You Don’t Need To Know Anything About The Game, But It Helps
As most video game enthusiasts will attest, TV shows and other adaptations of video games are usually disappointing, if not completely terrible. One of the absolute best exceptions to this rule is Wakfu.
Wakfu is a French animated adaptation of the MMORPG of the same name that was released back in 2012, though the show predates it by about four years, having been released in 2008. The game still updates and is available to play for free on Steam, though there are in-game purchases with real money. To be honest, though, when watching Wakfu the TV show, Wakfu the game needn’t have ever crossed your mind or entered your hands for you to enjoy this show for all its qualities. It is the rarest kind of video game adaptation – one that stays very true to the established world of the game it’s based on, but also doesn’t require you to know anything about it to enjoy it, and is actually ripe for expansion as an epic series unlike many other games that get the same treatment.
The show follows a young boy named Yugo, who was left in the care of a retired bounty hunter named Alibert by a mysterious stranger, and must leave home to discover his true origins once he begins to manifest the ability to create magical portals. He is assisted along the way by a cast of characters comprising of several of the major races that make up the World of Twelve, and they must all work together and grow as people in order to aid Yugo in his quest for the truth.
So many video game adaptations fail either because they take no effort to resemble the thing they’re based on, or the opposite, where they stick too closely to the established rules or formula, leading to a TV show or a movie that hardly feels like a TV show or a movie. Wakfu doesn’t have any of these problems. The story that takes place in the show works with the game’s established lore, races, locations and so on, and then builds on it rather than relies on it. The cast of characters and journey they go on are original and independent, so the show and the game serve to both enrich each other. What helps all of this is that the world of Wakfu feels huge, colorful, and very realized as a setting.
This post was originally written by Greyson Ditzler.
