 I had a comment or the other day say something like, no Neo or Neo2 reviews, boo. I can't directly quote them or note who they are, although you know who you are, because like YouTube doesn't let me filter comments by most recent, and it's terrible at actually showing me comments as they come in. Long story short, the YouTube studio app is terrible, but that person is correct. I never did a Neo or Neo2 review, even though both ended up on my Game of the Year list and my best souls-like ever lists. Neo came out right as I started the channel, and I didn't do a Neo2 because I felt like it would have just been me saying, Neo2 is great, it's like Neo, but a little better in every way, the end. Well, I just finished playing WoLong Fallen Dynasty, which is getting really great reviews, many of which are even better than Neo2. And my first response to these is, really? As good as Neo2? Explain how. Before we get to this, I want to make clear that WoLong is a reasonably fun game. If you have Game Pass, it's definitely worth playing, you know, it's fine. But this game is seriously getting reviews as good as Neo2 did, and I have a serious problem with that. When you're hearing all the negativity to come, understand that the game is not terrible. It's just, you know, not very good compared to Neo2. So let's talk about the mostly fun and perfectly average action game that is WoLong Fallen Dynasty, and point out all the ways that it is massively, tremendously inferior to Neo, and kind of embarrassing next to Neo2. We'll touch on the good stuff too, but I have to warn you that we're going to have to slog through a whole bunch of bad stuff here. After the intro. Neo is good. Team Ninja's last game was Strangers of Paradise, one of the worst games of the year, and a total failure in almost every way. Awful story, terrible level design, boring combat, terrible gear system, just disastrously bad graphics. But I still didn't feel at all nervous about WoLong. I kind of figured that Strangers of Paradise was like a little side project that had been pushed out for some cash while they worked on the real game they were developing, which I had assumed was Neo3. Then the demo came out for WoLong and I enjoyed it enough that my hopes were raised, despite it not being Neo. The demo was rough and the tutorial section was a mess, but the mixture of Sekiro and Neo did feel good. I only played it through once though, so many issues that appeared over dozens of hours hadn't reared their head. There's no getting around comparing this thing to Neo. So let's take a second to go over what makes Neo, and especially Neo2, so great. Neo had many weaknesses compared to a FromSoft game, but its core combat was so deep and interesting that they didn't really matter. Neo2 improved in every single area on the first game. Living Weapon was a press to win button, and it was replaced with the extremely deep and interesting yokai skills and transformations. The level design in Neo2 is significantly better than the first game. Graphics were greatly improved. Many of the overpowered Omni-O skills were reined in just enough. Neo2 is a complex game. The stance switching and key management is the most interactive combat system in the genre by a lot. The game is very hard until you learn how to flux and double flux, but becomes glorious once you get to a point that you barely run out of stamina. Neo has you juggling your stamina, your positioning to enemies, your weapon skills, your samurai skills, the intricacies of the key pulse and flux system, all wanting to attack different enemies from different stances and angles. Even individual enemies are best attacked multiple ways. You'll use a high attack to break a horn, then use a weapon skill to switch into a medium attack, and then flux down to the low attack to apply a debuff before finishing them with a mid-stance attack combo. Then when you add in the two different yokai abilities, the burst counter parry system, and the transformations, you have probably the most deep and engaging melee combat system ever made. One that's so good, totally scrapping it would seem almost insane. But that depth in the combat system isn't the only depth in Neo2 either. The progression itself is deep and varied. Each individual weapon type has a skill tree with powerful combos and moves. You can switch how combos work in each individual weapon. You can apply different debuffs or like elemental effects to all of your different attack combos. You have a universal samurai skill tree, you have a magic skill tree, a ninja skill tree. Then add in the tremendously varied build variety from the gear system, and the game has you constantly making decisions. The neo franchise has been a little criticized for the oblo style loot system. Even I have had that critique because I think that maybe too much loot drops and drops don't last quite long enough. My criticism isn't that the whole system should be neutered, it's that drops should be maybe 20% more rare to cut down all of the inventory screen time. But the system itself is pretty much perfect. Neo has a power level, rarity, and all sorts of weapon perks. Yes, it's insanely RNG dependent, especially having to get the drops for like weapons you want to craft. And you know, if you hate that kind of stuff you will not like Neo's system. But if you like RPG's and gear systems, it is basically perfect. It needed the tiniest little balance changes. And it's this gear system that keeps people who love it playing for like 1500 hours. So Neo 2 is an amazing game and reviews keep talking about how Wollong is an evolution of the franchise and that annoys me. Because Wollong is not Neo 3, it's a devolution of Neo. It's like Neo 0.75. Just like Neo, but uh... Luckily for all y'all, I don't need to spend an hour explaining everything wrong with Wollong. I can seriously sum it up with like Neo but worse at everything. Now let's spend the next 20 minutes describing how it's worse than Neo at literally every single thing. Graphically, there's like a little more detail in Wollong's textures and I mean a little more detail. The ground has like extra rocks and shit. Some textures have like extra lines and whatnot. But when it comes to art style, Wollong is far, far closer to Neo 1 than Neo 2. Neo 2 vastly improved the art style of the first game. Enemy designs were unique and memorable. Unlike anything else in gaming actually, the levels themselves took you to a ton of different interesting locations. Wollong is basically a series of corridors. You'll visit stunning vistas like Crumbling Wooden Town 1. Breaking up the wood towns are places like Linear Forest 4 or Castle 2 and Castle 12. In fact, I stopped playing last week halfway through NG Plus and I seriously cannot remember 90% of the places. I recall that one where you cross a bunch of wrecked ships which is great and one castle had pretty excellent level design but the rest are just kind of bland. Pretty much like Neo 1's level design. Level design was one of the biggest criticisms of the first game and it was greatly improved in two but Strangers of Paradise and Wollong make it look like Neo 2 was maybe a one off. It's a huge step back that hurts the game tremendously because it makes shit feel boring. It feels cheap, probably because it was actually cheap. The game so clearly feels like it had half the budget Neo 2 did. Alright, so what else is worse? Progression. Neo 2 has this screen here. This is not the skill tree. This is the menu that takes you into the sub menus of skill trees. It's a skill tree for your skill trees. This is Wollong's skill tree. Actually, there really are no skill trees in Wollong. There's a magic tree. In Neo 2, you are seriously constantly getting skill points. Every single weapon type gives you skill points for that weapon. Every level gives you points for the basic skill tree. Everything magic gives you points for the magic skill tree. And this massive tree makes build variety and play style variety ridiculously huge. It's like one of the very best things about the game. If you use two different weapons, a different burst counter and different yokai skills in Neo 2, a run can feel totally different. So how does Wollong compare? The universal skill tree is gone. The weapon skill trees are gone. Combos are gone. Unique weapon skills are gone. And all of the skill trees around switching them. Different weapon switching attacks are basically gone. Burst counters are gone. Yokai attacks are gone. Wollong has five magic skill trees. But that is still smaller and less interesting than the one magic skill tree of Neo 2. All of the magic in Wollong feels like different colors of the same thing. In Neo 2, you unlock stuff on the skill tree and then improve each individual node by dumping more points into them. So like you'll have this node here and you'll level it up three times. You cannot unlock all of the skills in Neo 2 in one run. It's impossible. In Wollong, you end up unlocking the entire trees like, I don't know, halfway through the game. You make like one tenth the amount of progression decisions in Wollong that you do in Neo 2. It is simplified to the point of your relevancy. Well, maybe things are better with the gear system. Wollong still has a huge, frankly annoying amount of inventory management so we can assume that here at least we have something at least as good as Neo 2. No. The gear system is massively catastrophically worse than Neo 2. It is so much worse it's kind of actually pointless. It has all of the flaws of Neo systems and none, and I mean none of the benefits. In fact, it is a weird and badly designed mix of FromSoft and Neo and it works badly. Gear no longer has a power level, instead it only has a rarity. Neo 2's gear is again most similar to Diablo's. You've got item level, rarity, and then randomly rolled perks and skills on the gear. This does in fact make it a massive grind to get the very best items for you build and it means that your items will be passed by new drops within 4 or 5 missions. Neo 2 does give you several ways to mitigate this however. There's a crafting system so you can attempt to make the weapon you want. There's a system to let you infuse a higher level item into a lower level item so you can keep up a loved one longer. There is a system to individually change each perks that you can buy with quality umbersight which is a fairly rare item that you only get from running Twilight missions. I think like at most you can get maybe 3 or 4 a day and there's more. It's an extremely deep and complex system. And the best part is you only have to engage with it as much as you want. You can basically ignore it on your first playthrough and just keep equipping upgrades as you find them. Or you can do it like I do and only engage with it every few levels. Or you can go full min max and trivialize the game with insane build power. Then there's the Abyss and MG plus cycles which give you a place to actually use that min max build where it actually matters. So what does Wollong do with its gear system? It trades all the complexity for simplicity and it completely deletes the fun of finding new gear. In Wollong there's no crafting. But there is a system to let you put whatever perks you want onto any weapon. I ended up stacking lightning and toxic damage and all of my armor and weapons but I didn't earn this build. I didn't find it in the world. I literally just pressed a few buttons and got the optimal build. When you make creating a build this easy it totally breaks the entire point of the system. I found a weapon I liked within like 3 hours and I then finished the game with that weapon. Once you find a 4 star weapon that's the very best thing you can find. You upgrade it like in Dark Souls and no other drop will ever matter again. It doesn't matter what mix of perks this new sword drops because I can choose whatever perks I want. And switching them in and out costs money but you'll be constantly showered with money. This not only breaks the loot game, it breaks the exploration game. And Neo exploring an opening chest is fun because there's always the chance of seeing a purple weapon splorp out of the box and glow on the ground. And because almost every level drops stuff you can use. Plus, you can turn loot into XP in Neo. So while yes there's a somewhat annoying amount of inventory management you're also constantly finding stuff you can use and you're constantly on the lookout for better stuff. So it is always worth fully exploring and opening every single chest and killing every single enemy. The Revenant system is excellent at this because you can see if they have a weapon type you want and kill them for a chance that they'll drop it. And while long, opening chest is pointless. Weapons cannot be turned into XP. You cannot craft so disassembling is pointless. There's nothing to really buy so money is mostly pointless. There's no item level so gear power doesn't matter. Instead, the only thing that matters is how many stars you have. If this system was in Neo, what it would mean was that the first time a purple odachi dropped you'd literally no longer have any reason to pick anything else up. Ever. Again. I found a four star sword and that was it. I had my sword. But there's still a fuck ton of loot to pick up and sell and all for nothing. I found my sword. I upgraded it with materials like in Dark Souls and I picked the perks I want. Yes, there are martial arts attacks, but they're all pretty similar. There may be a lot of them, but they basically all serve the same few functions. They're certainly not worth grinding for and seeing as how they basically serve the function of yokai attacks, they look even worse because these things are so much less interesting than the yokai attacks from Neo. Does Wulong do anything at all better than Neo too? No, no. It does some things pretty well, so let's talk about the combat in bosses. I'll be more positive here than I have been, but even the Wulong combat, which is easily the best thing about it, has big problems. But yes, Team Ninja is good at making action games so the moment to moment feel of killing things is fun. It feels good, it's fun to kill monsters and bosses. The actual spirit system where you build up spirit and expend it on attacks is also fun. The deflect system sounds really good and is consistently satisfying. While you're killing things, you will be having fun. That being said, it's not even in the same universe of quality as Sekiro or Neo too, but yeah, it's fun enough. Okay, that's actually it for the good stuff, so now let's talk about everything wrong with Wulong's combat and there are many things wrong with it. If you played this game and quit at the first boss, I don't blame you. And we'll talk about that tutorial in a minute, but the crazy thing is that first boss actually hides the game's greatest failure. Wulong is way too fucking easy. The deflection mechanic is so insanely powerful and the morale system is so bonkers and stupid that you will absolutely destroy everything in your way aside from a few weird and very frustrating difficulty spikes. In my first playthrough, only three bosses took more than two attempts. I'd estimate that 85% of bosses were killed on my very first try. I never once ran out of healing items during a level. In fact, I don't think I even ever got down to one. It got to the point where I just over and over traded healing items from morale every time I saw a flag because I could be certain I would only need three heals per run in between checkpoints. All the flags give you a full heal and the big flags heal you and refill your flasks. And they don't even respawn enemies unless you die or rest at the flag. So most levels you can just straight up cruise through without even sitting down until you want to spend your souls. That deflect system also means there are like three total enemies that are a threat in this entire game. And those enemies are mainly only a threat because it's impossible to actually read what they're doing. The enemy variety is pathetic and woe long. 95% of the enemies are zombies or dudes. Then there's a list of like four bigger enemies you have to deal with. Neo is criticized for a lack of enemy variety. Neo 2 improved things quite a bit but the game still didn't compare to the souls games on that front. But woe long is worse than Neo. There are, I kid you not, like 12 fucking enemies in this entire game. And one of those is a spider that literally will never hit you. I mean I guess there are a few more because there's a couple of human enemy variants but there are like 12 interesting enemies in the whole game. And a handful of those are variants of the fodder zombie. And one of them is the terracotta soldier from Neo with the exact same moveset. By my account there are a total of like 6 interesting enemies here, 6. You will fight those 6 enemies and a mountain of fodder chumps that are basically just there to keep you from getting bored because they can't have the whole game with just 6 enemies. By the end of the game woe long has nothing left so it just starts throwing like 4 or 5 enemies at you at once. Bosses are generally boring and bland and get reused over and over. And then the few bosses that are actually difficult are difficult for the wrong reasons. Let's get back to that first boss which is one of the worst examples of game design I've encountered in forever. Seriously it is just a total failure on so many levels. The tutorial level basically puts you up against like 7 enemies. You kill them while the game throws a few pop ups at you. The game does explain the deflects mechanic but what it doesn't do is even hint that this mechanic is literally the whole thing. It presents dodging and deflecting as 2 different things that you can do that are both about equally useful. And through this tutorial you proceed to murk every enemy who even looks at you maybe only deflecting the red attacks. Then about 11 minutes into the game it presents you with its first boss who basically cannot be defeated if you dodge. This boss will power through every attack of yours. If you block him you will be stunned and killed. You must patiently wait for each of his attacks and deflect them before hitting him twice and back and off to patiently deflect him again. If you do not do this you will die over and over and over. And again this comes after a tutorial where every single enemy can be burst killed without using deflect even once. I died to this boss like 10 times in the second phase before going to Reddit where people were doing a much better job at tutorializing than Team Ninja did. After seeing people say you had to deflect all of his attacks I beat him the next time and then only had one more death to a boss before getting to Lu Buu. Lu Buu killed me 5 times because the camera of the game simply cannot keep up with the bosses they've designed here. The people at Team Ninja saw that every Elden Ring boss jumps in the air and defies gravity and they figured they needed to do that too. But Wolong's camera is much, much worse than Elden Ring's camera. The camera spins in the air and shows the bottom of the boss. You're no longer in the frame so it's literally impossible to judge when he is low enough to deflect and this is basically a one hit kill. So you need to experiment until you stumble upon the correct timing and then memorize it. When the time arrived to that one move he is dead. The only other difficult boss in the entire game is the final boss and he's hard also for all the wrong reasons. The boss is smaller than the player and his entire character model is hidden behind you so you can't see what he's doing. Then he becomes like covered in low resolution particle effects making it even worse. Then he literally zips all around the fucking arena and spin the camera on you so you don't even know where he is. It took me like 9 attempts to finally memorize all of his attacks on intuition because your eyes don't matter. You can't see what he's doing and he has bad audio tells. The only other place this game is challenging are the times it's frustrating because the design is bad. The multi boss gang fights that are always terrible in Team Ninja games are even worse here because the whole game is about deflecting and there's like no audio cue for most attacks. Or the frankly ridiculous amount of ambushes. There are more ambushes in this game than in all the Souls series combined. Or the very few times where you'll die and then be severely underleveled for a major enemy who can now one shot you forcing you to die over and over until you get it perfectly or go fucking farm morale by killing enemies. I refuse to farm. No game will ever force me into boring fucking farming so I grit my teeth and died until I slowly whittle down the enemy while not getting hit. There are sections that are obnoxiously hard because the morale system is stupid. But 95% of the game is so easy it's boring. Finally that morale system it is just a terrible idea. Because the gear system is garbage tier I assume they needed some way to make exploration rewarding so they came up with this in level progression thing. You have to level up every single time you start a new level. Making regular progression literally pointless. Want to farm armor by killing a boss like you did in Neo? Tough shit you have to find every single flag and kill every single enemy to be on an even playing field with the boss. This system means there is no progression in WoW long. You always have to level up again in every single level. It sucks. It means you are grotesquely over leveled most of the time and can still suddenly end up under leveled if you get ambushed. It's like the worst thing in the game. It's totally pointless. It makes the game way way way way too easy except for the very rare times it makes the game frustratingly hard. It's a total mess and it sucks and I seriously cannot understand why people are saying it's good. It means that any further playthroughs always require farming every enemy and going to every part of the map to find every single fucking flag. It sucks. WALMONG FON DINEC got a bunch of like 9 out of 10s. How is this game a 9 out of 10? Its PC performance is horrendous. Totally unacceptable broken piece of shit. I literally could not play on PC. Luckily Game Pass let you switch back and forth but even on Xbox Series X it runs at like lower than 1440p. It's ugly. The graphics would be considered middle of the road if it had come out 5 years ago. The level design is bad. It's a straight up massive step back from Neo2. It's worse than Neo1. Its art design is entirely mediocre to bad. Way worse than Neo2 and worse than Neo1. Dude if this game was a 9, Neo2 is like 150 out of 10. Enemy variety is pathetic. Ridiculous. It has probably like half the enemies of Neo2 and the ones it has are bland as fuck. The enemies are so stupidly easy they're barely engaging. You spam them to death by pressing X 5 times in a row and occasionally pressing Y to parry. The combat is deeply dumbed down from Neo to the point that's not even close. It's the Neo engine with none of Neo's greatness. Progression is pointless. Gear is pointless. NG Plus is literally pointless. Find your 1 5 star weapon and boom you're done and now you can safely go back to playing Neo2 which is literally, quite literally better in every single way. Every possible single way. This game is worse than Neo2 in every single way. Woe Long does not one thing better than Neo. Not one. Even the story here is so much worse. Neo's story isn't all that good. Neo2's story is surprisingly good with a bunch of really high quality cutscenes. Woe Long's story is hilariously terrible. The cutscenes are like so bad the direction is so terrible. Your character sits there like an idiot. He looks like a moron. He sits with a goofy blank stare on his face while everyone tells you what a god you are. And once in a while he nods. You know how Neo1's story was bad? Because like there was too many characters and it was a little confusing. Well Woe Long has a series of like 50 characters. You see each person once. They get a cutscene about how massively honorable they are and how big their dick is and then they disappear until you forget them until they suddenly pop back up to get a cutscene about how honorable they are. Articles seriously praise this shit. This story isn't a little disappointing. It's downright garbage tiered dreck. Want to learn this story? Look at the names in the game and read the first sentence on Wikipedia about them. The first sentence of Wikipedia for each person does a better job of storytelling than an hour of terrible cutscenes in this game. It is insta skip level shit. Woe Long is a perfectly decent action game that's too easy. I played after work for a week and I will now never think about this game again. I would rate Neo2 a 90. I rate Woe Long a 70. Woe Long is like I was in high school. It's good enough to get a passing grade without trying but it's too fucking lazy to actually try and do better. Woe Long is me doing a school project. It could have created 45 interesting enemies but instead it waited until 3am the night before I made 14. Team Ninja is good enough that even their shitty basic effort means the game will be pretty good but compared to Neo2 this shit is embarrassing. So please don't offend this man. When you tell devs that their lowest effort is good enough you'll keep getting their shitty lowest effort. If this shit is a 9 out of 10 then Neo2 broke the laws of mathematics. So you know what? Never play this again. Just play Neo2 again. That's what I did this week. It's so much better. It's like mind-blowing. Alright. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.