The Séance Society And The Solitary Path

I started another post this morning but before I'd finished the opening paragaph I realized what I really wanted to do was play Wuthering Waves, so that's what I did. And now I'm going to write about it.

As usual, I wasn't timing my session but from memory I played for around an hour and a half, took a break, then played for maybe another hour. For the whole of that time I was doing one, continuous narrative sequence, Solitary Path, the "Companion Story" for the new Resonator, Yinlin.

Well, she's new to me, anyway. She's the focus of a new Event, When Thunder Pours, and by "event" I mean Cash Shop promotion. Based on that and the fact that the only video of Yinlin's adventure didn't pop up on YouTube until a few hours ago, I'm guessing both the character and the event arrived in the game at the same time.

I knew about the event before I started playing today but since it appeared to be nothing but a Gacha promo I had no intent to pay it any mind. That all changed in a matter of seconds after I logged in, when, the moment I appeared in Jinzhou, I got a call from Chixia, asking me if I could look into some missing persons reports for her.

Naturally I agreed because what else am I there for if not to do everyone else's job for them? Okay, that's a little unfair. Unlike most games I've played, characters in Wuthering Waves do genuinely seem to have real jobs with fixed hours and actual responsibilities they'll get into trouble for shirking. 

They even give broadly convincing reasons why it makes sense for me to run errands for them. As Chixia points out, Rover does keep running around all over the place anyway. She's in and out of the city all the time. And as we've established, she does have that Access All Areas pass the magistrate gave her...

What makes less sense and indeed completely undermines the whole conceit that the NPCs have prior commitments and full lives, is the way I, as the player, can summon any of the NPCs I've added to my team at any point, not just in combat but even while I'm just wandering around or goofing off. That's why lots of the screenshots you'll be seeing here may have someone other than the character I started with posing for a selfie. I'm sometimes not myself at all.

There's a crucial moment in the Solitary Path storyline when it becomes particularly hard to swallow this paradox, even with the most liberal sprinkling of story-teller's salt. I'll elaborate in a moment but just on the off-chance someone reading this might be playing the game (Unlikely, I know.) I'll just mention there will be extensive spoilers from here on. 

The Cliff Notes version of the plot is that it turns out the missing people have all lost someone to illness, accident or misadventure. A nebulous organization called the Séance Society has contacted them all with an offer of a way to see their loved ones again. After much investigation it transpires that someone called the Dollmaker has been supplying androids, known as "Puppets", that can emulate the dead, something they manage only by means of memories siphoned from the living.

Unfortunately, there's a side-effect. Prolonged exposure to the Puppets can lead to a violent, manic breakdown known as "Overclocking". It affects any human who spends too much time close to a puppet, although it doesn't affect everyone equally. Worse, the Dollmaker seems to be in cahoots with the underground rebel faction, Fractsidus, which wants to use his skills and his puppets for even more nefarious purposes.

After much running around, a lot of talking, quite a bit of fighting and several apparent changes of allegiance by half the cast, Rover ends up fighting her way through the Dollmaker's factory complex, ostensibly as the prisoner of his lieutenant, Yinling, but actually as Yinling's covert partner. 

Before Rover and Yinling team up, though, while Rover still thinks Yinling is one of the bad guys (Which she kind of is.) Rover manages to send a coded message to Chixia revealing the factory's location, which is why the red-haired Junior Patroller is outside the heavily booby-trapped and defended complex with a squadron of Huangdong's paramilitary police force. 

Except at the same time she's also inside it, with me. She's one of my deployable team of Resonators. The fights were getting pretty brutal so I had to call on everyone to see us through to the denouement. I did try not to bring Chixia into play, for the sake of immersion, but on the final boss, an Overlord Class mob almost ten levels higher than me, I really had no choice.

It was a chaotic fight but I'd intentionally charged and saved all my big attacks in the expectation the whole thing would end with a boss fight. Having all four of the team dump their Ultmates on the boss was what swung it for us. Without Chixia, we might not have pulled it off. 

For all practical reasons it was worth breaking immersion to win that battle. Still, it did feel weird when the fight ended and second Chixia broke through the doors and ran in to handcuff the defeated Dollmaker and drag him off to jail.

The aforementioned paradox inherent in the structure aside, I thought the self-contained story was pretty darn good. It would make a very decent story arc in an anime TV series. It certainly had no more logical inconsistencies or internal contradictions than some I've seen. 

The dialog was solid throughout, the plot was twisty and intriguing and the voice acting was convincing. The themes felt remarkably relevant, with some examination of the ethics and morality of AI and a touch of philosophy concerning existential identity and the eternal. I do like it when someone asks me to think.

All things considered, I was impressed. Also satisfied. The whole thing lasted about as long as the narrative section of a Guild Wars 2 Living Story chapter but the story was much better and the fights a lot less annoying.

I wanted to make it clear how much I enjoyed it before starting to nit-pick some of the detail. The issues with characters being in two places at once is inherent to the gameplay but most of my other concerns revolve around sloppy editing and inadequate Q.A.

As I mentioned yesterday, the voice work is produced in London. That may explain why the various voice actors can't seem to agree on how to pronounce some of the Chinese names. For example, there's a girl/Puppet called YuanYuan, whose father fully articulates both the "Y"s, saying it just as it looks on the page. Yinling calls her something that sounds more like "WanWan", which actually sounds more convincing, only then, a little later, she also begins to stress those leading "Y"s, losing the "W" sound altogether. 

It made me wonder if someone asked her to change her pronounciation or whether she reacted to what her colleague was doing. It also makes me ask why, since the whole thing has been translated into English anyway, they don't also give the NPCs western names.

Either way, it's something that ought to have been caught and cleared up in the edit, as should the occasional variations between what the voice actors are saying and the text that's on screen. It would also be nice if the game could remember whether Rover is supposed to be male or female. I realise it didn't actually say the appearance I chose was one or the other but I don't think the way some NPCs use "him"  to refer to my character while others use "her" is intended as a statement on gender fluidity. I think it's just more bad editing.

In general, I did get the impression the translation for the new story was very slightly less polished than before. Only very slightly, though. It was still orders of magnitude better than most imported titles I've played. On the other hand, I felt some of the voice acting was better, possibly - as others have pointed out in discussions I've read - because British voice actors are likely to turn in better performances if they're not asked to put on American accents. 

I did feel there was considerable chemistry between my character and Yinlin, which has something to do with the voice acting but more to do with the writers and the artists. This doesn't appear to be one of those games where you can romance NPCs and this particular story doesn't offer much in the way of leeway to react in different ways, so anything in the way of flirting has either to come from the script, the art direction or wishful thinking on the part of the player.

I don't think it was me this time. I'm pretty sure Yinlin was flirting with Rover and I'm damn sure the art director was telegraphing their attraction, which looked quite mutual on screen. I submit this screenshot as evidence. Judge for yourself.

Characterisation is definitely one of Wuthering Waves strengths. It tends to be, in these kinds of games, where everything revolves around building a roster. Noah's Heart had lots of very strong characters too, largely because they stole borrowed them all from history and literature, but unfortunately the translations weren't good enough to make most of them feel like more than curiosities and ciphers.

Here, they feel a lot more rounded and convincing. They're all familiar types and tropes but that's true of much popular fiction. Characters and story are easily strong enough to hold my interest. My main concern is whether that standard will be maintained.

I remember all too well how strong some of the opening content in Noah's Heart was. I wrote a whole post about one of the segments of the main storyline because it was just stunningly well done. A few months down the line, though, everything seemed much more rushed. By the end of the first year, what little new content we got was so badly translated I literally couldn't understand some of it at all.

I'd like to hope that Wuthering Waves is going to be a lot more successful than Noah's Heart and therefore won't slide into the same downward spiral but I do recall that Noah's Heart claimed a huge number of pre-registrations and was briefly illuminated in a flare of supposed success at launch. It didn't last.

I do wonder, too, what lifespan these Gacha RPGs are intended to have. They look fantastically expensive to produce and therefore to maintain. Perhaps they aren't meant to go on and on like MMOs. And maybe that's a good thing. Genshin Impact has been running for nearly four years now. Does it really need to carry on for another decade?

I think it's best to enjoy these things while the shine is still on them and not to expect that luster to last. If it does, all well and good. If not, there's always another game. Because there always is another game.

For now, though, Wuthering Waves is a lot of fun. I'm going to stick with it until it's not. I've had worse plans.