Team Ninja, one of the team that offered us a little bit of everything between Nioh and Stranger of Final Fantasy, the studio goes to tell us the legends of China with Wo Long. Between parrying, rolling, magic, attack and martial arts, you will have understood, we are on Souls Like with a Dynasty Warriors sauce.
The legend of the yellow turbans.
Wo Long places us in the year 184, when the Han dynasty is at war. Except that an artifact will change the course of things. A mysterious character will take advantage of the covetousness of the two camps to obtain this power and transform our enemies into
enemies into various demons. It is in this that your character will have to restore peace within the Three Kingdoms.
We are however far from a nioh or Stranger of Final Fantasy. Wo Long is much faster, fluid and nervous. The central mechanic of the game being the perfect parries. Yes, you’ll spend more time timing enemy attacks than you will with drunks. And be aware that if you don’t master this mechanic, death awaits you at every corner.
The game works with spirit bars. Yours and your enemies’. The more you hit and dodge in the wind the more it will fill up in red, if it is at maximum, the next enemy attack you will suffer without dodging will stun you. On the contrary, if you do a lot of parrying and well placed moves, it will turn blue giving you a spirit bonus. The same goes for your martial arts and magic which fill the bar with red.
On the enemy side, theirs is similar. It becomes orange with each powerful blow and if you dodge a red attack, it will turn grey to reduce the number of hits you have to do to stun it. Note that this technique is the basic technique for the bosses. You must succeed in dodging the red attacks otherwise death awaits you.
Dance of the blades
The funny thing is that Wo Long is not a difficult Souls like game. Once you’ve mastered dodging, the title becomes very easy. Especially since you and your enemies have what is called a spirit level. The higher the spirit level of the enemies, the more powerful they are. The lower it is. The more powerful you are. And so it’s normal to start at 0 and have difficulty on enemies 1,2 or 3 and then at some point come back into the zone and run over them, because you are level 5. Each zone will be built in the same way and so at some point the scheme becomes simple to understand. Especially since the levels of the game are cut like in Nioh and you will be able to do various side quests asking you to redo the level in reverse for example.
We will also note the presence of the ally to help us. Well, in reality, they are there to make you look pretty and take the aggression of the monsters when you are in bad shape. The rest of the time, they will be there to turn around the enemies without doing anything.
Mixing all this, we realize that Wo Long is perhaps the best entry point to the Souls Like universe. Its story, its gameplay and its progression make the title the most open game in this style. And we loved dying on the first boss to understand that the title would be demanding, but not that much.
In the end, Wo Long is our little surprise and indulgence that we like to play again in secret. Yes, the title is an open door to the genre and will even allow some to reconcile with Souls. However, if you have no rhythm… The game will be hell for you.
