Wuthering Waves: Very First Impressions

One thing I did not plan on doing today was downloading a game I'd never heard of, then spending a couple of hours working my way through the introduction and tutorial. And yet here we are.

As far as I'm aware, I'd never heard of Wuthering Waves until I saw a passing mention of it at Time To Loot. Even so, as I said in a comment there, I'm not absolutely sure about that. I guess I might have heard about it somewhere before...

You'd think it would be easy enough to remember. The word "wuthering" doesn't turn up all that often outside of the works of Emily Brontë, after all. Speaking of which, I wonder if the working title for the game was Wuthering Depths? Depths... ocean... waves? 

Wait... I'm not in the Upside-Down am I?

Never mind. Wuthering Waves is what they went with and a very good name it is, too. A lot better than most, although I am sensing a trend here. 

This is an open-world RPG, following the trail broken by another game with an odd, intriguing, evocative name - Genshin Impact. These open-world RPGs do seem to have a penchant for left-field titles - Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, Noah's Heart... After far too many years of games called World of Whatever or Abstract Concept or Unfamiliar Placename, it's refreshing to be faced with something that sounds both poetic and intriguing. Something that could be the title of a book or a movie or even the name of a band. Something that doesn't sound like a video game.

Or maybe that's just me. It must have worked, anyway because, although Naithin wasn't all that complimentary about it, my immediate reaction was "Ooh! I'd like to try that!" So I did.

What would a train station be without pigeons? Clean.

After just a couple of hours, any impressions I have are going to be very unformed but when have I ever let that stop me? And anyway there are always certain conclusions you can draw at a very early stage, like whether the game feels like a professional production, if it looks and sounds good and if feels user-friendly and inviting.

Wuthering Waves ticks all of those boxes. It also ticks the ones marked "I've seen this before" and "Oh God, not that again!". Still, originality isn't obligatory in gaming or even always welcome. Give me a good clone over a bad original any day. 

Starting at the beginning, WW scores big points for convenience. Downloading and installing the game (It's something like an 18GB footprint.) took just a couple of clicks from the website. There was no time wasted registering an account. It accepts a Google login, which it doesn't even bother to confirm with an email to the Gmail address you give it. 

Ah, that old chestnut!

As for character creation, it's literally two clicks: one to decide if you're a boy or a girl (Or at least if you look more like the traditional idea of one or the other - it doesn't actually mention a specific gender identity.) and another to pick where in the world you'd like to send your ping. I chose Looks Like A Girl and Europe. The game told me what server I'd be playing on and that was that. 

Oh, and I had to choose a name. Let's not forget that part. Even if the game did. But more on that later.

From then on it's sit back and watch a movie for the best part of two hours. I exaggerate slightly for dramatic effect but only slightly. I've played a few games that like to think they're movies or, in this case, anime TV shows and Wuthering Waves is up there with the best of them. Alright, not FFXIV but that one has no competition when it comes to Hollywood pretensions.

Oh, it was that dream I had...

The set-up is extremely familiar. It's also one of the better versions of the well-known scenario I've seen. There's nothing much new about any of it, from the opening cut-scene with your character and a mysterious, angelic (Or is it demonic?) figure floating in space to the crash-landing in the sea and the waking up surrounded by strangers expressing concern over your state of health, strange appearance and apparent inability to remember anything, including your own name.

From there everything proceeds pretty much exactly as expected. The strangers quickly bond with you and become your new best friends, not to mention your fighting force, since this is one of those "Make a Team" gacha games. They take you through the basics, explaining the way the world works and what the dangers are, as you all head off to the nearby Big City for further explanations and indoctrination.

Bright light, big city.

So far, so predictable. It's at times like these that I wonder why people are so worried about games developers using AI to create quests and other content. If some gaming version of Watergate's Deep Throat appeared tomorrow to reveal that most games had been written by AI for years now, would anyone really be surprised?

So, why did I carry on, not only continuing to play the game but watching every cut-scene, listening to all the dialog and paying close attention to the story as it unfolded? Well, because it's not a bad story as these things go. 

Yes, it follows the formula, but the specific details were idiosyncratic enough to make me curious to know what was going on behind the scenes. The characters may be types but they're well-written , with sufficient personality and individuality to make them believable, at least in the context of an anime world, where no-one looks much over eighteen even if they turn out to be the Magistrate in charge of the city. 

Not in Kansas any more, then?

Some of the stickiness I experienced is down to the writing and some to the visuals, which are good. If you don't like anime-style art you definitely won't like this but if you're no worse than neutral to the look, Wuthering Waves is probably going at least going to strike you as quite pretty. The backgrounds in particular, for both the natural and built world, I found very pleasing to look at.

The thing that surprised me, after reading Naithin's observations, was the voice acting, about which he said "Quality of the voice recording is especially poor and distracting." I didn't notice anything like that at all. In terms of technical quality, it sounded just like every other game. No better, no worse. 

In the couple of hours I played, I heard maybe two or three slight glitches in the vocal delivery, always when I was trying to do something else while someone was still speaking. I've played plenty of games where things like that happened far more often. I certainly wouldn't have thought to comment on it if it hadn't been in my mind from what Naithin had written.

Stop me if I'm going too fast for you.

As for the voice acting itself, I thought it was above par. It's not mainstream TV quality acting but it's good enough for the kind of TV show the game very much resembles and considerably better than quite a few games I've played, particularly imports. 

Speaking of the game's transition from East to West, the translation is also very good. The English is idiomatic. It reads and sounds naturalistic, insofar as a world apparently run entirely by teenagers ever could. I did notice the very occasional phrase that didn't sound absolutely like something I could imagine a native English speaker using and there were a very few incidences of the spoken and written dialog not matching up exactly but by the benchmarks of this sort of thing it all felt close to exemplary.

One odd quirk of the translation that did make me smile was the name my new friends decided to give my character, which then quickly became what everyone called her, making the name I gave her completely redundant. I know the name they chose for her means someone who wanders around all over the place and therefore makes perfect sense for a mysterious visitor who arrives from who knows where on her way to some equally unspecified destination, but in my book "Rover" is something you call a dog, not a person.

Arf! Arf! Woof! Yip!

There's also a lot of jargon, mostly pseudo-scientific technical terms, not all of which are cogently explained but I actually liked that. I've read a lot of science fiction in my life and I'm entirely comfortable with characters who know a hell of a lot more about the science of their world than I do. I actually prefer it when these things don't get explained up front so I can figure out the meaning from context.

Of course, imported games often have much better translation and voice acting in the tutorial and very early stages so Naithin may just be warning of rougher waters to come. For now, though, I have no complaints about the sound or the voice-work at all.

Sticking with the writing, there were several moments that impressed me. One that sticks in my mind is the cut-scene where the Magistrate appears as a hologram to make a broadcast to the city about the very special stranger she's expecting. As well as saying how immensely important the unknown stranger is to the future of the people who live there, she invites whoever it might be to a personal audience with her at City Hall.

Everybody wants to be famous.

It's clear the stranger is going to be the player character but as the Magistrate was talking I was wondering what the heck the rest of the population of the city was going to make of it. It seemed like an open call to every wannabe and fame-junkie in the region to high-tail it to City Hall for the promised step-up to super-stardom.

I assumed that was just clumsy plotting until I got to City Hall and found a crowd of would-be Special Ones had gotten there before me. What I'd taken as a plot hole turned out to be a plot point. There's a whole schtick about it, which I found both ironic and amusing. That's teach me to underestimate the writers.

So, the game looks and sounds good and the story's interesting. What about the gameplay?

I'd like to be able to go into detail about that but after two hours, I really haven't seen enough of it to say. There's crafting, something I only know because I picked up some mats while I was jogging into town. I think there might be housing - the Magistrate told me I have an apartment in City Hall but I haven't seen it.

Fight? In these heels?

As for combat, I've had three or four fights in total, all which were pure tutorial fodder. I vaguely followed the instructions about all the special attacks and how to swap from one team member to another but it always felt as though just hammering LMB would have done just as well.

Naithin says combat in Wuthering Waves is "without question superior" to that in Genshin Impact. I would say, even from the little I've seen, it looks a lot more complicated. Whether that's a recommendation or not depends on how much you like fighting in these games, I guess. 

Personally, as has happened a number of times before, I'm getting the feeling I'd rather watch Wuthering Waves the TV show than play Wuthering Waves the video game. I spent two hours with it today in good part because it felt like that's what I was doing. 

I strongly suspect that as soon as the game becomes more about fighting and less about watching, I'll make my excuses and leave. Until then, though, I'm quite happy to sit back and see what happens next.