Welp that's the first playthrough finished. The difficulty is really inconsistent where some bosses are hilariously easy and others are insanely hard.
So I think I'm going to go ahead and write up my review of the game after the first playthrough, which took me just under 20 hours to complete.
The game is very clearly inspired by Souls games to the point where there is blatantly a "blight town" and a "Sen's Fortress" style area. The level design, at least in the first half of the game is Dark Souls inspired in which entire zones loop back on themselves and there are plenty of shortcuts to unlock, as well as the entire progression of the first area overall eventually looping all the way back to the first area of the game and it's very cool because that kind of level design is just cool to see. However the level design sort of falls apart when you realize it's a very linear game. While there are side paths, the vast majority of them quickly dead end with an item or enemy at the end. For the most part the level design is really straight forward. Though I did get stuck once I felt like i had finished the first major path of the game because a side path ignored happened to have a small puzzle (pick up thing, put in other thing) that unlocked a boss which had the key i needed to move forward.
Speaking of bosses this game is surprisingly light on boss encounters which is strange because most of the zones feel really fucking long for no reason. Some of that length being dying to annoying enemies and running through all over again, but really there isn't that many bosses. I think I counted 12 in total, but there might be some secret bosses I missed. So maybe 15 bosses in total and couple of those are repeats with different movesets. And the bosses over are all really really inconsistent. Many of them barely fight back, while others move at lightning speed and buttfuck you before you even know what's going on.
Which leads me to combat. Wuchang's combat frankly sucks, and I dont like it at all. At the start of the game you are pretty slow compared to a lot of the enemies you'll fight, even just the idiot fonder enemies. This gradually gets better as you progress through the game and upgrade skills and whatnot, but my biggest complain is the lack of pretty much any real defensive options. There is no parry (that i found), there is a block limited to the Axe and it isn't even a good block, and beyond that there is the typical dodge every souls has. You do have skills and magic that I think are supposed to build you up into the hyper aggressor, much like how Bloodborne sort of promoted aggression and pushing the attack in most situations. The problem is two fold here, every weapon feels slow even the light attack of the single sword, AND most bosses continuously leap in and out of your attack range.
The other issue is that you have very little ranged options. You do have magic, but in order to cast magic you need to be hitting the enemy without getting hit yourself. And unfortunately magic doesn't really scale so by the end of the game even the most powerful spells will do very little to health bars. And at the start of NG+ the magic is effectively worthless removing one of your potential tools.
Speaking of tools I feel like Wuchang tries to get over complex with what it gives the player, from auras, to imbuing weapons, to all sorts of small battle tricks of which you can only equip two of. It feels like it's trying to over complicated the wheel, and where it could be a solid straightforward Souls-like it instead gets sort of foggy in the details. The good news is I can clearly see that there is a decent skill ceiling to the game in which by mastering the bosses and the ideal skill set up, you can pull off some impressive shit, that kind of thing isn't for me and I like combat to be a straight forward duel rather than a battle of who's got the flashier moveset.
Oh and before I wrap up, the game has the worst leveling system I've ever seen in a Souls game. It's not just allocate stats and boost the things you care about oh no, Wuchang wants to be overly complex so instead you have a multiarm talent tree that has stat nodes and skill nodes and not only do you need the "souls" to level up, but you also need specific items, meaning there is a cap to the skills you'll unlock in any given playthrough considering only bosses and key elite enemies drop the skill items. I fucking hate this system so much. Again it's needlessly tedious to deal with and it would have been better to have a simple leveling stat system.
Also there is like, no weapons in the game. You can buy like two weapons of each type from a vendor by giving him boss items but I never once found an weapon in the world while exploring nor are there any real upgrades in the game. My longsword got to +5 somehow and I don't know how it happened, nor was I ever able to get a +1 on anything else I had. So I'm not sure what I missed but it really made no sense to me.
There are four endings, I have no idea what I did to get what I got. I don't really care, I will not be replaying this. The four bosses that bashed me into the dirt 20 some odd times where not a fun experience and I don't wish to ever repeat it.
If you like Souls-likes you will probably find this okay, and even too easy a lot of the time. The difficult sections are mostly annoying more than actually challenging because of status effects and bullshit like that. Most of the bosses are easy, and others are insanely hard and you never know which one you're gonna get.
