Old Men, Cats And Emily Bronte

I've had a bunch of ideas for posts about Wuthering Waves bumping around in the back of my mind for a while now, all waiting their turn to be spun up into posts of their own but instead I think I'll just stuff a few into a Friday Grab-Bag get them out there before they go stale.

Before I do, though, I'd like to thank Naithin once again for introducing me to the game, which quite honestly I doubt I'd even have heard of, had he not mentioned it in passing. I've played every day since then and it's been a joy.

I'd also like to thank whoever it was at Kuro Games who thought of naming it Wuthering Waves. Without that, I doubt Naithin's nudge would have moved the dial on my interest.

I still don't know why the game is called what it is. As Redbeard pointed out in the comments, there's really only one association anyone is going to make when they see it and that's Emily Bronte's novel. (Okay, I suppose someone might think of the Genesis album, Wind and Wuthering, but I very much doubt it. And anyway, even that title was inspired by the book.)

At first blush it seems like a bizarre choice, given the game's obvious skew towards a younger audience and the fact that it's, well, a video game made in China but it isn't such an outlandish idea as all that. I don't know how things are elsewhere but where I live the classics are very big with a certain youthful demographic right now. At work, we've hugely expanded our Classic Fiction section and the substantive majority of customers browsing it are teens and twenty-somethings, seemingly buying the books to read for pleasure as much as to study. 

Whether it has anything to do with Tik-Tok I'm not sure, although most trends in bookselling do these days. Among the black spines, though, there have always been certain titles that seem to hold an innate fascination for adolescent and college-age readers. Wuthering Heights holds a prime position on that list.

You might think, if there was a connection of some kind, there'd be evidence of it in the theme or setting but if there is, I haven't been able to spot it. I'm not a big fan of the Brontes but I do know the plots of just about all the novels and I don't recall a lot of magic, guns, monsters or swinging from rooftop to rooftop on a grappling-hook in any of them. 

There is some romance in Wuthering Waves but it's far from central to any of the plots. Most of it so far involves the middle-aged and elderly, of which more later. Pretty-boy villain (Or is he the anti-hero?) Scar does have a little of Heathcliff's smoldering arrogance about him but if it's having the traditional effect on any character in the game they're not on my team. 

However the name came about, I do get the feeling someone at Kuro must have studied Eng. Lit. at college. I just finished a side-quest where I had to go stand in for a guard who hadn't turned up for his shift. I had to hang around at the top of a tower until he turned up, which he did not. The quest was called Wait for Godo.

It's the kind of detail which contributes significantly to my affection for the game, unsurprisingly. If we're going to have irrelevant cultural icons casually shoe-horned into our fantasy roleplaying games, I'd sooner have have Emily Bronte and Samuel Beckett than Haris Pilton any day. And I like Paris Hilton...

Since I mentioned the possible intended age profile of the audience, I feel I ought to offer a retraction of something I said in my Very First Impressions post. I described Wuthering Waves as "an anime world, where no-one looks much over eighteen even if they turn out to be the Magistrate in charge of the city." 

This doesn't give a fair or true impression of the population of Jinzhou and its hinterlands. There are a lot of fresh-faced young folk, for sure, but also a good number of citizens of middle years and more than a sprinkling of elders. Perhaps more surprisingly, senior citizens, particularly retirees, feature prominently in a number of side quests.

In one such quest I enjoyed, my pal Chixia asked me to have a word with her grandfather, who was having some kind of problem. It turned out he was infatuated with a very elegant elderly neighbor, who sadly seemed resistant to his charms. 

The sprightly old fellow wanted to come hunting with us so he could add some more daunting "Echoes" (Hologramatic images of defeated monsters.) to his somewhat feeble collection. For some reason he thought this would influence the woman to receive his attentions favorably. 

It did not. She was singularly unimpressed. I think she thought he was an embarrassment, frankly, and who could blame her? I was embarrassed for him. He, however, seemed perfectly fine about it all. Ah, the resilience of age.

That quest was mostly played for laughs. Another, centering on a retired photo-journalist, who wanted to take some final photographs of locations in the city that held special meaning for him, but who was no longer spry and agile enough to climb up to the vantage points he'd reached in his youth, had a much more elegaic tone. 

Another, lengthy questline involved a senior executive at a mining installation who was beginning to suffer from age-related memory loss. The topic was handled with surprising delicacy, although the translation did it no favors.

All the quests came with a wealth of back-story, revealing something about the lives these old men had led in their younger days. The writing in Wuthering Waves employs a lot of those kinds of textures, making the world feel more substantial and grounded than can often be the case in free to play games and mobile ports. 

The occasionally shaky translation makes the nuances harder to appreciate at times but the sentiment usually makes it through, as do some very revealing cultural differences and assumptions. In some less obvious ways, I think this feels like the one of the most Chinese games I've played.

Another somewhat atypical aspect of Wuthering Waves is the way quests recur in varying forms. The one I wrote about, concerning learning the languages of animals, turned out to be the first in an ongoing series. I've talked to dogs and rabbits so far and I hope there will be more. It's a fun sequence.

I also wrote a while back about a quest I was given to find a missing cat. That turned out to be part of a set of dailies in which the person who persuaded me to find the first one kept calling me up on my communicator and asking me to go look for more.

It wasn't just lost cats or cats stuck up trees. There were also kittens to find homes for and at one point I even met some guy who told me he was a member of the Kitty Rescue Team. The only member, as it turned out and also the "better half" of the crazy cat lady who keeps calling me. I was very surprised to find she had a partner, to be honest...

The cat dailies went on for a while. Each time I found and returned a cat I got to give it a name, which was the best reward of all. The cats I named are still strolling around the little park where I left them. I go visit them sometimes. 

After a while the dailies stopped being about cats and started to be about a very bad portrait painter instead. Then it was a guy who was trying to perfect some kind of sales pitch and wanted to try out his material on me. 

Each of these sequences lasted several days, with roughly the same task (Find cat/Sit for portrait/Listen to jokes.) but completely new dialog each time. Two of the three had a continuing narrative while the third was more of a social construct but they were all very different from the kinds of dailies I'm used to. In fact, if the game hadn't told me, I'd just have thought they were regular side-quests.

Every activity in Wuthering Waves comes freighted with story. I can't think of anything I've done in the game that wasn't. It's a notable feature of the game and it's something I very much appreciate, although it's not hard to imagine others finding it equally annoying. Not everyone wants to have to wade through several screens of fundamentally meaningless chatter just to get a daily done.

If you feel that way, this is probably not the game for you. Nothing happens without some NPC giving you their life story, explaining their reasoning, offering some historical background or telling a lengthy anecdote. Every time I go questing I spend considerably more time reading about why I'm doing it and what other characters think about it than I spend actually doing anything to fix whatever the problem might be.

This is where I really wish the translation was better than it is. Not that it's bad. Not at all. By the standards of imported F2P games it's actually pretty good. 

It isn't consistently good enough, however, to land all of these stories with the impact they deserve. Given how involving and entertaining I find them despite the variable quality of the translation, I can't help wondering how much more satisfying they'd be if they were rendered in fully fluent and demotic English throughout.

Translation is a complex and contentious issue that deserves a full post of its own. I'll have to write one some time. Until then, I'll just say I'd rather read good dialog in a less than perfect translation than poor dialog in perfect English any day. It's only when I literally can't figure out what the characters are supposed to be saying that I lose patience.

Finally, on the topic of things in the game being generally just more than they necessarily needed to be, let me introduce you to Maqi, the Pioneer Association Receptionist. She's really keen to tell you what a great organization it is. Boy, is she ever!

The Pioneer Association, previously known as the Universal Geographic Society, is an organization dedicated to exploring and understanding the world. You can get rewards for doing tasks, something that could easily be handled through the UI and explained via a tutorial tip, a process the game makes extensive use of elsewhere. 

In this case, it doesn't. Instead, you have to go to the Association's plush offices in the city and talk to Maqi. 

Maqi is full of information about the Association and its many public-spirited and commercial activities. She was so convincing, I actually went looking around the reception area to see if I could find copies of Wutherium Geographic or Post-Lament Anthropocene. If there'd been a way to sign up for them to be delivered to my mailbox every month, I'd have subscribed on the spot.

Sadly, this all appears to be flavor text. Still, top marks for effort to whoever wrote it. It's this kind of commitment that makes Wuthering Waves such a pleasure to play. How much longer it will continue is another issue. I've been spoiled by launch content then let down by updates before.

Fortunately, the game appears to be somewhat more successful than other recent favorites of mine, so there's an outside chance more content in this vein could follow. 

I won't count on it but it would be nice...