your infamy skyrockets sending the city guards after you and other players. if it's high enough, when you are knocked out you go to jail for x hours. if it's REALLY high you are on death row for an IRL day, to be executed at dawn the next morning. then your character is nerfed HARD for like 12-24 hours to where anybody could kick your ass under any circumstances.

i was completely charmed by its art style, what lore i could understand, the strange titles one could earn, the "flying" techniques like learning to run up walls, run on water, double/triple jump, (e.g. crouching tiger) and the way that all the bugs created this kind of bizarre meta lore. you could learn about some ancient, hidden sect with a legendary fighting style and the game would give you a location or a quest, but would it actually go anywhere? or would look through your maps, journey deep into an empty forest, avoiding crazy hard mobs and navigating mazes to end up at a broken quest chain or a riddle suddenly requiring deep, poetic knowledge of ideograms. would you know the difference between an broken puzzle or just one you don't understand? the wikis were bare and useless. it felt strangely realistic, like could you learn this martial art or was it a myth, dead and gone?

i also really liked the way one "leveled". your power "level" was in a tooltip with your name, but it wasn't a number. it was some translated term "weak in body and mind" "martial intuition" "peerless" there were dozens of them. inscrutable until you've earned them yourself, and they didn't always tell the whole story because you could slow your leveling while raising up other stats and be seen as feeble but be far more powerful than you appear by opening up meridians and training in different techniques.

i joined the "evil" royal guard school (apparently based on the Ming-era secret police, RP'd as chaotic evil, tried make enemies everywhere i went through explosive violence and fleeing/hiding. i learned as many cheap moves as i could figure out (the chain + claw weapon for ranged DPS and stuns) and had an IRL friend with the same motives who learned poison needles. we trained by dueling against each other trying to find the most absurd combos and gank move sets and sequences to unload and get the drop on groups of 1-4 to take them out and run away. found loads of weird little structures to flee in the empty wilderness to or hide in the dark corners of the city in my grubby clothes (you could overlay decent gear to make it look like drab NPC gear), looking weak but also like an peasant or tradesman, as most players wore these brightly colored and fine silk clothes and glowing weapons, displaying their most prestigious titles. we used stuff like "Novice Chef" or " Farmer". our haunt was the north gate of Chengdu and we learned all sorts of little hiding spots on roofs, in little buildings, walls and towers to watch the comings/goings and remain unseen or at least unnoticed until we'd ambush some great, noble warrior, emote our disrespect on them, and vanish like a couple of farts in the wind.

i was jailed probably +50 times and was executed probably 4-5 times. as i learned the infamy mechanic, i tried to skirt the line for killings as close as i could and let my infamy fade before crossing the line where infamy stopped decaying and arrest/execution became inevitable, but that was hard to do as enemies accumulated and kept coming to exact revenge. there is nothing so thrilling as fleeing from justice. i also used to get hilarious messages in game from people absolutely appalled at my tactics and disregard for honor.

that game was so funny, deep/complex, and weird. i haven't ever played anything like it, before or since.