Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Ranking: D
Let’s start with an interview Wo Long‘s developers gave at the 2022 Tokyo Game Show in which they expounded on the game’s design philosophy. On combat, they aimed to create a fast-paced battle system where the player and enemy flow seamlessly between offense and defense. They wanted to allow a variety of strategies and playstyles, including martial arts, magic, and stealth.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is the story of a development team that devised a design philosophy (above), then made a game that counteracts that design philosophy in as many ways as it possibly could.
Combat in Wo Long revolves around a resource, called Spirit, that you use to perform martial arts and magic. Taking damage and blocking hits reduces your Spirit and raises the enemy’s. Landing normal attacks and deflecting enemy attacks does the opposite. In particular, if you deflect an enemy’s critical (red) attack, it heavily depletes the enemy’s Spirit. Deplete the enemy’s Spirit gauge completely and the enemy enters Spirit Disruption, a brief period in which the enemy cannot move, and you can then perform a Fatal Strike, which does a chunk of damage.
What I just outlined is the game’s very central mechanic. You will deflect attacks or you will lose. Period. The game heavily punishes aggressive playstyles; in particular, the game will read your inputs and some bosses will automatically cancel whatever animation they’re in to perform a hyper-armored red attack on you before you can land a hit. As such, taking down bosses by actively attacking them is quite rare. Most times, you’re far better off sitting back, deflecting attacks until the enemy enters Spirit Disruption (when the enemy cannot move at all), then doing a Fatal Strike – a far cry from fluid combat between offense and defense or fights that encourage different strategies.
The game does have another prominent mechanic, the Five Phases system, something I actually really liked. This system draws from real-life beliefs in ancient China (for one thing, this shows the developers did their lore homework, an area in which I think they did an absolutely superb job) and forms the basis for the game’s magic system. Each spell falls into one of five elements that interact in a rock-paper scissors fashion: Wood > Earth > Water > Fire > Metal > Wood. You might use an element to counter an enemy’s element or use spells to inflict status effects. While this could add some strategy to combat, it’s still very peripheral compared to deflecting and performing Fatal Strikes. You are most likely not going to beat bosses as a pure mage for the same reasons I outlined in the previous paragraph.
But let’s say the developers changed their minds or something and decided they just wanted combat to focus on deflecting. It could still be fun – imagine a duel scenario where you’re paying close attention to the enemy’s movements, expertly parrying attacks, until the enemy gets tired. Well, the game undermines that design philosophy in just about every way too. Let’s count the ways.
First: performance. In the early days of the game, it took an absurd amount of computer resources and would begin stuttering at even the slightest hint of processor load. Good luck nailing deflect timings in a boss fight that resembles a faster-than-normal PowerPoint presentation. Now admittedly, the game’s performance has improved dramatically in recent patches, but one problem still remains: deflects are also inconsistent. Hitting the deflect button at the same time on the same enemy using the same attack under the same situation will work about 80-85% of the time. While this sounds high, if you’re going to make deflects the central mechanic in your game, they need to work 100% of the time, all the time. There’s an enemy I’ve killed more than 1,600 times (I’m not exaggerating – farming for gear in this game is a long, LONG slog) and some of its attacks can still hit me even though I know for a fact – and from muscle memory – that I hit the deflect button at the correct moment.
And while we’re at it, the game’s deflect timing severely fucks with your intuition. The correct timing for deflects is not when the attack’s about to land (as the game itself tries to tell you). No, you’re supposed to hit the button significantly before that. Imagine playing baseball and you need to begin swinging your bat as the ball’s about to leave the pitcher’s hand rather than when the ball nears home plate. This is because the deflect animation only deflects attacks toward the end of the animation and your character is slow enough such that the time it takes to complete that animation is significant compared to the time it takes for the enemy to land a strike, even if the enemy’s pretty far from you. You would not believe how difficult it is to fight intuition and not deflect attacks as they’re about to hit you.
Second: flying enemies. Good luck nailing deflect timings when the camera is going berserk trying to follow an enemy zipping around in the sky above you.
Third: Taotie. Taotie is a mandatory boss about the size of a small building. Your character’s around the height of this thing’s ankle. This means that if you’re in melee range, you can’t see the vast majority of his attacks (such as if he swipes at you with his arm, which is far above your field of view). Good luck nailing deflect timings for attacks you can’t see. Now early on, few people complained about Taotie because they could fight him at range (where you could see what he’s doing) and deflect projectiles back to him. Noting this, the developers realized they’d forgotten to fill this fight with bullshit and so patched some bullshit in. After the patch, Taotie became far tankier, to the point that deflecting projectiles back at him won’t hurt him much at all; he became more likely to chase you around to engage you in melee (where, remember, you can’t see what he’s doing); he began creating more red crystals in the arena randomly to block your movement and your line of sight (so now you can’t see what he’s doing even at range); and he started summoning adds. No, really. Adds.
Fourth: multiple enemies. Good luck nailing deflect timings for simultaneous attacks from people ganging up on you from multiple directions. On top of this, the game’s auto-targeting system actively works against you, because if you put an enemy into Spirit Disruption, the camera will automatically switch targets to a nearby enemy, meaning you need to switch back manually to land a Fatal Strike. By the time you do so (while fending off attacks from the other enemies, who are more than happy to protect their downed ally from you), the one you put in Spirit Disruption will have recovered. Yes, the game does this even if you’ve disabled automatic target switching in the settings.
Now most of the multiple-boss fights are optional…but let’s talk about Zhang Rang. He’s mandatory. He also begins his fight by creating NINE clones of himself. You are fighting TEN enemies at once, all peppering you with lightning spells and regular melee attacks from all angles off-screen. Each individual clone isn’t entirely difficult to kill, but when you’re fending off attacks from off-screen from eight other clones and the boss himself, it becomes a moot point. The auto-targeting has a field day screwing you over in that fight, as you can imagine.
Fifth: the controls. The deflect button does multiple things. Yes, you read that right. If you hit the button once, you perform a deflect. If you hit the button twice, you perform a dodge instead. But there’s more! If you hit the deflect button twice at the speed that would normally result in a dodge BUT there are two attacks coming at you in quick succession AND you’ve deflected the first attack, you’ll also deflect the second one. Who the fuck thought having the button that controls the CENTRAL MECHANIC of the game do any one of three things was a good idea?
…and now let’s get into the DLCs. The developers decided that, on top of undermining their own game philosophy, they wanted to challenge themselves to see just how much more bullshit they could fit in. Can DLC1 break the record for bullshit the base game set? Can DLC2 break the record for bullshit DLC1 set? Can DLC3 go even further beyond?!
Yes. Oh yes. The last boss of DLC1 can fly and manages to make the flying enemies in the base game look well-designed as he combines the spasming camera with electric projectiles, lightning tornadoes, and insta-kill red attacks. The last boss of DLC2 has two health bars and undermines the game philosophy even more because he rarely does red attacks, meaning even the “sit back and deflect” strategy doesn’t work against him (you still can’t be aggressive, either – he continually runs away from you while shooting projectiles, and while you can easily negate his projectiles, you’ll be hard-pressed to land any actual attacks).
And then we get to DLC3. Before we start, let me explain something – like in Diablo, the game has multiple sequential difficulties. The first difficulty is Crouching Dragon, which goes from level 1 to ~100, has a maximum gear rarity of 4 stars, and is limited to regular set bonuses. The next one up is Rising Dragon, which goes from level ~100 to ~150, has a maximum gear rarity of 5 stars, and has access to grace set bonuses, which are for the most part superior to the regular set bonuses from the difficulty below. Soaring Dragon goes from level ~150 to level ~300, has a maximum gear rarity of 6 stars, and adds even stronger graces. It goes up from there.
I fought the last boss of DLC3 on Crouching Dragon right when it launched. At that point I’d completed everything outside of DLC3 on the first two difficulties, and I was level 300 wearing a full set of 5-star gear with Rising Dragon grace set bonuses.
It took me around 35 tries.
No, really. I haven’t seen a boss so absurdly unbalanced to such an incompetent degree before in my life. If it took me that many tries on Rising Dragon (and it did), it would’ve made at least some sense. But on the first difficulty? When I’m almost TWO HUNDRED levels overleveled with gear straight-up superior to anything you can get in the first difficulty? This is insane.
When I first saw the last boss of DLC3, I actually thought it would be fun. Outside of the numbers (HP, damage, etc.), he uses all Five Phases in his attacks, so I thought he’d be a barrier change boss where I’d need to respond in kind with elemental counters. It’d use the game’s magic system and would actually require strategic thinking. But…I expected too much out of these developers, as he isn’t a barrier change boss so much as he’s a barrier gain boss. If you use an element to inflict status on him, he just becomes immune to it afterward. This means your use of the elements against him is mostly restricted to defense – and even then, outside of one or two attacks, it stops being viable in Phase 2 (yes, he has a second phase because of course he does) because he changes elements on the fly, meaning there’s no way to know what element he’s in until he’s already actively casting it on you. So your strategy is, you guessed it, deflect attacks until he goes into Spirit Disruption, then Fatal Strike…
…except no, you can’t really do that either, as he also loves to run away from you, allowing himself to recover any Spirit damage you’ve done while he shoots projectiles at you to keep you away. This guy’s beatable – I beat him twice – but it’s just so chock full of sheer bullshit it really boggles the mind.
To wrap up…For me, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is the story of gritted teeth and stubborn perseverance through some of the densest bullshit I’d ever experienced in a video game. I swam through mountains of trash gear for days despite farming for actually useful gear with an almost-max Luck stat. I endured petty, unnecessary nerfs to leveling and upgrade material farming runs until I hit the second level cap and constructed six different builds. I patiently calmed myself when my character randomly ignored my button inputs to cast a spell or heal, wasting time in a game that prided itself on its fast-paced combat system. I overcame the bosses’ most powerful skill, The Stuttering, and beat them even in PowerPoint mode. I swallowed my rage when the game decided my deflects were just not going to work now and I was going to die kthxbai. I went in again. And again. Until I’d won the fight. And you can too – but you don’t have to. You can stay away from this game. You can spare yourself the obscene amount of bullshit. And you absolutely should. There are so, so many better things to do with your time and energy.
Let’s start with an interview Wo Long‘s developers gave at the 2022 Tokyo Game Show in which they expounded on the game’s design philosophy. On combat, they aimed to create a fast-paced battle system where the player and enemy flow seamlessly between offense and defense. They wanted to allow a variety of strategies and playstyles, including martial arts, magic, and stealth.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is the story of a development team that devised a design philosophy (above), then made a game that counteracts that design philosophy in as many ways as it possibly could.
Combat in Wo Long revolves around a resource, called Spirit, that you use to perform martial arts and magic. Taking damage and blocking hits reduces your Spirit and raises the enemy’s. Landing normal attacks and deflecting enemy attacks does the opposite. In particular, if you deflect an enemy’s critical (red) attack, it heavily depletes the enemy’s Spirit. Deplete the enemy’s Spirit gauge completely and the enemy enters Spirit Disruption, a brief period in which the enemy cannot move, and you can then perform a Fatal Strike, which does a chunk of damage.
What I just outlined is the game’s very central mechanic. You will deflect attacks or you will lose. Period. The game heavily punishes aggressive playstyles; in particular, the game will read your inputs and some bosses will automatically cancel whatever animation they’re in to perform a hyper-armored red attack on you before you can land a hit. As such, taking down bosses by actively attacking them is quite rare. Most times, you’re far better off sitting back, deflecting attacks until the enemy enters Spirit Disruption (when the enemy cannot move at all), then doing a Fatal Strike – a far cry from fluid combat between offense and defense or fights that encourage different strategies.
The game does have another prominent mechanic, the Five Phases system, something I actually really liked. This system draws from real-life beliefs in ancient China (for one thing, this shows the developers did their lore homework, an area in which I think they did an absolutely superb job) and forms the basis for the game’s magic system. Each spell falls into one of five elements that interact in a rock-paper scissors fashion: Wood > Earth > Water > Fire > Metal > Wood. You might use an element to counter an enemy’s element or use spells to inflict status effects. While this could add some strategy to combat, it’s still very peripheral compared to deflecting and performing Fatal Strikes. You are most likely not going to beat bosses as a pure mage for the same reasons I outlined in the previous paragraph.
But let’s say the developers changed their minds or something and decided they just wanted combat to focus on deflecting. It could still be fun – imagine a duel scenario where you’re paying close attention to the enemy’s movements, expertly parrying attacks, until the enemy gets tired. Well, the game undermines that design philosophy in just about every way too. Let’s count the ways.
First: performance. In the early days of the game, it took an absurd amount of computer resources and would begin stuttering at even the slightest hint of processor load. Good luck nailing deflect timings in a boss fight that resembles a faster-than-normal PowerPoint presentation. Now admittedly, the game’s performance has improved dramatically in recent patches, but one problem still remains: deflects are also inconsistent. Hitting the deflect button at the same time on the same enemy using the same attack under the same situation will work about 80-85% of the time. While this sounds high, if you’re going to make deflects the central mechanic in your game, they need to work 100% of the time, all the time. There’s an enemy I’ve killed more than 1,600 times (I’m not exaggerating – farming for gear in this game is a long, LONG slog) and some of its attacks can still hit me even though I know for a fact – and from muscle memory – that I hit the deflect button at the correct moment.
And while we’re at it, the game’s deflect timing severely fucks with your intuition. The correct timing for deflects is not when the attack’s about to land (as the game itself tries to tell you). No, you’re supposed to hit the button significantly before that. Imagine playing baseball and you need to begin swinging your bat as the ball’s about to leave the pitcher’s hand rather than when the ball nears home plate. This is because the deflect animation only deflects attacks toward the end of the animation and your character is slow enough such that the time it takes to complete that animation is significant compared to the time it takes for the enemy to land a strike, even if the enemy’s pretty far from you. You would not believe how difficult it is to fight intuition and not deflect attacks as they’re about to hit you.
Second: flying enemies. Good luck nailing deflect timings when the camera is going berserk trying to follow an enemy zipping around in the sky above you.
Third: Taotie. Taotie is a mandatory boss about the size of a small building. Your character’s around the height of this thing’s ankle. This means that if you’re in melee range, you can’t see the vast majority of his attacks (such as if he swipes at you with his arm, which is far above your field of view). Good luck nailing deflect timings for attacks you can’t see. Now early on, few people complained about Taotie because they could fight him at range (where you could see what he’s doing) and deflect projectiles back to him. Noting this, the developers realized they’d forgotten to fill this fight with bullshit and so patched some bullshit in. After the patch, Taotie became far tankier, to the point that deflecting projectiles back at him won’t hurt him much at all; he became more likely to chase you around to engage you in melee (where, remember, you can’t see what he’s doing); he began creating more red crystals in the arena randomly to block your movement and your line of sight (so now you can’t see what he’s doing even at range); and he started summoning adds. No, really. Adds.
Fourth: multiple enemies. Good luck nailing deflect timings for simultaneous attacks from people ganging up on you from multiple directions. On top of this, the game’s auto-targeting system actively works against you, because if you put an enemy into Spirit Disruption, the camera will automatically switch targets to a nearby enemy, meaning you need to switch back manually to land a Fatal Strike. By the time you do so (while fending off attacks from the other enemies, who are more than happy to protect their downed ally from you), the one you put in Spirit Disruption will have recovered. Yes, the game does this even if you’ve disabled automatic target switching in the settings.
Now most of the multiple-boss fights are optional…but let’s talk about Zhang Rang. He’s mandatory. He also begins his fight by creating NINE clones of himself. You are fighting TEN enemies at once, all peppering you with lightning spells and regular melee attacks from all angles off-screen. Each individual clone isn’t entirely difficult to kill, but when you’re fending off attacks from off-screen from eight other clones and the boss himself, it becomes a moot point. The auto-targeting has a field day screwing you over in that fight, as you can imagine.
Fifth: the controls. The deflect button does multiple things. Yes, you read that right. If you hit the button once, you perform a deflect. If you hit the button twice, you perform a dodge instead. But there’s more! If you hit the deflect button twice at the speed that would normally result in a dodge BUT there are two attacks coming at you in quick succession AND you’ve deflected the first attack, you’ll also deflect the second one. Who the fuck thought having the button that controls the CENTRAL MECHANIC of the game do any one of three things was a good idea?
…and now let’s get into the DLCs. The developers decided that, on top of undermining their own game philosophy, they wanted to challenge themselves to see just how much more bullshit they could fit in. Can DLC1 break the record for bullshit the base game set? Can DLC2 break the record for bullshit DLC1 set? Can DLC3 go even further beyond?!
Yes. Oh yes. The last boss of DLC1 can fly and manages to make the flying enemies in the base game look well-designed as he combines the spasming camera with electric projectiles, lightning tornadoes, and insta-kill red attacks. The last boss of DLC2 has two health bars and undermines the game philosophy even more because he rarely does red attacks, meaning even the “sit back and deflect” strategy doesn’t work against him (you still can’t be aggressive, either – he continually runs away from you while shooting projectiles, and while you can easily negate his projectiles, you’ll be hard-pressed to land any actual attacks).
And then we get to DLC3. Before we start, let me explain something – like in Diablo, the game has multiple sequential difficulties. The first difficulty is Crouching Dragon, which goes from level 1 to ~100, has a maximum gear rarity of 4 stars, and is limited to regular set bonuses. The next one up is Rising Dragon, which goes from level ~100 to ~150, has a maximum gear rarity of 5 stars, and has access to grace set bonuses, which are for the most part superior to the regular set bonuses from the difficulty below. Soaring Dragon goes from level ~150 to level ~300, has a maximum gear rarity of 6 stars, and adds even stronger graces. It goes up from there.
I fought the last boss of DLC3 on Crouching Dragon right when it launched. At that point I’d completed everything outside of DLC3 on the first two difficulties, and I was level 300 wearing a full set of 5-star gear with Rising Dragon grace set bonuses.
It took me around 35 tries.
No, really. I haven’t seen a boss so absurdly unbalanced to such an incompetent degree before in my life. If it took me that many tries on Rising Dragon (and it did), it would’ve made at least some sense. But on the first difficulty? When I’m almost TWO HUNDRED levels overleveled with gear straight-up superior to anything you can get in the first difficulty? This is insane.
When I first saw the last boss of DLC3, I actually thought it would be fun. Outside of the numbers (HP, damage, etc.), he uses all Five Phases in his attacks, so I thought he’d be a barrier change boss where I’d need to respond in kind with elemental counters. It’d use the game’s magic system and would actually require strategic thinking. But…I expected too much out of these developers, as he isn’t a barrier change boss so much as he’s a barrier gain boss. If you use an element to inflict status on him, he just becomes immune to it afterward. This means your use of the elements against him is mostly restricted to defense – and even then, outside of one or two attacks, it stops being viable in Phase 2 (yes, he has a second phase because of course he does) because he changes elements on the fly, meaning there’s no way to know what element he’s in until he’s already actively casting it on you. So your strategy is, you guessed it, deflect attacks until he goes into Spirit Disruption, then Fatal Strike…
…except no, you can’t really do that either, as he also loves to run away from you, allowing himself to recover any Spirit damage you’ve done while he shoots projectiles at you to keep you away. This guy’s beatable – I beat him twice – but it’s just so chock full of sheer bullshit it really boggles the mind.
To wrap up…For me, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is the story of gritted teeth and stubborn perseverance through some of the densest bullshit I’d ever experienced in a video game. I swam through mountains of trash gear for days despite farming for actually useful gear with an almost-max Luck stat. I endured petty, unnecessary nerfs to leveling and upgrade material farming runs until I hit the second level cap and constructed six different builds. I patiently calmed myself when my character randomly ignored my button inputs to cast a spell or heal, wasting time in a game that prided itself on its fast-paced combat system. I overcame the bosses’ most powerful skill, The Stuttering, and beat them even in PowerPoint mode. I swallowed my rage when the game decided my deflects were just not going to work now and I was going to die kthxbai. I went in again. And again. Until I’d won the fight. And you can too – but you don’t have to. You can stay away from this game. You can spare yourself the obscene amount of bullshit. And you absolutely should. There are so, so many better things to do with your time and energy.