It's all very familiar if you have played a modern Final Fantasy game, though some elements - such as splitting up the world and traversing between areas with your fairy mount - are a little old-school, but at least it cuts out any open world bloat. Sword and Fairy 7 gets the full Digital Foundry video tech review treatment. Far removed now from its origins, combat is all in real-time now with differing move sets and special attacks - and the ability to change characters on the fly to others in your party who specialise at different techniques. Personally, I love subtitles and prefer local audio to often inaccurate dubbing, but for a release with so many cutscenes and NPC interactions, I can understand how the sheer volume of reading may be too much for many.

Thankfully, Sword and Fairy 7 comes with English text out of the box, but even so, barriers of entry are still there to a degree: the game's menus and interface are translated - yet all the audio and signage in the game is in Chinese. So why didn't it receive the same kind of profile as, say, Ultima or Final Fantasy? The reasons are legion, but importantly, The Legend of Sword and Fairy was never officially released with an English translation - and I've only managed to sample it via a translation patch released many years later.

Hailed as a pioneering game for Chinese development, its tragic story, mazes and turn-based battles struck gold, selling many millions of copies. The story begins in 1995 when The Legend of Sword and Fairy was first released for MS-DOS, telling the tale of a luckless orphan in provincial China who sets off on an adventure to save his ailing aunt. Sword and Fairy has spawned many games and live action adaptations, and this latest series entry is a high quality production that, curiously, has received very little editorial coverage. It's a quality game and looking into it, I've unwittingly stumbled upon a sleeping giant of a games franchise.

The era of the high-end PC exclusive may well be a thing of the past, but every once in a while a game comes along that is rather special, that can't be played anywhere else and in the case of Sword and Fairy 7, by Softstar Technology in Beijing, we have an excellent role-playing game that piles on the high-end visual features, including ray tracing support - all courtesy of Unreal Engine 4.

Sword and Fairy Inn 2 for ios instal