Where Winds Meet Review: Beautiful, Bloated, and Not for Josh
The community hijacked Josh into a free-to-play wuxia RPG he'd stopped caring about years ago. It looks incredible. Playing it was another story.
JoshBy Josh
Years ago, back when Paul was still on the show, we got excited about Where Winds Meet. There was a slick wuxia trailer where your hero learned moves by mimicking the world around them: hop like a frog to learn a super jump, roll like a sheep to bowl people over. Then it vanished for a couple of years, popped up on mobile in China, and eventually came west as a free-to-play game. By then Josh's hype was gone. Then the community hijacked him into playing it.
It's gorgeous
Credit where it's due: Where Winds Meet is beautiful. The graphics, the music, the characters and the over-the-top kung fu animations (flips, somersaults, slamming your sword down to stun a crowd) all look fantastic. If you want pretty lights and fireworks, this delivers.
So many systems
Here's where it lost Josh. He went in blind, no guides, just to see what the game is about, and it threw everything at him at once.
It's not just about combat and dialogue and exploration. It's, "We've got this system where your character does dailies, and this one where you can sumo wrestle somebody. Would you like to go try that out?"
He did try sumo wrestling against a stranger. There were no instructions, and he won some jade anyway. Another login greeted him with a festival day and nine activities to join, an hour into the game, when all he wanted was to learn how to play.
Combat has the same problem. Your weapon sets your moves, which is a cool idea, but on top of that are two swappable weapons, mystical powers, a charge ability, an unlockable ability, two activation grids and another move wheel. Equipping a weapon took a full minute of guessing because of a "martial arts not slotted" popup. The parry system puts a big flashing button on screen and then parries for you. Enemies start glowing blue when they can be stunned, and the game never tells you that.
It's a game with everything, but it has nothing. You don't know what to do, where to go, what any of it means.
Loot without meaning
Josh's first dungeon chest dropped 20 items: greens, blues, a shiny gold thing. Hovering over them shows lore snippets, not what they do. Jade pieces, scrolls, tapestries, all tucked into a sub-tab of a sub-tab. And there are something like 18 kinds of currency.
What good is loot if there's no reward, because I don't know what these 18 things are that I just looted?
Compare that to No Man's Sky, which also has a ton of systems but eases you in, and builds up to that unforgettable first takeoff into space. Josh never got a wow moment like that here.
It feels generic
Josh picked the MMO-style mode, and it felt like the most generic MMO he's ever played. Lost Ark had over-the-top Diablo-style combat, and The First Descendant had fun co-op hero shooting, but here, under the flashy animations, he was mostly button mashing. Ryan raised a fair point: we play so many games that generic is hard to accept, and generic isn't the same as bad. There were about 35,000 people playing when we recorded, so plenty of people are enjoying it.
If I have to spend 40 hours just to start finding the enjoyment in it, at that point...
The VGP take
Josh's personal score is a 5 out of 10. He's clear that it isn't a bad game. It's polished, gorgeous and free. It just wasn't for him, and it wasn't the right time. (He didn't even invite Ryan and Ace to play, to spare them, which Ace says is how he knew.)
If deep live-service systems, dailies and endless side activities are your thing, it's free, so download it and see. Just budget the hard drive space, and maybe a guide or two.