It’s been some time since the Japanese studio Team NINJA released a pure action game in the vein of modern Ninja Gaiden, as titles like the two entries in the Nioh series and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin combine the excellent action gameplay the studio is known for with role-playing game mechanics and challenging experiences inspired by FromSoftware’s Souls series. The developer, however, did not forget their classic games and has now returned to a slightly more straightforward action game formula with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, another solid game that fans of the studio will thoroughly enjoy, despite some issues.
Taking a page from the Nioh book, in terms of setting and story, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty combines a historical setting with fictional characters and fantasy elements. Like in the second entry in the Nioh series, players can create their own custom character, a nameless militia soldier who gets involved in a conspiracy set in the later Han Dynasty of the Three Kingdoms era surrounding a mysterious Elixir that is being used by warlords and generals all over China to obtain secret powers and summon demons. Having some connection with the being that spread this Elixir throughout the land, the nameless militia soldier will get to influence the history of Ancient China, crossing swords and allying themselves with important historical figures of the era such as Liu Bei, Cao Cao, and Sun Jian.
If any of these names sound familiar to you, it’s likely because you have played any entry in the Dynasty Warriors or Romance of the Three Kingdom series, as the setting is exactly the same. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty starts during the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184, so those familiar with the Three Kingdoms era will feel right at home. Like in the Nioh games, however, the story doesn’t play around with real history too much, providing a sort of alternating telling of the events that really transpired so many centuries ago.
Lacking the sort of personal stakes seen in Nioh 2, however, the story in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is far less engaging. Historical figures come and go and receive very little development, and so do the tale’s main characters. Team NINJA’s games don’t exactly shine for their stories, so no one should be surprised by this, but it is still a little disappointing, especially after Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, although that game did benefit from the collaboration with Square Enix and the Final Fantasy series setting.
If Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty doesn’t exactly provide a stellar narrative experience, it definitely delivers when it comes to gameplay. At its heart, the new game from the Japanese studio is an action role-playing game in the vein of their latest games, but with quite a few significant changes. Controlling their custom-created character, players will explore a variety of locations set in Ancient China in search of loot and fight all sorts of enemies, ranging from regular humans to corrupted warriors and demons, to reach a powerful boss that must be defeated to complete a stage. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, like recent games from Team NINJA, employs a quest-based progression system, so exploration is limited to individual stages, which makes sense as the developer wanted players to focus on the action.
Still, exploration did see some improvements over past games. In Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, it is possible to jump, and the addition of this maneuver allowed the developers to come up with a slightly more intricate level design with improved verticality. As such, it is possible to approach certain situations differently using the different paths provided by stages. If, for example, there’s a huge number of enemies in a certain location, it is completely possible to navigate around them by, for example, jumping on nearby roofs or ambushing them stealthily one by one. These new possibilities result in a slightly better-rounded experience that doesn’t necessarily focus on combat, although players do need to get good at it since there’s no way around bosses.
The slightly more intricate level design plays rather well with some of the Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty mechanics that define the whole experience. The game difficulty setting cannot be changed, but players can change how difficult combat can be via the Morale System. At the start of each stage, Morale Rank starts at 1, and it is increased by damaging and defeating enemies, deflecting their attacks, and more. The higher the Morale Rank of the player is compared to that of the enemy determines how much damage is done and received, so getting it as high as possible is extremely important, especially before a boss battle, as these powerful enemies hit extremely hard in true Team NINJA tradition. High Morale Rank is also needed to unleash the most powerful Wizardy Spells.
Morale Rank, however, can also go down, and if defeated, the players will go back to the stage’s current Fortitude Rank, which can be increased by activating Battle Flags that function as the Bonfires in the Dark Souls series or the Shrines in the Nioh franchise, allowing players to level up their character, summon allies and so on, and Marking Flags scattered all over stages. This is where the exploration mechanics and the Flags and Morale mechanics come together, as many Marking Flags are hidden away from the beaten path, and it is in the player’s best interest to activate as many of them as possible to avoid dropping too many Morale Ranks upon defeat.
Getting defeated is a regular occurrence throughout the game. While the Morale system can be used to make the game slightly less challenging, the unaware player will be defeated over and over, especially if they lack an understanding of the game’s combat mechanics. Doing away with the classic Stamina mechanics seen in most Soulslike games, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty employs a new system, the Spirit system, which allows for seamless offense and defense as well as for a more accurate representation of Chinese martial arts.
While not engaged in combat, the Spirit value, which is indicated by a gauge located right below the health bar, will be neutral. Every time damage is dealt to an enemy, the value will increase, allowing players to unleash a Spirit-charged heavy attack that deals a lot of HP and Spirit damage to enemies. Spirit is also used to unleash Weapon Skills as well as Wizardy Spells, which increase the player’s offensive capabilities with elemental damage, buffing, debuffing, and recovery effects, but also to deflect enemy attacks and perform dodges, so managing meter competently is extremely important. Interestingly enough, the Spirit value can also be negative, adding a risk-reward system that works extremely well. Enemies also have Spirit values, and depleting it will leave them open to a powerful attack called Fatal Strike that deals a lot of damage.
With so many things to keep track of while fighting enemies, and with Team NINJA wanting to game’s main focus to be on the action, it makes sense for Wo-Long: Fallen Dynasty to be more streamlined, compared to Nioh. For starters, combat options have been reduced considerably. The stance system, for example, is a thing of the past, and the combat skills have been simplified a lot, as it’s only possible to unleash only up to two Martial Arts, which are attached to weapons, and four Wizardry Spells. Generally, I haven’t found much use for weapon skills, as the Spirit cost associated with using them is usually not worth it. If Spirit value is high, it’s almost always better to use it to unleash a powered-up heavy attack or a Wizardry Spell. Magic also comes with a unique rock-paper-scissor system that allows players to nullify the effects of any spell the enemy has cast upon itself by using the opposing element.
The streamlining doesn’t stop at the combat option. While having fewer skills can be seen by some players as a definite step back, the streamlining of the loot system seen in the studio’s previous games is a plus in my book. The game features many weapon types and armor pieces that still come with different rarity levels and skills, but they no longer have an associated level, so a high rarity item found at the start of the game can be used even at the end of the game once properly upgraded. The Leveling system has also been simplified, with the reduction of enhanceable attributes to five. Enhancing these attributes increases multiple stats and grants players additional points that can be used to learn new Wizardry Spells.
The removal of the wealth of combat options seen in Team NINJA’s most recent games is definitely disappointing, but they don’t make Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty any less engaging or fun, mostly thanks to the already mentioned Deflection mechanics, which allow players to deflect all enemy attacks. These mechanics, which give the entire experience a unique flavor that’s closer to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice than any entry in the Souls series, aren’t just another combat option but the main one upon which the whole experience is built, as its proper usage allows players to build up Spirit easily while negating any damage and creating an opening for offense. Over the first demo, the Deflection window has been expanded a lot, so pulling it off is much, much easier, which makes tons of sense, considering how central it is to the combat experience.
To be entirely honest, it isn’t just pulling off Deflections that has become easier in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, but the entire experience as well. While the game definitely has its fair share of challenging bosses and optional quests that pit the player against multiple enemies at once, the general challenge level feels considerably lower than in the Nioh games, as I was able to defeat multiple bosses on the first or second try. While it is true that I went into these fights with a high Morale Rank, it’s also true that keeping this Rank low to increase the challenge level means playing the game in a way that doesn’t feel natural at all, avoiding fighting enemies, raising Marking Flags and so on. Even so, after a boss’ attack patterns have been learned, Morale Rank doesn’t matter much, as they won’t be able to touch the player.
With this in mind, there’s little doubt that with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Team NINJA wanted to make a more accessible experience, providing players with more tools to tailor the challenge level to their skill level without having set difficulty settings. One new mechanic lifted from Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin that can make going through Ancient China and the hordes of demons infesting it easier are AI companions. During most main quests and a few optional ones, one or more characters will join the player as the story dictates, helping them deal with enemies with decent competence. In boss battles, AI companions are mostly used to take the heat off the player, so players will still have to do most of the hard work themselves. In cases AI companions are not assigned automatically to the player, it is possible to recruit them at Battle Flags spending Tiger Seal items, and deepening the Oath Level with each of them will reward the player with some unique equipment. Those who don’t want any AI companion can easily dismiss the ones assigned to them for story reasons by using the Withering Branch item.
For those who require some competent help, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty allows players to summon other human players for co-op action. On the other hand, if one wants to test their build and Deflection skills against another human player, it is also possible to do so by becoming an Invader. In both cases, the experience is as balanced as possible, as the Level Sync feature ensures no player is overleved, compared to the others. Unfortunately, due to the low online population pre-release, I wasn’t able to try out online multiplayer extensively. Asynchronous multiplayer features are also available with the Revenge mechanics. These give players Accolades to exchange with items in the game’s main hub after defeating an enemy that killed another player.
Just like when it comes to the story, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty doesn’t deliver when it comes to visuals and performance. While the game doesn’t exactly look bad, it doesn’t look great either, most of the time feeling like a downgrade over Nioh 2 when it comes to character models, texture quality, and lighting, even at the highest setting, which is a shame, considering the visual design of characters, demons, and locations is decent enough, although a bit repetitive, especially level design. Some visual glitches, such as texture pop-in, impact the experience as well.
With visuals not being all that amazing, one would expect performance not to be a problem, but that isn’t the case, at least on PC. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty not only features a limited enough selection of graphics settings to tweak but also lacks support for upscaling technologies like NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS, which will only come after launch and would have helped performance. Unlike the other recent Koei Tecmo release, Wild Hearts, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty was somewhat playable on the PC used for the test (i7-10700 CPU, RTX 3070 GPU, 16GB RAM) at 1440p resolution, everything at max, but there were framerate drops in certain situations, especially with particle effects and in areas with plenty of vegetation, and some stuttering issues. Uneven performance is a problem in a game requiring quick reactions to succeed, and there have been times when a critical deflection came in too late due to said issues.
At 4K resolution, I could never achieve anything past 30 frames per second, which was expected, but still disappointing, considering the game doesn’t look demanding. The disappointment became even bigger when I verified with FrameView how I averaged 55 FPS at 1440p resolution during a late-game Chapter with bad frame times. These performance issues are less severe on current generation consoles, judging from the PlayStation 5 playable demo, so, like for Wild Hearts, I suggest players opt for the console version if possible, as the PC version is not in a good shape at all.
My 35 hours or so with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty have undoubtedly been enjoyable, and I will return to the game in the future to play the game through New Game Plus mode, which brings the challenge back to the levels of the original console demo, and the DLC expansion, but I cannot help but feel a little disappointed at the lower challenge level of the first playthrough and at the removal of combat options that result in a slighter shallower experience, compared to the Nioh series. These issues aside, which are a matter of personal preference, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is a solid action title that all fans of the genre will enjoy.
PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.
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