Jiangnan: Life in Water Towns
A city simulation mobile game set in the Ming Dynasty, with meticulous architectural research and delicate art style. Though exceptionally successful as a small workshop product, collection element design and commercialization model have issues.
Art Appreciation
Rating Breakdown
Deductions
As more and more gameplay gets added, the game is trending toward grind and losing its original casual nature. Meanwhile "city building," its core selling point, has actually grown weaker as more minigames and exploration stories roll out.
There's a long dry spell before each new city opens, and as the exploration stories get longer and longer, the late game becomes fairly repetitive.
Special residents give no decisive help in the game and are pretty much just "decorative"; their collection value doesn't match their usefulness.
Highlights
Every new city comes with a genuinely creative new mechanic, continually bringing freshness to the game.
It offers a novel angle, building "Ming Dynasty cities," and stands out among city simulation games.
The delicate art style and meticulous architectural research make it highly immersive, letting you truly feel the charm of a Ming Dynasty city.
Deductions
The global and Chinese servers differ in content, and characters being pulled for policy reasons hurts the game's completeness.
Highlights
It runs stably as a mobile game, with no notable technical issues.
Highlights
The delicate art style is its most obvious strength, and the architectural research is very thorough: early on it drew on "Along the River During the Qingming Festival," and later it researched real ancient buildings like the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda.
Characters become little more than pixel blobs when the camera zooms out, but look closely and you'll see the care in every detail; the visuals have rich layers.
The chibi character designs are painstaking: the figures are tiny, but every detail shows the artists' skill. The team has some treasure artists.
Highlights
Set in the Ming Dynasty, it builds a complete world through characters based on historical figures and historical architecture.
It digs deep into ancient Chinese culture, with every special resident modeled on a historical figure, giving it rich cultural depth.
Deductions
Special residents are pretty much just "decorative," with no decisive help in the game, so their collection value is limited.
The main revenue source is limited-time gacha pools, and building pools are few and far between compared to character pools; the monetization design is unbalanced.
New cities are released very slowly, leading to extremely long dry spells.
Update quality gradually declined later in its run, the inevitable end of the road for mobile and online games, I suppose.
It went through a backlash incident in China, after which users gradually drifted away; the small studio may still be satisfied, but retention remains a problem. The global server has fewer thin-skinned players and runs decently, but since Chinese players are a key audience for this game, the incident also exposes an oversight in its market strategy.
Highlights
As a small-studio work it's remarkably successful, studied by Tencent planners as a competitor, and the richness of its content is recognized across the industry.
Early on, the developers kept updating steadily, each new city brought a creative new mechanic, and update quality was consistent.
The audience skews toward women and people middle-aged and older, so the community is relatively harmonious and suits casual players.