Unlike the Warriors games where you are mostly playing as famous historical characters, in Bladestorm: Nightmare you will need to create a character to play the game. It’s pretty customizable with over 100 hair styles for both male and female characters, complete control over face shape and features, and body size. You can even have two different color eyes. I do wish there was a color scale rather than having a selection of 10 or so colors for most things to choose from, but otherwise I was quite happy with my character creation. The NPCs are a bit generic, as they are in most of these games, but you really don’t pay much attention to them anyway. The landscape is beautiful. They really put some work into giving the land a natural rise and fall, rather than just flat terrain.
You can also choose from a few different voices for your character and you can change the pitch. You can choose to set all of the system voices in Japanese or English. I do love that there is an English dub so that the on-screen text doesn’t block up the screen when I am in the middle of battle. You will have on-screen text for things like Level Up! and a combo counter when you hit 50, 100, etc. I did find that if you kill really quickly, these counters will be lagged a bit as they are still trying to display the last number and you just surpassed it.