Church, State And Family In Rinascita Today

Having said only yesterday that I find it hard to play more than a session of Wuthering Waves every few days, of course I immediately found myself playing for two days in a row. In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances, mainly involving me being woken up at 5.30am by Mrs. Bhagpuss and Beryl, both of whom wanted to let me know we'd caught a mouse in the live trap under the sink and also what was I going to do about it? 

That led to me sitting down at the PC just after seven, having already had breakfast and walked Beryl for an hour. Even so, and with all the day ahead of me and not much else to do with it, after an hour in Wuthering Waves I was, once again, sated with story. 

In the time I spent there, the plot moved on apace. There was much skullduggery and several twists as well as  the expected confirmation that what's rotten in the church-state of Rinascita is mostly the church. This is turning out to be a highly anti-clerical episode.

The actor playing Priest Alessio is determined to make sure everyone knows just who the bad guys are. He plays the arch-villain card so hard I can almost see him there in the sound booth, twirling an imaginary mustache. 

To be fair, the corruption of the church hierarchy has hardly been a close-kept secret up to now, which is why I'm not handing out spoiler warnings. It was telegraphed pretty clearly the moment a church official asked Rover to show her papers before she'd even shaken the sea-spray from her silk stockings as she stepped onto the dock. 

If I recall correctly, that official was Phoebe, now about to become one of the latest additions to the Resonator team in the new update. The normally tempered and even-handed Chris Neal  unfairly and inaccurately labelled her a "walking devoted priestess trope " in an unnecessarily snide news item at MassivelyOP yesterday, making me feel he had to be working purely from press releases and promotional videos. No-one who'd actually played the game could dismiss the complex and nuanced Phoebe, a lifelong believer, now forced to confront the hollow sham of her faith, as a "trope". 

This is one of the many things I really appreciate about the game. It's melodrama, sure, but it's top-class melodrama. The baddies aren't pantomime villains; they're properly sinister. A palpable air of entitled arrogance surrounds most of them like a funk. Equally, the good guys aren't just cardboard cut-outs, either. Most of them are quite scary, too.

Carlotta, the Morelli Family's "Executor" certainly is. She offers a great line in understated menace, lending her official job title a distinctly razor-like edge. The fact that she appears to have forgotten to change out of her nightdress before coming to work, along with the soft-spoken way she somehow manages to make even the most innocuous observation sound like a veiled threat, just adds to a sense of gleeful violence, barely contained, that accompanies almost everything she says and does. 

Wuthering Waves is a rare game in that I find I like almost every character I meet there. Much of the visual design seems highly original to me and also frequently wildly idiosyncratic. I already talked about the Resonator who ends every fight hanging from a sex swing. Now we meet one who spends most of her time willingly locked inside a box!

Of course, when I say I like them, I don't always like them. I find them entertaining.  I certainly don't actually like all of the bad guys, especially not the religious fascists, but some of them can be quite persuasive. There are a few highly engaging bad boys and girls who make a pretty good case for changing sides, something I thought, at one point, might be genuinely be on the cards for Rover. 

That seems unlikely now. The Fractsidus, whoever they are, now appear to be the actual master-villains behind most of the really bad stuff that happens not, as I once suspected, merely a very cool gang of impetuous and irresponsible rebels. The plot twists and turns so wickedly, though, I still wouldn't be entirely surprised if they turned out to be not quite so dastardly after all at some point down the line.

The story is a joy but it has its drawbacks, the main one being that following it exclusively makes 90% of the game disappear. Before I became hell-bent on catching up to the current content, I spent a great deal of time wandering around the gorgeous world, opening up the huge maps and glorying in the amazingly beautiful scenery. Now I find myself sprinting through landscapes I would dearly love to stop and savor, barely taking the time to register the broad sweep of the aesthetic, far less take in the exquisite detail. 

When I do, finally, get myself up to current content, something that can't now be too far off, seeing I'm now in the final act of what came before, I plan on stepping away from the main questline for a while to go exploring. Played that way, Wuthering Waves should revert to being a game I can relax and kick back in, rather than one where I have to lean forward to give it my full attention. 

I might also take some time and make some effort to acquire a couple of the newer Resonators. I can't help but notice how very much more powerful the new characters seem, compared to my own team, when they join them as "Guests". The difference is every bit as pronounced as it is between my Berseker and Necromancer in EverQuest II, something I discussed in some detail yesterday. 

I'm thinking this might be a path I could usefully follow in a number of games, now it's belatedly occurred to me. I do have to wonder to what extent I've been making things harder for myself by side-stepping upgrade paths and ignoring specific abilities and aptitudes of different classes or characters. Maybe just barrelling ahead with whatever character I happen to start with, while never really learning what it is that they do or even bothering to look at their gear, until they start to feel unsatisfying to play, might not quite be the low-effort strategy I took it for.

Something to think about, at least.