Saturday, January 25, 2025

And So The Story Goes

I took a break from Scars of Destruction in EverQuest II yesterday so I could carry on with the Rinascita storyline in Wuthering Waves. It really is very good indeed and for a number of reasons.

It's extremely well-paced. There are four parts, a prologue and three acts, all with titles that appear to be quotes, although from what I couldn't say:

Prologue: Through the Sea Thou Break
Act I: The Sacred Breeze So Often Breathes
Act II: Veils Off in Sun or Shadow
Act III: What Yesterday Wept, Today Doth Sing

I'm now a little less than halfway through Act II, so presumably more than halfway through the whole thing, and there have been no slow spots, no dull passages and no frenetic, rushed moments either. The story feels as if it's progressing organically, each scene a natural development of the last.

Both the direction and cinematography are quite possibly the best I've seen in any game I've played. I use the terms advisedly because although we often say that certain passages in games "feel like being in a movie", this really does. A huge amount of time is spent in what I suppose we have to call cut-scenes but the experience is very different from the comparatively static, mannered approach I associate with this kind of storytelling.

There's no set cut scene mechanic or style. Sometimes conversations happen in the world with everything going on around, sometimes there are full, cinematic inserts but mostly the characters talk to each other while the camera moves around according to the needs of the narrative. There are pans and close-ups and medium shots. There are birds-eye views and ground-level and over-the-shoulder and knee-level and pretty much you name it.

There are reaction shots, too, where characters reveal something of their inner thoughts by the way they move their heads or change their expression. Sometimes there are visual metaphors, where the camera cuts away to an object or a view to add nuance to what's just been said.

And it all works. It's never fancy or fussy or awkward or distracting, or at least no more than good film-making ever is, by which I mean that there are moments when it's so good it's hard not to find yourself appreciating the artistry instead of following the dialog.

Fortunately, the consistently excellent voice acting means focus never wavers for more than the occasional moment. Every sentence earns your attention as much for the way it's spoken as for what's being said.

All the new characters are good but one, Zani, is outstanding, which is just as well because she's in it a lot. She's the bank executive assigned to guide and assist the player character during their visit to Ragunna and for some reason she seems to be the only person in this Italianate city to have an Italian accent.

Or maybe it's Greek. Or Spanish. Opinions differ. It's definitely Mediterranean, though, and it's musical as hell. It's a real pleasure to listen to, whatever the origin. And in the end it's good that it can't be nailed down precisely to a real-world location. It is, presumably, a Ragunnan accent. Although that does raise the question of why no-one else in the city speaks the same way...

Zani also exemplifies another of the strengths in Wuthering Waves' storytelling: she's a genuine adult, something all too rare in video games or at least the ones I play. By that I mean she not only uses adult cadences in her speech and has an adult-sounding voice, she also expresses the kind of concerns and talks about the kind of topics I associate with a certain kind of adulthood.

Even though she lives in a magical, fantasy city, surrounded by the trappings of a child's storybook come to life, Zani works at management level in a bank and she sounds like she does. She also has a secondary role as a trusted functionary with a significant power grouping in the local political structure and she sounds like that, too. And to top it all, when encouraged by the player-character to relax and be more herself, Zani convincingly reveals a private self that seems equally grown-up.

This isn't a unique situation within the game. There were grown-ups in earlier storylines, not least the stiff and formal Baizhi, who always seemed weighed down with responsibilities, and some of the side-stories featured minor characters worrying about very adult topics, like problems at their place of work or in their extended friend and family groups. Even so, much as I appreciated it at the time, those feel like preparatory sketches compared to this. 

The main reason I mention it is because this kind of grown-up texture in storytelling seems quite unusual for something of this style, an anime-inflected gacha game set in a high-fantasy world. There are plenty of very un-grown-up characters in Wuthering Waves - precocious children, angsty teenagers, insecure young adults and cute, non-human creatures - and they're also both written and acted with exemplary skill, but those kinds of characters are frequently met and done well in these kinds of games. Grown-ups with full-time jobs and adult attitudes and concerns - they're a lot rarer.

Kuro, the developer responsible for Wuthering Waves, seems to be acutely aware of the path they're taking here and it's potential risk because they've included a lengthy, detailed questionnaire on exactly that topic. I filled it out the other day and the whole thing was question after question about the preferred age, attitude, personality and emotional frame of mind of characters you'd like to see in future. 

I've never seen anything quite like it in a game before. I hope enough people ticked the "adult" options to keep the ship sailing in the right direction although if not I trust the writers and artists to give us worthwhile stories, whoever they pick as protagonists.

Then there's the plot. It makes sense! Or it does so far, anyway. That ought to be a low bar but it's one so few games manage to clear that it feels like an achievement when any of them do. 

Wuthering Waves makes things harder for itself than it needs to by using a lot of jargon that makes it tough to understand what's going on until you attune your ear to it all. When you do, though, it's worth it. It's taken me this long to reach the point where words like "frequency" and "echo" mean what the game wants them to mean rather than what they usually would but I'm there now and it opens the story out significantly.

While you're getting used to all the pseudo-technical talk, it helps that, as well as the over-arcing, mystical through-line, there are much more down-to-earth sub-plots to hang onto. In Ragunna, there's a mystery to be investigated and a traitor to be exposed. A cabal of them, in fact. It's absorbing and entertaining stuff.

And there's a lot of it. There are several full playthrough videos on YouTube and none of them is less than six hours long. While there is some fighting, puzzle-solving and travel in there, the huge majority of your time will be spent watching or listening to NPCs talk, occasionally hearing your own character speak, and now and again selecting one of two responses that, as far as I can tell, make no material difference to what happens next.

Put like that, it sounds tedious but it's never that. It's six hours very well-spent. Or at least it's been about three and a half hours very well-spent for me, so far. I have every confidence it's going to go on that way until the end. 

One thing I do find it somewhat counter-intuitive is how I seem to be willing to spend as long watching this quasi-movie run as it would take me to watch three or four actual movies, when I can't generally talk myself into watching even one. It definitely doesn't feel all that much like playing a game at times.

I believe this, along with my recent experience with Cloudpunk, has finally chipped away the last of my resistance to video games as a narrative platform. Even though I've been playing these things for most of my life, I've always felt there were better ways of telling the stories; that the constant interruption of having to press a key hindered rather than helped immersion. If I have any lingering doubts, they mostly revolve around the eternal question of whether we really ought to be calling some of these experiences "games" at all.

It's still a difficult trick to pull off, all the same. I'm aware that almost everything I'm praising Wuthering Waves for here is uncomfortably similar to the things I most disliked about Final Fantasy XIV. All those endless cut scenes! All that talking! 

As the Funboy Three so wisely put it, though, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. And this is how you do it right.

2 comments:

  1. I wonder where is the "gacha" incentive in all this? My sense is that you don't spend money on the game and from what I've played of it, I've never felt much of a pull to spend money either. In similar games the content gets harder and you need better characters or better gear to tone down the difficulty, and both of those you often get via the gacha mechanics, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

    So maybe people just spend money because they like the new character designs? I mean at some point the company has to make some cash, right?

    Of course that said, I paid for a month of the 'subscription' thing where every day I get a handful of whatzits that are used, I suppose, in the gacha system.Y'know, just in case there's a character I feel like I need to 'pull' for!

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    1. I'm the worst person to ask about whether F2P games "require" you to spend money or not because I almost never feel the need to spend anything in any of them. In gacha games, though, I do usually at least spend my free tokens to roll on new characters but in WW I haven't really bothered even with that. I assume there must be content that rewards having the stronger characters in your team but apart from one speedbump that I wrote about (Which wasn't even a boss, just a mob I had difficulty with for no discernible reason.) I haven't had too much trouble with the fights so far and I'm pretty sure my team is far from optimal.

      On the other hand, I am seriously considering spending some real money on appearance gear aka "Outfits" when they get the system up and running. So far, I believe there's the grand total of two outfits on sale. I find it hard to believe they've gotten this far and don't have a cosmetic system as such. I have no idea how they're making money. In the questionnaires they frequently put up I have started using the final "Any suggestions" box to ask for cosmetics, pets and housing "Even if its in the cash shop". I'd spend money if they had anything to buy...

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