WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers understands what makes FROM Software’s games so good. Level design is king, with incredible vibes. When you nail those two aspects, as well as WUCHANG has, and have some of the best balance I’ve seen at launch, it is an extraordinary experience. Our titular character is an amnesiac Pirate Warrior. For upwards of forty hours, you will discover the ills of late Ming-dynasty China, be faced with choices that go against fate itself, and have an amazing time while doing it in this Day One Game Pass title.
Wuchang, our hero
The game begins inside the ‘Burning Cave’. Wuchang awakens wrapped in bandages, with a mysterious Feathering affliction all over her upper-right arm. We have been asked politely by the developers not to spoil the story, so, as always, I shall do my best to skirt around any specifics. Instead, let me start by saying how thoroughly satisfying I found the narrative in WUCHANG.
Information, like motives and past events, is doled out slowly and quietly. There are a handful of cutscenes in the game, most occurring before major boss battles. The Dark Souls franchise is an obvious inspiration for how light on direct info the game is. There is an interspersing of tantalizing hints as to what has happened in both the environment and item descriptions.
I beat the game in roughly 30 hours, my 2nd time through. I had an awful thing happen to me. Thanks to the way the review codes were handled, there was no cloud backup. My save corrupted, somehow, and was lost forever after roughly 25 hours of playthrough. With the knowledge I had gained, I restarted and got back to where I was in about half of that time. Once I rolled credits, I immediately started back up, not wanting to put the title down.
The story started slowly and ended strongly. The possibility of multiple endings, had I made a few different key decisions, is an alluring one. There are objects I missed, power-ups I never found despite thinking I had looked everywhere across the map. The excellent story is made all the better by the incredible level design and damned near perfect combat.
Respect the Respeccing
WUCHANG has five weapon types that act as your classes: 2-Handed Swords, 1-Handed Swords (Magic), Axes, Dual Blades, and Spears. You will begin the game with a 2-handed Sword that can potentially see you through roughly 75% of the game. If you bought the deluxe edition, you’ll immediately have access to a wide variety of gear that is highly useful for DLC content.
The two-handed sword can focus on sword counters, which allow you to easily parry enemies and put them into a vulnerable state. Some bosses practically require this as you are learning the game. Through a daunting to look at but easy to learn leveling up menu, you can respec at any time when out of combat. You will need to, as some bosses deal or take massive damage in ways that will demand it.
1-handed Swords are your magic-casting focused weapon. Dual blades is the rogue-like move around like a maniac spec. Spears have the best range, but my favorite ended up being the Axe. That bad boy can swing all day, crushing through enemy attacks as it sends them flying into a weakened state. To set these builds, you’ll need Mercury Essence. To get said essence, you can kill tough enemies, bosses, or convert Red Mercury, which acts as your ‘souls’ currency.
You’ll get it from killing foes, breaking down Red Mercury ‘buds’ in your inventory, or selling items. The Mercury itself is used for purchases from vendors, of which there are only a handful. As you defeat bosses and find items in the world, their inventories will increase. You’ll need all of these items as the game throws a variety of afflictions and debuffs at Wuchang. All of the Soulslike conventions are here, like a Manna Vase that heals you. To refill it, you will ‘enter the dream’ at the bonfire-like shrine.
That shrine is where you can upgrade your character and use multiple other systems called Benediction, Tempering, and Discipline. Benediction lets you set 3 buffs per weapon. These can be things like gaining HP when attacking from behind, or increasing the burn rate of your fire weapons. Tempering is a series of acupuncture needle points that let you buff your weapon once (eventually twice if you spec that way) per shrine visit. Discipline controls the left trigger for each attack, and you’ll unlock various other moves in each weapon tree.
There are so many options in how to build your character as you find more gear, which has four slots: Head, Chest, Arms, and Legs. Wuchang starts in incredibly cool-looking gear, and there are all types of cosplay to find. There is a transmog system, and by the end of the game, I had two bras and 3 pairs of panties, to give you an idea of the gooner outfits you can deck her out in. There are also incredibly cool-looking actual armor sets, cute bear outfits, and monstrously hideous items, and they can all be useful in certain scenarios.
There is a lot to your defensive setup in WUCHANG. Slash, Blunt, and Stab for steel, alongside various afflictions like despair, corruption, burn, and more. Every armor piece has strengths and weaknesses. Much like with your weapon and build setup, you will need to constantly shift your armor to match the zone you are in and the bosses that you are facing. If you are the “I like using this one weapon and outfit, and I don’t want to ever change it” type, then you will not go far in WUCHANG.
That’s not to say that this game is overly hard. I think it’s incredibly well balanced in comparison to titles like Lies of P and The First Berserker: Khazan, back when I reviewed them. Both of those titles reveled in their difficulty, whereas WUCHANG has spent its many years in development honing in on a high difficulty curve that never felt unfair. There are some frustrating zones, with mechanics like the Despair debuff that are an insta-kill if the meter fills up.
Those were few and far between and easily handled once I knew what I was dealing with. Exploring is everything in this game, and if you do not search for the various upgrade items, you’re gonna have a bad time. This is a Day One Game Pass launch on both Xbox and PC, sadly, not Play Anywhere. That means a lot of newcomers will be checking it out and know that you will need to explore and grind to keep the frustration down.
Play Smarter & Git Gud
These are the most important items to find in WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers. They are… feathers! There are a variety of feathers that you can find in the environment as pink-colored little sacks of tentacles (yeah, it’s weird). The main way to get the higher-level ones is to kill weird, poisoned jar lady monsters and red-eyed madness-filled enemies. The Faded/Brilliant/etc leaves are how you up your weapon mastery. Weapon Mastery is in each tree in four different spots, letting you reach up to a max rank of 10, and is the best way to up your damage dealt.
Alongside feathers are two items, both of which look really weird in their icons, that let you empower your Manna vase. They are almost always located in giant glowing chests, and by the end of the game, I had 15 heals per shrine visit, which could heal my original health bar three times over per use. While those are the best items to find while exploring, there are so many more, including lore items, quest progressors, one-time uses like removing blight or healing over time, and many more.
The other main mechanic in the game is Madness. As mentioned before, with the feathers, there is an in-game Madness system that rises every time you die or kill a human being. If you killed someone suffering from the feathering, or that is a monster, your madness goes down. As Madness rises, Wuchang’s eyes turn progressively more neon red. Your damage dealt and damage taken rise as well, meaning repeated deaths during boss attempts are a positive and a negative.
Whenever the meter reaches full, there is a chance that your inner demon will manifest in reality at the spot you last died. Instead of simply picking up your lost Red Mercury, you’ll have to fight yourself to the death to get it back. Your Inner Demon is on no one’s side, though, and any NPC near them can get in a DOOM-style NPC fight. Often, I’d dodge my demon until it hit someone else or was hit. Then watch the two go at it, picking off the winner at low health.
As far as the base gameplay goes, your right bumper and trigger are light and heavy attacks, the left bumper is your per-weapon ability, and your left trigger is a per-weapon type move. X uses items, which you’ll go through with up and down on the d-pad. Left changes your magic type, of which you can assign four moves at any time. Right will shift between your two equipped weapons, and most of your magic spells, discipline moves, and left bumper abilities require ‘Skyborne Might’.
Brilliantly Mighty
Skyborne Might is one of WUCHANG’s best features. There are various ways to earn it during combat. A well-timed dodge will always net you one charge, of which you can eventually have up to five. Every weapon type has an unlock that lets you earn Skyborne Might as part of your weapon combo, hitting an enemy. The one-handed sword has a passive buff that gains it every 10 seconds or so. Being the spell-casting focused spec, it makes sense, letting you cast often, as spells can cost anywhere from one to five charges of might.
By the end of my playthrough, I had 20 or so spells, found by defeating bosses or as small white wisps on top of dead NPCs. Magic can be either magic-based or feathering-based. There are upgrade points for both that are primarily in the one-handed sword tree, as well as a few other spots. Magic spells are your typical mage-like abilities with a focus on fire, ice, and wind. The Feathering spells go for blight, corruption, or straight-up crimson red damage.
By the end of the game and into my 2nd playthrough, I ended up feeling like a real badass. You do not dodge roll in WUCHANG, B instead is a quick side-step in your current direction. Enemy attacks are easy to read, which is good, as even at my most powerful, I could still die in a single combo to a boss if I wasn’t careful. Boss health bars are never too large, though. The final boss of my first playthrough was a 3-minute-long fight, as I had every upgrade possible and was hitting for enormous chunks of his health bar with each Axe attack. It all stays easy to read despite the immense scale of the mid to late game.
WOAHchang
My review was played through on an Xbox Series X. WUCHANG offers up various performance options, including 30/40/60 framerate targets, the ability to uncap said framerate, turn on sharpening, and motion blur. I ended up playing at an uncapped performance mode, which felt smooth with few dips but lots of image reconstruction artifacting.
WUCHANG is a gorgeous game, taking full advantage of UE5. Our current consoles are showing their age, though. The image quality can go from perfect to so low-res that I thought I was looking at a 240p image when it gets crazy. I’m not sure if Variable Rate Shading is being used, but some images in the image can be far lower resolution than others during combat.
Overall, I think the game looks amazing. This is a dour, miserable world full of color, gore, suffering, and beauty. We’ve been asked not to spoil bosses and story, so I won’t show off some of my favorite images before launch. There are some vistas and moonlight scenarios that are as good-looking as a game can be. The art style pulls from the late Ming dynasty, mixing real and fantastical elements into something special to behold.
My EIC Jon Clarke played a bit on PC before realizing he didn’t have it in him to get good. His first comments to me were about how bloody gorgeous WUCHANG is. I started the game in English, before moving to Japanese and finally settling on the Chinese dub. The audio in all three was excellent, with the quality of the English dub being nice to see. Souls games do not have a lot of voice acting, what is there is normally excellent, and WUCHANG following suit should help more people enjoy the experience without having to read mid-combat.
The music, good lord, the music, it is so damned good. I wasn’t able to capture much of it, as the “please don’t spoil anything” nature of our embargo had me hesitant to grab anything besides the main menu theme. The ‘main theme’ of WUCHANG comes through often, but not too much so. There is a part right at the very end that dove into a full vocal track as I ran through one of the prettiest, biggest scale areas I can remember seeing, and the hairs on my arms were raised the entire time.
As far as bugs are concerned, I didn’t have any major ones. I lost my save because of an Xbox whitelisting not allowing cloud saves issue. Outside of that, the Xbox console release was rock solid. Performance hitched occasionally when teleporting into a new zone, but it’s UE5, and that’s just kind of a given at this point. They would clear up quickly and never hurt gameplay.
Wrapping Things Up
I wish I could go on and on about the story and my experience in WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers. It is an amazing title, one of the best the genre has to offer. It is available Day One in Xbox Game Pass. After beating it, all I want to do is play it again and again.
Review code provided by 505 Games PR & Article updated to be in Gooner-Compliance
WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Gorgeous Visuals
- Fantastic Soundtrack and VO’s
- Finely tuned combat full of options
- An intriguing story that earns its ending(s)
- Gooner-Approved
CONS
- Gooner-Approved
- Occasional hitches after teleporting for a few seconds
Gooner-Approved should be a pro, not a con Jesse
It was, until I loved the game so much that others pushed it out. Have put it back in to show that gooners deserve love, too.
truth nuke
It’s both, sum ppl love sum not.
Hello, graphic that says the platforms Wuchang is released on is missing Epic Games Store
I don’t know that our plug-in has it available as a listing, sorry!