WO LONG: FALLEN DYNASTY
love the idea of a combat system devoted to translating macro level battle dynamics to a more intimate scale. love the emphasis on balance and momentum. love the spirit gauge working off of debt and surplus like you got the little bastard from hunter x hunter clinging to your back
the problem's that it all boils down to building meter and dumping it in service of stagger. as high concept as a surprising amount of wo long's systems are, the way it works when you're actually playing looks a lot like X X X X Y with some sekiro brand simon says in the middle. the updates' addition of more martial arts, more complex weapons, and more ways to deterministically itemize suggest that team ninja didn't intend it all to be so thoroughly overshadowed by the parry-burst-stagger loop, but when the problem's that everything surrounding it feels superfluous, scrambling to bolt even more on top doesn't solve the problem so much as bury it under a mountain of stuff
the morale system's just as disappointing. in theory it should play to a sense of battlefield management or shifting equilibrium, but in practice it's just busywork that creates significantly more problems than it solves. get the small flags. get the big flags. raise your fortitude. there's no meaningful interaction here, just a process you repeatedly go thru so bosses don't kill you instantly. ng+ doubles down even further by having bosses default to being five morale above your maximum fortitude, meaning you'll most likely be doing 12.5% less damage and taking 90% more even with all flags active. ng++ then adds flagbearer enemies that give one (1) fortitude when killed to make up for the default gulf being even wider. presumably this keeps going until the game's completely unbearable
the build layer's barely worth mentioning. it's a little more substantial than it tends to get credited for, but it also doesn't come online at all until you've finished the game twice, bought the dlc, and made significant progress into your third loop. this wouldn't be so bad if the combat system had enough depth to carry the load until its eventual diabolic metamorphosis, but it doesn't. as it stands asking someone to finish the game 3+ times in order to be able to make a character capable of bypassing the game's mechanics is a tough sell when turning the game off has the same effect
having quit in the middle of my ng++ run upon realizing that completing a full grace of daode tianzun didn't make sense if it meant i was still playing wo long, i walked away feeling almost exactly how i did at launch: certainly more interesting than any of its Bop It Extreme contemporaries, but the definite low point for current era team ninja regardless