Publisher: 505 Games
Developer: Leenzee, Chengdu Lingze Technology
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
I'd like to engage in a little thought exercise if you'll allow it, dear reader. If you were in a soulslike and you came across a consumable item called a "manna flask" (spelled exactly like that), what would you expect that item to restore?
If you answered "magic," then you've clearly played a game before. But no. That's what the health potion is in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and I feel like it's a great representation of what's wrong with the game. It thinks it's as cute as its main character. It isn't, yet it strides forward with an unfettered confidence unbecoming of the team's clear lack of skill. Fun fact: this is the 20th soulslike I've reviewed, and it's also the worst one. So, sorry to spoil it this early on, but Wuchang: Fallen Feathers doesn't get a thumbs up from me, and I'd recommend you spend your money elsewhere.
Given how saturated of a genre soulslikes are, most of the world has gotten sick of them. I'm not, but you know what I am sick of? The even more saturated sub-genre of soulslikes that take place in ancient Asia. With the notable exceptions of Black Myth: Wukong and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, this subgenre is filled with slop as far as I'm concerned.
Know what else? That subgenre is almost all from the same talentless studio: Team Ninja. Nioh, Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and Rise of the Ronin, all of these mid titles are at the bottom of the tier list in terms of soulslikes for me. They all have similar M.Os outside of their settings: a traditional soulslike formula filled with a bunch of extra crap nobody asked for, resulting in a bloated mess with more moving parts than hours of fun. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers (the second lackluster ancient Asia soulslike with "Fallen" in the title) is not from Team Ninja, but it boasts all the same hallmarks. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.
"That last one is easy," I hear you say, "Deflect is parrying!"
Wrong.
"Deflect" is just blocking.
"Clash" is parrying.
"Skyborn Might" is kind of a mana (not manna, that's health) buildup that allows you to cast spells and use special weapon attacks.
"Benediction" is the act of slotting in your special attacks.
"Enter the Dream" is the term for "resting" at the checkpoint.
"Impetus Repository" is the level-up screen.
And I have no earthly idea what "Alacrity" and "Shimmer" are other than soft stats that get built up with no meter of any kind if you use certain weapon skills. There are other stats like this, by the way, but these two are the only ones I remember.
On the subject of stats, anyone who has ever played a soulslike knows how leveling up works: you gain "souls" from enemies that you spend at checkpoints to upgrade stats however you choose. Typically there are health and stamina stats as well as things like strength, dexterity, and magic, with maybe one or two game-specific stats along the way. Wuchang, however, just has to try and be cute about it. You have stats just like in any other soulslike, but it's not a straightforward leveling system. Rather, you have unique skill trees for each weapon type, and each skill tree happens to come with various stat upgrades on certain branches, as well as general weapon upgrades.
One positive I can point to in this leveling system is that weapon upgrade aspect. Normally in soulslikes you take resources to a blacksmith to upgrade one specific weapon at a time. Here, though, you upgrade spears in general or longswords in general, allowing you to mix and match weapons you find in the world much more freely. That, dear reader, is a pretty clear positive, and I always give credit where it's due.
Another positive is the ability to "store" level ups. Say you have a whole bunch of souls (or "Red Mercury" in this game, because of course it's something like that) but don't quite know what to spend them on. At a checkpoint, you can cash in these souls to gain the relevant number of upgrade points, and you can use those at any time. It's a bit of a niche thing, sure, but a positive nonetheless...especially in a game for which the soul economy is as terrible as it is here.
The flip side of the leveling system is everything else. It makes no sense to lock stat upgrades behind a whole tree of weapon skills that likely won't get used. What makes even less sense is locking entire basic features of weapon functionality behind these trees.
I was up against a boss that was absolutely folding me to the point where I looked up a guide (something I'm never inclined to do in these games), and only then did I realize that my weapon type of choice had a skill that would allow me to parry...sorry, clash. Turns out, this skill was waaaaaay far down the skill tree, so I had to re-spec my build in order to get this ability, because parrying was pretty much mandatory for this fight. So not only are you going to be starving for more health or stamina (since you have to jump through god-knows-how-many hoops to do so), you'll be lacking in basic functionality until you sift through a bunch of unnecessary skills and the lamest passive bonuses you can imagine. These passive bonuses are almost always little improvements to things like Skyborn Might, but only when you're above 90% madness. It's not that all soulslikes need to follow the formula to the letter, but innovation has to be worthwhile or it's pointless. And none of these things are worthwhile, least of all the madness benefits.
Every time you die, your "madness" meter builds up by something like 10%. Once you reach maximum "madness", you both deal and take double damage because of how sane and joyful you are.
That was a joke, but you really do have that damage tradeoff at the max percentage. Can you see what the problem with that is? If not, I'll elucidate: if you've already died to something enough times to reach maximum madness, what the hell makes you think you'll overcome that something while taking double damage? Once you reach this level, the entire next run you make is essentially moot...because even if you do manage to get past a challenge to reach your dropped souls, an uber-hard phantom is summoned on top of that spot, and you have to defeat her to get your souls back. Again, you're functionally at half-health for this, and the phantom is faster and more aggressive than some bosses. So, once you reach maximum madness, you're basically better off just throwing yourself off a cliff, otherwise you're wasting time.
As that implies, once you've died at max madness, the meter gets set back to zero...unless you're fighting a boss, in which case you remain at this level until you die outside of the battle. Oh, and defeating the boss doesn't reset your meter, so guess what happens to the multitude of souls you gain from the boss if you mistakenly think there'll be a checkpoint around the corner (like in most soulslikes) and end up having your last sliver of health taken away by some standard enemy? Also there's at least one mimic checkpoint, so that's another thing you have to worry about.
Thankfully, phantoms don't show up in the boss arena while you're fighting them, but it's bizarre that the madness remains each time you attempt the boss. Again, if you've been struggling against a boss, how likely is it that you'll beat them while taking double damage?
Another way in which Wuchang is BS riffs off that whole "weapon skill to do basic things" discussion from earlier. As I said, in some cases, parrying is borderline mandatory, but it's gated off in some weapon types, and I may be wrong on this, but I believe some weapon types don't get access to that at all. What's more, there's basically no point to parrying other than surviving boss battles where it's needed.
This is a game mostly centered around dodging, and perfect dodges are how you build up Skyborn Might. In this way, gaining access to more powerful ways of engaging enemies is dependent on you dodging as best you can. There's no such system with parrying, even if you do it perfectly. One would think parrying would build up posture or stagger damage on an enemy or boss like it does in every other soulslike, but damage mitigation really is the only benefit, so I can't fathom why there needed to be both a block and a parry. There isn't even a counterattack you can perform...or perhaps you unlock the ability to counterattack after 15 more level ups? I wouldn't know, because I have better things to do with my time.
So, why exactly is parrying mandatory in some fights? Because some bosses literally attack too fast to dodge perfectly. A boss might perform two forward punches with just the right amount of time between the two for the iframes from your dodge to expire. You can't dodge as fast as you can press the button (it's on kind of a split second soft cooldown), so you literally can't dodge an attack like this unless you get lucky. I can already hear the tryhard copium addict gamers pushing their glasses up and telling me to dodge into such attacks...and guess what? I know. That's how I was able to sometimes manage these attacks. But it's all luck, because bosses sometimes have predictive tracking I haven't seen since Dark Souls III's Iudex Gundyr.
On that note, you obviously don't get nearly the same generosity with tracking that the bosses get. In that boss that kept folding me, I had a realization in one attempt that would eventually win me the fight after a couple more days of trying: the key to victory was to do the heavy strikes from the back that instantly break posture. So, it was a simple prospect: dodge into certain attacks to get behind her and unleash that strike as soon as I was in the right spot...but where the "right spot" was is once again dependent on luck. I would sometimes be right up behind her and unleash my strike off to into the air instead of into her back. Sometimes I would land the strike while oddly far away. Sometimes I would be facing away from her at the end of my dodge, then immediately flip over when I unleashed the strike and land the hit. Sometimes I would 100% land the hit with the requisite Skyborn Might to make the swing faster, but it wouldn't break the posture. There's no consistency to this, and it lead to more than a few rage quits.
Compounding on all of these things is the healing speed. If you've ever played Dark Souls II, you know how slow low adaptability healing is, and in Wuchang, it's a similar story. I timed it, and it takes just about three seconds (or two and a half depending on where exactly you start counting) to heal once you press the button.
The final giggle in this comedy of errors is not just inherently terrible, it's the worst possible iteration of it: knockdown. You're going to get constantly knocked off your feet, and getting up from this state takes even longer than the healing. The cherry on top is that unlike in most soulslikes, there aren't any iframes as you're getting up. So once you're knocked down, you've basically already lost, because you're going to get absolutely taken to the cleaners while you're getting up. And even if you survive that, you're more than likely going to be faced with another attack with the potential to knock you down. There's a silver lining in that the no iframes rule also applies to bosses, but I'd sacrifice that in a heartbeat to take it away entirely.
So, there you have it. Combat (the most important aspect of a soulslike) is grade-A certified bull.
Let's start on a superficial level. Some have praised this game's graphics, but I personally didn't notice them that much because of how ugly the world is. Bamboo forests are never ugly, per-se, but the starting bamboo forest level is easily the ugliest of the bunch (because remember, you can't throw a dart for all the soulslikes that will have a bamboo forest by virtue of their settings). And once you're done with that area, it just gets uglier. With every transition to a new area, I couldn't help but wonder what it was going to be. Would it be yet another fugly cave with bandits? Maybe yet another fugly burned wasteland with bandits? Maybe another fugly village set upon by bandits? Maybe a more stripped down (yet no less wanting for bandits) bamboo forest part than the last? Once I beat that boss I've been mentioning, I was excited to transition to an entirely new level away from the one I'd been in...only to find it was a fugly snowy mountain with buildings made of fugly charred wood that was also overrun by bandits. It's boring, fugly, bandit-laden area after boring, fugly, bandit-laden area, so I didn't even have something beautiful (Wuchang herself notwithstanding) to look at while I rolled my eyes at the combat.
But beyond the superficial side of things, the layouts are also terrible. This is easily the most expansive soulslike map that isn't Elden Ring's, and that's not a compliment. It's long dead end road after long dead end road, and there's almost never anything worthwhile at the end of the rainbow. You'll struggle to find the correct path, and then you'll get turned around from pointless shortcuts to nowhere. Every once in a while you'll find a shortcut you weren't expecting to somewhere actually important, but these moments are few and far between.
Know what else is few and far between? Checkpoints. If you think the constant roads to nowhere are bad, just wait until you go down them desperately looking for a checkpoint. This is a seemingly nonstop problem, as checkpoints are never anywhere that makes sense. Normally you'd expect one to be at the start of a new area or right by a boss, right? You'd think, for instance, that after getting out of a fugly cave and into a palace with yellow leaves, that a checkpoint would be right on the edge of that palace.
Nope.
Some areas simply won't have a checkpoint at all save for outside the boss arena. This usually means you'll have to do the runback to the previous boss arena, move through the previous boss arena, and then move through the whole next area to get to the current boss arena before you reach a spot to rest. And these boss arena checkpoints are placed in the most mind-boggling places. Long runbacks with lots of enemies are sometimes a staple of soulslikes, but that's not actually the deal here. Instead, the developers seem to love putting checkpoints in places that maximize inconvenience without causing a significant time loss. For that boss I've been mentioning, the runback was up a small hill with exactly one guy, then down a ladder, then around a building.
Why?
Seriously, why? It's not a huge runback, just the most efficient inconvenience per inch ratio I've ever seen. It's not the biggest thing in the world, but it's just so odd, and the inconveniences really start to pile up when you're having to head back to the boss upwards of twenty times.
Look, the fact of the matter is that this is a gooner game. It's a gooner game with an outward facade of some class, but it's a gooner game. The boob sweat, the skimpy underwear that makes Wuchang more immune to poise breaks (a stat usually reserved for the heaviest armor in these games), say it with me: it's a gooner game. If you want to make a gooner game, that's your right. It's cringe, but it's harmless cringe despite what some people might insist.
What I absolutely will not forgive, though, is when your gooning comes with a tangible technical price. Movement is clunky, to say nothing of the inconsistencies in gameplay. There's also some degree of stuttering on PS5. Not a whole bunch, but some. Normally, "just some" wouldn't ruffle my feathers (pun intended) too much. But that technical inconsistency exists because the developers decided boob sweat was a more important allocation of resources.
Ok, fine, I don't actually think that. It's just an entertaining thought to, well, entertain. But the fact remains that this is a technically weak package whose priorities were not where they should've been.
And for further proof, you need only look at the game's unplayable launch on PC. People bought this and couldn't play it because the developers couldn't be bothered to run sufficient tests. Since I played this on PS5, that wasn't a problem for me...but since I'm not a reddit mod, I'm not going to pretend that justifies things.
Let us review:
Basic combat functionality locked behind skill trees/specific weapon types - 1.0
Abysmal healing speed and technical jank - 0.5
Overall BS combat - 1.0
Madness system - 0.5
Inconsistency in dodge iframes and back strike timing - 1.0
Knockdown - 1.0
Awful level design - 1.0
Quit from boredom - 1.0
The final score for Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is...
3.0/10 - Bad
Give up, Leenzee, just give up
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