Where Winds Meet Review – Fart In A Windstorm

When I moved back to Arizona years ago, it was kind of a rough time. Luckily for me, an online friend was also in Phoenix at the time and we hung out. During one excursion, we went to go see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The ads had played pretty regularly, we were both interested, so it seemed like a good idea. And it was. It was one of those movies which captivated and amazed. The subtitles just sort of fell below your perceptive threshold, readable and understandable while still leaving you to focus on the action. It moved me to seek out more wuxia-type films, and gave me a yardstick for what a good example of the genre was. When I first saw the preliminary footage for the currently free-to-play open-world action-adventure RPG, When Winds Meet, I had hoped it would do for video games what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did for movies. How wrong I was.

Where Winds Meet places you in the shoes of a nameless warrior (you get to supply their name) in northern China near the start of the Song Dynasty. It’s a turbulent period, what with a newly crowned Emperor and the slow march towards the end of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” era which consumed much of the 10th Century CE. Dreaming of a life filled with adventure and chance meetings with the great heroes and fell villains of the jianghu lifestyle, your hopes are shattered by an attack on your home village of Heaven’s Pier by masked raiders where you’re seemingly pronounced dead. This neatly frees you up to go on a journey to find out who the raiders were and why they attacked your home. Along the way, you’ll pick up new weapons, learn various martial arts styles and mystical abilities, and deal with problems from the mundane to the world-shaking.

Visually speaking, Where Winds Meet has a high degree of polish to it for the most part. Buildings range from comfortably lived in to half-ruined shells. Statuary looks appropriately epic. Plants and animals are pretty well done, moreso for the plants. Visual effects are appropriately flashy and over-the-top. However, the UI suffers from navigation difficulties. When you’re running around and showing off your kung fu, the UI is fairly usable, though in certain quests console players may run into difficulty trying to bring back clues to puzzles that they may have received. Outside of basic exploration and combat, the UI quickly becomes a Windows 8-style mess of various tiles and badly organized lore sections. Highlighting unread sections with red dots is vaguely helpful, but there’s just so much crap to wade through even completing one quest can lead you to spend more time in the menus than actually playing the game.

The sound elements of Where Winds Meet is a mixed bag containing the best and possibly the worst in the same title. The musical score is certainly genre-appropriate, and one would hope period appropriate as well. There’s lots of ringing steel, blowing winds, animal sounds, and other environmental audio parts which help sell the illusion of living spaces and life-or-death combat within those spaces. And then it completely drops the ball when it comes to the voice acting. The general quality of the sound is good, but that’s about the only positive for that component. Unfortunately, there was either a voice director who was fundamentally bad at their job or the strong probability of an absolutely atrocious text-to-speech implementation. It’s difficult to otherwise realistically explain the odd pronunciation flubs (pronouncing “us” as “U-S,” for example) and the rampant mismatches between voice and subtitle. For such a character-focused title, where voice work is necessary to help imbue the characters with emotional and narrative heft, this cannot be seen as anything but a serious impediment to enjoyment.

As far as gameplay goes, Where Winds Meet seems to be suffering a terrible identity crisis. The initial pre-release impression was an action-adventure game perhaps adjacent to something like God of War or possibly Horizon Zero Dawn. And upon release we get… a giant Chinese-style MMORPG which seems to mimic a number of MiHoYo titles, particularly in terms of multiple currencies, gacha draw shops, and other “features”. Complicating matters, it does have a “Solo Mode,” yet progression through the game seems to be strongly encouraging multiplayer. Not to mention the obnoxious level gating in Solo Mode which requires you to undergo a short series of wave attacks in a “testing ground” arena instance to raise your level cap. Irritatingly, if you decide to go through the process of raising level cap while you’re in the middle of a quest, it can potentially put you in a bad position once you come out of the instance, as it seems to reset things like elevators and switches.

The combat model seems to borrow (to some extent) from various Soulsborne titles, with lot of emphasis on dodges and parries, as well as “signpost” markers where people can put down notes and “fallen hero” markers where another player died. It is definitely helpful that the developers added in a prompt for making parries, but at the same time, it sometimes leads to situations where you’re doing nothing but parries as you’re getting mobbed by enemies. In a game where the enemies aren’t armor-plated piñatas, this is less of an issue. But the durability of basic mooks even when you’ve maxed out the levels on your weapons makes you feel less like a wuxia badass and more like an SCA reject. Of course, it also seems to borrow rather strongly from Elden Ring in terms of status effects, right down to the icon-and-status bar in the lower center of the screen. The art may be different, but the mechanism is the same.

Narratively, Where Winds Meet has a pretty classic story: mysterious orphan has to discover their past, carve through armies of nameless cannon fodder to reveal the truth. The problem is that the pacing is such a painful and joyless slog (made worse by the various obtuse MMO mechanics) that you just stop giving a damn. The mass of side quests and situational activities between your starting point and your intended destination to actually start what is presumably the main story completely smothers the narrative flow. If side quests and activities had been hidden and restricted before the end of the first story arc which serves as the real prologue, and had been scaled appropriately, it might have led to a more engaging experience. Instead, we’re treated to such an inconsistently presented story that it almost feels like a parody, or at least a mockery of the genre.

Compounding the overall narrative problems is the inexplicable (and arguably indefensible) implementation of AI tech. It has already been reported that Where Winds Meet makes use of LLM-style AI for various NPCs when it comes to trying to establish relationships with minor characters such as vendors or stock characters like the village drunkard. I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but I’m not. Just as I’m not surprised that other players are gleefully screwing with the chatbot NPCs. We as players have no prior relationship to any of these characters, even if our avatars in the game have known some of them for a while. Yet we’re expected to make conversation with these characters as we would with other people in our neighborhoods. The degree of ludonarrative dissonance is positively deafening.

In the final analysis, Where Winds Meet reeks of a title which was designed by committee, and with about the result you would expect. It does nothing to advance the state of the art. It does not honor its genre roots in the slightest. All it does is smash up the most tiresome elements of MMOs with a contemptuous attempt at “appeasing” solo players while also ripping off mechanics from better titles with the perverse expectation that people will play it. Find yourself a golden bowl and wash your hands of this one.

Axel reviewed Where Winds Meet on PlayStation 5. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.