Water Margin - The Tale of Clouds and Wind

So this started off as an unlicensed Mega Drive/Genesis game sold only in Taiwan, using a bunch of stolen assets (including, amazingly enough, music from Final Fantasy VI.) A few years back it got picked up by Piko, which localized it and replaced the stolen assets with legal versions, and here we are. In short, it's your basic GoldenAxe/Knights of the Round clone, maybe a little jankier, but still quite playable. But of course there's technical issues, right? As it turns out it's literally just Mednafen running a ROM. It's a decent game, but a lot of the technical issues people are complaining about can be solved by stripping the ROM and throwing it into an emulator that doesn't suck, unlike whatever jank-ass copy of Mednafen the game ships with. Go into the game folder, then the 'res' subfolder, and look for a file named "game" -- no extension. Slap a .md extension on it and load it up in Retroarch or whatever and you're good to go! And yes, you can move diagonally if you do this.

In a nutshell. It's basically Chinese Golden Axe.

This is a decent beat 'em up game, but with one horrible problem, no diagonal movement, fix this game. I know the game should move diagonally. I should give it a thumbs down for that, there's no excuse

This game is a not so good clone of the classic Golden Axe series.. but like less better pizza there is no such thing as bad pizza...

It's as generic as beat em ups get, which doesn't make it bad by itself. But it's also horrendously long, repetitive, and the enemies have ridiculous amounts of health, even when you play as the strongest character. There's a lot else that's wrong or just plain baffling, like the disappearing pick-ups and the overwhelming surplus of continues, but I just finished it and I'm very tired.

does not go diagonally, I do not recommend.

I love classic games (this is a Sega Genesis game) and beat 'em ups, and I have played a lot of them. This has been on my radar for a while, and I finally decided to pick it up. The game isn't Streets of Rage, Castle Crashers or TMNT 2: The Arcade Game, but It plays nicely and has that beat 'em up feel. It's pretty close to Golden Axe gameplay-wise, especially the magic system. Health and other pick-ups only require being walked over and don't disappear very fast, so you can focus on the action much easier than a lot of other games in the genre. The game has 3 save slots, so you don't have to play it through in one sitting. Most importantly, it is a blast to play! Something to keep in mind though, the button mapping emulation for controllers is a bit off. I'd recommend using a third party application like JoyToKey to do this instead. As another review mentioned, diagonal movement is a bit broken. Interesting fact, the game's namesake is a Chinese 14th century novel. So if you want ...

The game is similar to Knights of the Round and has a credits system for continues. I played multiple chapters and there are no game stopping boss fights. I recommend the game to anyone who likes the side-scrolling 90s arcade style format. The publisher should find more of these lost 90s games to release.

Game itself: A great, Chinese version of Golden Axe. Piko Version: Horrible emulation that doesn't even let you move diagonally. Seriously. Unfortunately the emulation ruined this game. Find the "game" file in your steam folder, add .md to it, and load it up in a decent emulator.

It is good. It feels a lot like a Golden Axe game taking place in an Ancient China story. I would recommend this to fans of Golden Axe. I finished the levels as is, without encountering any issue whatsoever, and without having to resort to using a third party tool or emulator.