Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - My Brutally Honest Review After 50+ Hours (No Story Spoilers)

so while long Fallen Dynasty might be the sleeper hit of early 2023 because I just can't seem to put it down team ninja yet again are back at showing everyone why they are some of the best in the business at making great and satisfying combat I already finished the main story got the character over level 100 and there's so much I want to tell you about the 50 plus hours I spent playing it also big thanks to koi Tecmo for providing this early review code and as always I'll not let that influence my final review in any way now I do want to get one thing out of the way first the term Souls like keeps getting slapped these days on literally anything that has even a slightly darker tone or requires even the faintest of skill to play but that's clearly not the case here sure there are similarities just like how any game in any given genre shares some but in team Ninja's case they clearly establish themselves as the top tier developer a long time ago with series like Ninja Gaiden and even more recently Neo the DNA of which will heavily recognize in Fallen Dynasty as well to the point that sometimes it feels that maybe they even borrowed a bit too much from their tried and true formulas over the past often giving you almost like a Deja Vu feeling that being said Fallen Dynasty comes up with a few unique twists of its own one of which is the spirit gauge mechanic and another one the huge focus on deflecting enemy attacks instead of parrying the complexity provided by The Stance is present in Neo have been toned down in this game in the favor of this new system making it feel like it's somewhat more accessible but still hard to match their mix between Neo bloodborne and the bit of sakuro and a story that takes you back during the later hand dynasty in 184ab China makes a bit of Mythology and demons in it and that's basically your game but at no point did I ever feel Fallen dynasty was unnecessarily made more simplistic instead it just offers a different more fluid approach to an otherwise amazing combat which also makes a lot of sense given the switch from the slower more tactical Samurai combat system to a more fluid flow of the Chinese martial arts right from the first ever boss fight the game lets you know that your reaction time and willingness to study your enemy can make all the difference in the world that's why deflecting which you perform with the circle button on the controller is so integral to the gameplay Loop and because you do it so often they've made sure to make it especially satisfying there's just something about weapons clashing mid-air the camera panning over a better panoramic shot of your character just out scaling his opponents which all culminates in a spectacle of breaking enemy Parts impactful stabs and heavy damage that will leave your targets paralyzed I have a whole new appreciation for games that give you a difficult challenge right from the get-go because this forces you to adopt a playstyle that in the end proves to be not just the key to success but the Ace in your sleeve I promise you that once you master the deflection mechanic the game doesn't just become better but it becomes addicting in such a way that you won't want to put it down even hours later not that you necessarily need to as Fallen Dynasty is an action RPG at heart which means that in ninja air again offers deep role play mechanics through and through this starts with an extensive character customizer of our unnamed hero something that the game later lets you change with almost no restriction all the way to the extensive and many skill trees talent and logs plentiful Loot and most important of them all diverse weapon sets with unique martial arts in fact I would go as far as saying that maybe the fact that we can evolve our characters so much via skill point and gear upgrades that it made some of the otherwise difficult challenges to become a breeze for me to go through that or maybe the RPG lover enemy just overdid it but I do want you to know that if you think beating the main story is where the challenge ends well you're pretty much wrong once the game's finished this unlocks the final difficulty and access to even higher grade loot adding a massive amount of replayability to a game that honestly already had a lot of that to begin with in fact the game heavily promotes and rewards not sticking to is the main battlefields and instead taking detours one of the most obvious and honestly quite genius ways they encourage exploration is via the morale rank mechanic you can think of this as a separate leveling system than the one of your characters but that still heavily influences how well you fare in each map you start most missions with either a zero or a lower Morel rank than your other enemies and slowly have to work your way up as you defeat more of them perform skillful actions and claim control points this in turn provides the immediate benefit of taking less damage from overleveled enemies and provides more lenience to making mistakes the way the game forces you to constantly look out for these flag control points to bring you in New areas you probably didn't want to to play skillfully only to be rewarded with Juicy benefits has probably become one of the must-have features that I want to see personally in all future RPGs from this point on and here is the best part should you choose to take on the more difficult higher morale challenges should you not partake into any of these things I just talked about that's totally an option that exists in game sure that means you get punished more for even the slightest mistake but in turn this also further provides other special benefits that you cannot get otherwise it's almost like team ninja thought of everything and decided to give you the tools the playground and then just let you go wild with it which brings us to the environments featured here and one of the main reasons I did not want to even try out the demo yes the starting level I feel should be purely treated as a tutorial area not just from a learning the basics point of view but also from a design philosophy once you get past the first or even two levels in the full game it actually becomes clear that the game is a lot more ambitious provides access to much grander and diverse environments many more features semi-opened areas intricate layouts and more opportunities for gameplay than the demo can ever Encompass compared to some of the middle to later stages the early ones even feel restrictive at times just like the accessibility and the things that are given to you during that it's like looking at 30 minutes content and trying to judge a product of that when there's 40 to 50 more hours of even better stuff ahead of you and that's before the real end game even kicks in that's why even some who play the heck out of the demo should try to keep an open mind to the whole package not just a small fraction of it that being said I don't think all levels have the same quality or maybe there's a design decision here that just doesn't click with me because most of the environments in the game look opened and due to clever use of pathing even feel that way by the virtue of the way they let you navigate them however there is one map quite early that for some reason breaks all that illusion away with a layout that I haven't seen in video games since at least 2010 or at least not in games of this caliber not sure why this jungle area looks so bad design wise but maybe the devs forgot to add a few extra trees or bushes to hide that away or maybe that's just a design decision that just goes over my head that's about the only one I saw having this problem by the way and the strange part is that it comes super early so I don't think they ran out of development time whichever reason for that may be levels with maybe just that exception I found to be very well made quite open-ended which left room for approaching combat in all sorts of unique ways you can go ahead in like a maniac and take on more enemies than you can count or take out a more stealthy approach and assassinate the four Subs who failed too far from the protection of their own teammates that or take on a more methodical and strategic approach using any of the almost 100 or so different skills spells and the unique martial arts to lure enemies in trap them or eliminate them in very unique ways Fallen Dynasty also offers a very generous set of skill trees with plenty of talents that sometimes even overwhelm you with their abundance maybe that's one of the game's biggest faults with the Spells too the way it chooses to present these spells to you almost feels like it shies away from them it's like the developers wanted to let you know they exist but it almost feels like they did it in passing so you wouldn't ask too many questions about them I suspect the reason for that could be the fact that maybe many of these spells sometimes feel like filler and if they don't they require a significant enough investment that you really shouldn't care too much about them at least until much much later when you have enough points to get them and use them properly don't get it wrong either this still doesn't mean that you can play a full Mage or a spellcaster in this game but rather more of a hybrid kind of build that uses spells to supplement certain areas of the build or improve upon others that doesn't mean that there aren't very strong skills and spells to unlock early on there certainly are and we're gonna cover that extensively in a video guide coming up soon but I just felt that some of them get diluted with a myriad of options that started unlocking not too far after starting the game gear and weapon upgrades are where your focus will likely be on for the majority of the gameplay as they feel the most impactful almost the point of being must-haves unless you want to get one shot at there's an abundance of very good looking armors which all come with unique power ups when you complete their sets giving each one of them importance and a place in the multitude of different builds that you can likely create in the end game also the way the developers have chosen to provide much of the higher star loot by giving importance to leveling your standing with various companions you can meet made their acquisition feel that much more meaningful even more so there's a high degree of customization within the gear system as well as the game led to alter everything from the randomized stats present on them at first the more specialized and Powerful ones you get to unlock later all the way to a transmog system that led to altered looks to any of the ones you've unlocked so far and again every single aspect of the game heavily rewards load to the point that even the useless one can be salvaged and funneled into the main set likewise weapons have different categories and each weapon in each category can drop with different martial arts which are the special unlockable attacks that you will really want to test out and see which fits the best I will admit though there's probably a bias against the faster paced weapons such as the dual blade setups which for me personally and the build I ran with completely trivialized most if not all the major boss encounters again that might have been just me who over obsessed with Min maxing the heck out of everything and we didn't even cover yet the dozens or so companions you can bring in combat with you the fact that the game features player co-op and invasions or the Myriad of mythical creatures and the pretty decent story that you will have throughout the 40 or 50 plus hours that it takes to completely beat the game before the end game even starts but going through my final verdict of walang Fallen Dynasty should you try it or should you skip it for now well heck yes you should try it and go ahead and play it even if you're completely new to team Ninja games or are overwhelmed by their so-called difficulty this is the most accessible their newest games has ever been and provides dozens of hours of amazing content and replayability and not just that if it's not enough to convince you the game is going to be available on gamepads pretty much day one so there's no better deal out there for any game in probably 2023. this is it with the review Thanks so much for watching and until next time

Channel: KhrazeGaming

Views: 85,006

Keywords: khrazegaming, wo long, wo long fallen dynasty, wo long fallen dynasty gameplay, fallen dynasty, team ninja, dark souls, elden ring, wo long boss fight, wo long fallen dynasty game, wo long review, wo long fallen dynasty review, wo long tips and tricks, wo long fallen dynasty best class, wo long fallen dynasty best early unlocks, wo long is it good, wo long fallen dynasty is it good, wo long fallen dynasty should you play, should i play wo long fallen dynasty, is wo long good

Id: ep4SGP5FHTs

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023