Wuthering Waves

Does the prospect of playing a casino activate your neurons? Is the thought of adding additional chores to your daily routine orgasmic? Do you identify as a hardcore copium addict who just quit Genshin Impact (for all it's justified flaws) in the hopes of seeing the light of day with this game? Well then you are the perfect sucker to play Genshin 2.0 aka Wuthering Waves. Now, first and foremost you have to understand you are dealing with a gacha game (casino) here, and gachas in nature are just creatively bankrupt games that tend to copy from each other left and right so if you played any before, the rest will feel the same. The upside of this review is that gacha gamers usually aren't capable of reading (think Yu-Gi-Oh players) so it will be mostly directed to people whose brains still aren't mush by the mediocrity that is gacha games in general. Now without further ado let's take a closer look at this work of art. Do you remember that Powerpuff Girls intro that goes like: "sugar, spice and everything nice" well we can apply the same principle to gacha games in general. So which tenets constitute a Chinese made gacha game then? - The World/Universe is in a loop (you will find this in 99% of gachas made in CN) - Time travel shenanigans is a must (your average gacha gamer isn't smart enough to question so it's an easy way to justify poor writing) - Power of friendship saves the day (ever present in every gacha) - There are no stakes (well atleast not for playable characters) - Pinch of sadness (when in doubt elicit "sadness", it works without a fault on gacha gamers) In the case of Wuthering Waves you assume the role of space Jesus (to the residents of this planet) that hails from a highly advanced civilization. Except for an individual that possess so much power the main character simply can't stop themselves from their chronic addiction of erasing their memories over and over. However for a being as old and ancient as they are you would expect the concept of emotions to be eradicated millenia ago but I guess this is the developers attempt at humanizing the MC or as the game calls them Rover. As for the rest of the story you essentially just go around different nations resolving all sorts of problems for the residents or in this games case trying to deal with the games mass extinction narrative called the "Lament" and the big bads called "Threnodians". Every character you meet on the way is essentially immediately ready to pounce at your reproductive organ, even if they don't possess any prior knowledge about you. Now naturally I am a sophisticated player so I chose the female MC variant because let's be honest who want's to look at men when you can choose such a sex bomb and her massive AURA (remember this term as it will be important for later). But don't get too attached to the characters as they are just the flavour of the patch, meaning they are mostly forgotten as the next patch rolls around unless the plot deems them important enough to have reccuring appearances. This is of course natural for gacha games as characters are the equivalent of used goods. As mentioned before gacha games also have no stakes. This will be painfully obvious in the third region where they try to force upon you a character that's supposed to be the equivalent of your adopted daughter (pardon me but this is really cringe). This of course won't stop r34 or pixiv artists from drawing gooning material (this is not cringe). This might be an attempt to convince the Chinese audience to start reproducing but let's be honest their gender wars are far beyond such salvation but I digress. The combat at first might feel somewhat interesting but as you progress through the game you will quickly realize that just like Genshin, this will result in you performing generic rotations with little variance as the game simply isn't particulary deep and there is only so much you can do with the characters (limited by their moveset). Not to mention you are limited by the daily stamina systems and RNG layers upon RNG layers when it comes to gearing your characters, at this point, congratulations you have succesfully inhaled so much copium and convinced yourself this isn't Genshin 2.0. Just boot up a game like The Division 2 at this point as you can atleast farm the same layers of RNG to your hearts content without being limited by stamina systems. The exploration itself could easily be described as a checklist and nothing more. Once you are done there is absolutely no reason to ever return to these areas as they are designed as one time areas that feed you breadcrumbs for your gambling addiction. The goon offering is lackluster. If you are a Snowbreak refugee don't even bother as you won't find anything even remotely close to what you are used to. The game offers at best some cringe level teasing that won't result in anything, meaning you are the equivalent of a cuck in the grand scheme of things. The closest is a skin for a character named "Carlotta" where you get to see some ass cheeks but she hasn't reappared for over a year so good luck. At this point you should consider playing Marvel Rivals because that is where the real gooning is going on. Summer skins galore with exposed ass, boobas you name it Marvel Rivals has it. I guess we know which Chinese dev is superior in this department. Honestly for this specific aspect of the game you are better playing anything else really as the best the Wuthering Waves developers can do is some wet ass cheek stains on the new "summer skins" and thats it. When you are playing a supposed gooner game with 2 hands you know something is royally wrong. If by this point the review has by some twisted turn of events intrigued your interest in this game then perhaps I can give you some tips as to how to interact with this community and the unwritten (see what I did here Iuno mains?) rules to follow. First of all you need to understand that this community is rather simple to interact with. You only really need the capability to expand your vocabulary by 3 specific terms: 1. AURA FARMING which refers to any act that is deemed cool and makes the character look badass. You will generaly scream this when playing through patch 2.6 content, more specifically the story involving a character named Augusta. Anything she does on screen during combat is to be considered AURA FARMING. 2. ABSOLUTE CINEMA which is used in two ways. First usually relating to cinematic moments where the average gacha gamer can finally put their brain to rest (not that they used it prior to this), like when the Starbl... I mean Exostrider does something cool on screen during the third regions finale. However it is also used to refer to any good decision made by the developer of this game which is only happening because Genshin refuses to die and they are forced to actually implement player friendly features. 3.PEAK which is just a general term you use in conjunction with practicaly everything. You think the story was good? PEAK. The character model feels good? PEAK. That one hated character got powercreept? ABSOLUTE PEAK. 5 female characters and 1 male character roadmap? ALMOST PEAK, you get the idea. Another thing to consider is that this game has a flavour of the patch term that you should be aware of when trying to interact and even more so when trying to spread propaganda to other social media. For instance in patch 3.3 which served as the finale for the third region the term most often used was "Glazing humanity" refering to the finale of the third region and the power of friendship that saved us all. The patch after (3.4) was the Edgerunners collaboration and its corresponding term "Golden standard for collaborations". And lastly, as of the writing of this review (patch 3.5), the current term of the patch is "generational run." Now excuse me, I've gone long enough using 2 hands and need to reacquaint one of them with a specific part.