Where Winds Meet Review – Technical Turbulence in a Wuxia Dreamscape

Where Winds Meet Review

Where Winds Meet is an incredibly ambitious open-world, free-to-play Wuxia action RPG. It’s also broken in places and incoherent in others. Where Winds Meet desperately tries to make the player feel rewarded and engaged by something, anything, all the time. Not unlike the world in which we live, there’s so much going on it’s hard to know what’s important. Where Winds Meet is not necessarily a complicated game, but making sense of it can be a challenge.

After spending decades in the medieval fantasy dungeons of Europe, open-world RPGs have of late been turning to Chinese and Japanese history and settings. With a rich culture full of drama, conflict, philosophy, mythology, and folklore, ancient China provides a perfect backdrop for a game like Where Winds Meet. More than most of the games in this genre, Where Winds Meets is about shaping a character via the wealth of influences, characters, and opportunities naturally found in the environment.

Tabula Rasa

The player begins as that relatively blank slate so beloved by game designers, with a shadowy past and only the vaguest amnesiac notion of a direction. Set during the late 10th-century Ten Kingdoms and Five Dynasties period, you play an inexperienced sword master trying to recover a stolen jade pendant. The breadcrumb narrative trail starts in the sleepy province of Qinghe and covers a lot of ground, finally landing in the hub city of Kaifeng, which is where things narratively kick into a higher gear.

The main story eventually evolves into much bigger conspiracies and conflicts between different centers of power and even spiritual traditions. Where Winds Meet obviously fantasizes on historical events and introduces supernatural elements and magic. Still, the dizzying number references to Chinese history and culture are about as granular as they come.

Lost and Found

Where Winds Meet includes hundreds of side quests and thousands of NPCs — 10,000 in the city of Kaifeng alone, according to PR. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in the auxiliary content and forego the main story entirely. In fact, the game encourages it. You can minimize the role of combat and instead focus on a profession like doctor, merchant, or architect. It doesn’t take long before the already vague main narrative becomes a needle lost in a large haystack of other stories and activities.

With so much narrative content and so many side quests, odds are that not all of it is great. And it’s not. Some of the voice acting — in English, at least — is pretty bad. Subtitles quite often don’t match the dialogue and the writing itself can be perfunctory. But equally, there’s a chance to stumble upon a haunting and even spiritually engaging drama, like a town where the residents died in a fire, leaving their unrested spirits in search of a cleansing Buddhist ritual.

Systems Shock

Where Winds Meet has a lot of systems. Character skill upgrades, special attacks, weapon skills and weapon upgrades, crafting, professions, and of course, inventory management. Then there are purely cosmetic items only available in the cash shop. There are several different currencies, various forms of XP, and much more. What’s more, nearly every system has a dedicated page accessible from the HUD and/or menu. It’s good that there’s a codex, because many of Where Wind Meet’s mechanics are haphazardly introduced or poorly explained. The relationship between systems takes a lot of time to understand.

Like so much of Where Winds Meet, the firehose of systems and mechanics reflect a philosophy of more is more. The game is constantly deluging the player with stuff: money, items, crafting materials, lore tidbits, gear. It’s everywhere. Every little bit of exploration, every moment of combat earns a reward. The dopamine receptors fire, but unfortunately a lot of the stuff is more trinket than treasure.

To be fair, it’s absolutely impressive how much content — both activities and rewards — the developers have stuffed into the world. It’s literally impossible to be bored. But it is easy to be overwhelmed, confused, to miss important guideposts, and to make mistakes.

Clash of Swords

When it comes to the game’s Wuxia-inspired combat and movement, Where Winds Meet is probably at its most comprehensible and confident. There’s a satisfying array of weapons — swords, twin blades, fans, spears, whips, bows, etc — and each have dedicated movesets and special attacks to unlock. You don’t upgrade specific weapons, but classes of weapons, which encourages experimentation. There’s a full system of martial arts-inspired moves to learn and add to combat, like a tai chi gesture that tosses enemies or a ground pound.

Overall, combat and movement are fluid and pretty impactful. Success demands mastery over the usual mechanics, like perfect parries and heavy attacks or specials. Where Winds Meet does a good job of providing difficulty options, allowing players to dial in the experience they want. At the higher difficulties, combat can be extremely challenging and rewarding. It’s a bummer, then, that all those overwrought systems behind the combat and the UI itself impose themselves on an otherwise good time.

Look, See, Hear

Thanks to effective lighting and luxurious attention to historical, architectural, and environmental detail, Where Winds Meet often looks like the visually stunning game it aspires to be. There’s some repetition, of course, not unexpected in a massive open world, and a few textures that don’t repay close inspection. Unlike the world in which they live, the human characters are often less effectively rendered, especially in the margins with minor NPCs. Even in the prerendered cutscenes, there’s a lack of realism and believable expression.

Almost entirely successful is the game’s audio design and music. As noted, the English voice acting is all over the quality map, but the music is a rich synthesis of traditional Chinese instruments and orchestral textures. It’s particularly effective in quieter moments of exploration.

When it comes to performance, there’s some bad news. I spent the majority of my time playing the game on a vanilla PS5. There were regular crashes — sometimes every few minutes — and abrupt server disconnects, plus issues with unresponsive controls, texture pop-in, and sound drop-outs. I also had the chance to play on PC, where the experience was a little more solid. Where Winds Meet is such a big, ambitious, and complex game, it’s probably not surprising there would be some problems. Still, they degrade or even end the experience.

So Close

Where Winds Meet is over-ambitious, messy, opaque, and inconsistent. It has too many gears that don’t mesh, a lot that’s poorly explained, and it refuses to give the player a moment of unproductive time, even at the cost of coherence and comprehensibility. For all that, Where Winds Meet is a lot of fun. It often looks incredible and the world is certainly filled with content, whether for a single player or in a group. Even without touching the cash shop, Where Winds Meet provides a huge amount of free game play. Right now, Where Winds Meet is a little shy of greatness, but with some technical improvements and time it could get there.

***PS5 and PC codes provided by the publisher for review***