If I Could Talk To The Animals...

I could post about something else today but I don't want to so here are some more of my unstructured, rambling, unnecessarily detailed thoughts about Wuthering Waves. I might be getting a bit obsessed with it. It happens.

With that in mind, perhaps it's as well that this morning I reached the point where the story takes a breather and you have to increase your "Union Level" to find out what happens next. Just don't ask me what Union it is. I don't remember joining and I'm pretty sure I haven't paid my dues.

When I got the message about it, it told me I needed to be UL14 to carry on with the story. I was only UL 8, so it seemed like it might take a while.

There was a helpful list of things I could do to earn Union XP. My feeling was the developers would prefer I do a lot of dailies or, failing that, spent some currency they would probably be able to sell me in the cash shop. That made me glum for a moment until I read on and realized I could just do some quests and go exploring instead.

Just about everything seems to give some Union XP, including wandering around the open world, exploring, beating up Tacet Discords, engaging in challenges of various kinds and generally behaving as though it was an MMORPG. That suits me just fine. For now, anyway.

At some point, no doubt, I'll have explored everything there is to explore in the local area, done all the quests, bested or failed at all the challenges, but by then, with luck, I'll have increased my standing with the union sufficiently to carry on with the story, which in turn will send me to another area, where I can start the cycle all over again. 

Or so I hope. There's the small matter of vertical progression to consider, something about which I'm currently quite ill-informed, not having taken the time or trouble to do any research on it whatsoever. In fact, I haven't bothered in the slightest with what I'm assuming will at some point become the central tenet of gameplay, namely upgrading my gear and filling out my roster of... hang on, what do they call them here? Ah yes, Resonators. 

In some gacha games I've played, ignoring the core purpose of the game, i.e. spending money on power (Or, more realistically, the slim chance of power.) does eventually mean you can't win the fights. Not being able to win the fights means you can't see the rest of the story and sometimes it means you can't even see the rest of the world either. 

Then there are the games where you can pretty much pootle around as long as you want, doing all kinds of stuff so long as it doesn't further the story. In those games, if you're willing to forget about progression, the whole gacha aspect fades into insignificance. Noah's Heart was like that, which is one reason I stayed with it for so long.

It's too early to say which way WW leans but should it turn out to be the former, I'm covered. I found a full edit of the entire story so far on YouTube, so if I get roadblocked by bosses I can't beat, I can just go watch that instead. 

Always providing I can find a spare seven hours, that is. That's how long the cut scenes last if you string them all together. Longer than the original Star Wars trilogy. And probably... no, better not go there.

Although I am invested in finding out what's going on, what I'd most like to be doing in the game right now has nothing to do with the main storyline, compelling though it is. And it has even less to do with whacking mobs with my sword, something I'd happily do without altogether. 

What I'd really like to do is carry on working with Xuanyin, the self-styled "citizen scientist" who's developing an app that translates the language of animals into English. (Well, presumably into Mandarin then into English, since Kuro Games, the developer of Wuthering Waves, is based in Guangdong.)

The app is supposed to work on any animal but the experiment I helped out with inevitably involved a cat. You can't walk down the street in Huangdong without tripping over one.

I met Xuanyin on a bridge in the city, where she immediately put herself into my good books by not only knowing who I was but also calling me by my actual name! Yes, alright, I had to prompt her. But she knew who I was without my having to use the cursed R word. 

That's happened twice now, which makes the game's insistence on calling me "Rover" even more annoying. I know it knows who I am. It's just being deliberately awkward about it. Either that or someone on the writing team isn't talking to someone else.

There does occasionally seem to be a certain disconnect between departments in Wuthering Waves. For example, as you can clearly see in the screenshots, the cat Xuanyin and I were talking to is a short-haired calico (Or tortoiseshell as we call them where I come from.) It also looks full-grown to me. Whoever wrote the dialog thinks otherwise.

Both Xuanyin and the descriptive text describe the cat as a "hairless kitten". Xuanyin even has a short speech, which I unortunately neglected to screenshot, in which she wonders what breed it might be. Evidently the art department didn't get the full brief.

I wasn't too bothered with all of that. I was much more interested in the prospect of being able to Doolittle all the animals in the game. When Xuanyin added the app to my gourd, the local nickname for the do-it-all communication device everyone carries on their belt, I thought I'd be getting a new ability to add to my Utilities along with the Grapple, the Scanner, the Camera and the other one I can't think of right now.

Sadly not. After we'd tested the translation on the cat-kitten and found out she wanted snacks (Not sure we really needed an app for that.) Xuanyin gave me a lecture on the dangers of feeding human food to animals, then sent me off to find some Milky Fish Soup.

Luckily I remembered seeing both the cooking station and the food vendor on a high boardwalk in the upper city. I'd been wanting to try my hand at cooking and this seemed like the time - start with cat food and work my way up. 

The moment I got to the cookery station, which is in back of a resturant, Panhua, the chef and proprietor, started in on me about some girl at the counter who just wouldn't stop crying. That led to a literal sob story about the girl's grandfather and some spicy dish he used to make for her when she was a tearful tot and how she couldn't find it anywhere any more.

The restaurant-owner offered to make it for her but of course she didn't have all the ingredients and she couldn't leave the restaurant to go get them, so she asked me if I'd go instead. Or maybe I offered. My character is helpful like that. Unlike me. 

I was headed there anyway, of course, so it wasn't such a great favor. I stopped at the stove on the way, just long enough to check the soup recipe. I had nearly everything. Not surprising since I've been picking up random cooking mats since day one. I was only missing the fish.

At the food vendor I got everything I needed both for the spicy recipe and my soup. I also got a call from my pal Chixia, asking me out to dinner. We fixed to meet at the restaurant I'd just come from, apparently one of Chixia's faves anyway, so that all worked out. Meanwhile, Chixia told me how Panhua and Mahe, the food vendor, have one of those Diane and Sam relationships so beloved of sitcoms and we had a good laugh about that.

Mahe and Chixia engage in a nice-off.

I could go on. It was a strong sequence that flowed really well. I'm still not sure if it was a series of fortuitous co-incidences or a script that felt a lot more organic and unplanned than it probably was. The sheer triviality of it all added hugely to its appeal.

To cut to the chase, I made the Milky Fish Soup, went back to Xuanyin, gave the soup to the cat and then the translation app went on the fritz and Xuanyin took it back for adjustments so I don't get to talk to the animals after all. Just that one cat. I'm hoping that's not the last I'll hear about the Animal Language Translator Module but I fear it might be.

It would be exceedingly handy to be able to talk to cats. They do seem to play a surprisingly large role in the game. Not only are there cats all over the city, as I said, but I've already done two quests featuring felines, the other being to find a missing cat called Lulu, who turned out to be hiding at the top of a very tall tree. 

That one ended with Lulu's owner, who seemed more than a little unhinged, suggesting, with disturbing intensity, that Lulu and I might like to get married. I really should have taken some screenshots but I was too stunned by the turn the conversation had taken to hit the button.

A cat even plays a significant part in the main storyline. Last night, the inevitable anti-hero and his slinky sister, both dressed all in red and looking like KPop idols, arrived to try and convince me my current friends were all part of some dark conspiracy, which of course was exactly what those same friends just been telling me about the Siblings in Scarlet. 

Scar, for that is the bad boy's name, subtlety not being in any way relevant here, used a cute cat to trick Yangyang into falling into a trans-dimensional trap, just so he could monologue at me for what seemed like  - and indeed very probably was - a full half hour. His trap worked because of course no-one in this game can resist the charms of a cute li'l kitty-cat.

I certainly can't. Nor a cute li'l puppy dog either, although I haven't seen one of those yet. I hope there are some. I hope there are plenty more quests featuring cats and dogs, too. I'll happily do 'em all.

And since that almost sounds like a punchline, I think I'll end this post there. That way it'll look like I had it all planned out when I sat down to write it. 

Which I did. 

Of course.