WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers

tl;dr: I really wanted to like this game, but the longer I played, the more annoyed I got. No wonder the company that made this game went out of business. The NPC quest design is probably the worst part. You can permanently fail or lock yourself out of important questlines just by progressing the story at the “wrong” time, and the game gives you basically no warning. No proper quest log, no clear cutoff points, nothing. An NPC can just disappear because you killed a boss or entered a new area, and suddenly that entire quest is gone for the rest of the playthrough. I basically got locked out of the good endings and endgame bosses along that route because I wasn't religiously following a guide. Sue me. The bosses are also a huge letdown. Many of them are humans, and the ones that aren't are far too easy and mechanically pretty basic. Once you figure out their main attack pattern, they fall apart. Big animations and flashy effects do not mean much when the actual fight has no tension. One of the "higher difficulty" fights in the game according to my online searches, Commander Honglan, isn't particularly difficult compared to what you can see in other soulslikes. An easy soulslike is hollow. Also, normal enemies and random traps are often more dangerous than the bosses. The game loves hiding enemies around corners, behind doors, above you or just outside the camera. After a while, it stops feeling clever and starts feeling cheap. You die not because you couldn't read enemy patterns well enough, but because the game decided to hide yet another enemy behind a wall. The game also has very little identity of its own. It copies so much from other soulslikes: the vague NPC dialogue, missable quests, corpse runs, shortcuts, grotesque bosses and cryptic story. The setting is interesting, but the game does not do enough with it. Most of the time, it feels like a collection of ideas taken from better games. There are some nice environments and some fun moments in the 15 hours that I played, but they are buried under bad quest design, forgettable bosses, cheap ambushes, repetitive enemies and unnecessary frustration. Not recommended unless you are happy to strictly follow a guide from beginning to end.