When I became aware of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, I had just finished revisiting Nioh 2 in pursuit of another platinum trophy. I was surprised to see Team Ninja following up their souls-inspired, loot-stuffed masterpiece with a game that, on the surface, appeared to be very similar. I wondered what it was that would make Wo Long stand out on its own. After recently spending so much time in Nioh 2, with almost no complaints about its refined combat, improved enemy variety or boss and environmental design, I wasn’t necessarily chomping at the bit for a threequel. I’d already binged on something I don’t think could get much better. Therefore, Wo Long’s announcement came as a pleasant surprise. According to early coverage of the game, Team Ninja, a trusted developer with proven evolutionary potential, had blended their own Nioh and the astonishingly innovative Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice together. Well, well, well, I thought, it’s time to party.

Did I say party? I meant parry. Everyone loves a good parry, right? We’re not talking about blocking an attack. THUNK. We’re talking about deflecting one. CLANG! A block forces the defender to hunker down and absorb the blow. A parry encourages the defender to become the attacker once again. Get that sword out of my face, says the parrier, before striking their off-balance opponent with a lethal riposte. It’s a mechanic that empowers the player by forcing them to take a fatal risk. If you can’t deflect the danger, get ready to feel some anger. Wo Long’s combat is dependent on parries in a way that’s reminiscent of Sekiro. Every attack can be parried and every parry pumps more orange into the enemy’s spirit gauge (stamina meter). Orange is the color of anti-spirit. . . so, cowardice? Hopelessness? Disappointment? Anyway, when the gauge turns totally orange, the enemy is temporarily defenseless. In Sekiro, this same system leads to a critical attack that empties the remainder of the enemy’s health bar. Wo Long requires multiple stuns to kill bosses, but boss spirit is depleted faster than boss posture in Sekiro. Getting used to the parry was my biggest hurdle to overcome before I could truly enjoy the game.

The same thing happened to me in Sekiro. I disliked FromSoftware’s shinobi epic for the first five or so hours of trying desperately to adapt to what the internet had led me to believe was another soulslike title. I couldn’t for the literal virtual life of me grasp the combat. I was ready to give up. That is, until I forced myself to forget about Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I could only play Sekiro on a clean slate. Deflections were mandatory. Dodging was pointless. With that in mind, I began to finally understand Sekiro more and more until I eventually fell in love with it. The samurai fantasy took off in full swing once I *ahem* got good. In Wo Long, I once again struggled to get things going, though it wasn’t as difficult of a process as in Sekiro, rather less intuitive. There was a more specific roadblock standing in my way than a new overall concept for combat. In Wo Long, the parry is mapped to the same button as a flippy dodge. To parry, press circle once. To dodge, press circle twice. You can probably already see why this would be frustrating to get the hang of. As I tried reading the pattern of each new enemy I encountered, I found myself accidentally backflipping away from a string of attacks that I intended to parry. Even if I successfully dodged an attack by accident, my rhythm was entirely thrown off, meaning I’d surely be smacked by an enemy’s follow-up before I could even register why my character was spinning around in the air like some kind of maniac. On top of that, dodging costs a big chunk of spirit, so my gauge was often glowing a dreadful shade of orange at very inconvenient intervals as I reflexively tapped circle too fast and lamented the fact that remapping the controls won’t allow for the separation of parry and dodge. I understand why Team Ninja did this. It’s a different approach to Sekiro’s blueprint. In Sekiro, spamming the parry is an instinctual part of the learning process. It’s possible for the player to repeatedly tap L1 when facing an enemy that has just wound up for a ferocious combo. The panic parry is perfectly natural, and while such a method may save your skin here and there, it’s not sustainable. If you don’t learn how to properly parry, Sekiro’s rogues’ gallery will destroy you. It’s also not exactly fun to spam, because you aren’t really accomplishing anything when it works. So, the idea that spamming is allowed but not reliable doesn’t hinder the experience at all. It helps a player through the early stages of clicking with the combat. Wo Long’s one-button-two-behaviors approach does the opposite. It strictly prevents spamming the parry. Any attempts to do so will activate a weird evasive maneuver that the player didn’t plan on. This issue hurt my first impression of the game, because I was expecting speedy, sword-clanging showdowns. Instead, I was continuously throwing myself all over the arena while bosses chased me around and promptly destroyed me. After several hours, I began to hold back. Instead of trying to chain together multiple attacks and deflections, I decided to allow my enemy to lead the dance. I became more patient, only tapping circle once when I was confident I could parry whatever was coming my way. If I couldn’t, I’d make use of the block to bridge the gap. This was when I started to like Wo Long, but I knew the game had more to give. There was one more pothole to rumble over before I could finally cruise.

In Nioh 2, burst counters. . . burst. . . onto the scene. Though Nioh incorporated parries that were tied to each individual weapon, I never used them very much due to the sometimes-wonky timing and deadly punishments delivered upon failed execution. I’d rather block or side-step. Burst counters are basically enhanced parries, available only when an enemy flashes red, indicating that their next attack can be exploited for maximum damage to their ki (aka spirit/stamina/posture). Burst counter opportunities are clearly communicated to the player and grant significantly rewarding moments in return for well-timed defensive action amid back-and-forth battles. These same red attacks show up in Wo Long, but there’s a catch. Parries cannot be performed mid-attack. In Nioh 2, animation cancelling was instantaneous. Burst countering during an attack string was crucial in maintaining the momentum of combat, not to mention a lot of fun to pull off. A burst counter could take place in the blink of an eye, whereas in Wo Long, the timing must be precise so as not to overlap with any other attempted actions. For me, this meant that all heavy weapons with a longer wind-up were immediately off the table, lest I get one-shotted by a red body-slam or fireball while attempting to perform a simple chip-damage light attack. I understand that Wo Long wants players to face consequences for getting too greedy, but during the first several hours I began to feel duped, as though I had been misled by the way Wo Long’s ostensible preference for speed could suddenly revert back to the more classic soulslike philosophy of patiently waiting your turn. I elected to use swords and dual halberds for their faster recovery frames, but I still got crushed by plenty of red attacks that were thrown my way because I pressed square one too many times, thus locking my character into an animation that can’t be cut off. To solve this issue, I had to learn the timing of each weapon more carefully than I remember doing in Nioh 2. Or maybe it just felt that way. About halfway through the game, I knew I’d be using the same two weapons for the remainder of the adventure. The lack of an incentive to experiment with every other weapon is somewhat disappointing, especially compared to Nioh 2, where mastering each unique weapon was an addicting challenge. The expansive skill trees tied to Nioh 2’s arsenal ensured that each weapon functioned in a noticeably different way from one another. I was genuinely curious and eager to see what new abilities I’d get to play around with depending on whether I was using tonfas or dual hatchets (my two favorite choices). Wo Long doesn’t offer the same versatility. There are martial arts, which replace skills, but these are randomly attached to the weapons you find and, while some of them are interesting and useful in breaking spirit, they become repetitive quite quickly.  

Wo Long’s combat is clearly held back by a few speedbumps, but sticking with the game until I better understood what it demanded of me did result in discovering a lot to enjoy. Learning to adapt to a less creative and more simplistic style than in Nioh 2 isn’t automatically a bad thing. Just because I can’t go wild with an insanely feverish combo doesn’t mean that I can’t combo at all. The combat shines when deflections and regular attacks/martial arts are chained strategically with critical strikes. When the player accumulates enough spirit to turn their own bar blue (by landing and deflecting attacks), they can perform a buffed heavy attack that breaks an opponent’s block and oranges their spirit gauge. It’s very satisfying to deflect an attack, then counter with a light-heavy chain that shatters an enemy’s spirit, allowing you to immediately engage in a critical blow by hitting the heavy attack button once more. When muscle memory kicks in regarding enemy behavior, you’ll *ahem* get good enough to add a spell to the mix and be more liberal with your martial arts. By the way, Wo Long’s spells are fine, but I personally didn’t use them often. On the surface, they’re predictable. Offensive projectiles, defensive buffs, enemy nerfs and weapon imbuements. I ended up favoring a fire spell that allows me to shoot flames out of my hands while spinning around in a circle, which can quickly set enemies ablaze. It’s fun to cast, but I found myself forgetting about it while I focused mostly on melee throughout my journey.    

If you want to be the strongest you can possibly be in Wo Long, you’ll need morale. Morale is an extra value related to the player by a number always visible above the health bar. The more enemies a player defeats, the higher their morale becomes, with twenty-five as the maximum value. Higher morale means more damage dealt and less received. By finding battle flags, which function as this game’s bonfires or shrines, the player can increase their fortitude (base morale) for the rest of the current mission’s duration. Upon death, fortitude reverts to the base value. It resets altogether at the start of each level. While morale/fortitude is a neat idea that promotes exploration and aggression, it never drastically changed the way I would have already approached the game. It can be fun to find optional battle flags tucked away into a corner somewhere, which don’t trigger a respawn point like the main flags but still increase fortitude and fill your health bar, yet the stiff jumping mechanics combined with decent but nowhere near stellar level design doesn’t make it very challenging or interesting to do so.

Team Ninja also attempted to make looting and leveling feel novel, though they didn’t entirely succeed. Finding random gear dropped from enemies or hidden in chests feels very familiar to Nioh 2, except there’s far less of it. As I already mentioned, weapons are permanently tied to their respective martial arts at random, so there’s a constrictive limitation when it comes to customizing a weapon’s abilities. The most you can do is alter bonus values, like increased elemental damage. You could do the same thing in Nioh 2, but the whole process was so much more engaging due to the intrinsically protean design of each armament. I cared more about finding better versions of the same weapons in that game because I wanted to continue learning the ins and outs of each skill tree, and if I didn’t consistently upgrade my kusarigama, spear, axe, etc., then I wouldn’t be able to keep using that weapon type against the hordes of ever-strengthening demons standing in my way. Wo Long’s loot and upgrade cycle isn’t bad, it’s just basic. Leveling is where Wo Long gets more creative credit. The game introduces what’s called the five phases. There is wood, earth, fire, metal and water. Each element increases certain values that affect combat performance in different ways. For instance, spending points on wood will decrease the damage done to the player’s spirit gauge whenever they are attacked. Fire increases how much a player’s spirit is boosted whenever their attacks land and earth will award the player more spirit with every successful deflection. Each element increases health, so you aren’t forced to dump a bunch of points into survivability while missing out on the good stuff. I liked the five phase’s focus on individual combat mechanics rather than broad categories. I felt as though I was directly accommodating my own playstyle as I leveled up, instead of mandatorily spending XP on common stats.

Wo Long ultimately comes across as a side project developed by many of the same people who worked on Nioh, if many of those many people also played Sekiro. Its parry-heavy gameplay can be initially off-putting due to the pesky dodge’s infiltration of the parry button, but if you can solve that problem, you’ll end up enjoying Wo Long’s loop. By the end of my first playthrough, I was comfortable enough with the combat to coast through to the end. I’m about thirty hours in, halfway through a second run, and I’m starting to feel fatigue, which is only amplified by the fact that the enemy roster isn’t very deep, nor does the loot really matter anymore. Also, red attacks on new game plus are usually guaranteed one-shots. Would I recommend Wo Long? Sure, but it’s not the next best thing that I can see myself returning to again and again. Not every game needs to be. The best endorsement I can probably give Wo Long is that I will finish my second playthrough, so it’s doing something r r r right. Okay, ve r y funny, who mapped ‘r’ and space to the same key??