Wishes Come True In Wuthering Waves

Last week, Kuro, developers of Wuthering Waves, dropped the game's second major update since launch, taking the game to Version 1.2. It's called In The Turquoise Moonglow and as you'd expect from a gacha game it adds several new collectable characters - Resonators in the jargon. There are also new weapons to roll for and some login rewards you can get without doing anything. Well, you'd have to log in, of course.

That's all par for the course for a game of this kind but this update offers much more.  For a start, it includes what I imagine might become an annual holiday event, the Moon-Chasing Festival, already going down well with players, if Reddit is any guide. 

Then there are two more action-oriented activities, both with really great names: Carnival in Slumberland and Do Echoids Dream Of Electric Sheep? In additon to those, there's a full Companion storyline for one of the new Resonators, the deeply charming Zhezhi, and an "exploration quest" evocatively, if scarily, entitled Vigil of Endless Night.

By any standards, this is a lot of content and to be truthful that's not even all of it. I left out some of the more routine bits. Altogether, there's far more than I've had time even to take a first look at yet. All I've done so far are the first two parts of the four-part festival storyline, which I've found to be both excellent entertainment and surprisingly thought-provoking.

So much so, in fact, that I wanted to post about the new questline immediately after my first session  because I found both the subject matter and the way it had been handled so unexpected. Circumstances intervened, which was probably just as well, since it's never a great idea to rush to print before giving these things time to settle in the mind. Who knows? Maybe the first part of the questline was an exception, unrepresentative of the rest.

I guess it still could be but I've now played through the second section as well and I can at least say the quality absolutely holds up thus far. I'm pretty confident it'll continue that way until the end, at least if it's all been done by the same team, because this is some fine video-game writing. 

It was so good, I took forty screenshots across the two sessions, all of them of dialog. I was thinking of using them for the post I wanted to write and honestly even at forty shots, that was me trying to restrain myself and not just clip everything. The dialog is that strong, from start to finish, any of it would have done to make the point.

Since it's apparent this thing will get away from me if I don't impose some structure on it, I'm not going to touch the whole Moon-Chasing Festival mini-game, other than to say it's hella fun and extremely well-done. I might get to it in a separate post sometime. Ditto all those other quests and activities I mentioned up above, none of which I have even got to yet, so why speculate? Their time will come.

Here, I'm just going to stick to the main questline. There will be spoilers so you've been warned. Not, I imagine, that anyone reading this is currently playing the game. But just in case...

Okay, here's a synopsis of the plot so far, all from memory. Apologies if anything's not quite perfect. My memory certainly isn't. Plus there's going to be commentary as we go because I just can't help myself.

The player character, Rover or whatever you've called them (Let's not get into all that again...) gets talked into going to the Moon-Chasing Festival by her girlie chums. Boy, these girls can talk!

Once they get there, Rover runs into a strange little robot called Patty that seems to be having some technical difficulties and ends up chatting to a hot-looking guy (That's my take - there's nothing about it in the dialog!) who turns out not just to be in charge of the bot but who also built it and another one like it.

The bot-builder, Xiangli Yao, moonlights (Heh!) as the secret hero who makes everyone's wishes at the fair come true. How he does this is unclear but we are in a magitech setting so it seems fair. Plus most people seem to be wishing for nice things like having fun at the fair not for a million dollars or eternal life so mostly he probably has to just stand back and let it all happen. 

The second little robot, cutely named XiangLEE after its creator for cute reasons of cuteness,  has the job of collecting and collating wishes for the Fair but is having a melt-down because something in the wishes has glitched its programming. And we're going to fix all that, right? Because that's what we do.

So far, so RPG. The twist is in what, very specifically, the problem turns out to be. 

And now, having issued a spoiler warning, it falls to me to add a trigger warning as well. The problem that's freaking the little bot out, it transpires, revolves around wishes that touch on depression, grief, guilt and similar difficult mental states and the anonymous individuals making the wishes more than hint at suicide being their wished-for solution. 

For Patty, it's a classic Does Not Compute situation.To grant such a wish would breach the robot's Asimovian programming, hence its confusion.

I know! Cheery, fun little mobile game, right? 

Yeah, not this one, or not so much, at least, when you aren't getting kittens out of trees. Multiple previous questlines I remember revolved around similar subjects like dementia and racial prejudice but this new set strikes me as even more challenging, thematically. 

To a considerable degree that's because the translation and voice acting is so good. In the game in general, translation can be variable - some of it is excellent but, for example, the long quest involving an old man and his failing memory was nowhere near as emotionally affecting as it could have been because the dialog didn't read at all naturally. Also, from memory, I don't believe that one was voiced at all. Good voice acting really does add a lot.

It definitely does here. The whole thing is fully-voiced and the readings are both accurate to the text and carried off to perfection with a good deal of understatement and gravitas, a take which really suits the subject matter. 

One thing that is weird about it is the way Rover sometimes speaks and sometimes doesn't but that's almost becoming a trope of the game. I'm used to it now. When she does speak, though, the actor who voices her is really convincing. Normally I prefer my characters to be silent but I'll happily make an exception for line readings like these.

Back to the plot. Xiangli manages to isolate the problem to four specific wishes. After a good deal of discussion and some detective work, which mostly consists of analyzing the prose style of the wishes then sidling up behind people and eavesdropping on them, we pare the possibilities down to the shy, nervous artist Zhezhi or a young scientist by the name of Shifan. 

I'll give you a clue: it's not Zhezhi.

Shifan does his best to disguise his suicidal tendencies but fails to throw us off the scent. By way of some highly dubious rifling through the record of his online activity (To which he objects and we just ignore him, because that's what heroes do.) we soon establish that he has a history of posting his negative thoughts on the forums of the institution where he works. It seems he may be suffering from something that's becoming an endemic problem in the city, a maliase commonly referred to as Nighttime Blues Syndrome.

Much more investigative work follows. We discover Shifan was the instigator and leader of a project that resulted in the injury of his colleague and best friend, Jiuli. The project was shut down but Shihan still blames himself and has slumped into a suicidal depression as a result.

Up to this point, getting to which has taken the best part of an hour, there has been no combat at all but the abandoned project, which represented Shifan and Jiuli's life's work, more a calling than a job, involved working with the "Echoes" Tacit Discords sometimes leave behind when destroyed. Naturally, Rover offers to gather a few to get Shifan back on track. That's going to mean a battle, surely?

It does. Kind of. The fight takes about a minute and that's all the fighting you get. Other than that, the entire quest is conversation, interspersed with a few changes of location. 

I found it compelling from beginning to end. I never knew exactly what was going to happen next. The part where Jiuli shows some tough love for his friend by punching him in the face came as a particular surprise!

In the end it all comes right. We don't grant Shifan's wish for self-oblivion but we do deal with the underlying cry for help and everything ends with the project back on track and the two friends re-united. Plus Patty is working properly again, meaning we can crack on with the next glitchy wish.

I completed the second part today and it was possibly even better-written and voiced than the first, although I didn't find it quite so surprising. I won't subject anyone to another fifteen-paragraph summary but I will say the narrative revolves, once again, around an elderly person and their sense of isolation and powerlessness following a personal loss. 

There was also a sub-plot with another, young, character that revolved around more issues relating to overwork and not being able to achieve a good work-life balance. The themes in this game are consistently adult even when the presentation comes from the perspective of youth.

I didn't have a timer on the first part but I know it took a good while longer than the second, which I clocked at almost exactly an hour. That hour did include some business with the new mini-game, progress in which is required to move the main quest along, plus a few minutes when I got distracted by other things that were happening in the game around me. Wuthering Waves reminds of Guild Wars 2 in that it's very easy to find yourself caught up in events when you're out and about in the world.

I think I'm half-way through the quest now. I've done two of the four wishes, anyway. Assuming they're of roughly equivalent length, this one quest could take me three or four hours. Having mentioned GW2, I can't help comparing this update with the old Living Story chapters, most of which infamously had storylines which, minus the intentional padding of pointless and drawn-out fights, generally lasted no longer than a couple of hours, tops.

This story I'm enjoying so much here is just a smallish part of the full update. It's also considerably more solid and satisfying as a story than those old Living Story segments, with a lot less cruft and considerably tighter focus. I'm used to my fantasy MMORPGs slipping some heavier themes in through the back door - the Living Story certainly covered plenty of emotional ground - but not to having those themes placed so squarely front and center with no crunchy action-adventure coating.

And then there's the specific nature of those themes, surprisingly common throughout the game so far. There seems to be a highly unusual concern among the writers for the mental health and well-being of the characters, something I can't help but feel has to be drawn from personal experience.

Every new character introduced in this update that I've encountered so far expresses concerns about work-life balance. Over-working, not making time to relax and recharge your energies, not trying to do everything yourself, listening to other opinions and recognizing your own limitations - these themes come up again and again, as do understanding your duty and carrying it out in difficult circumstances. 

These are the kinds of things that make me feel this is the most "Chinese" game I've played. The cultural expectations to which these storylines refer and from which they arise feel noticeably different from what I'd expect in an American or European title. There's less of an automatic assumption that individuality is the apogee of human behavior, more of an expectation that players will react with emotional familiarity to scenarios involving parental pressure and social obligation - and not react with outright rebellion, either. 

All of that makes the repeated attention paid to maintaining good mental health by way of self-care all the more impressive. The tone manages to be supportive rather than directive and the feeling I'm left with after completing quests in Wuthering Waves is frequently one of warm satisfaction. It's a very positive game without being in the least bit "cosy" in the current, often uncomfortably twee, gaming sense of the word.

In terms of game mechanics, the second part of the quest has no more combat than the first. Possibly less. So far, it's been something like three hours of gameplay with maybe five minutes action, if that. And yet I've found it riveting. 

I think it helps a great deal that the long dialog sequences are handled not in cut scenes per se but in something of the style of an interactive novel. Having to press "F" frequently to choose between two dialog options works well to maintain a sense of involvement, even if there doesn't appear to be any material difference in which of the two you choose. The simple fact of being able adopt a variety of tones to move the story along does manage, somehow, to feel like agency.

The nature of both the gameplay and the subjects under discussion means I don't much feel like burning through the whole thing in a single sitting. I was happy to take a break of a day or two after the first part and I'm not planning on moving on the next until tomorrow or the day after. There's no hurry. The event runs almost to the end of September. 

With luck I'll have finished everything I want to do in it by then. With the game being as successful as it is, I'm sure there'll be more to come. If subsequent updates are anything like as good as this one, we're in for a treat.