Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Since the sequel's been announced, I grabbed Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and played through it to more or less complete my trip through the modern Team Ninja character action RPG lineup. It's quite good! In a lot of ways, Wo Long feels like Team Ninja taking a Nioh script and doing a find/replace on the character names and plot McGuffin. In this case, it's a Romance of the Three Kingdoms-based Chinese historical drama, and instead of spirit stones, there's Elixir, which is crystallized qi energy (in convenient gumball-sized form). Beyond that it's exactly what you expect from Team Ninja historical drama - fighting alongside various important historical figures, taking down evil warlords and occasionally an Elixir-corrupted ally. It's workable enough and moves quickly, covering about fifteen years worth of wars in expedited fashion. You may recognize some of the names that crop up and things largely play out as you expect, up to and including knowing that when Lu Bu makes an appearance you're going to get your ass handed to you. To go along with the change in setting, Wo Long has a variety of systems that run somewhat askew to the Nioh games. In a lot of ways, the standard Team Ninja formula applies here - random gear drops like an action RPG, checkpoints, mostly-linear levels with loopbacks and shortcuts. To reflect the change in theme and setting, there are also some unique twists. One primary system is the Virtues - rather than a normal set of attributes (strength, dexterity, etc), everything is based around raising and using the five cardinal virtues - Wood, Fire, Earth, Water, and Metal. These form a five-pronged rock-paper-scissors system of strengths and weaknesses, and taking advantage of those goes a long way. This applies both to your character attributes, the magical spells you can learn, and also using appropriate elements to negate enemy strengths. It's a simpler approach to character building but works well enough. Wo Long also takes a faster paced approach to combat with a focus on deflecting attacks, not basic blocks or dodges (which do exist as well). Every attack in the game can be deflected, even critical blows, and the game heavily rewards you for taking that risk with more chances to press the offense, a boost to your spirit gauge (which is the stamina/mana bar equivalent that can go both positive and negative), and boosts to your Morale. Morale is the most unique thing that Wo Long has going for it systems-wise, and it's an interesting sort of snowball mechanic. Everyone on the battlefield has a morale score. Playing well (hitting/killing enemies, deflecting attacks, landing critical blows, etc) raises morale. Getting hit (especially by critical enemy blows) lowers morale. Finding marking flags across the battlefield (both major checkpoints and bonus flags) raise your morale floor for that mission if you end up dying. In an otherwise equal playing field, the combatant with higher morale will be stronger - doing more damage, taking less. Wo Long rewards you for playing well in a more concrete way than simply avoiding damage - building morale up can lead to a very powerful snowball effect, and conversely being sloppy puts you on the back foot. Levels are often designed in a fashion where there's a safer route with more gradual morale ramping, or a direct dangerous path you can take that has enemies with higher morale values. I really liked it overall, but I'm someone who often goes out of their way to scour maps in Team Ninja games for secrets and the system feels designed with that intent due to the bonus of raising your morale floor. It did feel odd at times where the first attempt on a boss was the easiest due to having a disproportionately high morale value compared to them (and losing would make subsequent attempts much harder), but there's something to that dynamic push-and-pull that adds to the fast-paced nature of Wo Long. There's a few problems I had with the game. Gearing is boring, even by Team Ninja standards - I just put on some gear I found early (and one of the DLC armor sets) and upgraded it as I went along, so most drops were pointless. It didn't feel like there was much room for buildcraft due to being focused around the five virtues and it not feeling like it was worth it to specialize during the base game run. I overall liked morale but having to find the flags again if engaging with the traditional NG+ difficulty cycles in the game would be a drag for sure. Lastly, and this is very much a common first-game-in-the-series problem for Team Ninja - the enemy diversity was lacking. Wo Long feels like a game where you're mostly fighting normal humans or demon versions that effectively fight like normal humans. The boss fights are cool spectacles, and there's a few interesting demon types to mix things up, but there was a very distinct lack of weird little freaks to fight until later in the DLCs and it led to a bit of saminess as I went along. Still, I had a great time pushing through Wo Long and its DLCs across a fairly breezy 40 hours. It's an easier, streamlined take on what Team Ninja has done in the Nioh games, and if you like fast parry/deflect type action games, there's a lot to enjoy here. I'm hoping the sequel takes the same kind of iterative leap forward that Nioh 2 did for that franchise, but even if not, we've still got a really solid game here that's worth a look.