Team Ninja is punk. From outside it does not seem so, and perhaps in its first steps, the most remembered and acclaimed, they had less of this new spirit; but this renewal of Team Ninja that arises from blatantly copying and without fear with Nioh, doubling the bet with a sequel and relying on the arms of Square Enix to do a double or nothing in the most absolute shamelessness with Stranger of Paradise, finds a very particular reflection in Wo Long.
Wo Long is his Sekiro. No one denies it and no one seems to care too much because we are in a different situation. That Team Ninja has needed references is obvious, and its mechanism of copying the older brother has not been unique or particularly good with what we have behind us. Nioh is a gargantuan game that after five hours gives you a nail and asks you to pierce it because inside it only has air and Nioh 2 as much as it pains me I have not even tried it because the formula immediately clogs. Nioh is a game that is consumed, not played; you have to devour it quickly and without consideration, you have to enter it as someone enters an all-you-can-eat buffet, not valuing each dish and each flavor but filling your mouth so much that the palate does not know what signal has to send to the brain; you have to incapacitate yourself to continue enjoying the combat and the corridors in an animal way, without thinking about level design and much less about the nonsense that the characters spit out of their mouths.
Wo Long is not that far from this. It is also a game that is enjoyed by being devoured and that wants to be opened in half and exploded. But where Nioh was rude and rough Wo Long tries to be cathartic and aware. There are many edges in Team Ninja games that must be overlooked to get carried away by the playable core, and I do not want to be misunderstood, the shortcomings of Wo Long are clear from the first moment because they are already the idiosyncrasies that define the way of making action games of the studio. But there is a clear attempt to reformulate itself without bending through design with some changes that modify the formula enough for the vision that unifies the game as a whole to be seen more clearly, and that makes revisiting the ideas that did not work in Nioh by playing with the form but leaving the structure feel correct.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Wo Long does quite a few things well, and one, the combat system, is so satisfying that it justifies the entire game. The backbone is the parry, as it already was in Sekiro the idea of embodying a nameless warrior who faces combat through blocking and counterattack is immediately pleasant; and Wo Long does not hesitate to emulate some great moments from it in a direct way and above all trying to find its own click with its particular system of parrys. Also like in Sekiro, the basis of each combat lies in the posture bar; an energy system that is spent when we are attacked, block badly or dodge. A way to encapsulate in a single meter the result of combat, blows given and received, like the energy of the character itself with dodges. This posture bar is also present in all our enemies, and works in a similar way, we can lower them by attacking them, correctly blocking their attacks or stalking them from behind when they have not yet seen us to stab them while maintaining stealth. The classic combat of energy and life changes to a kind of boxing confrontation, where each one fights to lower the other's bar, to achieve not immediately killing but breaking posture. And this breaking of posture leads us to the possibility of an execution that, this time yes, significantly lowers the life bar and in our mind represents the victory or defeat of a round, with seconds of delicious animation in the stake to breathe and celebrate or murmur between teeth and seek confidence to win in the next. So far everything is Sekiro, there are no severe changes, simply a base that was already brilliant in Sekiro and that gave us the adrenaline of sword clashes like rarely has been transferred to our control. It is in the way of focusing how we execute the parrys and how it is transferred to the command where Team Ninja seeks its own identity. Everything works also starting from the same button, but the twist it executes is interesting, and what it generates in the playable loop even more so.
In Wo Long the parry’s done with the dodge button, and we dodge with a double tap of the same, this means that speaking in Xbox buttons a tap of B slightly moves us to the side we choose and serves primarily to, adjusted to the timing of the enemy blow, block an attack and lower the posture of the attacker, and the double consecutive tap of B will make us do a long roll that leaves us defenseless during its execution but moves us far enough to gain perspective and space in most confrontations. There is a block button, LB, which serves us to hold our position in place by blocking enemy attacks, but drains our posture bar. This mapping on the controller makes Wo Long focus much more on our mobility than on our rhythm; being the parry the center of combat be linked to movement, blocking goes from being the standard to the alternative and forcing us to bend to combat through parry will make us constantly move because each tap in search of a counter will also be one that will displace us slightly through the scenario. This paradigm shift does not modify the premise of its combat, in the end this is another kind of rhythmic game that forces us to understand the combos of our enemies as sequences of attacks by times that we have to learn and memorize. The main change does not come so much in what we do but in how, and that constant mobility that it imposes makes everything constantly spectacular and opulent, so that we enjoy more the sight than the challenge. The combat is tight and precise, but it does not penalize as much as it seems and the parry windows are wide, the enemies except for a few occasions always have quite telegraphed attacks and although there are stones along the way and we die repeatedly, there is always that feeling that the game does not want to put its foot on the accelerator of difficulty. Not for lack of desire or ideas, but for self-containment.
Nioh started an interesting path in which several of the tics and obsessions that would be seen later were in a primitive state, and where the lack of polish was attempted to be obscured by copying systems that did not work. The online implementation was one of them, it did not work particularly well although it tried to have its own identity, but it was in difficulty where I think they did not know how to measure and frustration at times took over the intensity that the game required of one to get carried away by its combat. Ninja Gaiden is known for being tough but Nioh set up walls in the form of bosses with sometimes impossible to understand attacks and with fights that ended when we were lucky and not experienced. It was not the majority of the time but enough to go from challenge to exhaustion.
However, we do not have that here. The only wall is the first boss, who in order to show us how the parry works serves as a fire test so that we cannot start without perfectly understanding its timings, and in an exercise as noble as regular it serves us to learn and, if we do not leave it for impossible in the first hour, a problem that many people will face, endure with a game that always wants to stimulate us with the breadth of its combos and animations, where the memorability of the bosses comes more from their appearances and the catharsis of chaining attacks on them than from the challenge of finishing them off.
This change from challenge to pleasure is important, because that is where the great change in the formula that Stranger of Paradise already presented but that here is transparent really comes; although Team Ninja imitates From Software, their games are pure action. The spectacle always comes before the challenge, and the animations are a concatenation of pirouettes and jumps that drink much more from Wuxia than from Dark Souls. And the systems that support this idea are as round and clear as the combat itself.
We return to an RPG level system that seems more and more outdated but with a twist that works like a shot. Despite the fact that we can and must increase our level of experience and each mission has its recommended level (of course), all missions have within them a kind of level multiplier. That is, it does not matter that we go to a mission with a recommended level of 12 or 55, we will always start it with an indicator on the screen that says 0, and that is filled with a limit of 20 as we finish off the enemies of the level without dying. Up to here it is a twist that rewards us extra for risking confrontations and rewards us with more damage when hitting and less when receiving, but if we die the counter is reset. And here is where one of the most interesting points of Wo Long comes in; the plot revolves around the era of the Three Kingdoms in China, which serves us to establish each level as a kind of territorial battle in the great war in which we must not only get to the final enemy, but “conquer” the area. This means raising banners throughout the map that are distributed more or less clearly, and each banner we raise will raise our minimum level. It is a lot of information, but basically the game rewards us for exploring levels with a lesser penalty upon death, which in turn makes us level up more because we will find more enemies to kill and better equipment to wear. It is an artificial curve in each level that engages, and structuring always in levels of approximately one hour in duration feels like an immediate gratification that, added to the micro-rewards of combat in the form of animations, sounds and graphics, generate an incredibly stimulating loop that is very difficult to leave.
They are simple systems that work exactly for that and that feed back in very direct ways at the most superficial level but that gain a depth that I surely have not even seen to its ultimate consequences. These two ideas are powerful enough to hold the whole game, but it is when you start to see how the rest of the systems work on a similar scale without overwhelming with abusive tutorials, letting you experiment and try things when the game starts to connect all those things that the study had left abandoned. And in the background with these systems we still have more to help us not stagnate. We can invoke AI companions without any complication to face the bosses, we have a string of spells to use that can tilt the balance quite in our favor and even an invocation with a sort of added Devil Trigger so that we cannot complain about lack of options to face any combat, even the equipment with statistics (a rather severe problem that they ended up facing by simplifying it with a single button to put you the "best possible" in Stranger of Paradise) impacts the parry window, expanding or reducing the frames we have of action but showing up simple and clear in the menu through a very simple color and number code that is noticeable during gameplay. Everything continues to feel as extreme and expansive as before in these accompanying systems, but the playable core is polished to allow us to flow by introducing us only into the scale we want.
That is why Wo Long is a victory. Because it is the first time I see Team Ninja free within their own mannerisms; without renouncing certain vices that are here for better or worse and are already part of their usual repertoire, but polishing them enough so as not to overwhelm those who do not want to see them. It is an admirable display of honesty and lack of shame as Stranger Of Paradise already was, but where that one shone for the twist it presented to the first Final Fantasy, wallowed in its radical sense of humor and defined itself as a game of the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation, this feels like a step forward. Wo Long will not revolutionize anything but it is an action game with intention and focus, still far from reaching the standards of the best Capcom or Platinum but with enough to say to justify itself outside of copying. And where there is a game with a parry as pleasant as this, it is worth being there, no matter the cost.
Lo tenéis en español en mi web :) https://irrationalreviews6.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/critica-wo-long-fallen-dynasty/
Wo Long is his Sekiro. No one denies it and no one seems to care too much because we are in a different situation. That Team Ninja has needed references is obvious, and its mechanism of copying the older brother has not been unique or particularly good with what we have behind us. Nioh is a gargantuan game that after five hours gives you a nail and asks you to pierce it because inside it only has air and Nioh 2 as much as it pains me I have not even tried it because the formula immediately clogs. Nioh is a game that is consumed, not played; you have to devour it quickly and without consideration, you have to enter it as someone enters an all-you-can-eat buffet, not valuing each dish and each flavor but filling your mouth so much that the palate does not know what signal has to send to the brain; you have to incapacitate yourself to continue enjoying the combat and the corridors in an animal way, without thinking about level design and much less about the nonsense that the characters spit out of their mouths.
Wo Long is not that far from this. It is also a game that is enjoyed by being devoured and that wants to be opened in half and exploded. But where Nioh was rude and rough Wo Long tries to be cathartic and aware. There are many edges in Team Ninja games that must be overlooked to get carried away by the playable core, and I do not want to be misunderstood, the shortcomings of Wo Long are clear from the first moment because they are already the idiosyncrasies that define the way of making action games of the studio. But there is a clear attempt to reformulate itself without bending through design with some changes that modify the formula enough for the vision that unifies the game as a whole to be seen more clearly, and that makes revisiting the ideas that did not work in Nioh by playing with the form but leaving the structure feel correct.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Wo Long does quite a few things well, and one, the combat system, is so satisfying that it justifies the entire game. The backbone is the parry, as it already was in Sekiro the idea of embodying a nameless warrior who faces combat through blocking and counterattack is immediately pleasant; and Wo Long does not hesitate to emulate some great moments from it in a direct way and above all trying to find its own click with its particular system of parrys. Also like in Sekiro, the basis of each combat lies in the posture bar; an energy system that is spent when we are attacked, block badly or dodge. A way to encapsulate in a single meter the result of combat, blows given and received, like the energy of the character itself with dodges. This posture bar is also present in all our enemies, and works in a similar way, we can lower them by attacking them, correctly blocking their attacks or stalking them from behind when they have not yet seen us to stab them while maintaining stealth. The classic combat of energy and life changes to a kind of boxing confrontation, where each one fights to lower the other's bar, to achieve not immediately killing but breaking posture. And this breaking of posture leads us to the possibility of an execution that, this time yes, significantly lowers the life bar and in our mind represents the victory or defeat of a round, with seconds of delicious animation in the stake to breathe and celebrate or murmur between teeth and seek confidence to win in the next. So far everything is Sekiro, there are no severe changes, simply a base that was already brilliant in Sekiro and that gave us the adrenaline of sword clashes like rarely has been transferred to our control. It is in the way of focusing how we execute the parrys and how it is transferred to the command where Team Ninja seeks its own identity. Everything works also starting from the same button, but the twist it executes is interesting, and what it generates in the playable loop even more so.
In Wo Long the parry’s done with the dodge button, and we dodge with a double tap of the same, this means that speaking in Xbox buttons a tap of B slightly moves us to the side we choose and serves primarily to, adjusted to the timing of the enemy blow, block an attack and lower the posture of the attacker, and the double consecutive tap of B will make us do a long roll that leaves us defenseless during its execution but moves us far enough to gain perspective and space in most confrontations. There is a block button, LB, which serves us to hold our position in place by blocking enemy attacks, but drains our posture bar. This mapping on the controller makes Wo Long focus much more on our mobility than on our rhythm; being the parry the center of combat be linked to movement, blocking goes from being the standard to the alternative and forcing us to bend to combat through parry will make us constantly move because each tap in search of a counter will also be one that will displace us slightly through the scenario. This paradigm shift does not modify the premise of its combat, in the end this is another kind of rhythmic game that forces us to understand the combos of our enemies as sequences of attacks by times that we have to learn and memorize. The main change does not come so much in what we do but in how, and that constant mobility that it imposes makes everything constantly spectacular and opulent, so that we enjoy more the sight than the challenge. The combat is tight and precise, but it does not penalize as much as it seems and the parry windows are wide, the enemies except for a few occasions always have quite telegraphed attacks and although there are stones along the way and we die repeatedly, there is always that feeling that the game does not want to put its foot on the accelerator of difficulty. Not for lack of desire or ideas, but for self-containment.
Nioh started an interesting path in which several of the tics and obsessions that would be seen later were in a primitive state, and where the lack of polish was attempted to be obscured by copying systems that did not work. The online implementation was one of them, it did not work particularly well although it tried to have its own identity, but it was in difficulty where I think they did not know how to measure and frustration at times took over the intensity that the game required of one to get carried away by its combat. Ninja Gaiden is known for being tough but Nioh set up walls in the form of bosses with sometimes impossible to understand attacks and with fights that ended when we were lucky and not experienced. It was not the majority of the time but enough to go from challenge to exhaustion.
However, we do not have that here. The only wall is the first boss, who in order to show us how the parry works serves as a fire test so that we cannot start without perfectly understanding its timings, and in an exercise as noble as regular it serves us to learn and, if we do not leave it for impossible in the first hour, a problem that many people will face, endure with a game that always wants to stimulate us with the breadth of its combos and animations, where the memorability of the bosses comes more from their appearances and the catharsis of chaining attacks on them than from the challenge of finishing them off.
This change from challenge to pleasure is important, because that is where the great change in the formula that Stranger of Paradise already presented but that here is transparent really comes; although Team Ninja imitates From Software, their games are pure action. The spectacle always comes before the challenge, and the animations are a concatenation of pirouettes and jumps that drink much more from Wuxia than from Dark Souls. And the systems that support this idea are as round and clear as the combat itself.
We return to an RPG level system that seems more and more outdated but with a twist that works like a shot. Despite the fact that we can and must increase our level of experience and each mission has its recommended level (of course), all missions have within them a kind of level multiplier. That is, it does not matter that we go to a mission with a recommended level of 12 or 55, we will always start it with an indicator on the screen that says 0, and that is filled with a limit of 20 as we finish off the enemies of the level without dying. Up to here it is a twist that rewards us extra for risking confrontations and rewards us with more damage when hitting and less when receiving, but if we die the counter is reset. And here is where one of the most interesting points of Wo Long comes in; the plot revolves around the era of the Three Kingdoms in China, which serves us to establish each level as a kind of territorial battle in the great war in which we must not only get to the final enemy, but “conquer” the area. This means raising banners throughout the map that are distributed more or less clearly, and each banner we raise will raise our minimum level. It is a lot of information, but basically the game rewards us for exploring levels with a lesser penalty upon death, which in turn makes us level up more because we will find more enemies to kill and better equipment to wear. It is an artificial curve in each level that engages, and structuring always in levels of approximately one hour in duration feels like an immediate gratification that, added to the micro-rewards of combat in the form of animations, sounds and graphics, generate an incredibly stimulating loop that is very difficult to leave.
They are simple systems that work exactly for that and that feed back in very direct ways at the most superficial level but that gain a depth that I surely have not even seen to its ultimate consequences. These two ideas are powerful enough to hold the whole game, but it is when you start to see how the rest of the systems work on a similar scale without overwhelming with abusive tutorials, letting you experiment and try things when the game starts to connect all those things that the study had left abandoned. And in the background with these systems we still have more to help us not stagnate. We can invoke AI companions without any complication to face the bosses, we have a string of spells to use that can tilt the balance quite in our favor and even an invocation with a sort of added Devil Trigger so that we cannot complain about lack of options to face any combat, even the equipment with statistics (a rather severe problem that they ended up facing by simplifying it with a single button to put you the "best possible" in Stranger of Paradise) impacts the parry window, expanding or reducing the frames we have of action but showing up simple and clear in the menu through a very simple color and number code that is noticeable during gameplay. Everything continues to feel as extreme and expansive as before in these accompanying systems, but the playable core is polished to allow us to flow by introducing us only into the scale we want.
That is why Wo Long is a victory. Because it is the first time I see Team Ninja free within their own mannerisms; without renouncing certain vices that are here for better or worse and are already part of their usual repertoire, but polishing them enough so as not to overwhelm those who do not want to see them. It is an admirable display of honesty and lack of shame as Stranger Of Paradise already was, but where that one shone for the twist it presented to the first Final Fantasy, wallowed in its radical sense of humor and defined itself as a game of the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation, this feels like a step forward. Wo Long will not revolutionize anything but it is an action game with intention and focus, still far from reaching the standards of the best Capcom or Platinum but with enough to say to justify itself outside of copying. And where there is a game with a parry as pleasant as this, it is worth being there, no matter the cost.
Lo tenéis en español en mi web :) https://irrationalreviews6.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/critica-wo-long-fallen-dynasty/
Casinocaster
1 year ago