What’s most important to you in a game like Wuthering Waves?
Wuthering Waves presents a captivating blend of swords, guns, and spirits, creating a unique combat spectacle. While its fast-paced combat and exciting movement quickly drew me in, the story, unfortunately, faltered at times, prompting me to consider skipping through its dialogue.
Jess’s Best RPGs
Wuthering Waves is fundamentally an action-driven game. Each character boasts an element and weapon type, alongside unique skills that can be leveled up. However, unlike conventional action RPGs, like Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves distinguishes itself with its intro and outro skills, activated when swapping between characters within your three-person team. These skills unleash cool special attacks, such as fire-infused shootouts. Additionally, the game features a separate skill gauge that charges up as you deal damage or successfully dodge and parry, adding a strategic layer to party building and teammate management.
Characters also possess distinctive combos that can be activated during combat, each of which can be practiced in dedicated tutorials. Executing these combos might require pressing the same button multiple times, holding a button after a different attack, or performing aerial attacks before activating an alternate combo. While memorizing these inputs takes time, mastering them for your favorite fighters makes using them even more rewarding. Notably, Wuthering Waves encourages experimentation by offering small rewards for trying out various combos.
However, the element system, while adding visual flair, doesn’t contribute significantly to combat mechanics. None of the six elements inflict status effects like you might expect. For example, fire doesn’t deal damage over time, and ice doesn’t immobilize enemies. This means a character’s element is essentially just a color-coding, with their actual move set being the primary determinant of their effectiveness. While the variations in move sets still encourage experimentation with team compositions, the lack of significant element-based effects is a slight disappointment.
Instead of traditional equipment like helmets and gloves, Wuthering Waves utilizes “Echoes” to strengthen characters. Echoes are animal-like companions that provide buffs to attack, elemental damage, and other stats. The strength of these buffs depends on the number of the same type of Echo equipped, and each Echo takes up limited space in your equipment slots. These restrictions encourage strategic thinking about maximizing the benefits within your available space. Tuning, the process of unlocking additional stats for Echoes, is randomized, making optimization more challenging but not hindering the gameplay significantly. It’s more of a bonus feature than a necessity.
The most appealing aspect of Echoes is their integration into the environment. During combat, enemies and bosses sometimes leave behind ghost-like shells for you to absorb and convert into Echoes. This system incentivizes exploration, as finding different types of monsters unlocks Echoes with new effects. Beyond stat boosts, capturing Echoes grants points in a collection tracking guidebook and battle pass rewards, providing additional reasons to actively explore the map and collect them.
While actively hunting for Echoes keeps me engaged in fighting enemies throughout the overworld, the repetitive nature of combat becomes noticeable after extensive gameplay. Even though I continue to discover new parts of the map, defeating the same enemies repeatedly eventually loses its appeal. On the plus side, farming for Echoes is unlimited, unlike Genshin Impact’s artifact system, which is restricted by daily currency.
Despite its strengths, the story in Wuthering Waves falls flat. The developers have acknowledged that the story underwent a significant revamp before launch, but the final product still suffers from uneven pacing and excessive exposition. The beginning is riddled with unnatural, lengthy conversations that employ cryptic terminology, requiring players to consult encyclopedias and loading screens for comprehension. The story doesn’t become more compelling after deciphering this complex jargon.
The main character follows the well-worn trope of an amnesiac protagonist who emerges seemingly out of nowhere. This generic storyline revolves around uncovering the protagonist’s past, which can be effective if executed well. However, the setup feels confusing and unjustified due to the overwhelming amount of history and jargon presented without adequate explanation or connection. While things begin to clear up in the later acts of the first chapter, the introduction of even more characters diverts attention before players can establish familiarity with them. The monotone voice acting, even during intense cutscenes, doesn’t help to maintain player engagement, especially when compared to contemporaries like Honkai: Star Rail, which showcases expressive voice acting, even in side quests.
Most side quests observed have failed to forge a connection with the characters or setting. While players witness the dangers of the apocalyptic environment, such as dying NPCs and comrades who melodramatically urge them to continue on, there’s nothing that truly conveys the sense that anyone important might be harmed. Small inconsistencies, like the protagonist’s sudden speech despite being largely silent, also feel jarring. At times, I found myself preferring to skip through lengthy dialogue or simply listen to the audio on autoplay, rather than read through all the text.
While some side quests offer more meaningful experiences, such as one about a mourning monster and a researcher who lost their partner, these standout quests are exceptions rather than the norm. I still have several major side quests remaining, but I’ve already begun to dread the expected text blocks. At this point, I’m primarily motivated by the rewards rather than curiosity. My overall engagement remains far from that of a compelling story that keeps me on the edge of my seat.
Completing the current main story took roughly 20 hours, with an additional 10 hours spent in the endgame. Like many free-to-play RPGs, the endgame progresses more slowly, focusing on character and weapon level-ups, and hunting for new Echoes. Having reached level 32, I now spend most of my time experimenting with team compositions and finding new ways to earn rewards. Waveplates, the currency used to claim rewards from challenges, are generated at a rate of 10 per hour, which isn’t excessively slow but feels like a waiting game when the most satisfying aspects of Wuthering Waves are its combat rewards and progression.
Despite this, the rewards for climbing the ranks are enticing enough to incentivize further investment. Gacha games utilize “pity systems” as fail-safes to ensure players eventually receive high-quality rewards from banner pulls. Wuthering Waves has been more generous with its pity system than many other games in the genre, requiring only 80 gacha pulls to guarantee a 5-star character or item, compared to the typical 90+ pulls. The game also provides abundant resources during the initial stages, offering dozens of pulls for every 10 ranks climbed, along with other systems that make these resources particularly easy to earn at the beginning.
New players are guaranteed at least one random 5-star character from the beginner’s banner, plus another banner that offers a 5-star character of choice after 80 pulls. Furthermore, Wuthering Waves has provided a free pass (available until next year) for another 5-star character, allowing players to potentially assemble a team with three top-tier fighters within the first few hours of gameplay. While luck still plays a role beyond these initial advantages, Wuthering Waves feels generous out of the gate, especially for gacha game fans who may be jaded by less generous pull rates in other titles.
Some characters, as is inevitable in games with expanding casts, do feel underpowered compared to others. However, Wuthering Waves strives to offer “future-proof” free-to-play characters that facilitate building optimized rotations without relying on constant updates. Six 4-star characters can be unlocked for free through the story and challenges, offering a foundation for strong team compositions that are satisfying right from the start.
Kuro Games has also provided substantial rewards as an apology for bugs reported around the initial launch, though I did not encounter any issues as severe as those experienced by some players. I utilized Wuthering Waves’ cross-progression feature to play on three devices: a high-end gaming laptop, a Legion Go handheld PC, and an iPhone 12 Pro. While reports of bugs rendering the game unplayable on specific devices have circulated, I haven’t encountered any significant issues that hampered my enjoyment. I experienced occasional lag during boss fights or after extended gameplay, but these were minor blips that quickly faded away within the context of dozens of hours of play. Nevertheless, the apology rewards were welcome, adding a touch of speed to the slower endgame progression.
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