I’ve barely started playing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and it’s already become painfully clear that I’ve made a terrible mistake.
I should probably preface this by saying I have played and beaten all of the From Software Souls games, as well as Elden Ring. I tried to get into Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but it was too flowy, focused on parries for success, and turned out to not really be my cup of tea. I want to be grounded in my souls-likes, with meaty attacks and rolling around like I’m trying to extinguish a fire.
Having played both the Nioh games and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, I had simply decided for myself that Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty would obviously follow in those same footsteps. So, without looking at a single bit of gameplay or downloading the demos, I purchased the game.
I was immediately distraught by what I found within as the game handled nothing like how I was expecting, and I was woefully outmatched by the early enemies that should’ve been no problem. This was a bad sign of things to come, but Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty already had my money, so my determination level was still high.
I’ll admit that I could’ve easily solved this by looking into the game in any way, but I have enjoyed every Souls-like Team Ninja game released thus far. Why would I need to do something crazy like watching a trailer or reading a preview?
The thing about Wo Long that I think serves as the biggest barrier for me is that damage isn’t important. In every Souls-like, I’m all strength-focused and like to hit hard while staying alive. Wo Long doesn’t care about all that, and damage is probably the third most important thing in any fight, boss or otherwise. Instead, it’s all a focus on parrying and keeping track of what the enemy is doing.
There’s not even a really a poise system, which certainly gets me. It’s endlessly frustrating to overpower an enemy, they block to stop the stunlock, and they can just maintain that defense. I prefer to be aggressive, and plenty of Wo Long is absolutely against that as a main strategy.
I do feel a little better that I’m not the only one struggling with the first boss of the tutorial (but maybe the only one here at Twinfinite). There’s always a definite challenge at the start of these games, but I don’t know that it has ever felt this insurmountable. Considering most of the time, the bosses kind of offer themselves up to you on a platter or do really basic moves, to be thrown into the ring with a drastically different two-phase boss as a tutorial is a unique experience.
Seeing as Nioh is centered in Japan, there was the obvious use of a katana as the no-brainer weapon from the very beginning. However, Wo Long doesn’t have that one apparent and signature Chinese weapon to use. So, the game wants to leave it up to me, the dumb unprepared guy who didn’t even know the game would be like this?
I’d love to brag about how this led to some great experimentation as I found the right thing, but that’s not what happened. Graciously, the game hands you this three-star Polearm Padao in a different area of the tutorial, and it’s terrific against regular enemies. However, Zhang Liang doesn’t care about things like reach and damage. The abilities of the weapon even state it does some level of poison damage, so either that was a lie, or the boss just wasn’t phased.
As I said, I hadn’t bought the game to play alone, so I basically had the phone-a-friend option from Who Wants to be a Millionaire to share notes. I should also mention, of the two of us, I’m the worse Souls player. I’m not necessarily bad (I don’t think), but my friend is why I tried Souls games to begin with and is one of those people who played PVP in the first Dark Souls for fun.
The fact that he was struggling against the boss was also a rather sizeable red flag, but there was truly nothing we could do for each other as co-op doesn’t open up until after Zhang Liang is dead, tragically. I figured part of my best strategy was just to emulate what my friend was doing, so that’s why I switched to the Ring Pommel Saber that the game gives players to start with. This definitely made a difference, but only against the first half of the fight. The trick to the second phase was patience, which I had to figure out for myself to succeed.
While it took a fair bit of grinding Morale and a weird tactic to get through the tutorial boss, a solid chunk of the game from there has proven that Zhang Liang is something of an outlier for bosses. The rest have been difficult in a fun way which is what the tutorial boss lacked to set the mood properly. The whole of the game is certainly worth the arduous task of beating the inordinately tough boss, and then anyone can roll up to the next with either AI or player-assisted backup and never have to get rocked alone again.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be all that great at Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty as a solo player the same way I am at Nioh, but it’s a worthwhile game, even if it makes you absolutely earn your beginning progress.
