Ascend From Nine Mountains Review

Nine realms, nine mountains, one cultivator

Ascend From Nine Mountains sets out to do something surprisingly rare within its own genre: tell a xianxia cultivation story, complete with meridian-opening, spiritual cores, and an ascent through nine realms toward immortality, written natively in English rather than translated -- often incompletely -- from an original Chinese release. Developed and published solo by Nine Ascension Studios, it entered Steam Early Access on 1 October 2025 at NZ$30.99, and Steam's own news history confirms the date without ambiguity: version updates begin within the game's first days on the platform and have continued on a consistent weekly-to-biweekly cadence ever since, a pattern consistent with a genuine, actively developed Early Access launch.

The pitch resonates strongly with the genre's core audience, according to an unusually enthusiastic review sample for a solo-developed Early Access title: 306 reviews at the time of writing, 284 of them positive, a Very Positive rating built specifically around the game's systems depth. One reviewer, describing themselves as having "played just about every cultivation-inspired game out there that has an English translation, including the fan translations," writes that "this game does everything right." Another calls it "a turn based Xianxia game highly reminiscent of Tale of Immortal but without the janky translations and with a more coherent story," a comparison echoed by several other reviewers who name-check Tale of Immortal specifically as the genre's most obvious touchstone and credit this game for standing up to it. The native-English script draws its own specific praise, one reviewer noting simply that the game is "developed (and written) natively in English so no missing or faulty translation," a real point of differentiation in a genre where fan-translated releases are common and frequently criticised.

That systems depth extends well past writing into the game's crafting and character-build loops, which reviewers describe in genuinely granular detail. One reviewer grades individual systems like a report card -- "Character Builds: S Tier" -- while another describes the core loop as "an auto-battler that's more about building a killing machine so you can focus on resource acquisition," and a third specifically highlights the developer's update cadence, writing that the game "receives chunky patches every week or two that adds new content," adding that "even now in EA a single playthrough has more content than most other games." One particularly striking data point: a detailed review reports having logged over 200 hours in the game before it even arrived on Steam, noting that only five of nine planned cultivation realms were implemented at the time of writing -- a genuinely substantial amount of content for a game still openly labelled unfinished.

Set against that enthusiasm, the review sample converges on a specific, detailed, and repeated balance concern, raised most pointedly by Chinese-language reviewers. One detailed review describes reaching a milestone realm with roughly 200,000 total effective health -- shields and armour included -- while enemies at the same stage deal damage in the hundreds of millions to billions of points per turn, arguing plainly that "there is no concept of normal offense or defense" at that numerical scale, and that winning fights depends heavily on luck, consumable stockpiling, and external buffs rather than build fundamentals. That's a specific, quantified complaint rather than a vague "it's too hard" grumble, and it recurs in substance across multiple Chinese-language reviews describing the game's difficulty curve as a "glass cannon" design with effectively zero margin for error at any stage of progression.

A second, entirely separate and repeatedly corroborated complaint concerns the game's art. Multiple reviewers, independently and specifically, identify visual assets as AI-generated rather than originally illustrated, and are candid about how much that affects their recommendation: one writes that "the use of AI art assets is so egregious I can not recommend," while a separate reviewer asks directly, "why have you not gotten an actual artist yet? Game is horrible to look at," going on to describe the crafting, UI, and time systems together as feeling "like a jumbled mess." A third reviewer puts it more bluntly still, writing that the "gameplay is horribly repeated that I think everything is AI generated except the buy game button." This is a real, repeated pattern across independent reviewers specifically about the game's own art pipeline, distinct from and worth reporting alongside the otherwise strongly positive reception of its writing and systems.

A handful of further complaints round out the criticism. Performance draws a specific complaint from at least one reviewer who calls the game "the laggiest" they've played in years, particularly during screen transitions, despite otherwise enjoying its crafting loop -- and separately, two reviewers report save-corruption incidents, one recovered via an automatic backup slot losing only around fifteen minutes of progress, the other losing a full run. Repetitive, non-skippable NPC dialogue during crafting draws a specific complaint too, with one reviewer noting the same acknowledgement lines replay every single time an item is crafted for a given NPC. And more than one reviewer raises a monetisation-model concern distinct from any in-game system: the developer runs a tiered Patreon alongside the paid Steam release, which one reviewer describes as "the path of ensh*ttification," specifically objecting to exclusive supporter roles that influence the game's direction for an already NZ$30.99 purchase. Localisation outside English draws its own separate complaints -- a Chinese-language reviewer criticises the Chinese translation as unexpectedly poor for a cultivation-genre game, while Korean and Vietnamese reviewers separately flag incomplete text and font-rendering issues in their respective languages.

Steam's own achievement data offers a rough, useful picture of how the game's realm-by-realm progression actually plays out: 97.2% of players clear the first realm milestone, dropping to 70.0% for the second, 55.9% for the third, 37.0% for the fourth, and 22.9% for the fifth -- a steady, gradually steepening attrition curve broadly consistent with a game that starts approachable and grows meaningfully harder as it goes, even if it doesn't directly confirm the specific "glass cannon" numerical complaints raised above.

Set against the wider field of xianxia and cultivation RPGs this coverage tracks, Ascend From Nine Mountains's clearest strength is systems depth that reviewer after reviewer credits as standing up to, or improving on, the genre's most established name, backed by a rare native-English script and an unusually responsive solo developer. Its clearest weaknesses are a specific, quantified balance complaint about disproportionate enemy damage at higher realms, and a repeated, independently corroborated criticism of AI-generated art that a meaningful slice of the review sample treats as a real dealbreaker.

Verdict

Ascend From Nine Mountains delivers genuinely deep crafting and character-build systems in a rare native-English cultivation RPG, and its large, Very Positive review sample backs that up with real enthusiasm for a responsive developer shipping substantial content on a consistent schedule. A specific, quantified balance complaint about disproportionate high-realm difficulty and a repeated, independently corroborated criticism of the game's AI-generated art are worth knowing going in, alongside its still-unfinished Early Access state, but neither undercuts what's already a genuinely substantial cultivation RPG for genre fans.