First Impressions With Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty
And now for something completely different.
That’s right, we’re taking a look at the opening hours of Team Ninja’s latest outing, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. As someone who likes a lot of Team Ninja’s work with Ninja Gaiden Black, Nioh and Nioh 2, I was eager to try it out. Plus, it does some neat things to the Soulslike formula I honestly feel like more games need to be taking notes on. With that out of the way, let's begin.
The story of Wo Long can easily be described as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, But With Demons. It’s set during the end of the Han Dynasty and there are these three kingdoms all fighting to get their hands on this elixir of immortality. The only thing I know from that period is that you shouldn’t pursue Lu Bu. If you’re actively into that sort of thing, you’ll probably get a lot out of it, but so far I just smile and nod as if I pretend I know what’s happening. But that’s not to say that it’s terrible, it’s just that I’m more here for the fighting of demons and monsters and Wo Long provides that in spades.
Like a lot of Team Ninja’s output since the end of the 3D Ninja Gaiden series, Wo Long is a Soulslike action RPG, but with an emphasis on the action this time around. It still has a lot of the stuff that the Nioh games use (level-based progressions, heightened aggression of enemies and players, a ton of loot), but it also makes many changes from the standard fare of Dark Souls to make it more like Sekiro. A lot of this is done through system-specific actions. While you still have attacking, dodging, and blocking, Wo Long has a parry function and spirit attacks. The former is a straight-up parry that you can use to bypass enemy attacks and weaken their defences and the latter allows you to break guards and deal increased damage. The time it takes from the game to introduce these systems and then throw you into the deep end is almost immediate.
Once you get to the first boss, Wo Long goes “Aight, that’s enough training” and throws everything it’s got at you with aggressive enemies, ambush tactics, and unblockable attacks. Two of those three that I mentioned are also done by the first boss, so the game is at least consistent with it. If there’s one complaint I have about the parry is that while it does as good a job as it can to ape Sekiro, it ultimately doesn’t feel as good as Sekiro if that makes any sense. While you still have the ability to block attacks, the parry is the main defensive tool on display. However, the timings and windows in the early game feel so weird and off to me so far that I end up getting into fights where I can steamroll minibosses and some of the main bosses I’ve encountered so far in one attempt, but get my face kicked in by regular enemies. It has a tendency to feel inconsistent as heck at times, but when it feels good? It feels really good.
These can also tie into the exploration as well with the Morale and Fortitude Ranks. Morale ranks serve as a sort of scaling of the damage capable of both you and your enemies. They increase as you go through levels and defeat said enemies and can scale from levels 1-25. While the lower levels feel comparably squishy, once you get to the higher ones, enemies start to get more and more powerful and this is also where most bosses are going to be sitting. This also ties into Fortitude ranks. These are increased by finding smaller battle flags across each zone map, up to seven in total. Fortitude ranks give you bonus HP on top of what you already have along with your ever-increasing Morale rank. I’ve never seen it done in a Soulslike before and I think this is a neat way of incentivizing the exploration of levels in games like this. And this is before getting into the way the elemental magic can add bonuses to that stuff and how the inclusions of special attacks and Divine Beats round out the arsenal in awesome and interesting ways.
It also still has the Nioh problem of being inundated with a near-useless amount of gear. But I’ve just taken to ignoring all of that stuff and picking whatever increases my damage and defence.
If the first six to ten hours of WO Long Fallen Dynasty are anything to go by, it’s probably gonna be a game that I’ll eventually finish because of Game of the Year stuff to see how much I really liked it. While it may not feel as good as the game it’s aping, it’s got some solid new ideas that people who like games based on FromSoft’s output will no doubt enjoy. Plus it’s on Game Pass, so it’s a much easier recommendation to see if you’ll like it. Give it a try if you got Game Pass.
