Legend of Mortal: Two People, 30% Approval, 700,000 Copies

On 14 June 2024, a wuxia RPG called Legend of Mortal (活俠傳) launched on Steam. The development team, Obb Studio (原始鳥熊), had only two members — "Bird" wrote the code, "Bear" wrote the story and drew everything. Neither came from the game industry; this was their first title. In its first week, the Steam approval rating dropped below 30%. Twelve days later it was back to 70%. A month later, 94%. Six months in, sales hit 700,000 copies and the Steam rating settled at 9/10. Korean fans completed an unofficial Korean localization on their own, and a Taiwan-Korea collective then organized to translate the game into Japanese. The protagonist is written as "a nobody disciple with no main-character aura," and so are the people who built him.

Bird and Bear

Obb Studio is exactly what the name says: Bird, in charge of programming and operations; Bear, in charge of writing, art, and community. Neither had worked in games before. Legend of Mortal was their first product.¹

The game was built in Unity and took more than a year and a half from conception to launch. Bear single-handedly wrote every line of dialogue while also producing the art. Bird single-handedly wrote every line of code; "another all-nighter" was just the standard work rhythm.²

Two people building an RPG with an absurd word count produces predictable results: at launch, the game was an "unfinished product." But buried inside that unfinished product was something players couldn't put down.

A Nobody Without the Main-Character Aura

Legend of Mortal breaks the conventions of the wuxia game genre.

The player character is an "outsider disciple" of the Tang clan — mediocre talent, looked down on by everyone, a nobody. There is no chosen-one script and no martial-arts manual falling from the sky. You scrape by inside a declining sect, encounter random events, make choices, and watch them shape your personality and your sect's fate.³

The team explained the meaning of the character "活" (alive / living) in the title: "Mortals are not the mediocre. Mortals are anyone who wasn't dealt a winning hand and yet still chooses to live with courage and infinite possibility." (from the INCG Media interview)⁴

The premise gives the game an entirely different emotional anchor in a market saturated with "tragic-genius takes revenge" wuxia stories. What players care about isn't how strong the character is, but how a character holds on inside a world that is not kind to him.

📝 Curator's Note
Legend of Sword and Fairy (1995) made people cry because Zhao Ling-er died. Legend of Mortal (2024) resonates because the protagonist isn't even qualified to be a protagonist. Over thirty years, the emotional core of Taiwanese wuxia games has shifted from "the hero's tragedy" to "the mortal's struggle."

The 30% Abyss

On day one, things blew up.

Within days the Steam approval rating fell below 30%, plunging from "Overwhelmingly Positive" expectations into "Mostly Negative." The list of complaints was long: no save points during pivotal story sequences, dice-roll-driven difficulty, no New Game+ inheritance system.⁵

The bigger storm came from Chinese players. Certain character routes were read as NTR (your character being taken away from you), which a vocal segment of Chinese players found offensive. They flooded the page with negative reviews within hours, flipping the rating from positive to "Overwhelmingly Negative."⁶

Some Chinese players, refusing to let the game be torpedoed by mob review, wrote a 700-character open letter rooting for the dev team.⁷

A Twelve-Day Reversal

Bird and Bear moved fast.

The studio issued a public apology, admitted the game "is in substance an unfinished product," and committed to completing the character routes and main-story setups. Then came "four updates in four days" — patches landing daily to fix the save system, retune difficulty, rework the UI.⁸

Bird pulled all-nighter after all-nighter. Bear answered player feedback in the community one comment at a time.

Twelve days later, the approval rating was back to 70%. A month later, 94%. Players started writing long strategy guides and character analyses on the forums; the mood on the Steam discussion boards turned from anger into anticipation: "When's the next update?"⁹

The game dominated the Steam rankings for an entire month. Some players described it as feeling "like a weekly serialized comic" — every patch arrived like the next chapter.¹⁰

✦ From 30% to 94%, with one month between them. The number is itself a wuxia story: rock bottom, written off by everyone, then the long climb back through sheer practice.

The Foreigners Who Translated It Themselves

In the second half of 2024, Legend of Mortal started going abroad — but not in the usual way. The studio didn't roll out localized versions; players did it themselves.

Korea became the largest non-Chinese-speaking market. Korean fans completed a community Korean localization mod on their own, an absurd volume of text translated entirely by unpaid volunteers.¹¹

The studio later released an official Korean version, but Korean players panned the translation quality as "almost machine-translated." The community translation was rated more highly than the official one.¹²

In September 2024, a group of Japanese-fluent Korean and Taiwanese players formed the "Legend of Mortal Japanese Production Committee," announcing they would translate the game into Japanese with a 31 December launch target. The stated goal was to "let more Japanese players see this work."¹³

By November 2024, sales had crossed 700,000. The studio announced a major story update in development, with a single line: "We believe she's worth waiting for."¹⁴

💡 Did You Know?
The community-driven localization of Legend of Mortal follows the same logic as the time Italian hackers cracked into Red Candle Games' Nine Sols and helped translate it: when a game is good enough, players will localize it for free. In the games industry, that's worth more than any marketing budget.

The Mortal's Wuxia

Legend of Mortal and the Softstar twin classics (Legend of Sword and Fairy / Heroes of Jin Yong Online) sit thirty years apart, but they're talking about two sides of the same thing.

In 1995, Yao Chuang-hsien used Legend of Sword and Fairy to prove "Chinese-language games can tell stories that make people cry." In 2024, Obb Studio used Legend of Mortal to prove "two people can make a wuxia game played by 700,000 of them."

The difference: the protagonist of Legend of Sword and Fairy, Li Xiaoyao, is a hero. The protagonist of Legend of Mortal is a nobody. The team behind Sword and Fairy had Softstar's resources and brand backing them; Obb Studio is two people, one computer, and a Unity install.

Thirty years later, it's the nobody standing on top of the Steam charts.

Bear once wrote: "Mortals are not the mediocre." The line works just as well as a description of the people who made the game.

Further Reading

• Softstar Twin Classics (大宇雙劍) — the starting point of Taiwanese wuxia games thirty years earlier
• Red Candle Games (赤燭遊戲) — the other path of Taiwanese indie games
• Taiwan Gaming Industry — the full panorama, from licensing to original IP

References