A new game that still won't do open world? Mengzhan Jianzhihai brings the classic SRPG to the present day

Author / SD

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On the first day of the first test of Langrisser: Sea of Swords, the moment I opened the game, I was struck by its art.

Thick-painted characters, a classical fantasy palette, and the strings of the login screen reminded me of the JRPGs of the 1990s and early 2000s. Players whose eyes have been "spoiled" by cel-shaded flat art or Korean-style 3D art may find themselves even fonder of this classic painting style.

As the team's new work, Langrisser: Sea of Swords continues the Langrisser IP, and retains hand-drawn 2D art, stage-based battles, and JRPG-style storytelling. Rather than blindly chasing the currently popular open world, the developers added concepts like dual commanders and mixed units into the classic framework, reworking a language of game design players already know with today's production capabilities.

It seems we players have not been forgotten by the times after all.

Over the past few years, anime-style games have increasingly relied on striking 3D characters, three-dimensional scene construction, and open-world map design. Players have also gradually come to see box-garden structures, fixed camera angles, and a lack of exploration as signs of insufficient production scale. Product specs keep rising, yet aesthetics and controls grow ever more alike. For some players who are used to 2D portraits, stage-based progression, and turn-based combat, playing these new anime-style games means re-adapting to new cameras and controls.

At the same time, designs like fully 2D character portraits, character animations, stage-based progression, and troop deployment have gradually faded from new products. Some players who cannot adapt to 3D can only go back to their old games; even if the graphics and systems are outdated, the familiar characters, stages, and music can still keep them quietly playing for hours. To be honest, every so often I too open an old game, play a few stages, or listen through its soundtrack, savoring a kind of fun that was engrossing even without an open world.

Langrisser: Sea of Swords was developed by BlackJack Studio under Zlong Games. As a top Chinese SRPG team that previously made the Langrisser mobile game, Tiandi Jie: Youcheng Zailin, and Gang Lan, it has been nearly 8 years since their first product launched. By industry trends, the next step really ought to have been a "3D SRPG open world." Surprisingly, this new IP entry still chose hand-drawn 2D and a classic JRPG framework.

For me, this choice feels long overdue. The first test of Langrisser: Sea of Swords proves, at least to the outside world, that classic game design language can still be used to develop a new title aimed at the present day.

The art of Langrisser: Sea of Swords certainly is not the strongest of this year, but it displays considerable skill. Semi-realistic thick painting, JRPG-style European characters, armor, classical fantasy — each of these elements alone is common, yet they are rarely put together in commercial blockbusters. Even as a 2026 game, Langrisser: Sea of Swords did not follow the trendy flat-color art style, nor the somewhat fatiguing pixel-art style, nor did it turn all characters into 3D models. In story scenes and battles, characters switch to seven-heads-tall forms, letting the figures and temperament of the portraits be expressed through classic 2D animation performances.

Beneath the classic art style, the texture of characters' skin, the sheen of armor, and the folds of fabric — aided by today's device performance and 2D animation techniques — showcase a wealth of motion that in old games had to be imagined. After the trailer was released, the player community had no shortage of voices comparing it to Unicorn Overlord, but the character designs, temperament, and visual presentation of Langrisser: Sea of Swords still belong to the Langrisser IP. The classic characters, redesigned, remain instantly recognizable through their hairstyles, silhouettes of their outfits, and class features.

For an SRPG, the combat often determines longevity. Players must judge unit counters, calculate positions, and arrange skills, while the design of main and secondary commanders and mixed units further expands team compositions, and terrain and elevation differences on the map also change the solutions.

Moreover, the various elements on the battlefield map also affect how each encounter is solved. Judging from concentrated community feedback, Chapter 2 alone has already stumped a batch of players. The strategic depth of an SRPG shows in the fact that repeated attempts alone don't guarantee a pass: beyond developing your pieces, you need to adjust your team composition, unit types, and positioning to find the right solution.

Only when the stages offer real resistance do team development and tactical choices gain value. That satisfaction of clearing a stage after repeated deliberation may seem a bit old-fashioned today, but it is precisely why SRPG players were willing to invest time in the first place.

The first innovation in strategy is the dual-commander system, where a single unit consists of a main commander and a secondary commander. The main commander controls movement, range, a unique talent, and the whole squad's life or death; the secondary commander covers the main commander's weaknesses, but has fewer soldiers and more limited skills. Without changing the SRPG core logic of "calculating positions and counters," this opens up the ceiling of team building.

Secondly, commanders' class system now has dedicated class lines — for example, the effect of the exclusive class "Runaway Princess" is increased damage when there are no allied units nearby, plus a movement bonus. This gives a hero multiple developable class paths; combined with complete independent talents, exclusive skills, and main-commander traits, hero building is stretched from a single class-change into multiple mutually exclusive independent builds.

These gameplay experiments bring richer depth across team building, character development, and late-game exploration.

Beyond its strategic innovations, whether the dual-commander and class-line systems will lead to heavier character development has become one of the questions of the first test. In addition, there are issues like Chapter 2's difficulty rising rather quickly, and some stuttering in certain scenes and animations.

But judging from this first test, I am actually willing to give it a bit more confidence. The art may be what first draws players in, but what truly keeps people playing is no longer limited to the art style itself: the basic combat delivers the fun of strategic interplay, while the dual commanders and class lines prop up the strategic space — showing that the developers are seriously building a gameplay skeleton capable of producing content sustainably. As long as they continue filling in content along this skeleton and keeping the development burden in check, Langrisser: Sea of Swords has a chance to turn first-glance novelty into a real reason for players to stay.

The 2026 January–June China Gaming Industry Report shows that the domestic gaming user base has reached 684 million, up 0.82% year over year. New user growth has already slowed to a crawl, and what developers must compete for is increasingly mature players with settled preferences. Now, the core player bases of top games form a clear断层 — an overwhelming advantage in marketing that makes it harder and harder for new games of the same genre to break in.

In a market with limited new users, a new product can hardly gain attention just by raising graphics specs and map size. For a team like BlackJack that has long developed strategy RPGs, continuing to leverage 2D presentation, stage design, and accumulated strategic depth may fit their own experience better than chasing the open-world route. Langrisser: Sea of Swords represents a choice suited to a specific team and audience. The 2D space, once seen as conservative, short on money, people, and technology, holds more latent opportunities when polished by a mature production line.

Of course, adaptive innovation on classic gameplay has no ready-made answer. Change too little, and players will say it's treading water; change too much, and the parts that truly attracted people may vanish along with it. The difficulty for Langrisser: Sea of Swords lies in that the developers must know both what to add and what must not be touched.

From the first-test feedback, players' expectations for a new Langrisser IP title are not complicated, and Langrisser: Sea of Swords is not merely making the SRPG more modern. It carries the story and exploration from the overworld all the way into battles. Players can freely walk between forests, towns, and caves; side quests and puzzles are scattered across the map, and field encounters and story progression unfold naturally along the journey. A place players just walked through may turn into a battlefield the moment they turn around. The SRPG remains Langrisser's most distinctive gameplay, but the reasons to stay in Langrisser: Sea of Swords now go beyond just playing out one more battle.

IP fans can recognize the "Langrisser" elements in it, while newcomers to the IP also have the chance to become loyal players through the adventure of a classic JRPG.

If new games are willing to come back and keep innovating on classic content in a language players understand, then this seemingly homogenized genre may see more possibilities for a breakthrough.

Over these days of the first test, my biggest takeaway has been this: players don't necessarily need to change themselves to follow every trend. Every now and then, there should be a new game that walks back and gives them a hug.