And So The Story Goes

I took a break from Scars of Destruction in EverQuest II yesterday so I could carry on with the Rinascita storyline in Wuthering Waves. It really is very good indeed and for a number of reasons.

It's extremely well-paced. There are four parts, a prologue and three acts, all with titles that appear to be quotes, although from what I couldn't say:

Prologue: Through the Sea Thou Break
Act I: The Sacred Breeze So Often Breathes
Act II: Veils Off in Sun or Shadow
Act III: What Yesterday Wept, Today Doth Sing

I'm now a little less than halfway through Act II, so presumably more than halfway through the whole thing, and there have been no slow spots, no dull passages and no frenetic, rushed moments either. The story feels as if it's progressing organically, each scene a natural development of the last.

Both the direction and cinematography are quite possibly the best I've seen in any game I've played. I use the terms advisedly because although we often say that certain passages in games "feel like being in a movie", this really does. A huge amount of time is spent in what I suppose we have to call cut-scenes but the experience is very different from the comparatively static, mannered approach I associate with this kind of storytelling.

There's no set cut scene mechanic or style. Sometimes conversations happen in the world with everything going on around, sometimes there are full, cinematic inserts but mostly the characters talk to each other while the camera moves around according to the needs of the narrative. There are pans and close-ups and medium shots. There are birds-eye views and ground-level and over-the-shoulder and knee-level and pretty much you name it.

There are reaction shots, too, where characters reveal something of their inner thoughts by the way they move their heads or change their expression. Sometimes there are visual metaphors, where the camera cuts away to an object or a view to add nuance to what's just been said.

And it all works. It's never fancy or fussy or awkward or distracting, or at least no more than good film-making ever is, by which I mean that there are moments when it's so good it's hard not to find yourself appreciating the artistry instead of following the dialog.

Fortunately, the consistently excellent voice acting means focus never wavers for more than the occasional moment. Every sentence earns your attention as much for the way it's spoken as for what's being said.

All the new characters are good but one, Zani, is outstanding, which is just as well because she's in it a lot. She's the bank executive assigned to guide and assist the player character during their visit to Ragunna and for some reason she seems to be the only person in this Italianate city to have an Italian accent.

Or maybe it's Greek. Or Spanish. Opinions differ. It's definitely Mediterranean, though, and it's musical as hell. It's a real pleasure to listen to, whatever the origin. And in the end it's good that it can't be nailed down precisely to a real-world location. It is, presumably, a Ragunnan accent. Although that does raise the question of why no-one else in the city speaks the same way...

Zani also exemplifies another of the strengths in Wuthering Waves' storytelling: she's a genuine adult, something all too rare in video games or at least the ones I play. By that I mean she not only uses adult cadences in her speech and has an adult-sounding voice, she also expresses the kind of concerns and talks about the kind of topics I associate with a certain kind of adulthood.

Even though she lives in a magical, fantasy city, surrounded by the trappings of a child's storybook come to life, Zani works at management level in a bank and she sounds like she does. She also has a secondary role as a trusted functionary with a significant power grouping in the local political structure and she sounds like that, too. And to top it all, when encouraged by the player-character to relax and be more herself, Zani convincingly reveals a private self that seems equally grown-up.

This isn't a unique situation within the game. There were grown-ups in earlier storylines, not least the stiff and formal Baizhi, who always seemed weighed down with responsibilities, and some of the side-stories featured minor characters worrying about very adult topics, like problems at their place of work or in their extended friend and family groups. Even so, much as I appreciated it at the time, those feel like preparatory sketches compared to this. 

The main reason I mention it is because this kind of grown-up texture in storytelling seems quite unusual for something of this style, an anime-inflected gacha game set in a high-fantasy world. There are plenty of very un-grown-up characters in Wuthering Waves - precocious children, angsty teenagers, insecure young adults and cute, non-human creatures - and they're also both written and acted with exemplary skill, but those kinds of characters are frequently met and done well in these kinds of games. Grown-ups with full-time jobs and adult attitudes and concerns - they're a lot rarer.

Kuro, the developer responsible for Wuthering Waves, seems to be acutely aware of the path they're taking here and it's potential risk because they've included a lengthy, detailed questionnaire on exactly that topic. I filled it out the other day and the whole thing was question after question about the preferred age, attitude, personality and emotional frame of mind of characters you'd like to see in future. 

I've never seen anything quite like it in a game before. I hope enough people ticked the "adult" options to keep the ship sailing in the right direction although if not I trust the writers and artists to give us worthwhile stories, whoever they pick as protagonists.

Then there's the plot. It makes sense! Or it does so far, anyway. That ought to be a low bar but it's one so few games manage to clear that it feels like an achievement when any of them do. 

Wuthering Waves makes things harder for itself than it needs to by using a lot of jargon that makes it tough to understand what's going on until you attune your ear to it all. When you do, though, it's worth it. It's taken me this long to reach the point where words like "frequency" and "echo" mean what the game wants them to mean rather than what they usually would but I'm there now and it opens the story out significantly.

While you're getting used to all the pseudo-technical talk, it helps that, as well as the over-arcing, mystical through-line, there are much more down-to-earth sub-plots to hang onto. In Ragunna, there's a mystery to be investigated and a traitor to be exposed. A cabal of them, in fact. It's absorbing and entertaining stuff.

And there's a lot of it. There are several full playthrough videos on YouTube and none of them is less than six hours long. While there is some fighting, puzzle-solving and travel in there, the huge majority of your time will be spent watching or listening to NPCs talk, occasionally hearing your own character speak, and now and again selecting one of two responses that, as far as I can tell, make no material difference to what happens next.

Put like that, it sounds tedious but it's never that. It's six hours very well-spent. Or at least it's been about three and a half hours very well-spent for me, so far. I have every confidence it's going to go on that way until the end. 

One thing I do find it somewhat counter-intuitive is how I seem to be willing to spend as long watching this quasi-movie run as it would take me to watch three or four actual movies, when I can't generally talk myself into watching even one. It definitely doesn't feel all that much like playing a game at times.

I believe this, along with my recent experience with Cloudpunk, has finally chipped away the last of my resistance to video games as a narrative platform. Even though I've been playing these things for most of my life, I've always felt there were better ways of telling the stories; that the constant interruption of having to press a key hindered rather than helped immersion. If I have any lingering doubts, they mostly revolve around the eternal question of whether we really ought to be calling some of these experiences "games" at all.

It's still a difficult trick to pull off, all the same. I'm aware that almost everything I'm praising Wuthering Waves for here is uncomfortably similar to the things I most disliked about Final Fantasy XIV. All those endless cut scenes! All that talking! 

As the Funboy Three so wisely put it, though, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. And this is how you do it right.

Welcome To Rinascita

Yesterday I finished the Black Shores storyline in Wuthering Waves, meaning I was able to move on to the new region added in the recent update, Rinascita. Black Shores was excellent - exciting, enlightening, emotional and thoroughly enjoyable. Occasionally I found some of the combat challenging but never overwhelming. I had a lot of fun there.

The one thing it wasn't was easy to understand. I'm still not entirely sure what some of it meant but then I see a certain degree of inscrutability in these things as a net positive so that's all to the good.  I prefer to be somewhat puzzled than completely in the picture, sometimes.

When the main quest in Black Shores came to a conclusion, the game tried to shunt me into Camellya's companion story, a direction I would have been very happy to go, had I not known there was a timer hanging over at least some of the content available in the new land. I have a plethora of narrative options waiting in the background - several companion stories, a slew of side-quests and at least two chains of dailies that appear to lead to some kind of conclusion - but with my slow and scattered playstyle, I can't really afford to stray far from the main questline or I'll lose all hope of ever catching up.

The introduction to Rinascita, like just about everything in the game, is more nuanced and playful than it has any need to be. Other games would just send you through a portal or add a marker to your map where you could go to take a ship. Wuthering Waves gives you both of those tropes and it's still not how you end up getting there. 

First the Shorekeeper opens a portal so you can travel to Rinascita instantly but your point out it will drain too much of her power so you offer to find your own way there instead. The Shorekeeper suggests going by ship but when you get to the dock it turns out the navy is off doing something more important and no ships are available. Luckily, Aalto, one of your many new pals, just happens to have a dinghy you can use. 

There's some joshing about how small it is although I thought it looked pretty spiffy. More like a sleek speedboat than any dinghy I ever saw.

You set off alone in the small craft but before you can get to Rinascita an ominous shadow appears in the water below. It turns out to be a humongous narwhal-like creature that flips your ship high into the air and you into the sea, where you're saved from drowning by a passing circus troupe, who just happen to be floating past on the back of some giant sea-beast. They're all headed to Rinascita for the Carnavale and they're happy to give you a lift, which is how you eventually arrive.

Rinascita means rebirth in Italian and it's the name of an island continent. The city where you start is called Ragunna and it's an analog of Venice. At first sight, it also appears to be a borderline sinister theocracy, complete with strict immigration policies and the quasi-military infrastructure to enforce them. The opening quest is actually called "Papers Please" and they're not joking.

The weirdest part, though, is that the entire economy, service sector and social infrastructure relies on "Echoes". Echoes are something I don't wholly understand. In the early game they're physical manifestations of the frequencies Tacet Discords sometimes leave behind when you kill them and if that doesn't make much sense then welcome to Wuthering Waves. 

In Ragunna, they seem to be very much more than that, being more like droids in the Star Wars universe or Munchkins in Oz. They basically do all the work and have no rights of their own. They also can't talk, which means everyone you meet is absolutely fascinated by Abby, the cute, sassy Echo that lives inside the player character. 

Abby's articulacy does raise uncomfortable questions about the way Echoes are placed into service. If it makes the Ragunnans uncomfortable, well it should.

I suspect that theme may develop. The main reason you're in Rinascita in the first place is to talk to the local Sentinel about halting and reversing the degredation of Abby's frequency, a worrying situation that's making her sleep much more than before and will likely lead to her fading altogether. 

Unfortunately, no-one has seen the Sentinel in what seems like forever and the Sentinel only speaks to the leader of the religious order or occasionally to the single person fortunate enough to be crowned at the Carnavale. Which is going to have to be you, obviously.

Enough rehashing the plot. If it makes no sense when you read it here, then I assure you it does in the game, at least in all the ways that matter. What Wuthering Waves excels at is making you care about the characters and what's going to happen to them. The overarching plot may be all but incomprehensible but that absolutely does not matter at all. Everything makes sense in context and the emotional through-line is crystal clear.

The world-building is also exemplary. Ragunna is stunning. The attention to detail is intense and the quirky whimsy adds a surreal edge to what would otherwise be a faithful evocation of an idealized Italian city. 

Transport is by self-driving gondola and it feels serene and relaxing. Citizens of the city-state go about their business, some visible only from the water. The city feels alive in ways so many game-cities seldom do.

That has to be, at least in part, because of the degree of  attention - surely unnecessary from any practical point of view - paid by the designers to how the place functions. Take the banking system, for example

. Most games have banks but how often do they also have members of the senior banking staff who come out to greet you and explain the way the system works? And not in a tutorial fashion, either, because this isn't a typical game bank where you can stash your surplus stuff. It's the bank the locals use.

Wuthering Waves consistently opens out the lives of the ordinary people, who live in the world through which the player character only passes. They share worries and concerns about the economy, the social infrastructure, the government, their personal lives, their families and pretty much everything that might come up in a conversation with someone you'd just met, if that person were something of an over-sharer. It's very strong storytelling and it makes the whole game-world feel that much more convincing.

If all that feels a little too real-world, let me introduce you to the Tubpups. Tubpups are half bathtub, half puppy dog. They're Echoes you can ride in and wash away the grime of the city at the same time. Not that there is any grime in Ragunna. Not where you can see it, anyway.

Nothing in the game introduces you to this bizarre form of public transport. It's just there if you want to use it. I noticed one standing idle, saw it was interactable, went up and spoke to it and ended up being carried - i n c r e d i b l y  s l o w l y - through the streets for what felt like half an hour but was probably five minutes. 

It has to be by far  the slowest means of transport I have ever encountered in a game, much slower than walking, and if it has any practical purpose, other than being very entertaining in its own right, I have yet to find out what it might be.

I could go on and on about the wonders of Rinascita and I've only just arrived. I'm almost scared to imagine how much there must be still to come. 

I'll just mention one more thing before I finish. A few games I've played have made use of wall screens showing moving pictures. It's something I always find both impressive and amusing. 

In Ragunna, it goes a stage further. There are numerous, large wall-mounted displays that run advertisements on a never-ending loop. They're full-length ads, too. And they're for the NPC shops and restaurants you see around you.

Sometimes advertising can be a good thing, especially if no money changes hands. And I guess that's what this post is, after a fashion; an advert for Wuthering Waves that no-one paid me to write and which isn't trying to sell you anything, except maybe on the idea that it's a game worthy of your attention.

And it's free, too. The gacha thing? If it's the story you're after, you can forget about that. And the story is what matters.