Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is Team Ninja’s latest addition to the Masocore genre, taking inspiration from the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history. Released on the 3rd of March, 2023 for Playstation 4, 5 Xbox One, Series and PC, this is likely to be one of the most divisive games I’ll play all year. Although this has been billed by many as the spiritual successor to the developer’s Nioh games, this does alter enough to stand out on its own.
Wo Long sees the player control a nameless protagonist who becomes critically wounded fighting for a militia group. Close to death, your custom character is saved by a blind young man and you learn about the power of Jade and Divine Beasts, and how the mystical substance of “Elixir” is behind a full-scale war in the country.
Chinese myth is an area I have little to no experience in, so I had a genuine interest in learning about which parts of this game have roots in fact and traditional lore, and which the game had took liberty with. The narrative is cursed with the same problematic pacing that both Team Ninja’s Stranger of Paradise and Nioh games had. These sections jump around and switch focus between characters very quickly early on, and you’re usually saddled with a heroic warrior or two to provide context that your silent avatar does not. These interactions are minimal and fleeting, and at times it feels like the story team were given a long list of Chinese names then told to create short narrative bursts to check them off in turn. The only ones of these that really make a lasting impression, are the ones you end up fighting and dying to, multiple times.
These somewhat lacklustre character interactions and narrative pieces are dropped either side of the game’s level and mission design. This functions really well as a gameplay framework, but doesn’t help develop characters or drive the story. In fairness, you don’t need to know much outside of “Evil magic man manipulates warriors into committing genocide to create powerful elixir.” Your job, of course, is to stop him.
Your player character is mostly silent outside of the odd grunt and this might be a blessing in disguise as the English voice acting felt rushed… literally. It really gave off the impression that the actors were given a time limit to get each sentence out by. (Play opening exposition)
That clip was the opening monologue explaining the entire concept of the plot after you hit new game. The delivery of this is really important to get this off on the right foot yet it comes out without natural pauses.
Now, I’ll leave story and narrative by the wayside and jump into mission design as that’s clearly more important in a game of this kind. This is a difficult, melee focused looter RPG and the game can afford to drop a few points in the story category. Each mission is its own contained “run” with the player progressing through weaker enemies and working their way up to a boss of sorts. Sub-stories, or side missions can be one-on-one duels or a smaller section of a level you’ve already visited with a different set of objectives.
All enemies have a chance at dropping loot, and all drop money and Qi (chi) which is used to level up your character. You can reset and recover at Battle Flags, with the game keeping track of how many of these are still left to unlock in each mission. There is a second set of flags called “Marker Flags” which boost your character’s fortitude level. I’ll touch on this more later, but the design of this loop is well refined and works very well.
To get through the enemies to the boss, you’ll have to either avoid them or defeat them, with the latter being the better option 99% of the time. This is where combat comes in.
Combat is real time action and feels familiar to anyone who’s played a third-person RPG with melee combat. Normal swings can be supplemented with harder hitting spirit attacks, and the game also has weaponskills and magic spells which can be used to deal damage, recover health and debilitate the enemy. Despite coming from the Nioh developers, this feels much closer in execution to From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Wo Long’s Spirit damage works a lot like Sekiro’s posture damage, and you can use powerful Fatal Strikes if you break an enemy’s spirit.
The number above your health is your current motivation, and this goes up by defeating enemies and planting flags. This works like a temporary “level” on your character, where you have the advantage if your number is higher than your opponents, and vice versa. This slowly builds up as you progress through a level to keep you on par with the enemies, and getting hit by your foe’s fatal strikes drops this down. When you die, this falls to a fixed “floor” value, indicated by your Fortitude level, which can slowly be raised by capturing Marker points.
Overall, this works quite organically and longer levels often give you the opportunity to go into a boss fight with your motivation a few numbers higher than your foe. This comes in really handy for clearing story content as you can begin on the front foot.
Combat itself is solid, but simple. Weapon choice affects reach, swing direction, style and speed. Special weapon attacks are tied to the weapons themselves, and you get up to two per weapon.
This system works well because of its simplicity and accessibility. The gameplay loop rewards strong counter play as well as measured aggression, and puts a real onus on learning enemy attack patterns.
When you level up, you invest points in each of the five-phases, which are elemental affinities that loosely affect your leaning towards certain playstyles and which Wizardry spells you can use. Each of these phases has a counter, such as Water to Fire and fire to metal. Leveling any of these increases your health and damage by a small amount, with certain Phases affecting weapon damage or health in more major ways.
If you’re new to Team Ninja games, this is a really good starting point, as this is just simple and effective. Your harshest learning curve is going to be getting the timing of the deflect right to keep your spirit up, and avoid enemy attacks. There are three bosses in particular that feel like walls to test your skill level, and they are the first boss, final boss and Lu Bu.
While I agree that combat works here, and is objectively excellent, that viewpoint is likely to change if you ARE a veteran of Team Ninja games. Compared to what you might be used to if you’re coming in from Nioh, your weapon choice here is very arbitrary because the skill ceiling for each weapon is not much higher than the skill floor. The biggest skill barrier is not weapon-based, rather it’s deflect-based and that transfers universally across all weapons with some granting slightly more leniency in the window for timing this. All you’re really improving between hour one of the game and hour 27, which is when I finished my first run of the story, is your knowledge of enemy patterns and timings for deflecting their blows. For anyone interested, I had around 250 deaths as I saw the credits roll. Wo Long features strong enemy design, where attacks are telegraphed well, but are meant to try and get you to jump early so you get cleaved by them anyway. You need to take a breath and wait for the perfect moment to counter. Outside of this, your character kit is not very deep at all, and the moment-to-moment bursts of each encounter tend to fall into waiting for an enemy to attack, timing your deflect, getting one or two normal attacks in, and then returning to wait for their attack until you have enough spirit to hit them with a heavier strike.
Loot does drop and comes in an RPG-style rarity system. However, it’s probably inaccurate to call this game a “looter” in the same vein that Team Ninja’s Nioh or Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins was. Loot here does not have a requirement level and there are four rarities on normal difficulty, with a fifth in NG+. This did mean that the 4* staff I picked up in Mission 3, stayed with me the whole game. This certainly addresses an issue I had with Stranger of Paradise, as you feel more attached to loot here. Weapons and gear more closely match the Dark Souls model rather than the Nioh formula, where weapons don’t have item levels or requirement levels, just upgrade values. This endgame is just New Game Plus and sees you replaying harder versions of the game’s missions for the chance at 5-star loot. This mode is quite punishing though, and you’re likely going to want to go into this with a functional 4-star set unless you really want to put the “Maso” in Masocore.
I’m going to step away here and say something that is my personal opinion, rather than any objective criticism.
If you’re a veteran of the Nioh games this progression and combat is going to feel anemic by comparison. Every ounce of technicality and complexity in the movesets, stances and weapon mechanics have been ripped from the game to create a functional, and more accessible system. Yet, for me at least, the reason I believe Nioh 2 is the best Masocore game, is because it has the weapon complexity and technicality of Monster Hunter, the loot and build creation of Borderlands or Diablo and the difficulty and speed of Bloodborne and Sekiro. It is not perfect, but it had a level of depth and complexity that I appreciate.
Progression in Wo Long could be said to be better, as you’re not having to upgrade your gear every few levels. Yet, this fundamentally takes the “looter” element out of this game, a fact compounded by the companion mechanic which sees you HANDED a fully functional 4-star set if you become “Sworn Brothers” with one. Unless you plan on doing a NG+ run, that’s some of the best gear in game and it can be acquired relatively early.
That’s not the game’s only problem, but for me, it was by far the biggest. I am happy for those of you who found Nioh to be convoluted, but this just made me really want a Nioh 3.
Back to objective criticism, and on PC at least, Wo Long’s launched in a poor, but ultimately playable, technical state. This demands a lot more of your GPU than it should to render what are at best, PS4 era graphics. Ultimately, this looks okay, rather than good or great and the game held at 60 FPS with the occasional frame stutter and drop.
There’s also a bug with Ambient Occlusion that created intermittent flashing on the screen, that I won’t show footage of here as it’s quite jarring to watch. This is like a short flashbang and I had to disable this setting each time I loaded the game, as this didn’t seem to save between sessions.
To further compound the technical mess this was on PC, the keyboard and mouse controls were awful. Most people seem to believe this is because controller deadzones have been left in for the mouse movement, meaning your mouse has to reach a certain speed before the input will register. I want to say, that it’s my personal opinion that you really should be playing this type of game with a controller – but, I do believe that keyboard and mouse controls should at least work competently for those who want to use them.
This game also crashed a lot. You can see here the Event Viewer logs for this game over launch weekend, but in mitigation most of these occurred during cutscenes rather than gameplay.
I did notice some unusual white “fuzz” in some areas as light and reflections are not handled well at all, but this is quite minor and only terrible on a specific mission.
Just before recording I checked and a handful of these issues have been addressed in hotfixes, which are up to 1.03 at the time of recording, but did affect my playthrough. What hasn’t been fixed are the lack of Quality of Life features such as auto-loot, or the ability to directly travel elsewhere following missions. There are countless others that were in Nioh and Stranger of Paradise that feel like omissions here
Despite all of the above criticisms, I do believe there is enough to like here that I’m leaning slightly towards recommending this, but that recommendation can only stretch to the console versions right now. For a sweeping bit of context, I like this a little more than Final Fantasy Origins: Stranger of Paradise, but a LOT less than Nioh 2. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the game most similar to this that already exists, with the mission-based structure making this more replayable than From’s title.
There is a belief from the community that this will get much better when more endgame content and loot tiers arrive with DLC drops, but this base experience didn’t do enough to convince me to get the DLC. Yet, it didn’t leave me feeling like I got ripped off either. I may even consider getting the DLC if they address some of these in free content drops. For better or worse, this is going to be a very divisive game, and a lot of that might come down to your choice of platform, and how you felt about Nioh.
Fatelighter 