Last year, I played Team Ninja's prequel to Final Fantasy, Strangers of Paradise. I praised that game, I thought it was leaps and bounds above what they've done before, despite some drawbacks. After Nioh, they had everything they need to make a bad-ass soulslike, comparable to FromSoftware games even. Like, they're challenging them to do better.
Wo Long here, however, is an interesting case study. For a multitude of reasons. The story is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdom novels, the early prologue parts where a hero rises in a long term crisis, with liberties of putting a lot of fantasy elements as well.
This game is more Sekiro than Nioh was. Fallen Dynasty's combat is as more intense, while also having more means to explore each level. Adding verticality to this continuous power trip. Despite some rather odd choices and redundancies made. It also falls under the "another Japanese game with poor optimization" category.
After using its robust character creator, similar to Wild Hearts, I started the game playing in the midsts of an invasion by an opposing force. These Yellow Turbans massacring a village before me, and some blind boy started to butt-in the pillaging.
There was no setup for me to be immersed enough to grasp an idea of what's going on, there are just a lot of spectacles added with easy tutorials. I also died a lot, before understanding how to manage pressing the dodge and parry button, which both are the same.
I had a hard time adjusting to the parry system, because of how they are telegraphed, not that they're hard to read, but my monitor sometimes misses that one frame where I could have spotted it. That is bothersome, because after my first boss battle, I have been forced to accept that parrying is the best way to win the game. Normal attacks are only deflected.
And it is a game changer once done well, enemies are easily subdued and exposed before taken down. Subdued enemies even have finishing moves that kill or take big chunks of health. Mixing my combat style with wizard skills and weapon abilities. But not without exhausting my spirit stamina.
I had to relearn that a game like this has limits to button mashing, unlike Strangers of Paradise, the moves I have to make, need to be well planned out and concise. Otherwise, resulting in my easy death. At least the dodging mechanic isn't entirely useless all the time.
And about my first boss battle, this guy was constantly hyper-aggressive, he was gaping in closer when I was far away, throwing hard attacks when I couldn't see it, and I was trying my best to lower his health. And ah, fighting him took me a solid 2 hours to beat. That's because the only way to incapacitate him was to parry his attacks, and then hit him hard.
The next thing I know, his form was changed and this was him bigger, but with twice more the obscenity too. In my final fight, I barely held my guard, before at 40% health, my divine beast summon was unlocked by the blind kid, and with relief, I can say he finally dead.
That's where I finally moved on from my frustrations of just beating the guy, and try to understand how I should actually play. The game is still difficult, as I can easily get killed. If my spirit gauge is maxed out, I cannot use abilities. Certain enemies can also stun me out if I don't deflect right, and the other headache is accidentally dodging when I should be parrying.
It's fun, intense, I have to constantly deflect fast attack rapidly. I can block them too, but my spirit gauge would be at stake, so I normally don't do that. Thing is, dodging isn't prompt if I don't tilt my analog. Talk about adding more to my frustrations.
The obvious thing was that Wo Long was training me to learn restraint and use the right attack patterns to win fights. Which also doesn't work if I am surrounded by enemies, hence I dodge out of hell. Adding A.I. companions or online players to the game breaks it, it becomes too easy at that point. The difficulty doesn't adjust as well.
These drawbacks didn't hold me back after I was continuously playing the game. There were a few core systems of the game that kept my dopamine feed. Different enemy types to fight, new gear and abilities to unlock, well tied progression system, and interesting boss battles.
Farming spirits to increase each of the 5 virtue points, doing so allows me to unlock and use powerful wizard skills while also increasing my stats. These virtues represent kind of like the 5 elements of the world. So, if I levelled Earth, I could use skills like increased armor or accumulating damage, whereas Air skills increase movement speed.
Weapons and armor rarities range from 1-5 stars. They're also upgradable, with bonuses possible to embed into. There are a lot of RPG traits to pick and choose too. As I got far enough, instead of one, I had weapons with 2 total abilities. The in-game economy isn't so bad, either.
Then there's the morality system. I fight enemies better and kill them, my morality increases. I die, that enemy takes all my morale and becomes stronger when I respawn. So I start from zero, unless I have found respawn points and fortification posts that increase fortified moral.
Saving me from respawning and killing enemies all over again. Morale is very much correlated to how much damage enemies can take, and how much they can hit me back. The bigger risk factor is fighting the ones with higher morale than mine.
Playing the dance of death in both Nioh, and Strangers of Paradise has always been about having properly tactics before playing them best way possible. Team Ninja has made sure that skill always factors in playstyle. Wo Long is hyperintensive about that. In both the RPG aspects and gameplay.
I really like using the parry system to take down enemies, while moving to the next one as they're distracted by my allies. The enemies don't hold back either, I mean, it's Chinese martial arts combat, they be pulling some serious damage on me.
The boss battles in this game define the absurdly chaotic nature of each battle, going from engaging with powerful warlocks to army generals getting mutated by powers beyond their control. Killing each one had help to unlock the divine beast abilities while also progressing story.
Now, I've sung the high praises. Let's talk about the issues. I think it's interesting to use the dodge as parry, but it kind of doesn't make sense and removes the flexibility of the combat by making the use of dodge harder, and sometimes redundant.
The camera doesn't help either, but it's not that big of an issue. I really did enjoy progressing further into the story, but couldn't shake the feeling that the level designs felt pretty same-ish. Especially when doing side missions which are rehash maps. Though hey, least now I can easily switch to range weapons from melee on the fly.
And dear god help me, what is up with the performance issues and bugs? Is Koei Tecmo games having a QA problem? Because this is similar to what I've dealt with playing Wild Hearts. They're both also using the same engine.
Wo Long captured the franatic nature of combat beautifully. Story didn't move me, no instead, the visual spectacle gave enough to reason to go on. The progression system always incentivized and rewarded me for playing well. And, cool boss battles are neat.
But this game felt pretty easy, and it was like giving me an excuse not to perfect my skills while dealing with the technical issues that it had. It just seems like the Elden Ring craze made them wanted more people to play their games, which would have been swell if they implemented the co-op properly. Also, I got invaded once, it ended quickly like a tud while my online companion floored him.
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