Sweet Poison or A Girl's Story

In writing about Wuthering Waves, I find it very hard to avoid repeating myself endlessly. It's staggeringly gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is excellent and the voice acting is top-notch. There's an extraordinary amount to do, the gameplay is varied and wide-ranging and the whole game feels welcoming and comfortable throughout. Yada yada yada...

Also, as I say every time, I find it exhausting and overwhelming to the point where I need a good lie down to get over it every time I indulge. It's like a delicious but extremely rich dessert, something you crave but know, for your own good, you can only indulge in every so often.

That cadence makes it very tough to write about, too. Because I've fallen into this pattern of leaving a couple of weeks between each session, biting off a complete chunk of story every time, I'm stuck with reviewing each chapter without trying to get too spoilery, while using a selection of screenshots I took along the way as illustrations and maybe dropping in a critical comment or two about anything that strikes me as being particularly notable, unusual or well done.

I'd add "or that could have been done better" to that last but honestly, there's not very often much that I feel could be improved and there seems to be less every time I play. Wuthering Waves feels very "finished" compared to just about all the games I'm used to or that I've played over the years.

It wasn't always that way or I don't believe so. I seem to remember at the start there were a lot more translation issues and plenty of times when what the voice actors were saying didn't match what I was reading in the subtitles. This morning I saw just one example of that and even then it was only a single word that differed.

Contrast that to Once Human, another relatively slick, well-funded and successful game which, as I recently noted, gets a five star rating from me in most departments. Even there, the tendency, as it is in many games I've played, is for the words you're hearing not to match the ones you see. 

I was playing OH last night. I did a couple of new quests and the words the voice actors were speaking barely resembled the text at all. The weirdest part about that wasn't that the production team couldn't get it right, it was that both versions were coherent and well-written, so either of them would have been fine. How they ended up using both is the mystery. Just pick one, guys!

I suppose it's a minor issue anyway. There's no real reason to read along with the actors after all, even if having subtitles on for everything, all the time, is the current fashion. I do find it distracting, all the same. I wish production teams would talk to each other now and again and settle on a final version. Or at least listen to the QA reports when they tell them "The words don't match the voices". I mean, it's not like its a hard error to spot. Maybe it's intentional, I don't know...

As I said, that wasn't a problem for me this morning, as I played through the quest that came up top of the list when I logged into Wuthering Waves for the first time in a fortnight. I had kind of half promised myself I wouldn't do that - just blindly follow the prompts. I was going to go off and do some exploring, open up the map a bit, do my own thing but it's so easy to just slip into the old habit of going where the quest-marker tells you. And when what you find when you get there is often so compelling, why would you want to stop?

In this case what I was being led towards turned out to be a Companion Story. There's one of those for all the main Resonators, I think, not just the leads but the co-stars, too. I haven't done very many of them. I think this might have been the fourth. Maybe the fifth. I should check sometime because they've all been excellent so far.

This was no exception. Cantarella's horror-inflected tale is chilling, even disturbing, but ultimately joyous. It also stands well inside the boundaries of the primary storyline, adding some depth and texture to the core narrative, rather than simply filling out the biography of the character herself.

And it's long! Boy, is it ever! It took me at least two hours which, judging by the full play-throughs on YouTube, seems to be about average. The huge majority of my time was spent, as always, watching animated characters act and listening to their voice-actors speak. I watched an anime movie, basically. 

I doubt that if you cut all the gameplay and just strung the cut-scenes together you'd get a cut lasting less than seventy-five minutes, a very decent length for an animated film. There was a fair amount of fighting this time but it was all so easy, none of it took very long. Ditto the puzzles, which mostly involved not too much more than following the visual prompts and pressing a few buttons at the appropriate moment. There's even a potentially terrifying jumping puzzle that the game just takes over and does for you.

In keeping with what has been the very welcome trend in the past sessions I've played, even the final boss fight is both easy and partially completed through cut scenes. I sincerely hope it's a trend that continues. As for the narrative, without giving any spoilers, I'd say 90% of Cantarella's story was clarity itself, without any of the confusing technobabble just about all the characters are prone to. 

The wrap-up, though, did its best to make up for that with a flurry of lines about frequencies and sonoro spheres that I'm a little concerned to say I mostly understood. I worry I may have been assimilated.

And then there was very final coda, because no Wuthering Waves story is ever complete without at least three or four false endings. That was... odd. One aspect of the game I do my best not to mention is the ever-present, free-floating sexual charge that seems to hang in the air around some of the main characters like the opiated miasma across the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. 

Nervously passing over Cantarella's distracting personal appearance, which gives me disturbing of Eurotrash as presented by Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gautier back in the 'nineties, in this case I'm talking about the almost predatory way she looks at, talks to and occasionally even touches the player-character. She's by no means the only NPC to have clear and obvious designs on "Rover" but she's the first one to try to put her intentions on a co-habitational basis.

All of which might be uncomfortable if my character wasn't so very much the alpha in every situation. I'm used, as we all must be now, to having the character I'm playing be treated as some kind of famous hero or maybe even a demi-god but in Wuthering Waves it's quite self-evidently true. When NPCs act awe-struck or honored to meet her, it's with palpably good reason and they, frankly, do not know the half of it. 

With that level of authority, I'm pretty sure she can handle a few over-familiar flirtations, not that she ever seems to notice there's even a subtext. She tends to look, at most, slightly baffled by the attention but by and large it just seems to fly straight over her head. 

As I've often said, if I'm going to stick with a game for long, I really need to feel an affinity for my character, something that's almost inevitably going to be harder to achieve in a game where the player gets no choice at all in who they play, other than to pick a gender. Add to that a complete inability to affect what your character looks like (Seriously, are there no cosmetics in the game at all outside the cash shop?) and then to add insult to injury, dress the main character in the worst outfit of anyone on the team and it's surprising I've been able to bond with her at all.

That I have owes a significant amount to the skill of the actor who voices her and also to the way that vocalization is handled in production and writing. I generally prefer the good old "Silent Protagonst" approach, so I was happy enough when all my character did was nod and gesture, which was all she did for a long time after I started playing.  When she suddenly began to speak, I was first astonished and then delighted at how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I really appreciate the way she doesn't speak in every scene, only when she has something worth saying or to give her internal monologue an airing. It makes the times when she does speak up feel much more significant. Secondly, and much more importantly, I love the way the actor voicing my character handles the dialog. I like her voice, which obviously helps, but mostly I love her phrasing, which is reliably close to the way I hear the lines in my head. 

You'd be surprised how often that doesn't happen. Lots of actors seem to have very different ideas to me about cadence, emphasis and even interpretation. It's jarring to hear them stressing the wrong syllables or drawing attention away from the subtext, which is why, on balance, I like my characters not to speak. If they all spoke up as eloquently and authoritatively as this, though, I'd be happy to sit back and enjoy the show rather than imagining I could do a better job myself.

With Cantarella's story told I imagine a return to the main storyline will be next. As usual, I'm going to need a while to decompress before I take that on. I'll at least try to make it a shorter break than last time. It's hard enough to remember the plot as it is.