When In Rome...

As of now, I am officially up-to-date with the main storyline in Wuthering Waves. I have the screenshot to prove it, too, but it's a really boring screenshot, so I'm going to make it super-tiny so it doesn't spoil the look of the post.

There it is. Get your magnifying glasses out. Of course, I'm absolutely nowhere with the rest of the bazillion side quests, which would probably take me the rest of the summer to finish , if I did nothing else, but that's not the point. My goal in the game, in so far as I've ever had one, is to follow the really very good main story and that I am just about managing. Let's not get ambitious.

How did I reach this welcome but largely unexpected position? The latest update, gloriously named Lightly We Toss The Crown (Whoever it is at Kuro Games that keeps coming up with these titles deserves a raise.) arrived two weeks ago, a week after the eight-minute (!) promotional video.

As you can see, it's taken me a while to get around either to writing about or playing it but I've now done one and here I am doing the other so that's all good. Of course, as I've suggested already, "doing" the update only means I've made my way through the latest chapter of the MSQ. 

As you can see, if you're crazy enough to sit through the full eight minutes of the video, that's just a very small part of the new content. I continue to be completely in awe of the sheer amount of gameplay added with every update but then I did play Guild Wars 2 for a decade. My benchmarks are shot. 

Some of it only sticks around until the next one but most of it is flagged "Permanent" so the total size of the game increases significantly every six weeks or so. How long that's going to be sustainable is another question. I'd seriously hate to be starting now and the game's only been out for a year.

Same picture but bigger in case you didn't click

Speaking of which, when I logged in a few days ago to try and get caught up, I was expecting to have to go through whatever was added to the MSQ with the Anniversary because I'd been running one update behind for a long time. I was surprised and very pleased when the game took me straight to the start of the current chapter. It seems whatever happened in the Anniversary celebrations wasn't part of the main storyline at all. 

I still don't actually know what it was, only that it generally wasn't well-received. Naithin at Time To Loot, the only other blogger around these parts who writes about WW, mentioned  a couple of times that he was unimpressed by whatever it was and expressed some curiosity about what I might think about it, when I got around to doing it, but I'm going to have to disappoint him there because I haven't and now I probably never will.

Unless, of course, it was the thing with Encore and the video game sponsored by the Pioneer Association... If it was, I can see the problem. After I finished the latest chapter of the MSQ, I went back to see if I could figure out what I'd missed and that looked like the most likely candidate so I went to give it a go.

You may well ask, Abby...

It started out well but it ended badly. The conceit is really similar to GW2's Super Adventure Box, a gimmick I never much liked. In both cases a character in the game you're playing creates a video game inside the game your playing for the characters in that video game to play for fun. And also in both cases that video game looks much more like what a video game would look like if you asked someone who doesn't play video games and has no particular love for them would imagine all video games probably look like, namely childish and dumb.

Aesthetically I prefer the one in Wuthering Waves, which is called... no, I've already forgotten. Super Adventure Box has it beaten hands-down on the naming front. SAB is a great name and very easy to remember - it's three years since I last played GW2 and I remembered it instantly, whereas it's about half an hour since I played this one and I'm going to have to look it up... Second Coming of Solaris. That's it. Not very catchy, is it? Must have given the job of naming it to an intern, I guess.

Anyway, it starts out quite charmingly but soon devolves into some huge arena fight where you play a character that isn't you, which we all love so much, don't we?  I got a warning at the start that all my resonators were too low for it but I carried on anyway because they were the best ones I had so what else was I going to do? 

There has to be an easier way to travel.

The warning was on the money. Unsurprisingly, my team, all 40-60, couldn't make much of a dent in the level 90 mobs they had to fight and pretty soon everyone was dead. I tried to exit the arena but there was no way to do it without spending a Revive token to get someone up, so I force-quit the game and rebooted... and came back in exactly the same position. So I had to revive and then quit, which annoyed me.

If that was the thing you didn't like much, Naithin, I didn't like it either. I'm not surprised people were up in arms about it.

The current update, though... SO much better! I really loved it, actually. It's spectacular but also subtle, with a throughline from previous chapters but also plenty of new and different elements of its own. I found the plot involving, the setting evocative, the new characters engaging and the gameplay satisfying. Pretty much straight As all round from me.

I'm not going to do any plot summaries. Frankly, the plot is now so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it while I'm playing, so it's going to make no sense to anyone who isn't. And that, you'd think, would be a negative but it's far from being that.

There are inns?

It's true that I do, in general, enjoy narratives that I can't unravel but they also have to be stuffed full of interesting or exciting details and moments to keep me engaged and this one really is. So much is going on all the time it's impossible to follow but instead of feeling confusing it successfully creates a sensation that there are huge, hidden forces moving beneath the surface, creating ripples strong enough to knock you off your feet. 

And that's quite thrilling. I'd be happy never to learn what's really going on. Indeed, I might prefer it that way. I'm happy just watching the ripples spread.

The update adds a whole new playable area, which I have yet to explore to any meaningful extent. In fact, when I look at my map in the game and at the achievements associated with exploration, I see that I have yet to explore almost everywhere other than the territory that came with the original launch and wherever the story's taken me since. I really am letting the explorer archetype down.

How about one of those inns I was hearing about?

The new city is called Septimont and it has a vaguely Roman theme inasmuch as everyone wears either a toga or roman legionary armor and the big ticket in entertainment is gladiatorial combat in the arena. A good deal of the chapter involves pairing up with one of the locals and competing in the four-yearly Agon, a knockout competition for gladiators. 

That's very clever. A previous chapter had us competing in similar competition that was culturally inflected. It shows just how rounded a personality the player-character must be, that they can beat entire populations at both the arts and in combat. But then, if you've been following the plot, you'll know that the PC, for once, really is superhuman. I know all games tell you your character is the Big Kahuna but in Wuthering Waves the lore and the storyline back that up with evidence.

The writing and the voice acting is excellent as always. I particularly liked the thoughtful observations on the effects of fame and the relationship between performers and fans. That seemed extremely up with the zeitgeist. 

Are you looking at my tail?

The new character you pair up with, Lupa, I found both delightful and fascinating. She's full of nuance. I couldn't entirely figure out either her motivation or her trustworthiness for a long while. In the end I decided she was - mostly - what she a) said she was and b) believed she was but there's definitely some part of her that's neither. 

Her name, of course, means Wolf, which is fine... except she apparently is a wolf. I mean, she has a tail and she keeps sniffing people. Yes, really. I am not sure exactly how that goes in Solaris-3. 

There was that whole side-quest ages ago, with the guy who was a wolf, and he had a tail like hers but as far as I remember he had to pretend he wasn't really a wolf, just a boy with a false tail pinned to his pants or else he'd have been lynched. Maybe I'm misremembering or maybe Septimont is just more socially advanced and wolf-people there don't suffer the same type of prejudice.

Lupa's voice actor, like most of them, does a bang-up job but I do feel I ought to call attention to a rare case where that... erm... isn't exactly true. If you watch  the first couple of minutes of the promo video I linked earlier, you'll soon see what I mean.

I'm sorry? I didn't quite catch that. Did you know you have quite an accent?

Yes, it's Augusta. What is that accent she's doing? I honestly can't even tell what it's supposed to be, let alone what it is. Sometimes it sounds Scottish - or rather it sounds like someone who once saw a phonetic version of a Scottish accent one one of those amusing seaside postcards but has never heard an actual Scottish person speak. Quite often it sounds Welsh but as if whoever's talking is trying, unsuccessfully, to pretend they don't have a Welsh accent. Mostly, though, it sounds like nothing on Earth.

Arguably, that could be okay. Solaris-3 isn't Earth. There could be plenty of accents there that no-one here has. If so, it's just weird only Augusta has this one. But then, I bet the actor playing her is the only one that could do it...

As you'd expect from a plotline involving trying to win a knock-out competition for gladiators, there's a fair amount of combat in this chapter, although even then not so much as you might expect. Once again, I'm extremely pleased to say, all the fights are well within the capability of an under-geared, under-prepared, casual player with minimal skills and a tendency to button-mash.

A girl's gotta make a buck, right?

The only time I lost a fight was the Final, on my first attempt, at which point the game popped up a window to suggest that before I tried again I might do something about my Echoes. That was good advice. I had five of them slotted as I should but only one had been upgraded. The others were all zero level. 

Once I'd swapped some of them around, adding a healer, which seemed like a pretty crucial omission, and upgraded them all, my second attempt was cake. And anyway, I didn't even need to finish the fight, which changes for story reasons several times, at what seem to be set points, into different fights with bigger bosses, all of whom also turned out to be quite manageable.

Most of the gameplay, as usual, isn't fighting at all. It's watching a rather good movie, this time one with a spectacular ending, stuffed to bursting with special effects. It was very impressive. And also satisfying. I had a really great time.

Lupa is great but it's Buling I really want to see more of next time.

I didn't have a stopwatch running but the whole chapter (And I did nothing else in the game until I'd finished it.) took me three sessions. I don't play very lengthy sessions these days but all three were well over an hour, so I'd guess the whole thing must have been at least four hours long.

And now, for once, I'm technically up with the story. Well, the MSQ, at least. It'll be another month before the next update, if past cadence is a guide, so I've got time to go do some exploring on my own time, without pointers telling me where to go.

I think I'd better make the effort or they'll throw me out of the Explorer's Guild.