It's Beautiful... But What Does It Mean?

I had a very simple plan for today. I was going to patch up Wuthering Waves, log in and do as much of the new story content as I could cope with, then stop and have lunch. After lunch, I was going to write a post about it. The story, not the lunch.

And that's still the plan, except for one very slight variation. I won't be writing about the new story any more. I'll be writing about the old one.

I thought I'd finished the main story quest last time. I thought I was ready to jump straight into whatever came next as soon as it appeared. I even said so in print. Confidently. Definitively. 

And as I also said then, I even had the screenshot to prove it. A screenshot that read 

"No Content. No New Quest". 

I'm just going to have to take your word for that, Lupa.

Under the Main Quests category in the quest journal.

I don't know... seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

Except for one thing I'd missed...

Kuro, in their wisdom, decided to split the story content in Update 2.4 into two parts. I had indeed finished the first one but there was a Part Two I didn't even know about. 

Chapter II Act VI - Flames of Heart dropped on 3 July. 

I didn't spot it because I haven't logged in since I finished Chapter II Act V - Shadow of Glory back in June. I also didn't read anything about it in any of my gaming feeds, which is a bit worrying. I imagine it was covered, WW being a very popular game, but either I just didn't see it or I didn't bother to read past the headline.

Luckily, it only took me a few seconds to figure out I still had another chapter to do before I could take a look at the new stuff. And anyway, the old stuff was still new stuff to me, so I was fine with having to take a bit of a run-up to get to the current chapter, Dreamcatchers in the Secret Gardens. 

Looking at some of the commentary around Kuro's decision to split the last drop into two episodes, I see there was speculation that the second part might be more combat-focused, presumably fueled by the fact that the first part very much wasn't. If anyone was hoping that prediction would turn out to be correct, they'll have been disappointed.

I can't remember exactly how long the first installment took me back in June but today's session, in which I did nothing but the aforementioned Flames of Heart, lasted a couple of hours. I did have to stop once to play with a very insistent Beryl, so maybe it was about an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters of actual gameplay.

Don't mind us, We just live here.

Or, to be more accurate, about fifteen minutes of pressing buttons. The rest of the time I was watching a movie. 

A very absorbing and enjoyable movie with some excellent acting, skilled direction and superb set design but also with a plot that was very hard to follow. 

I mentioned last time, how the plot in Wuthering Waves is generally "so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it". It's really not getting any easier, even now more of the mysteries have been revealed.

In fact, forget the plot... I couldn't even claim I understand the setting. I imagine we're all used to games and books and movies and TV that relies heavily on the audience's preconceptions and prior experience and which draws extensively from a huge corpus of long-established tropes, symbols and devices? Well, Wuthering Waves doesn't do a lot of that.

It's not a Western fantasy with dwarves and gnomes and elves and orcs but it's not strictly an Eastern fantasy with dragons and demons and spirits either, although there are a few dragons or dragon-like creatures, now and then. 

It's not science fiction in the familiar aliens, rayguns and spaceships mode, but there are plenty of robots and one hell of a lot of advanced technology. It sometimes has an urban-fantasy or cyberpunk moment but mostly its just hard to place, exactly.

I guess it might fit uncomfortably within the ill-defined parameters of science-fantasy but then doesn't everything? That's a tag that never feels like it's telling you much, anyway. 

Oh, right... that makes everything clear...

It's post-apocalyptic in a  sense, in that there was some sort of catastrophe called The Lament in the near-past, but that seems like it must have been either a very metaphysical event or longer ago than you'd think from the way everyone talks about it because there's very little sign of devastation in the urban areas and not much in the hinterlands. You have to go a fair way into the boondocks to see the remnants of the disaster, whatever it was.

There are superior beings in the world but they aren't gods or deities per se. They're "Sentinels" or "Guardians", usually tied to a locale like some kind of genius loci. There's an evil version called the Threnodian but your guess is as good as mine what sort of entity that is.

There are Tacit Discords,  aggressive mobs that come in industrial quantities. They're the grunts of the game, filling the roles orcs or demons might take in other settings.  And then there are Echoes, which are like the TDs but on your side. Mostly. Except when they're trying to kill you.

Somewhere behind all of this is some network of what I can only take to be AIs: sentient supercomputers that run everything but frequently have issues or need assistance for reasons I could not begin to explain. They seem to be fairly universal in a world made up of city states, each with its own form of government - monarchies, technocracies, theocracies and so on.  

And everything is sound or music-themed, from the Resonators and Echoes to the Frequencies that make up everything in the entire world. That's not confusing at all...

How all of this ever came to be I have no clue, although I'm more than willing to believe it's explained somewhere in the narrative. That's part of the problem - everything is explained in the narrative. So much is explained so often, in such detail and by so many characters, many of whom are written to novelistic standards, meaning there are unreliable narrators and limited narrators and subjective narrators and first-person and third-person and omniscient... that in the end the sheer wealth of information isn't just confusing but overwhelming and, I find, impossible to remember, even if I feel like I understood it at the time.

The game also uses any number of visual and gameplay devices to tell its story. I tend to dwell on the cinematic elements but there are sections told in stained-glass panels, in picture-books, by holograms and malfunctioning robots, in pages torn out of notebooks, on computer screens, in flowcharts and over com-links. Significant plot and narrative elements are sometimes conveyed by way of mini-games, where the whole game becomes a 2D scroller or a platformer, something that really doesn't add to my ability to follow what's going on in the story.

And of course there's the ever-popular developers favorite - key speeches on major plot points delivered by significant NPCs in the middle of a pitched battle. Always fun, that one.

Somewhere in the back of all of this lies one of the most meta-fictional devices I've ever encountered, namely the ability of some of the characters to place other characters and even the player-character, inside a fictional reality within the game-world, sometimes without the game giving any indication it's happened. Awareness is then leaked in ways that are familiar from novels and movies but even when the artifice is revealed it persists, stubbornly, as though just knowing something isn't real isn't enough to stop it being real.

And there's a lot more besides. Not least, The Fractsidus.

The Fractsidus might be the real arch-villains. Or they might be just another faction. At one point I thought they might be anti-heroes or even The Good Guys.  And maybe some of them are. Who's to say they all have the same agenda?

The Fractsidus have been in it almost from the start and they keep coming back. In the next chapter it looks like we might find out something more material about the mysterious organization or at least one of its members, Phrolova, because she's set to be the next playable Resonator and therefore is presumably the player's ally for the meanwhile, at least.

I was very keen to find out more when I logged in this morning but now I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. I have a full slate of things to do through into the middle of next week so it's going to be a while before I can clear the necessary morning or afternoon to watch the next Wuthering Waves movie. 

Pretty sure I won't be any the wiser about what's really going on by the end. But that's how I like it.