Crouching Dragon: Fallen Dynasty Review – How to Make Friends and Kill People

In most games, getting into low-level combat pretty much means death. Breach into the Fire Giant’s lair in the Elden Ring without adequate preparation, and you will meet your doom before you even raise a blade. Stride into Gehrman, the arena of the first hunter, do not swipe the whole field, and eat weapons full of tricks.But in fact, it’s not Crouching Dragon: Fallen Dynasty – A curious experiment in similar souls from Nioh and Ninja Gaiden developer Team Ninja. Your level does matter here…but the game cares more about your morale.

Each level takes the form of a battlefield, the simplest premise of which is for you to retake the field from the enemies of the day—the Yellow Turban rebels, Lü Bu’s army, the power of treacherous allies who betrayed you in your name. So you need to take back territory by planting flags, each of which will give you and your troops morale. The higher your morale, the more damage you can do to enemies, and the more likely you’ll be able to take them down in a duel. Pay attention to the movement? That’s great, because we’re just getting started.

When you first face each boss, they have a morale level of 20. In each level, you’ll need to explore everything and every place and capture all the flags — both campfire-like ones that act as checkpoints and smaller ones smugly hidden in the most hidden parts of the map — to keep your Morale is 20 in the level when you die. If you miss one, you’ll need to go into the level and kill things (don’t get hit yourself) to get your morale level back to boss-ready.

Crouching Dragon’s sadism, then, rears its ugly head in unexpected places. Like hiding flags from you and making you religiously sniff them out like a hound, and planting late game enemies where they tend to suck your morale away, you’ll smirk and curse at this bastard game design as much as you do. FromSoft taught Team Ninja well.

This beauty trick that forces you to explore means you can at least chew on the combat more. Here, the game excels. With every encounter, you can feel the momentum slowly turning in your favor, and a few well-placed blocks and special moves that infuse the rhythm of the fight will give you the complete edge over your foes. Knowing the intricacies of the deflection system (which basically steals morale from enemies and grants you more power), you’ll feel like a demented berserker as you cut down swathes of soldiers and demons in Han China – Dance, spin and effortlessly crush anyone who dares cross your fearsome path.

This is not an open world game. The structure is more traditional; more manageable levels, divided into chapters and supporting smaller side quests. Actually, this is good for anyone suffering from open world fatigue: you can work through Wo Long’s productive sessions, a little at a time, to catch your breath and let the cortisol leave your room after the boss beats each level. Body.

You may need to catch your breath. Crouching Dragon has a lot of problems, but the combat brings them all together, making the overall experience more important than the sum of its parts. There are more junk bosses than good ones, and while playing on New Game+, I found that some levels made me roll my eyes while loading. For all the cool areas full of verticality and exploration, there are poisonous swamps or bland cave networks to endure. Ninja 101 team, at this time.

To smooth out rough levels, at least you have friends. If you’ve ever wanted to play a dating simulator from Dynasty Warriors, you’re in luck! Crouching Dragon wants you to be best friends with Guan Yu, Cao Cao, Sun Ce, Han Gai, and all the names you might recognize from Koei Tecmo’s other ancient Chinese history fantasy games. Bringing your three kingdom mates along for the ride is almost essential: they’re good meat for absorbing enemy attacks and giving you a window of opportunity, and you’ll get talent gear that reaches the “Brotherhood” level with them is top tier The – notch. Just don’t expect them to help, as the AI ​​is incompetent and confused. At times, the whole thing feels like a lesson in “how to make friends and eliminate people”; you take Sun Ce on a day trip as you slaughter hundreds of Lu Bu’s minions. healthy!

After Guan Yu gave me his armor, I played Guan Yu the whole game, and I didn’t change clothes once (I know it’s grim). Finding materials in the world allowed me to upgrade the suit I wore from level three onwards, and the set bonus it gave me meant I didn’t have to dress for different battles. This situation ties into one of my main problems with Crouching Dragon: it has fluid combat and densely layered, intricate levels, but its systems are overdesigned.

Every weapon you pick up–and you’ll pick up hundreds of them–has a different ability associated with it, as well as different stats associated with the “five stages.” This is your stat base: water is agility, fire is strength, earth is stamina, and so on. But elements also have a rock-paper-scissors flow…you can completely ignore it and finish the game without knowing it. The same goes for special moves on weapons; it’s better to master the basics of melee combat than to try to weave fancy Soul Calibur-like special moves out of which you can put together anyway.

I can’t help but feel that more enemy types and a wider selection of subquests would be preferable to the 8,000 different weapon variants and spell synergies that many tend to overlook. In New Game+, each of these systems is unique and important, but how many players will participate in it? More content and game ideas would have been much appreciated than this fancy side salad.

Oddly enough, many of my complaints about Crouching Dragon mirror almost exactly what I didn’t like about the first Nioh: the Excel spreadsheet-like gear menu, the huge variety of enemies, the inexplicable magic system. You can complete the campaign (all major and minor quests) in about 40 hours, a third of which can be spent on menus. In the pre-release version, you couldn’t access your stash via quests, you couldn’t auto-refill necessary items, and sorting/dismantling your weapons and armor was the catchphrase of some poorly designed spreadsheet sadism. Nioh 2 fixes a lot of these issues – so why are we holding back until now?

Crouching Dragon: Fallen Dynasty is an excellent action game, and it’s a focused, well-executed example of why Team Ninja is often compared to FromSoftware. Skillful use of the power of momentum for razor-sharp combat against an exaggerated historical fantasy backdrop, backed by intricate and well-designed levels? It’s a real shame that quality-of-life disturbances keep sapping your morale.