If you’ll permit some lengthy stage setting, self-deprecation, and eye-rollingly bad dad jokes, I’ll start with an admission.  Souls-like games, try as I might, are just beyond me.  I keep buying them, and I keep not finishing them, because my tolerance for running back to a boss could not be measured with an electron microscope.  Therefore it was with some trepidation, ultimately overcome by my fondness for the source material, that I picked up Team Ninja’s Stranger of Paradise a few years back.  What a treat it turned out to be – high risk, fast-paced action combat with complex RPG character building systems that still maintained a bit of interconnected exploration, if not quite to the level of the subgenre pillars.

Having developed a taste for Team Ninja’s answer to the question, “What if Dark Souls was fun?” I decided to dip back into their recent offerings.  Nioh 2 was a swift, humbling reality-check.  Once more, I was stymied by an onerous run-back, this time to some triocular owl whose aerobatics and stage-filling attacks ensured I learned nothing for the effort.  Still, there’s something unique about Team Ninja’s combat, so I tried again, and redeemed myself with Rise of the Ronin.  Next up was Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.

There I was, learning the counterattack timing and getting a kick out of the new systems, when against my better judgment, I pursued Lu Bu.  This time, though, there was no run back to blame – I just couldn’t beat him.  However, there’s good news – I didn’t resign myself to saying “so long” to Wo Long.  Therefore, I can share with you a review of another great Team Ninja ARPG, valuable lessons about actually reading the game’s tutorial messages, and maybe a little bit of spiritual value to boot.

Whereas Nioh builds a fantastical story upon Japanese history, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty takes its inspiration from the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  In particular, it focuses on and bookends the Yellow Turban rebellion, then superimposes a magical root to the conflict: the coveting and abuse of a substance “Elixir”.  Elixir is essentially a distillation of life force, but it is a counterfeit of the genuine article, and its misuse generates demonic power.  Unfortunately, there’s an evil Taoist wizard afoot who wants to use that demonic power to transition the world into a utopia of his design, so he goes about the country instigating conflicts from which he can harvest what he needs to make Elixir, and therefore gather more demonic might.  You play as a nameless soldier brought back from the brink of death through the blessings of the benevolent divine beasts, and it’s up to you to fight back the Taoist’s corrupting influence and his demonic hordes.

The narrative backdrop of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is sufficient to propel you from mission to mission, and the game makes brief attempts to clue you in to the motivations of the principal figures you meet along the way.  However, it does often feel like you’re missing something if, like me, you’re not versed in the history of the warring states period of Chinese history, or not literate enough to have read Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  My exposure begins and ends with Dynasty Warriors 3 over twenty years ago, so while I’d heard a lot of the names before, I couldn’t tell you why it’s significant to see allegiances shift during the course of the story, or the political ramifications of its ending.  Team Ninja was probably wise to shift some of the storytelling duties to the source material, though, because it puts less distance between you and the action, which is this game’s focus and strength.

In contrast to Nioh, said action doesn’t involve managing multiple weapon stances, so Wo Long is perhaps less taxing on your memory, but remains fluid, demanding, and satisfying.  You still have two melee weapons equipped at a time, but rather than having skill trees devoted to the weapon type, each weapon you pick up has up to three martial art skills built in.  It’s up to you to find a combination you prefer, or keep a few handy for different situations.

Combat itself is based around a resource called “spirit”.  Your natural state is zero – spirit is earned through attacking and successful deflections, while spent through spirit attacks (heavy attacks), unsuccessful deflections, getting hit, and Wizardry spells.  If you run out of spirit, you’re unable to take action other than guarding for a short period of time.  Your enemies are bound by these same rules, so combat revolves around taking calculated risks with your own spirit, and cutting down the spirit of your foes, opening them up to flashy critical attacks.  It’s satisfying to best your demonic foes – but it’s delightful to do so with an acrobatic leap followed by a meteoric descending sword thrust.

The aforementioned Wizardry spells are somewhat analogous to Nioh’s Yokai attacks, in that they can be equipped independently from your weapon choices, but in Wo Long, Wizardry spells are part of a larger elemental system.  Each of the five elements opposes one of the others, and it’s a system that again is enforced on both you and your foes.  You may equip up to eight of the spells you’ve learned, and are encouraged to mix and match in order to counter the spells of your foes, and not to be countered yourself.  Wizardry spells require spirit, though, so you have to balance the magical pyrotechnics such that you don’t leave yourself open – or earn enough Morale in the level to reduce their Spirit cost.

Morale is another system unique to Wo Long amongst Team Ninja’s recent ARPG offerings, and it’s a fun incentive to explore Wo Long’s levels.  Within each level, your Morale begins at 1, and may be increased to a value of 25 through critical attacks or finding flags throughout the map.  You’re going to want it as high as possible, as getting hit by an enemy with higher morale is far more punishing.  Fortunately, finding flags doesn’t just increase your value, it provides a new floor, so you do not lose all your Morale progress when you die.  Therefore, exploration provides an additional reward, encouraging you to keep a keen eye throughout the diverse and colorful levels.

It’s worth noting – Wo Long takes a slightly different approach to traversing its levels compared to Nioh 2 or Stranger of Paradise.  You are not taken back out to a world map between each level – instead, you’re whisked from one level to the next, which does help the adventure feel more natural…but it has a negative effect if you are conditioned to expect a map and keep waiting for one in order to upgrade your equipment.  So, um, pro tip from someone who knows: when you get the menu box that says “Travel”…you should probably read what it does.  Don’t pursue Lu Bu without upgrading your gear.

You’ll want to travel anyway, because the levels are so colorful – you visit barren, rocky battlefields littered with the bodies of the unfortunate fallen and lush forests suffused with mist and monsters.  You’ll visit towns frozen by winter and caked with snow, as well as dank dungeons beneath military strongholds physically corrupted by the evil of their commanders – and plenty more.  Wo Long’s visuals lean into the legendary, using saturated colors and fantastical geography.  The effect is delightful, and it’s the best I’ve seen a Team Ninja game look so far – though I’ve yet to play the recently released Nioh 3 or Ninja Gaiden 4.

The musical front is also a success for Wo Long.  Instrumentation is exactly what you’d expect – wind and string instruments evocative of ancient China – but it’d be jarring if that weren’t the case.  The soundtrack is often very tense, so there’s definitely a portion of the background music that isn’t necessarily pleasant to listen to outside of the game, but the main theme is memorable, and you’ll occasionally hit a track like “Battlefront” which builds excitement in just the right way as you approach a mission’s boss arena. I’d also contend the Hidden Village’s tune is right up there with the best of the Souls-like hubs.  Kenichiro Suehiro’s “Sanctuary” fits Wo Long’s base camp perfectly, and I dig it.

Overall, I find it hard to find things to pick at when it comes to Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.  Team Ninja diehards might be somewhat disappointed, I suppose, if they want another Nioh, with stances, ki, and skill trees the size of Yggdrassil.  Wo Long’s trying something different, though, and if engaged on its own merits I think it’s a great Souls-like ARPG experience.

Spiritual Value

Beyond the basics of heroic combat against demonic foes, I want to commend Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty for a theme that appears too infrequently in games.  This is an adventure in which, rather than chafing against divine forces and grumbling about wanting to live and fight on your own terms, you are elevated by your participation in divine activity.  Granted, it’s not Catholic theology on display, but I appreciate that your hero seeks virtue, combats corruption, and in participation with higher powers works for the good of his or her neighbors.  However, what I kept coming back to was the namelessness of the player character.

Your hero is not featured in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and therefore is quite literally not in the history books.  Instead, you dwell in the background of the lives of all the principal players, humbly helping them succeed, without a word.  As strange as it may sound, this got me thinking about the missing years of Jesus’s life.  God – God! – was here for decades, and other than those close to him, no one knew or cared.  How scandalous it is that humanity writ large was so preoccupied with its own affairs to notice, and how wondrous – and challenging to emulate – is Jesus’s humility to live that life of obscurity.

Challenging to me, at least – whereas Jesus is content to work his Father’s will unknown and unrecorded, I’m too often focused on praise, plaudits, and external validation.  It’s a sad demonstration of a lack of faith in God’s love, which is not conditional upon or evidenced by anything I’ve done or can do.  It’s a free gift, demonstrated on the cross and given while I am yet a sinner.  

As for the rest of humanity during those hidden years, how different am I?  It’s not a distant historical question, as Jesus is physically present to me in the Mass.  How often do I fully appreciate the weight of that?  I fear more often than not, I’m treating the Eucharist like those unrecorded years, either too preoccupied with my own problems or too mundanely distracted to grasp what’s going on.  

If any of this feels familiar, may God grant us the humility to be content with namelessness so that we may better acknowledge, appreciate, and participate in his grace.

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