I don’t have a great intro for this one. I love Sekiro, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is trying to be a combination of Sekiro and Nioh, and I think the results are a mixed bag.
If you haven’t played Sekiro, or have but don’t remember the specifics of the mechanics, here’s a quick rundown of how Sekiro worked. Unlike other Souls games you didn’t need to use stamina for attacks or dodges, but instead every character had a “poise” that would be damaged by blocking attacks or if their attacks were perfectly parried by pressing block at the moment an attack would hit you. Holding your guard up would gradually reduce poise damage which is great news because if a character’s poise is shattered they’re open to an instant kill attack. Most attacks can be blocked but grapples and sweep attacks cannot, however those can be reliably countered with dodges and jumps in a system similar to rock, paper, scissors, which is the main way that Sekiro discourages you from just turtling behind your sword forever. With this in mind combat would generally be both you and your target trading sword attacks and blocks back and forth, with the occasional interruption of an unblockable attack you’d have to react to until you or the opponent had your poise broken and were insta-killed.
Wo Long changes things up almost immediately by having everything able to be parried (called “deflect” in Wo Long) but also having the deflect button not tied to the block button like Sekiro but instead triggered by using the dodge button, with one button press for deflecting and multiple button presses for regular dodging. I imagine the theory here was that the game’s red unblockable attacks, called “critical blows,” can’t be blocked but can be deflected, so if you missed the timing of deflecting it you could still dodge away by pressing the dodge button a second time. In practice the dodge doesn’t act as much more than a quick form of movement, since from my experience its i-frames are more of a happy suggestion than anything you can actively rely on, which routinely means that if you fail your deflect you’ll either be out of position or get hit, and it can lead to further punishes if there are rapid attacks that follow up what you were initially trying to deflect. Is this more skill testing? Yes. Does that mean it’s well designed? No; especially since deflecting these critical blows is the best way to reduce enemy stamina. This makes most fights feel rhythmically identical since at the end of the day, regardless of how aggressive you are or what weapons/spells/martial arts you use, you’re just waiting for the enemy you’re fighting to glow a bright red so you can deflect them for huge damage. But not an instant kill of course, because every other Sekiro clone has been too scared to try to balance a game around that.
Getting hit by these critical blows plays into Wo Long’s other primary mechanic: morale. In the strangest choice of game design that I’ve seen in the Souls genre, Wo Long has added a stage-based “morale level” mechanic where every main story level has you start at level one and you have to work your way up to twenty-five. Every enemy you face will also have a morale level, and the difference between their level and yours dictates how much damage you deal to them and how much damage they deal to you, with very little regard to how high your character’s level actually is. You can decrease enemy morale levels with stealth attacks or attacks on them after they’ve had broken stamina, but enemies will steal your morale if they hit you with critical blows or kill you, which means that if you screw up the fight will get progressively harder by degrees. The most reliable way to gain morale levels is to find hidden flags scattered around the map that will not only up your morale but also increase your “fortitude,” a stat that prevents your morale from dropping below a certain point during that level, and while I appreciate what I’ll charitably call the encouragement to explore I can’t understand why they thought this was a good mechanic to add to the game. Unless you’re good enough at the game to no-hit every enemy the morale level essentially creates artificial road blocks, with the game just dropping a level twenty enemy in front of a door and strongly encouraging you to explore elsewhere and come back later in lieu of better map design. It also leads to an extra layer of frustration for people that try to get summoned for co-op (I’ve heard), since there are tons of players out there that apparently don’t understand how morale works at all and are trying to fight level twenty bosses at level five.
This lack of a true level also impacts the loot system that has carried over from Team Ninja’s other Souls genre game, Nioh. Most enemies will drop items, armor, and weapons when they die but instead of the gear being based on you or your enemies levels like in Nioh, Diablo, or Borderlands, they instead just kind of drop with the same general power level regardless of your level or situation. Sure you might get a +3 weapon instead of a +1 weapon, but you can easily upgrade a default weapon to that same level with little effort, and probably have already just to make yourself feel better when wrestling with the morale system, so the only thing to keep an eye out for is the random special attacks and stat bonuses on each weapon. This means that if you want to get really in depth with what a “good weapon” is it will require a lot of reading percentages and balancing the benefits of 3% healing vs 5% experience vs 8% cold damage. This of course is assuming of course you find one with special attacks you like, which should be your first priority alongside what attribute scaling it has. I found picking a weapon first and then leveling your character around it worked better than trying to find a weapon that suited whatever stats you like, especially with the morale system undermining your stats no matter what you do. In my case that meant grabbing a set of dual swords due to the fast attack rate combined with a huge damage bonus when wearing light armor and rarely looking back outside of a brief stint with the staff weapons. Special attacks are cool but cost stamina to use, and while they generally are a better use of your stamina than magic spells (which also carry over from Nioh and are just as unnecessary) or heavy attacks, they won’t deal as much damage in the long haul as deflecting critical blows so they aren’t vital to your success. In any event, the punchline here is that loot drops in Wo Long are essentially just a huge pile of clutter and a waste of time since you’ll very rarely find drops that are actually exciting.
The thing I was the most surprised by in Wo Long was how much it really does feel like Nioh, and not just because of the loot system. Rather than an interconnected world the game has Nioh’s map system to pick missions, but unlike Nioh the story missions will lead into each other one after the other, forcing the player to return to the map menu to choose side missions rather than presenting them to you after each story level. Neither option is bad but it still lacks the thought put into From Software’s interconnected worlds, and hilariously you’ll even miss out on a few key story moments (or at least experience them out of order) as some side missions are direct follow ups to main story missions but you’ve already moved on to another main story point before the game lets you go back and experience the previous chapter’s “epilogue.” Wo Long also has spirit guardians like Nioh, called divine beasts, and you get them the same way you get them in Nioh: you team up with a historical or plot-important character and in the post-boss fight cutscene you’ll get a little montage of their life story before being gifted that character’s spirit animal. Unfortunately they feel less impactful than the spirit guardians in Nioh and especially so when compared to their demon forms in Nioh 2, since while you can still get powerful benefits they don’t give you a bonus health bar or have any cool passive abilities like the phoenix in Nioh.
Speaking of the plot characters, Wo Long takes place during China’s Three Kingdoms era and really rides the hype of that time to the fullest by forcing co-op gameplay down your throat at every opportunity. The plot is essentially the same plot as Nioh 2: you’re just “some guy” that turns out to be pretty good with a sword and you’re noticed by a historical figure that takes you on a series of grand, somewhat-tied-into-real-events adventure. But because everyone loves the various heroes from the Three Kingdoms time period you get to have AI controlled co-op friend time with all of them, as almost every mission lets you bring at least one historical figure, from Cao Cao to Zhang Liao, along with you to help you in combat and “bond” with you until you unlock their special weapons. Review sites up and down the internet have praised this addition as a way to make the Souls experience more “accessible,” because the AI can distract enemies for you so you can sneak in quick heals and stab them in the back, but I absolutely hate it for that reason. It’s not that I dislike the game being more accessible, if you found that having an AI distraction bot made the game easier then good for you, but I like my combat to be PREDICTABLE. If I’m the only thing for the enemies to focus on then I always know where attacks are going to go and I can react accordingly, which unsurprisingly is very useful in a game that is all about perfectly deflecting oncoming attacks. However if there’s one or more little worker bee friends running around distracting the enemy AI then who the hell knows where the next critical blow is going to go, especially when facing enemies that jump above you to do them. I’d repeatedly find myself deflecting thin air as the big red glow happened and the enemy decided to smack my AI friend instead, which of course they NEVER seem to properly avoid, and combined with the approximately zero damage they inflict to everything except the smallest enemies they were more of a hindrance than a help in my experience. Fortunately there are several levels where they’re optional and they aren’t invincible, so you can let them die or dismiss them and get back to your lone fights if that’s how you want to play.
One final word before we wrap up here, this time about the game’s questionable quality of life design choices, which fortunately they’ve started to patch out. For example, the game launched with no way to get any excess ammo or other items from your inventory stash unless you specifically went to visit the blacksmith character in the Hidden Village (essentially the game’s equivalent to Elden Ring’s Roundtable Hold) and dug them out of your stash yourself, in defiance of literally every other Souls game that just auto refilled from your stash when you visited a checkpoint. This has since been patched, but I have to ask how they missed that in the first place. Additionally this side area is the only place you can upgrade/sell/breakdown or otherwise manage your inventory, which feels like a pain compared to Nioh’s menu interface just taking you straight to the blacksmith in-between missions whenever you wanted. Instead if you want to upgrade or clear out your gear after a mission you have to wait to start the next mission, find the starting rest point, open your travel map, skip past the notification you unlocked new side levels, select the Hidden Village on the menu, and then once you load into the Hidden Village you have to turn right and jump off a cliff to get to the blacksmith.
You’re probably saying you have to go through a number of those same steps to reach the blacksmith in Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring, but unlike Wo Long those games don’t have a loot system that constantly dumps a billion worthless weapons and pieces of armor in your inventory every time you turn around, so there’s no reason to visit the blacksmith to clear out your inventory every three missions. It’s also impossible to compare said loot drops side by side to properly compare stats at time of writing, so you better have a pen and paper handy to compare those percentages I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. I also have to take two seconds to complain about the complete lack of block or dodge cancels in the game, which is not something any other Souls game has either EXCEPT FOR THE GAME THEY’RE TRYING TO EMULATE. In a game about last second attack deflection it’s absolutely ridiculous they only adopted a quarter of Sekiro’s concessions to the Souls formula (basic attacks not taking stamina) but left in everything else in Souls that’s antithetical to this gameplay style, such as every other action taking stamina and no last moment cancels to block or dodge.
I’ve seen several reviews say that Wo Long feels like a “natural development of Nioh’s gameplay” and in some ways I think that’s true. Nioh 2 was more of a sidestep than a full sequel with new ideas and Wo Long definitely takes the framework of Nioh in a new direction. Unfortunately it feels a little half baked to me, like a first pass into a concept without taking the time to refine it and understand what would make it feel more like its own beast rather than just a fast Souls game with a jump button and a requirement to learn how to parry attacks. If you loved Nioh and Sekiro didn’t click for you this might be the game for you, or if you liked Sekiro but thought it needed “builds” and weapon variety you might find a home here as well. But if you want another Sekiro this isn’t it, though admittedly it does show there’s a world where a game with Sekiro’s mechanics could expand into weapon types other than swords. Hopefully From Software is watching.
