Last week, players of the character action gacha asked formore freedom to skip story scenes and dialogue.
Having sunk a bunch of hours into the game, I can see why.
Wuthering Waves has been this month’s lightning rod for hype.
But it’s worth dissecting what it’s actually like to play.
The simplistic answer is: it’s likeGenshin Impactbut rougher.
And it is still, transparently, agacha game.
You control a whole cast of fighters with different powers, styles and weapon types.
I’d rather leave them all in the machine.
Chatter between characters has me spacing out within seconds.
But it’s enough to observe that it does.
The player is machine-gunned with proper nouns and abstract lore.
Have you noticed that this character is what they call ‘tsundere’?
For those who don’t care about storytelling, that’s the problem solved.
If I don’t care about these characters, I won’t want to collect them.
The lack of polish goes beyond unskippable cutscenes anyway.
The whole plot seems to hang together with glue and duct tape.
Wuthering Wave’s publisher famously splashed out on advertising byhiring every billboard in New York’s Times Square.
It’s not a huge deal.
you’ve got the option to’t just roll for a character, you must “Convene”.
You don’t find a stack of cash, you earn a “Voucher of Reciprocal Tides”.
This deluge of doughs isn’t anything new to the genre, or free-to-play games in general.
ADestiny 2player can rattle off the countless coins and coin-adjacent non-doubloons they will need for their favourite cosmetic.
But this in itself might just qualify as another mark against Wuthering Waves.
Even its free-to-play psychic warfare is uninspired.
It is, as you might expect, a completionist’s game.
At the top of that cleft mountain you will discover a small sanctuary of felines at the summit.
It is hard to build a sense of motivation around that alone.
When Nintendo makes a game like Breath of the Wild, other creators open their eyes wide with glee.
They take away its clever ideas.
What if the player could climb almost every surface?
What if the player could put their own stamps on the map?
