Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain is a Taiwanese role-playing game for DOS, released in 1996. It draws on the classic novel Legend of the Swordsmen of the Mountains of Shu, the same source that inspired the famous Hong Kong film, and belongs to the xianxia tradition of flying swords, Taoist magic and immortal hermits.

The game appeared in Chinese only and was never localised, so outside Chinese-language markets it remains almost entirely unknown. That is precisely what makes it worth a look: it shows mid-1990s Taiwanese studios mining their own literary canon at a time when most of the world's RPG makers were still reworking Western fantasy.

You can run Zu directly in your browser here on OldGame.cz.