Wait, Aren't You Someone Who Hates Souls Games? So, Why Did You Play Wo Long?

Before any of you challenge me about penning a mildly skeptical blog about Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, let's set the record straight. Yes, I have made it abundantly clear repeatedly that I am not a big fan of the Soulslike genre. I have stated in the past and still maintain to this day that FromSoftware gets a pass by the mainstream game press for their notable design and programming shortcomings because the media circuit continues to assign review duties for their titles to enthusiasts, which raises the question of how valuable most reviews of their works are for the public. I'm not fond of their approach to open-world game design, which burdens players with banging their heads on walls to make marginal progress with any of their games. The anti-player and anti-pick-up-and-play design that they seemingly have codified has resulted in anyone leveling even the most marginal and reasonable criticism of their works as being inaccessible, getting nothing but the worst toxicity from their fans, and From's silence to me is defeating. They should be denounced for the clipping issues, bad platforming, poor signposting, and terrible camera design that they plainly refuse to address, but I am still not surprised to see they haven't.

That's where I come from and the perspective I maintained the minute I booted up Wo Long. If you think that translates to me placing an unrealistic bar for Wo Long to summit to meet my threshold to pass muster, I cannot entirely deny you having a right to think that. Nonetheless, I did pen a two-part series about their work on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin and was mainly upbeat about their work on that game. Final Fantasy Origin, while not perfect, showcases how they might be the best in the genre in creating player-related assists and quality-of-life additions to the Souls experience without entirely ripping apart its identity. If it weren't that so much of Final Fantasy Origin's appeal stems from one's ability to recall dozens of games preceding it, it might have even taken the top spot of my list of games to give for newcomers interested in the Soulslike genre. Likewise, I cannot deny being a fan of their ARPGs and Musou works (i.e., Dissidia Final Fantasy NT and Fire Emblem Warriors). So, when I heard that Wo Long continued some of the traditions of Nioh 2 and Final Fantasy Origin but in a Han dynasty-inspired setting, my interest was piqued, and I ended up giving the game a shot. And with the game and its post-game DLC now under my belt, I feel comfortable calling it "perfectly good." The issue for me is that I think Team Ninja's business strategy and structure are what is holding them back, and I worry things will come to a head with Rise of the Rōnin.

A looming specter is clouding my enthusiasm for Team Ninja's work moving forward. While there's no denying that anything that brandishes their label is bound to be of respectable quality, they're starting to err closer toward a journeyman-like label in the Soulslike arena. Many of my contrivances with Wo Long and their previous works are just that, contrivances and mild annoyances. However, these problems continue to persist. Team Ninja's prolific factory-like production cycle allows them less flexibility as they continue to be committed to churning another game of this ilk every year and a half since the release of Nioh in 2017. With them already trying to gird people's loins for the release of Rise of the Rōnin, I cannot help but find this both predictable and, pragmatically, unsustainable. With expectations continuing to evolve and grow with every Soulslike game attempting to reach the wholeness of FromSoft's game worlds, I don't know how many more of these side dish-like affairs from Team Ninja will continue to be able to tread water even with incredibly well-funded marketing efforts. Team Ninja is slowly but surely beginning to occupy the same B-Tier space that the Hideo Baba era of Tales of games from Tales of Destiny to Tales of Zestiria inhabited. For one thing, you can tell which games got decent funding, but overwhelmingly, everything they make rarely receives enough time to bake in the oven.

I also want to address the half-dozen internet denizens who get upset when an action-roleplaying game from Team Ninja is compared to the works of FromSoftware. It is weird having to be the thousandth person to say this point in print, but genre labels are funny and can inhabit a wide breadth of different but similar things. While Team Ninja's action-roleplaying games have some noted differences from the lion's share of From's works, they are kindred spirits, and there's no denying how the Souls template has informed the works of Team Ninja. I get that there's exhaustion with everything getting called a Soulslike. Indeed, the meteoric fame achieved with Elden Ring led to many people misusing the label nauseatingly. Trust me; I have seen the questionable clickbait listicles that have come out that seem as if they were made using ChatGPT. Nonetheless, if complex political philosophies can be summarized in an umbrella-like fashion, the same can be afforded to this sub-genre. I'm not arguing that the works of Team Ninja are the best or purest representations of the Soulslike crease. Still, they exhibit enough of the genre's core that they should count as representatives of it in some capacity.

Look, I'm NOT Saying This Game Is Bad!

To try and assuage some of the concerns of those of you who put Wo Long on your 2023 GOTY lists that this is not a hit piece or a four-thousand-word long axe grinding session, let me share things about Wo Long that I enjoyed that I hope to see again in future Team Ninja titles. First and foremost, Wo Long's morale system is a revelatory addition. This feature has met near-universal praise and deserves every bit of it. Getting a visible and understandable estimate of how difficult bosses and new areas will be based on your current accomplishments on that level is highly appreciated. The thing I detest in many From works is when you enter a boss battle, unsuccessfully wail away on it ten to twenty times, and don't know if the problem is because you lack the levels or equipment or if your failures stem from you not parsing an obtuse or esoteric sign or animation cue on when and where to dodge and attack. To some of you reading this blog, I know you might chime in, "But that's part of the appeal," rest assured, I genuinely see no appeal in this design foible and, instead, find it endlessly frustrating. Wo Long simply telling you if your armor and weapons are not up to snuff is a breath of fresh air, and it takes a ton of the frustration out of its more climactic battles. As a result, you can appreciate them more for what they are: big cinematic set pieces.

With the game boiling out a bit of trial-and-error from the Soulslike formula, Wo Long's battles feel more tactical and puzzle-like than anything else. Like previous Team Ninja works, Wo Long values deflections and parries before you can go in for massive damage-dealing attacks. Nonetheless, as with Final Fantasy Origin, while Wo Long might provide you with multiple countering-oriented abilities at your disposal, it prefers one over the others. In the case of Final Fantasy Origin, it was parrying, and with Wo Long, it is blocking. In the case of Wo Long, you can completely neutralize most enemy's regular attacks by simply holding the block button. Sure, you have to worry about your "Spirit" meter, but that shouldn't be a problem in regular non-boss combat. Blocking is essential to someone like me because it adds to Wo Long's overall sense of leniency towards its players. When I got stuck on an early boss battle, I watched a tutorial on IGN. I was shocked to learn that you can hold the block button down while attempting to deflect attacks, so if your timing hitting the deflect button is off, you at least don't get your entire ass handed to yourself. There's a synergy with your counter abilities in Wo Long that does not exist elsewhere, and I am praying that this is not a one-off idea or design for Team Ninja.

The other Soulslike trappings are equally enjoyable. The Spirit meter is the currency for magic, which means your use of spells can eat away at how frequently you can block. Due to the puzzle-like nature of your combat encounters, once you "figure out" the gimmick to an enemy, even if they reappear, there are no secrets on what you need to do to get past them in the future. Some traditional FromSoft fans tend to bristle at Team Ninja's more linear approach to level design, but I prefer it. While I don't think Wo Long is a pick-up-and-play affair, the fact that you only need to worry about moving forward means that the "fear of missing out" is mainly to a minimum. There's still an unevenness with Team Ninja's production values, and I have my theories on why they exist in Wo Long, but this game has some astounding vista shots and environments. Team Ninja gets a pass on the linearity of their games because, when things come together, their environments and levels feel like lived-in ecosystems with flora and fauna, and their works still span an impressive breadth of temperature and thematic changes. These environments also have tactical breaks between chaotic or tiring combat arenas, so you never get too overwhelmed by whatever any level or environment has in store for you. Finally, the game is a fun take on ancient China and is likely the closest thing Koei Tecmo will make to a proper Warriors Orochi 5 in a long while. Man, remember when Omega Force made games for niche sickos?

My Main Issues With Wo Long Are Problems That Have Plagued Team Ninja's ARPGs Since Nioh 1

Now, it is time for me to shoot my shot! How in the world is it that we are now six to seven years deep into Team Ninja's Soulslike games, and they still haven't figured out how the loot in these games should work?HOW?! How has this problem been allowed to persist since Nioh? As was the case in Nioh, Nioh 2, AND Final Fantasy Origin, you need to spend five to seven minutes between combat sessions sorting through your loot, trashing what is useless, and donning new garb that you'll likely only use for a level or two. Sure, the smithing and item refining mechanic in Wo Long is an improvement from Nioh and Final Fantasy Origin, but that's a low bar! Yet again, a Team Ninja action-roleplaying game drops too much junk whenever you beat even the most basic enemies. While Wo Long's sorting filters and tagging abilities are far better than Team Ninja's earlier works, it is still the same loathsome rigamarole. Furthermore, there's no more frustrating feeling than when you do a decent amount of questing and spend time crafting a new weapon you have been fawning over for hours. Then, thirty or forty seconds into exploring a new environment, killing a random enemy drops something noticeably better than what you spent dozens of minutes making.

I don't understand why Team Ninja cannot comprehend the concept of scarcity in any of their post-Nioh games. It's such a core aspect of From's games that it's not exactly a secret sauce. When you manage to scrounge up the resources to smith something in Elden Ring, you can notice the difference immediately. In contrast, in Wo Long and most Team Ninja games of this type, you gaze at spreadsheets, eyeballing which percentages go up and down when you merge two or more items to form another one. The marginal sense of progression that dots a lot of this game, like seeing your Martial Arts Spirit or Genuine Qi Obtention buffs go up from 4.3% to 5.6%, isn't satisfying, nor does it ever translate into anything that makes you feel like you are making real progress with your time or the game's non-combat mechanics. What do your one-point percentage increases ever translate to, and why should you care about them? The game does a terrible job of communicating this point and justifying the time commitment associated with some of its non-combat sub-systems. And while Wo Long's smithing might be the most user-friendly and approachable smithing system we have seen from Team Ninja, it's still going to inflame those of you with analysis paralysis.

As someone who was hoping to see Wo Long as an improvement from Final Fantasy Origin, I was especially miffed to see Team Ninja repeat a shortcoming from the latter I felt everyone raked them over the coals for. YET AGAIN, Team Ninja's enemy variety is A PROBLEM! Every environment introduces only a few new enemy types, and by the time you reach the game's mid-point, new levels recycle old enemy types ad nauseam and, at best, introduce one new one to mix things up. As was the case in Final Fantasy Origin, despite Wo Long presenting a plethora of distinct combat options, you typically see the same finishing moves and animations because, outside of bosses, you only need to plan for a limited number of enemy types for every environment. With Nioh, I didn't think this was a huge issue, considering it was their first one of these, and with Nioh 2, I thought they were making progress, but things have worsened in this regard since Final Fantasy Origin, and they are coming to a head in Wo Long. If with Rise of the Rōnin, I'm still wailing away on basic spearmen and katana samurai that you encounter at the start of the game, I'm going to take that as a note that Team Ninja does not have this as a priority.

It is WILD to me that we have another Team Ninja title with an almost endless stream of character options and build paths that ultimately boil down to just a few half-dozen killing blow animations you see repeatedly. It adds to an unfortunate sense of repetition even as the game makes shocking local changes. It is a problem that returns us to the more significant issue of this game's dire loot situation as, because of the puzzle-like nature of the combat, when you correctly deduce how to approach an encounter, your coffers become flush with riches in a matter of seconds. The menus in Wo Long are indeed an improvement over previous Team Ninja joints. However, they still feel fiddly and bake in unneeded hours of analysis paralysis at every interstitial break area you get. And while no game of this type ever allows you to get married to the garb you deck out your avatar with for too long, Team Ninja Soulslike games seem to be the worst at letting you play around with dress-up. There's no point in becoming too attached to outfits you've painstakingly made because they'll likely become outdated by the next level, and updating equipment is an absolute pain. I am making a big deal about these two issues because the game bludgeons you over the head with them all the time.

Ninja Theory Is Still Not Great At Storytelling And Wo Long Is One Of Their Worst Told Stories Yet

I might be a FromSoft critic, but I cannot deny them their flowers regarding worldbuilding and tone setting. Elden Ring's many disparate locals perfectly communicate the corrupted world you occupy, and the Souls games that preceded it are equally adept in this regard. Is FromSoft too reliant on haughty weapon bios or verbose codex entries to communicate early tells on what's happening in their games? I sure think that's the case, but at least the text you read is engaging and well-written. Likewise, even when you decide to skip these textual-based storytelling vehicles, the lands you inhabit get the job done through the sheer virtue of their excellent mood and tone setting. Team Ninja's worldbuilding and narrative aspirations are less ambitious and more mixed. With Nioh and Nioh 2, they relied on character-based drama and storytelling, and the worldbuilding was simply satisfactory. Final Fantasy Origin might be the "high point" of their narrative ambitions, but that's primarily thanks to them inheriting a franchise with literal decades of innate nostalgia built into it. With Wo Long, I'm starting to realize that when they need to build something from scratch, there are gaps in their fossil record when constructing a game of this type.

All that aside, I must give Team Ninja credit where credit is due. Wo Long features a magnificent premise with you occupying a fantastical take of China amid the Yellow Turban Rebellion. The blending of historical figures, reinterpreted liberally, with East-Asian fantasy staples such as dragons and other mythological icons makes it one of the more compelling takes of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in recent memory. Team Ninja's efforts to both "follow the script" of one of the most important books ever written while still having their own take was a trapeze act they handled admirably. Nonetheless, there's no doubt that they struggled under the weight of Romance of the Three Kingdoms' tremendous cast, which makes Wo Long one of the more awkward stories they have ever told. The cast of characters you encounter is massive thanks to the source material Wo Long is borrowing from. As a result, people enter and exit the narrative without a ton of pomp and circumstance and then either die or leave until they are convenient to a different part of the story. No one is allowed enough time to shine, especially your player character, because the story insists on cycling through every character from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You bounce around years and ensemble casts, and the game rarely affords itself an opportunity for you to become attached to anyone or anything you are looking at or listening to.

The structure of the story also doesn't deviate from what we have seen from Team Ninja in the past, and with this game attempting to tackle a much larger world, it doesn't work. To me, the Nioh format of having linear levels with cutscenes before and after missions, plus a boss cutscene to get you excited about an end-of-the-level capstone, works best when you are not witnessing drastic changes in time wherein you experience time skips and have to wrap your mind around a new half dozen companions. It also does not help that while you experience these massive jumps between the years, no one physically ages, and the environments fail to depict the human and environmental costs of its core conflict. Yes, you see a lot of villages and hamlets that have been torched and derelict temples to Chinese gods or goddesses, but the world of Wo Long still feels superficial as it railroads you down linear paths, and the stitching between its levels is all over the place. By the time I reached its final act, I came to accept the game's story as a disjointed affair, and it did not help that your protagonist is about as interesting as a cardboard box. Seriously, with Team Ninja previously relying on characters to guide their narratives with their previous games, I am shocked at how milquetoast their main lead is in Wo Long, wherein he stands in every cutscene silently nodding their head as other drivers of the story droll on about military plans or political intrigue. Even at their worst, at least From understands the importance of highlighting you as a driver of change. Unfortunately, in Wo Long, the main character hardly feels relevant to most of the story outside of their efforts to fight enormous monsters or malicious rebel generals.

Comparing Wo Long to any previous From title is unfair. However, the fact that it compares unfavorably to 2023's OTHER non-From Soulslike, Lies of P, speaks to Wo Long's core narrative shortcomings. The city at the heart of Lies of P is dwarfed by any From world, but it feels more dynamic and vibrant than Wo Long's world. The cast is also smaller, allowing more characters to occupy the center stage and undergo unforgettable character arcs. Honestly, no character in Wo Long is as exciting or memorable as Geppetto in Lies of P, period. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the story in Lies of P is this epic work that we need to teach in college game development settings. Nonetheless, it is a game that better understands how to occupy its moderate budget and marry that with its creative ambitions. Wo Long really and truly struggles under the weight of its cast, and while I think there's no doubt that Team Ninja opened up its checkbook to make it and that it cost more than either Nioh game, Team Ninja's "best shot" at a more significant production just isn't going to cut it. I'd rather they continue to occupy their crease within this pantheon of games than see them take their formula to a proverbial breaking point.

Team Ninja Is Still Maybe The WORST At Making Good Post-Game Content And DLC Among Major Soulslike Developers

This is a nitpick in the grand scheme of things, but it has bothered me with a few of Team Ninja's more recent games. Due to Team Ninja's workmanlike game development cycle, buying a season pass to any of their games is a coin flip. Sometimes, they do you a solid, and other times, they carbon copy what they have done in the past with zero shame. As someone who has bought the DLC for Dissidia, Nioh 2, Fire Emblem Warriors, Final Fantasy Origins, and now Wo Long, I can safely say that I know the whole gamut of what they are willing or able to do after a game of theirs releases. Anything they release will have a post-game challenge arena, and there will likely be referential costumes or classes that immediately put everything you can create in the vanilla campaign to shame. It's very repetitious, which is a shame, considering it appears they peaked with the Nioh games in this regard. It's bizarre that they did a decent to excellent job of continuing the stories of their games in DLC four years ago and now seem content in phoning it in with post-game DLC that barely addresses any of the loose ends of their recent titles.

This point is a bit of a tangent, but HOT DAMN, do I still feel wholly BURNED on the season pass I bought for Final Fantasy Origin! Sure, the Marksman gun-based class is incredible and a lot of fun, but even to get a modicum of progress with any of the DLC storylines, you have to wail away on twenty to thirty-minute grind sessions with new jobs so you can beat bosses that only unlock at newer and higher difficulty settings. Worse, while Team Ninja provided hints about there being a second act to the game, their lack of commitment to any game for more than a year leaves most of that work unaddressed as, by the time they completed one season for Final Fantasy Origin, they fully transitioned to Wo Long. The DLC for Wo Long is virtually the same thing, and there is no doubt that when Rise of Ronin comes out, this game will become entirely forgotten by the studio. With Wo Long's DLC, you have a few crucial battles from the annals of Chinese history from the Han Dynasty, and everything feels isolated from the main story enough that it doesn't conflict with the base game but doesn't add anything too compelling. The latest flurry of DLC from Team Ninja feels incredibly safe, and worse, it very rarely deviates from the same pattern of DLC they have provided in prior games. And with the studio transitioning to Rise of the Ronin, very rarely are they ever committed to a game for more than six months, an odd habit they only break with their hack-and-slash efforts and Dissidia, though that could be Omega Force more than them. Without spoiling too much, it is frustrating with Wo Long as the game finally starts to "get there" in terms of juggling its world and ensemble cast in its last act, and it seems to be opening up to something new.

Wo Long needed more time to make it feel more authentic and for its world to feel genuine. I also refuse to accept that the people at Team Ninja are oblivious to some of the mechanical shortcomings of their games. Yet, knowing Team Ninja, the grind must go on. They have only one pace: to continue making games and never to look back for too long. This sentiment reminds me of developers in the fighting game realm, which leads me to believe some Dead or Alive old guard might still be kicking around at the studio. Maybe you think Rise of Ronin will be a new hard reset for them, where they can refocus on their strengths and learn from their prior mistakes. This presumption was echoed when Team Ninja was hyping up Wo Long, but things may be different now. Also, as some of you know, I'll be skipping Rise of the Ronin entirely for different reasons. I draw many lines in the sand regarding upcoming video games to get excited about. A director praising a far-right philosopher who advocated for the violent conquest of Korea and who is enshrined at a temple surrounded by generals who committed crimes against humanity; that's a line I refuse to cross. And as I close this essay, remember that whenever afforded the chance to talk off a fascist, you should take it.

Modern WoW had that same, granular level of minute progression

I did a hard quest, received a rare weapon, and it had an extra +1 strength, and, I shit you not, did an extra 0.2 DPS.

I can't stand this modern gaming phenomenon of incremental upgrades. I don't want to be able to use one more throwing knife, or gain an extra +20HP when I have 600 plus. Give me 20% damage on level up and make me feel like a monster, you cowards

I put Wo Long on my 2023 GOTY list at last place, just like I did with SOP a year earlier. I've already said a number of times and in a number of places that I found them both to be lacking follow-ups to Nioh and Nioh 2. While I agree with pretty much all of the criticisms of Wo Long you lay out here, I disagree that anything Wo Long did other than the parry system is any sort of improvement.

This paragraph to me was the biggest head-scratcher because it makes it sound like you don't even understand how the morale system actually works, since you talk as if your equipment has something to do with it. It doesn't. It has nothing to do with equipment at all. Morale only has to do with your temporary in-mission "level" based on enemies killed, generally ranging from 0-25. It also cannot go below your "fortitude" rank, which is generally based on how many flags you've raised on the level, though it is sometimes locked to a particular minimum for boss-only missions, usually 20.

I talked about this in the big 100+ post forum thread, but in the end I found the morale system to have some serious flaws. You say it got "universal praise," but if so, I missed that. Admittedly I did not look at a lot of games press reviews.

First issue. A clear design intent of morale is to force the player to explore the level and raise all the flags to up their fortitude rank, rather than running straight to the end. The problem is that it doesn't actually seem to work that well. E.g., the second battle flag of the second stage is on a little hill overlooking three weak enemies. Killing those guys gets you roughly a full morale level each time, and only takes about fifteen seconds to do so and reset. So if you farm them for three or so minutes at the beginning of the stage, you can have your morale in the teens at the start, and the rest of the stage becomes a cakewalk because you're so far above your expected morale. It would have made more sense if the game didn't allow your morale to go more than a certain number of levels above your fortitude--say five levels or so. But as it is, you can quickly farm your way to power each time, and then the flags and your fortitude rank stop mattering.

Second issue. At the end of long stage, you can fight a tough boss, lose, and when you try again it will be harder because your morale has gone down (fortitude typically caps at 20, but morale can go to 25), unless you want to run around farming it again before you re-try. This SUCKS. It is TERRIBLE. A boss shouldn't get harder because you died on the first attempt, and you shouldn't have to break your rhythm to run around fighting random mobs to get your advantage back. By the way, SOP effectively did this same thing because dying to a boss would decrease your max MP, which was such a key resource in trying to defeat them.

I think I could probably get behind a system of this kind where these two problems don't exist. They're not even hard fixes. It would be easy to cap morale to a certain number of levels above your current fortitude, and it would be easy to make you not lose morale when you die to a boss. But in the end I cannot support Wo Long's implementation of morale as it is.

While I absolutely agree with most of your criticisms here, particularly the (lack of) scarcity and the fact that equipment properties/affixes have so small an effect as to mostly not matter--and these criticisms also apply to the Niohs and SOP, more or less--I disagree that the smithing and refining are better here. In fact, even though the first GB blog I wrote was all about how Team Ninja didn't seem to understand how to design a loot system, I think that overall the loot system is even worse and more broken in this game due to one fundamental change: weapons and armor no longer have an item level. This means, in effect, that you could pick up some rare equipment in the first few hours of the game and not need to change it for the rest of your playthrough... which is exactly what I did in the case of my armor.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is not a bad thing in itself. The problem is that Wo Long throws just as much loot at you as Nioh and SOP ever did, despite the fact that having no item level means a weapon dropping at hour 1 and another at hour 50 are going to be the same or nearly so. The entire loot system basically collapses before it begins because you never need to change out your equipment due to out-leveling it (though you *still* have to look through all your drops just to find good transferable properties, like elements... so all that junk loot is both 99.8% useless AND a pain to micro-manage! All the negatives and none of the positives! Magic!). Gear churn due to gear level is a staple of loot games for a reason; removing it makes you question why the loot system exists at all. And indeed, Team Ninja has proven to be so bad at color-coded loot that I wish it simply did not exist in Wo Long, even though I am typically a sucker for randomized loot (e.g., Diablo).

Anyway, in the final equation, Wo Long was... OK. I liked the parrying, and seeing a different take on the Three Kingdoms period than the one we've seen from Koei Tecmo. But morale was poorly implemented, the loot system was even more pointless than usual, and I'd still take either Nioh game over it any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I will also not be buying Rise of the Rōnin at launch... not necessarily due to the controversy you describe, because I haven't read up on that aspect sufficiently to make up my own mind, but because the last two Team Ninja games have been somewhat of a disappointment to me. Also, the fact that Dragon's Dogma 2 comes out on the same day makes it all the easier to at least wait a while and see what the critical consensus ends up being.

@atheistpreacher: Huh, that typo with equipment might have been me having Grammarly auto-substitute words that I repeated over and over again. In the original draft I did say "current accomplishments on that level" several times and I may have clicked "auto-resolve" when processing typos and grammar mistakes and it replaced words with ones that seem similar but are incorrect in this regard. I have corrected the mistake here.

I think your other points about there being a downside are pretty fair.

Rise of the Ronin notably ditching the loot system, last I heard. Unless that was just rumors. I thought it was a recent announcement though.

I dunno, I enjoyed Wo Long quite a bit but it has a great parry and that always wins me over. Neither it or FFO lived up to Nioh 2 though which is what I'm waiting to happen again and will see if Rise manages it.

I hadn't been keeping up, did a Google search and found an article that does claim loot is gone. If so, that would definitely be addition by subtraction in my book, given how bad they are at designing such systems. And that would have then theoretically allowed them to direct more resources to improving other aspects of the game.

This really does drive me up the wall. If you are going to have stats, have the stats progress in significant ways I can notice in-game. That especially the case when I invest in sub-mechanics that take time to see the fruits of my labor. When a game has me go off to far corners of the map to retrieve foibles and trinkets and it amounts to a single-digit percentage increase in one stat category, that just sucks.

It was a recent announcement, and I'm honestly happy to see Team Ninja basically throw in the towel. I don't think their equipment levelling mechanics have ever been great and I would rather they spend their time assessing systems elsewhere. Also, with samurai usually personally tied to a single sword for their entire life, it just makes more sense.

Also, I am 100% with you that Team Ninja seems to have peaked with Nioh 2.

Now, I'm going to press this issue ever so slightly because I agree it's not perfect. Nonetheless, isn't needing to redo in-game progress upon the player's death to be expected with anything within the realm of the Soulslike category? Yes, you do need to re-engage points in the map to better prepare yourself for bosses, but with Team Ninja games, you often are going to have to trek linear paths that lead you to most of these flags in the first place. Also, is this system not that far off from needing to rekindle things in Souls games or scouring for things you dropped upon your death?

I can only agree with you to a limited extent.

The particular problem I have with what Wo Long did RE: morale loss after bosses (and SOP's max MP loss after death) is that you are actually losing functional power and hence making the next attempt harder, unless you take time out to run around farming mobs for morale or for MP. The Souls games simply don't do this, as a general rule. Yeah, a death can make you drop your souls, but this is by definition a "liquid" currency that isn't actively helping you (one extremely rare exception: weapons whose damage scales with souls carried).

The only exception in the Souls games I can think of to this general rule is using up consumables that then might have to be re-bought or re-farmed. I am thinking in particular of the fact that in Bloodborne, your blood vials (your sole healing item) are finite, unlike in the other Souls games in which they restock at bonfires. I wasn't a fan of finite blood vials then and am still not now. Nothing sucks more than using up all your vials and then having to run off and farm them up before you can attempt a boss again. That's just stupid. (Also: Demon's Souls had this same problem but was also worse in the other direction, i.e., the number of healing items you could carry also wasn't capped, meaning you could bring more healing to an encounter than you really should have been allowed to.)

With regard specifically to your talk of "rekind[ling] things," I'm actually not sure what you mean there. The only "kindling" I know about increases your number of estus flasks in Dark Souls 1, but "rekindling" is not a thing, those upgrades are permanent after you do them for any particular bonfire. (Edit: wait, was this the DS3 terminology for reverse hollowing? It's been a hot minute!) But it is true that some of the Souls games will, for instance, give you less health when you die, or make you unable to summon multiplayer aid, and maybe this is what you were referring to. Addressing this aspect, I never engage in the multiplayer in these games in any sense--invasions or boss help--so that part simply doesn't matter to me.

As for losing health upon death... that's a more complex issue because different games have handled it differently. E.g., in Demon's Souls you could actually do more damage in soul form (as opposed to body/living form), and equip a ring that would give you most of your lost health back, so there were compensations. Meanwhile, Dark Souls 2 made you progressively "hollow" with each death and lose max HP at a rate of something like 5%--up to a whopping 50%, with no compensations that I can recall--but the items needed to reverse it were so plentiful that it functionally didn't matter much, and amounted more to world/lore flavor. Nonetheless, I do agree that in general I'm just not a big fan of making a subsequent encounter harder on a second attempt, and things that do that annoy me. The degree to which each FS Souls game falls into that design conceit is debatable.

Lastly, I can sort of see an argument that the need in Wo Long and SOP to re-farm morale or MP is functionally similar to the long run-back to a boss encounter that happens in some of the Souls games. But two things here. (1) In FS's games there's no reason to not just run past stuff if you can in these instances, whereas in Wo Long and SOP you actually need to farm enemies. (2) FS have sharply curtailed the number of long run-backs they demand from players for lost boss fights as time has gone on, and it's a change I appreciate. In the end I do think it's pretty important in games like this to be able to re-engage with a tough boss fight quickly, rather than lose your "groove" by needing to do a bunch of other BS between attempts.

I'm probably forgetting other aspects, but I think that covers the biggest points I wanted to make about it. Again, for me the key one is that Wo Long and SOP are actually actively decreasing your power upon death, which is not a thing that the FS Souls games do, with very rare exceptions (the Nioh games don't do this either, in any manner that I can recall).

Goddammit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH3Kyhhjuo&t=170s

"You will really be showered with loot! I found 200 pieces of equipment in my 5 hours!"

"Weapons also come in different rarities..."

In case you were hoping Team Ninja would stop with this crap... nope! Apparently Rise of the Rōnin still has their fuckin' bullshit colored loot system. Pardon my French, but I am so tired of these bozos and their patently terrible randomized loot. Seriously, just stop it. You guys can make a better game than this.

Ah, well I am entirely neutral to the loot system so makes no difference to me but what a weird thing to have made the rounds like that.

@atheistpreacher: war... war never changes

So I have been playing a little bit of Rise of the Ronin in between hangin with my pawns in Dragon's Dogma and it's still not Nioh 2 but it is Ghost of Tsushima which for me personally is a sort of lateral move that I'm able to get behind.

But yeah if the loot is something that annoyed you in their games.... it's still going to it's everywhere but now it feels even less necessary because there's no armor type system anymore so you're just throwing on whatever looks nicest, has the bigger number, or some combination thereof.

The open world is... a first timer's open world in 2024 so let's just say it's not taking a whole lot of chances but it also hasn't fell on its face in any real way yet either so we'll see.

On the subject of loot though Ronin does have a very funny "Yeah, we know" option in the menu that I don't think is in any of their games but you can assign a rarity and tell the game to just get rid of that shit (sell or dismantle) for anything under that rarity when you rest at a bonfire.

If it actually auto-sells or dismantles, that would be an improvement. What they've had in previous games was an option to set it so that you wouldn't pick up loot below a certain rarity at all, so it would just sit there on the ground. Yes, less inventory clutter that way, but I could never bring myself to do it because it felt like a waste just leaving items on the ground when I could get mats or money for them.