Wuthering Waves

A timely review for once. I hopped onto the Wuthering Waves train at launch, and I've been playing it a good few hours every day since. I wouldn't normally be so eager to try a new game, but you know how it is with gacha / live service games - every day you're not there, you're falling behind on the curve. Being forced to play daily is a sad thing for any game, but the live service model has proven very successful, so it seems here to stay.

If you want to stop reading early, then all you need to know is that Wuthering Waves is literally the same as Genshin Impact. It can in no way be said they just took inspiration from it. They very blatantly copied most aspects of the game, renamed them, and reskinned them. I am honestly appalled. I do not know what they were thinking with this decision. Surely they didn't hope to just flat out beat Genshin, which is still one of the most popular games in the world, and has multiple years worth of extra development time and content. Maybe they thought people just wanted more of Genshin. That seems like the most reasonable explanation. But let me get into more details on the differences.

In case you don't know Genshin, it's an open-world action JRPG where you have a team of characters where only one is on the field at a time. The characters synergize with each other, incentivizing cycling through all of them instead of staying on your strongest one. As for the differences in Wuthering Waves... On the gacha front, it's almost a 1:1 copy. Same for crafting and leveling. Any differences are not worth mentioning. About 90% of the innovations are in the combat department. Everything else is lifted from Genshin. And honestly, I feel they did a good job with the combat - it rivals or maybe even exceeds Genshin's combat, which is quite the achievement, considering I think Genshin's combat is top-notch.
Wuthering Waves reduces the team size to 3, but each character becomes more complicated. Aside from their skill which is only limited by cooldown, and their ultimate, which is limited by cooldown and energy, each character also gets an intro and outro skill which occur when swapping characters, under the condition that the corresponding energy bar is full. Aerial combat is also slightly improved, with some characters having air attacks, and plunge attacks being possible from even just a basic jump height. There's also a larger emphasis on skill, with dodges being rewarded by a special dodge counter, and interrupting certain enemy actions via a sort of parry staggering them. More interestingly, each character gains an enhanced version of one of their existing abilities or attacks which is charged by some special mechanic unique to that character. This really sets each character apart.
If it just added onto Genshin's combat, Wuthering Waves would most certainly have superior combat, but they're missing my favorite mechanic - the elemental reactions. They do have elements, but aside from a rudimentary resistance and status effect system that you almost never think about, they amount to little more than having differently colored numbers. I'm not even sure why they added them.

I personally place a lot of focus on skill expression in combat, but the sad reality is that gacha games aren't really about that. They need to appeal to a wide audience, which includes casual mobile players. Therefore combat is mostly determined by your stats, not your skill. Sure, you can beat a significantly stronger enemy by being skilled, but the game doesn't expect you to, and the fight will just be against a damage sponge that one-shots you with any hit. In areas where it matters, you'll be on a timer, meaning even the best players won't be able to have their skill compensate for the lack of time investment into building their team.
But worse still is that these games often aren't focused on combat in the first place. Most of the content is exploring the world, collecting thousands of collectibles, and doing hundreds of quests. And this is where Wuthering Waves quickly falls behind. Their story just isn't interesting, and the English dub is terribly directed on top of that.

I'd love to tell you more details about everything, but this review is getting far too long. So, to summarize: Wuthering Waves is a carbon copy of Genshin, but with a worse story, less content, and a different-yet-possibly-better combat system. However, because skill expression doesn't matter in a game oriented towards a wide audience, I must mainly judge this game on the non-combat aspects. And based on those aspects, I find little reason to play this over Genshin. Thus, I can't really recommend it. If you want to play Genshin, go play Genshin. If you want something different, then you won't find it here.
If I had to predict, I would say Wuthering Waves is headed the way of Tower of Fantasy. The population will halve each week, until it almost settles at maybe a few percent of the popularity Genshin has. This will still earn them millions every month, so it will be enough to keep things running, but I doubt it will ever grow into something greater.

Monster Sanctuary

I kind of wanted to like Monster Sanctuary. It's a combination of Pokémon and metroidvania. Clearly a lot more effort has been put into the creature collecting and turn-based combat side of things as opposed to the world exploration, but the way the meroidvania aspect is implemented is quite unique. You see, usually you'd find a powerup in some part of the world that allows you to now get to an area you were previously not able to get to. Here, however, the monsters you collect each come with some ability that can be used outside of combat. So now, exploration is gated by having to first find an area where this monster exists, and then collecting them. It's functionally the same, but it fits very nicely into the world.
I would most certainly not recommend this game for its metroidvania aspects. The platforming and level design are both simple, clearly meant to exist as a somewhat novel way to guide the player to go to one area or another. I can't tell if the game might have been better off without it, because it's easy enough to not really cause any frustrations, but also too easy to not provide any joy in interacting with it.

As for the combat, it's both more deep than I expected, but somehow still lacking. Combat is done with a team of 6, 3 of whom are in play at a time. Each monster has its own basic stats, but also an element its weak to, and a whole skill tree with roughly 100 nodes. The skill tree gives you your abilities, upgrades them, and also gives a whole slew of passive bonuses. As you end up getting about half the nodes, this really gives you a whole lot of customization options for your party, from trying to match your monsters to hit the enemies' weaknesses, to having buffers, debuffers, damage dealers, defenders, and healers. There's also a combo system incentivizing to think about which monsters to attack with first, and 4 pieces of equipment you can give each monster. It's a lot, and this can be either a really good thing, or not so good if you're like me.

You see, I can appreciate the depth of the customization, but there is a problem in the effort-to-payoff ratio. I'm spending more time on customizing my party, choosing skills and equipment for my monsters, and picking the optimal turn order, than I am actually fighting. So much effort goes into being optimal, but then the fights don't really feel all that rewarding for it. And this is not the first game I've had this problem in. I think many games fall into the trap of giving the player more knobs to turn, more systems to interact with, while not considering how fun interacting with those systems is. More isn't necessarily better, because I can't just ignore these systems now that they're in the game, and the game has been balanced with them in mind.
I think deep customization fits when you have only one, or maybe a small party of (up to 4) characters you need to customize. It feels really rewarding seeing these characters become something unique to my vision, possibly different from most everyone who played the game, if only by a little bit. But I just don't have the energy to do it over and over again for tens of characters.

So, is Monster Sanctuary a bad game? I wouldn't say so. But I also wouldn't recommend it, unless you have a lot of time, and wish to spend it on customizing your zoo of monsters. It's polished, has a lot of content, looks nice, and the combat is pretty deep. Still, I feel it's not good enough that I'd be willing to spend so much time on preparing my party instead of playing the game. If that aspect feels like something that's right up your alley, you can give it a try, but for others, I would suggest finding something else.

Crusader Kings III

It's been a bit of a rough month for me, which is part of the reason I've released no reviews. I finally got around to playing Crusader Kings III though. Played it with my friends during the recent free weekend, although Crusader Kings has never really been much of a multiplayer game. Fighting against one another is quick to lead to someone being knocked out of the game, and there aren't a lot of opportunities for co-operative play. Sure you could form an alliance, or invite each other to events, or divvy up the land, but you're not really having too much of an impact on each other.

While I was thinking about what to write about, I went back to read my Crusader Kings II review. I realized not much has changed, so you can go read that, and then return. There definitely are some differences, many possibly arising from the 8 years between the release dates of the two games. I would overall say Crusader Kings III is better, because it just refreshes the game. The UI, graphics, and presentation is more modern, and a lot more accessible. One could argue that the additional accessibility makes the game easier, but I've never felt that difficulty through obtusity is a good thing in any way. A lot of it also comes down to personal preference, or a preference for the old game, because it's already familiar. I definitely think some things have gotten worse, while other things have gotten better. They're still making updates 4 years in, so I have faith there's more improvements to be made yet.

Overall, Crusader Kings III is very similar to its predecessor. A bit too much so, if I were to be honest, where I didn't really get a novel experience playing it. Ultimately, I'm okay with this. I think the game has improved, and making the same thing, but better, is a valid direction for a sequel. To that end, I'd recommend Crusader Kings III just as I recommended its prdecessor. In fact, I'm replacing it in my favorite games of all time list, because I don't see a reason to go back to the old game.