Where Winds Meet is an ambitious exercise in maximalism. It’s sprawling world is a vibrant Wuxia love letter filled with over the top characters with infectious charisma who can run up walls and practically fly through the air, grand odes to the beauty of the natural world, and the inescapable violence and dark political sorcery that threaten all of that on a daily basis. Combat is a steady, enjoyable ebb and flow that is full of style and substance, but at a slower and more tactical pace than you might think from just watching it. The collage of stories it tells, both the main saga and the innumerable smaller fables and side affairs, is a turbulent gust of ups and downs both thematically and in quality. But unfortunately, the journey to experience it all is pocked by the steep cliffs of jarring late game progression pacing and rocky valleys jagged with dizzying amounts of micromanagement that turns the very idea of interacting with its RPG systems into stone.
If you’ve seen movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Kung Fu Hustle, you’ve experienced Wuxia fiction before. It’s a genre that is heavy on operatic and exaggerated fantasy, usually featuring a young and masterless wanderer looking to find their place in a world where martial arts are akin to magic, and the strongest practitioners are superheroes who wield the elements like a weapon and practically fly. Naturally, all of this makes for the perfect building blocks of a video game, and Where Winds Meet really does nail the vibes pretty consistently, at least.
The fictional version of 10th-century China it’s set in is a politically broken place, where powerful clans fight to divvy up the region both with open warfare and subterfuge. It’s the perfect backdrop for your character, an orphan raised by a working class, well-enough-to-do wine maker that’s just itching to leave the humble life behind in search of adventure and purpose. The tale that sends you to lavish palaces, haunted caves, and dank dungeons is a run of the mill one with a handful of memorable moments that would be moving, but they are often undone by some pretty awful English localization that makes exchanges between characters dense with redundant sentences and turns of phrase that don’t really make any sense.
It’s also plagued by weird technical issues like voice lines running over one another, subtitles not matching the words coming from characters mouths, or voices going missing entirely. A dramatic last stand where two frenemies unite to beat back a great evil is completely undermined when their voices suddenly stop speaking and never kick back in. Later in chapter two, you and an ally must don disguises to sneak into a party, Honey Bee Inn-style – but even after changing, your model looks no different, which is very jarring when party guards treat you like you’re blending in. The main campaign is only two chapters but they’re long. With some diversions into side quests and mini game dabbling, they took me roughly 30-40 hours to complete, and while each button up their own isolated stories well, it leaves the journey of your wanderer on a rather unsatisfying cliffhanger.
The various side stories have the same uneven quality. On the whole, the best of them are better written and have far more interesting plots than the main campaign, as well as a greater dramatic range. One story had me leading ghosts to the afterlife by helping them through the physical and emotional trauma of the violent fall of their Buddhist commune. Another starts only when you join some half-naked martial arts school trainees in what seems like a sort of hazing ritual. There’s a spontaneity to these stories that you don’t really see in other RPGs like this, but they are also sullied with way more of the technical blemishes that undercut the main story.
True to its inspiration, the combat in Where Winds Meet is flashy and energetic as you’d hope. Each of the seven weapons feel distinct and dangerous, and some of these have different styles to discover that change the patterns of your normal and heavy attacks, as well as the weapon skills you can unleash on your enemies. You can equip two at a time, providing access to different kinds of offense that might give your kit some much needed flexibility – but weapon styles are classed into support, DPS, and tank types, and I found I was much better off sticking to weapon pairs that matched their distinctions since switching between them offered greater synergies. I spent almost all of my playthrough as a tank, with a spear and glaive that would actually buff each other when I used specific abilities in certain combinations. I would start with the spear to taunt my foes and raise my defense, which would turn the self-shield ability on my glaive into a powered up version that also raised its damage if I switched to it in a short window of time.
You start with a sword and get a spear and an opportunity to choose a third weapon pretty early, but it’s a real pain in the ass to find anymore after that. That’s mostly because you might find a rope dart or bladed umbrella in your travels, but they’re unusable until you also learn a combat style to wield them with. I probably went a solid 10 hours before I found a style for an umbrella I had picked up, and that’s without even addressing the fact that the umbrella was underleveled, and that I would now need to spend resources to level up both it and the style that used it to get them on par with the enemies around me – a task that was certainly not worth the effort just to see if I liked it or not.
All of this ability chaining and buff management made Where Winds Meet feel much more like an MMO than an action game. It’s faster paced than the genre might typically be known for, but this combat doesn’t share any of the sensibilities of a Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry. There’s no bouncing enemies or air juggles. Nary an air combo or wall splat. Just a lot of stun meter management and weaving attacks and abilities into a specific sequence to make the most out of your opportunities to do damage. I can’t speak for how other classes felt, but the tank was right at home to me as a lapsed MMO guy. Managing when to defend and when to go all out felt almost identical to a Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, except with an active block, parry, and dodge.
These tools do help break up the sort of autopilot syndrome of many MMO battles. Especially the parry, which is often the vital difference maker between capitalizing on a big attack in order to creat an opening that wouldn’t come by simply moving out of the way, and getting overwhelmed by a bevy of stamina and health draining barrages instead. Parries become so important that there is even an auto-parry system you can toggle on and off that gives you regenerating resources called insight points to spend as “get out of jail free cards” when an incoming attack is about to land. This was a great system for me to play around with early on, and I still appreciate it as a clever way to blunt some of the difficulty spikes for people who need it.
The MMO-but-rowdier combat shined the most against groups of regular enemies. I’d still get to apply my beat-em-up flow chart of finding and eliminating the scariest enemy of the group – a healer, buffer, strong ranged attack, etc. – while navigating the threats of all of the lower tier henchmen, but keeping my attack loop going and buffs topped off while doing so added an extra layer of tactics that really created a flow state I don’t usually get from games like this. Of course, these enemies aren’t very diverse, largely the same types of guys in different faction garb with a special gang-specific unit to spice it up.
Ironically, I think the flaws of this amalgam is most evident against bosses, where things really just get reduced down to a rinse-repeat cycle of parrying and dodging attacks, counter attacking, avoiding big telegraphed blows, and so on. Most bosses are just super thugs with greater health and damage than the guys like them that you’ve encountered in the field. The occasional big spectacle boss can shake things up, but even that tier of baddies is hit or miss. Chinese dragon dancers in a full connected costume that hops on beams and shoots fireworks at you? Hit. A late chapter one boss that seems to be attempting to recall Sekiro’s Lady Butterfly fight from memory? Miss.
The vast open world is overflowing with things to find and do when your adventure begins. Especially early on, I was pretty regularly surprised by some of the mostly silly things I stumbled across, like a bear practicing tai chi. But, as is true with the smarter moments in Where Winds Meet, that’s not simply there for a chuckle. You can actually spy on it and, through careful study (a timing minigame where you need to press a button while a ring closes), you too can learn tai chi. This, and many other so-called mystic arts, are learnable in this way and have many uses. With tai chi, I could actually channel the power of the wind to yeet this very same bear into nearby rocks. I could use it to stir up shallow bodies of water and shake wildlife onto land, or even gracefully rip a shield out of the hands of bad guys during combat. Of the many, many things Where Winds Meet tries to pull your attention to in its world, this was by far the most clever. When time permitted, I always stepped aside to try to use my mystic arts to solve puzzles or help (or harass) people in the wild.
Where Winds Meet’s big problem, though, is that it is filled wall to wall with other activities that come nowhere close to this sort of ingenuity. There are some jobs you can pick up that make a good first impression, like a healing minigame that turns curing diseases or setting broken bones into a card battler. But that doesn’t evolve much past a basic Slay The Spire-style back and forth and doesn’t really reward you meaningfully as you progress up the ranks. Most everything else are versions of the sorts of things you’ll see in any open world RPG like this, from fishing to crafting to duels to scavenger hunts – none of these changed the well worn formula of these distractions in a way that made checking each one out more than a couple of times feel worth the trip.
And that’s despite the fact that they all dump a bunch of loot on you every time you succeed. Just about everything you do in this game does, but very little of what you are given is worth even opening your inventory to take a second look at. It’s not that it’s all worthless, chances are its going to be potions or food items that will be auto-used when necessary, or the various crafting and upgrade materials that will wait patiently deep in your pockets for when you occasionally need them. My only relationship to any of this stuff is hoping I have enough when its time to level up.
Same with gear, which I just slot in when its time to make my overall power level rise. Weapons, armor, and accessories all have little nuances to increase things like crit rate and damage by small percentages, including set bonuses if you match pairs of items with similar set symbols, but this wall of text approach to equipment management is off putting and not even very impactful until way into the endgame. Where Winds Meet somehow finds ways to take the micromanagement even further overboard, allowing you to spend resources to upgrade the gear slots themselves to provide micro bonuses, eventually letting you equip additional full sets of armor that add a small percentage to your overall power on top of everything else. I have to imagine that the amount of people who are excited to wring every single number out of this game in such a neurotic way is measurable on fingers and toes. Most people, me included, will probably just click the super handy “Quick Advance” button in the bottom corner that spends all of your resources to upgrade everything it can in a manner it deems fit, an option whose mere existence sort of makes a more damning argument against these overstuffed systems than I ever could.
There are milestones that freeze your ability to continue leveling up at certain points until you pass what’s called a Breakthrough Test, pitting you against waves of enemies that you must slay in a certain time frame in order to move on. When you pass, not only does your max level rise, but so do the collective strengths of all of your enemies, which feels like it undermines the progress you’ve made in order to complete it in the first place. After the first four of these worldwide level-ups, the Breakthrough Tests start to get tough. The most I had to retry any fight in Where Winds Meet was maybe my breakthrough test to get to level seven, as I just couldn’t kill the fiery calvary boss it threw at me fast enough.
Pushback from a legitimate challenge was not really the annoying part of this ordeal, though. Its that main story quests start to become level gated as you approach the end, meaning you have no option but to spend time simply grinding experience in order to eventually pass these literal DPS checks. But even then, your Breakthrough Test might require you to wait real life hours before you can move to the next tier, as it did for me on two occasions by gating my progress behind daily server updates. Making me jump through a bunch of hoops to progress only to then tell me that I’m actually moving faster than intended is ridiculous. Don’t tell me how to waste my life!
Gliding across the windy shores, rolling hills, craggy mountains, and bustling towns of the jianghu is a breezy experience when your generous triple jump and wall running abilities actually work. But during every play session, at inexplicable intervals of time, these features would inevitably stop working entirely, only to be fixed when I log out and log back into the client. This doesn’t just make navigating all of the mixed terrain a problem, but some hidden chests or activities that require these extra movement options are temporarily taken off the table for reasons that never feel good.
Navigating menus to sort out your gear, check the map, or level up your abilities can be a chore as well. The full main menu always lags when you open it, and gets buggier every subsequent time you do. Button presses feel unresponsive on controllers, and fumbling through sub-menus to click a tool tip so I could read a further item description or find out where on the map I can find more of a thing was always a draining experience, especially when some of those links and shortcuts lead to blank screens or were just broken all together. The world of Where Winds Meet could have done with a couple dozen fewer of its random, five-minute mini-quests if it meant spending more time making the process of flipping through all of these spreadsheets less painful.
You can play a lot of Where Winds Meet co-op, but servers were pretty scarce pre-launch and finding people to run multiplayer-focused events like clearing a set playlist of Assassin’s Creed-esque outposts or big raid style bosses with multiple phases and mechanical gimmicks wasn’t possible. I did at least get to take on the latter events thanks to a full CPU party that would take on the necessary roles. These automated party members were competent enough to do the Simon Says required to minimize damage when necessary, but if they weren’t basically immortal, I’m not sure they would have had the chops to kill any of these scary enemies. I’m sure my experience here is not representative of the design intention of these big co-op romps, but I’m still glad I could get access to the novel items they drop without having to find five of my own friends to do so.
