We didn’t even know Wolong: Fallen Dynasty – the next game from the creators of Nioh – for a long time. It was announced at Xbox and Bethesda’s Game Show in June, and it immediately caught the attention of anyone with a brief love of hardcore action RPGs.
Wolong: Fallen Dynasty is the new action title for Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo (no, not Rise of the Ronin – we won’t see it for a few more years), and in a series of trailers, it shows how it immediately intends to differentiate itself from the developer’s previous Nioh games.
There is a jump button! No position! You can’t ki pulse! It’s much faster! Not Japan but China! But it’s hard to see from the trailer what this actually means for the game — no matter how gorgeous and perfectly put together they are. In the first demo of the game, though, I’ve been able to try everything for myself…let me tell you, the difference is as huge and significant as FromSoftware’s jump from Dark Souls to Bloodborne.
First, Wolong is faster. So fast. Jumping between stations and moving your sword towards your foes is a thing of the past – instead, you’re encouraged to sprint towards your foes like a wave, leaving them with little room for recourse. If they do get attacked between your standard moves and your martial arts-powered special moves, you have a chance to fight back. After all, Chinese martial arts contains the essence of alternating back and forth between aggressiveness and self-preservation. Wolong understands and embraces this natural flow.
That’s the soul of this game: fight back and parry. Like Bloodborne, a good defense is built on an incredibly violent and impeccable offense, right here. Standard attacks can be parried (with plenty of time) and give you the upper hand, which can knock enemies back in one fell swoop. But stronger enemies—those corrupted by demonic power, even the demons themselves—would not fall so easily.
These deadlier foes are armed with devastating attacks, indicated by a furious red aura and long clockwork time. Well telegraphed, they’re ready for a more destructive parry: get the timing right, and knock them out in these moves, and you’ll deal a ton of damage (as well as severing body parts, making the rest of the fight a lot easier) .
Aiming, understanding, and responding to these moves makes you feel like a true martial arts action movie star: the camera yanks back, you kick the tiger (or something) to the floor, then you dive in and stick your sword into it its chest and annihilate its two nasty claws.
While you do have an stamina bar, like the rest of the Soulsbourne genre, it has something to do with your stamina – it’s like a mix of morale and stamina. Witchcraft (read: spells) will eat this bar, and if you dodge, guard, dodge, and then blast an expensive spell, your level will drop as you eat and overuse your bar. Given that this morale meter effectively differentiates your “level” from the level of your enemies, you’ll need to constantly weigh whether you want to finish the fight with spells and guarantee victory, or reserve your perseverance for future battles.
Every time you die, you lose your “soul” (here, “chi”) and tenacity level, but – surprise, surprise! – You can take back anything lost by killing enemies that kill you on the next run. Keeping morale high is key: otherwise, you’ll make a lot of things harder.
You may encounter level 20 mini-bosses midway through a level, for example, when you reach level 10. To make sure you can face this bastard again and again (and have a chance to fight), you can explore and plant the flag; raised secondary and primary standards will demoralize enemies and empower you.
Enter the jump button. As any Nioh veteran will know, the yokai-powered fighters from your previous games are basically rooted to the floor (unless you’re doing some cool samurai kick and jump evasion). In Wolong, jumping is a key part of combat and exploration. In combat, you can use it to outsmart — and rain down — your foes, but it comes with a risk/reward dynamic. Jump into the attack and you’ll be slapped like an inept insect, and if the timing is right, you can break limbs or interrupt the attack.
The main function of the jump, however, is to make you grit your teeth through these gorgeous Chinese levels. While your jump is more of a small, nimble jump, overall it’s a lot more vertical and exploratory than you’ll find in Nioh. This is best because Wolong is a linearly structured game, similar to Nioh and Ninja Gaiden before it.
But with Soulslike games sticking more and more to the open world now, I like this: it differentiates Team Ninja from the ever-growing pack and allows it to really encapsulate a compact level design and show what you can achieve by collecting enemies, bosses Goals, and some aspects of level design to one place – before the next level hits you with something completely different.
It’s not surprising, really, but Wolong: Fallen Kingdom is shaping up to be something special. A true action RPG classic is in the works. Team Ninja took everything it had learned from Nio, studied the genre extensively, and rejected the path most often taken. Instead, it’s stepping forward, sticking to its stance and just sampling the formula that made Elden Ring the biggest game in the world – rather than replicating it entirely.
The result is unique, relentlessly brutal, and absolutely stunning. Wolong: Fallen Kingdom might not be king of souls anytime soon, but it doesn’t care – it wants to be king of ninjas.
Wolong: Fallen Reigns will release on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in early 2023. It’s also the first day of Game Pass’s launch.
A demo of the game is out now on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
