I have a confession, I have never read Journey to the West, but like a lot of people, I am aware of it through cultural osmosis, and the influence of its most popular character, Sun Wukong. My knowledge of the plot of Journey to the West is, let’s call it minimal at best, and while I had some familiarity with the main characters through TV shows and characters inspired by them, it isn’t something I would have said I knew anything about. Going into Black Myth: Wukong, I hadn’t seen anything about the premise of its story, and I, wrongly, assumed it would be a retelling of the original story or something closely inspired by it, similar to 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. It is not. It is essentially a sequel, and you play as a character known as the Destined One, sent on a quest to retrieve Sun Wukong’s relics.
The story, for someone who knows nothing of the original, can actually be quite hard to follow. Many of the NPCs and Bosses you meet are characters from the original story, and the locations you visit are too. It doesn’t mean the story is impossible to understand, or that you need to know the story of Journey to the West beforehand, but I did feel, especially in the first half of the game, that I was missing important things. There are also constant references to Buddhism and Chinese culture, most of which went straight over my head.I had to do a lot of googling between chapter beats to try and keep on top of it all. While playing through the game though, I realised that, as someone who grew up in the UK, there are cultural touchstones that occur so often in games I take them for granted. How many games use imagery or references to Christianity to evoke certain feelings or emotions, or pull from Ancient Greek, or Norse myths? Having this in mind, I did find parts of the storytelling refreshing and unique, even if it still left me confused at points. This confusion was lessened by the later chapters where the story felt like it really came together to form a cohesive tale, and although some things still went over my head, I appreciated the story it was telling. I will say I do think the story could have been clearer, or explained better though, as a lot of the details to do with NPC motivations are hidden in vague descriptions on their journal entry, rather than told to the player.
There are also some amazing animated sequences in between chapters, including one amazing stop-motion animation that are absolute highlights of my playthrough.
Despite my small misgivings about the narrative presentation of Black Myth Wukong, I have no issues with its visual presentation. The world Game Science has built looks gorgeous. Each area you visit throughout the game is full of life and it’s clear how much passion and effort went into making the areas look as realistic as possible. The characters and enemies you fight all have the same level of visual quality as the world around them, and for a studio’s first attempt at a triple-A title, I am blown away by what they have achieved. Throughout each chapter, there are spots that the Destined one can sit and meditate at, and these were always used to highlight the beauty of the area you are in, as the camera pans around showing beautiful vistas for a few seconds as a soft piece of music plays. I loved finding these, as they do a fantastic job of making you appreciate how great the game looks. I did face some weird graphical and framerate issues, however. There were times when textures didn’t load in correctly and areas would look flat or undetailed, and there were times when the game would almost skip for a second, freezing just for a moment before catching up with where I had moved. I noticed this a lot when I was jumping off a cliff edge to farm some of the game ingredients, but it happened a few times in combat and it was always infuriating. There was also one boss in chapter 4 that completely tanked the framerate for seconds at a time, due to the amount of things going on in the fight.
You will be spending a lot of time looking at these stunning backdrops, as Wukong is a game full of secrets. There are so many things squirrelled away in this game, some small like chests full of upgrade materials and currency, to much bigger things like entire secret bosses. The areas you explore are surprisingly deep and full of dead ends and paths that loop around in meandering ways, and sometimes these dead ends have nothing in them which can be a bit frustrating, especially as there is no map in the game. For the most part, I don’t mind games that don’t have maps but there were plenty of times when I wished the game had one, especially in the third and fourth chapters, where the regions you are in are the most open. The game is also plagued by invisible walls and indistinguishable ledges and so many times I tried to run to what I thought was a path forward that turned out to be nothing but scenery. It can be quite frustrating trying to figure these out, especially when you are trying to pick up everything the game has.
Sometimes these walls can be surmounted though and there are whole areas hidden away in each chapter, usually with multiple boss fights inside them. These are usually accessed by completing small side quests in the chapter. For example, in Chapter 1, there are three hidden bells around the chapter. If you ring all of these then you get transported to the chapter’s secret area. Chapter 1 just has a straightforward boss fight that provides some lore and story for the chapter, but other chapters though have much more expansive areas to explore, with multiple bosses, and spirits inside them to collect. All of them also reward you with a Vessel, which is another item you can use in combat to give yourself a boost. All of these are, coincidentally, hugely effective against the final boss of that chapter, so it makes them well worthwhile to figure them out.
One thing I really appreciated too, along with how varied each chapter’s locale was, was how many varieties of enemy types there were, each chapter had a unique selection of beasties to smash your way through, and there were only a couple of re-used mini-bosses in the whole game. The bosses themselves are absolute standouts though, some of them being absolutely huge when compared to the destined one. Gigantic rock creatures, or beasts covered in beautiful fur, to much more grotesque or unique giant demons and divine dragons, are all sights to behold, and the only thing better than how good these bosses look, is how good they feel to fight.
Combat in Wukong is a fairly simple affair, sitting between the more recent God of War games and a Souls game. You build focus using light attacks, which give you focus points that can be expended on heavy attacks. As you level up, you will unlock more focus points to charge up at once. The heavy attacks can either be added to the end of a light attack combo, which will use one point, or you can spend them all at once for a large heavy attack. You can also press and hold the heavy button to charge these focus points up, but if you get hit before using the attack, you lose the focus you’ve built.
The manner of these heavy attacks depends on the stance the Destined one is in, which you unlock as you level up. Smash stance is your basic starter one that uses, unsurprisingly, heavy smashing attacks on the enemy. Pillar stance lets the destined one extend his staff up into the air and sit on it, which can actually avoid some attacks, before slamming it down on top of the enemy, and thrust stance makes the destined one do lots of jabby thrusting attacks at a longer range. All of these stances are equally viable, and have their own upgrade trees to improve them, so which one you use is personal preference. I liked the Pillar and Smash Stances but didn’t really get on with the Thrust one.
On top of these physical attacks, you also quickly unlock other options in combat, like Spells that are accessed by pressing the right trigger and one of the face buttons. These spells fall into 4 categories, Mysticism, Alteration, Strand and Transformation, and you can equip one spell from each at the same time. Mysticism is mostly attack-focused, immobilising enemies or empowering yourself, Alteration is more defensive, either letting you turn briefly invisible or turning yourself to stone to parry an attack. Strand is one of the coolest and the main spell from this tree lets you create clones of yourself for a short time. Lastly, transformation, which lets you for a short period, turn into various bosses that you have bested, with their own health bar and moveset, but use a resource called Might instead of Mana.
You also have access to smaller transformations, called Spirits that turn you into a creature, do one attack and turn back to yourself. There are 54 of these and they all can be upgraded with various materials. These use a separate resource called Qi which recharges as you attack things.
You also have some build variety to go with your stance options. Different armour and weapons, some found in the wild, some crafted, offer different set piece bonuses depending on how many pieces of the set you wear. Some weapons empower the heavy attacks of certain stances, and there are also accessories, called curios, that let you customise the Destined One slightly, like increasing damage resistance, or ailment resistance, or increasing your critical hit rate. Along with the upgrade trees that have perks to do similar things you can put a build together which can be really nice to use. You can also respec these whenever you want at a shrine, which is amazing for trying out new things or spells.
With all of these things put together, it is a shame that only the best of the boss fights ever really make use of it all. When you are fighting regular enemies, most of them can be taken down with basic combos and occasionally immobilising them if you get overrun, and as cool as the enemies look, it starts to drag when all you do is hit them a few times, dodge once or twice and hit them again. Many of the mini-bosses feel the same, as these rarely felt as challenging as they could have been. It’s only the bosses that push you to use all of the tools the Destined one has at his disposal, that make the game really sing, and those fights tend to be large spikes in difficulty. Combat here can be brutal, with bosses delaying attacks to punish dodge spamming, and rarely letting up enough to give you a chance to heal between their onslaughts. Some of the secret optional bosses took me dying repeatedly for hours before I finally figured them out, and each one felt like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth. It was in these moments that Black Myth felt amazing, and at its best, and luckily there are a ton of bosses so it hits these highs pretty often.
As you would expect, from a game with as many hidden treasures and bosses as this one, Black Myth: Wukong’s trophy list, is expansive and completionist and has a whole bunch of missables.
The biggest among these are the Spirits for the trophy Fickle Forms. As I mentioned earlier a lot of these are hidden in the secret areas you can unlock, but many of them will also disappear if you defeat the secret area’s main boss, before beating the spirit’s owner. On my first playthrough of the game, I missed a few of them in the first couple of chapters, because I thought I could come back later and get them, only to find they had disappeared.
You do need to complete 2 almost complete playthroughs regardless, as some things are locked behind new game+. One of the weapons and armour sets you need to craft for the Staffs and Spears trophy, and the Mantled with Might one, require 8 of a limited item that you can only get 4 of in a single playthrough from the secret area of Chapter 5. You will also need to buy the last Drink for Brewer’s Bounty, and the last recipe for Page Preserver. Due to this, it is not the end of the world if you miss some of the spirits or spells, as you can pick them up on your second time around the cycle.
There are a couple of NPC questlines that are missable too. In each chapter, there are two characters you need to find and speak to, the horseman Ma Tianba and the man who upgrades your gourd to let you trap spirits in chapter 1, Yuan Shoucheng. If you have found them in every chapter previously, in chapter 5 you will be rewarded with a new spell and a new healing gourd.
There are also a lot of unmissable things, like finding all of the meditation spots, Secret Area main bosses, and the four Vessels. There are also four dragon bosses you will need to find and defeat, one in each of the 4 first chapters. To find these though, you need to find a key item hidden in chapter 2, where you fight the First Rat Prince. There is a wall on the left side of the arena that you can try and get the Rat to smash into, or use the Azure Dust transformation to do it yourself. This will create a hole that leads to a secret room where you will find the Loong Scale and let you find these hidden bosses.
There is also a second, true ending that you can only get if you beat the secret boss in the last of the secret areas, which is actually in Chapter 3’s Great Pagoda,.
Overall the trophy list wouldn’t be that bad if this was where it ended. But there are a couple more trophies I feel the need to talk about, and both of them are very RNG reliant. The first of these, is the trophy, “A curious collection” which is for collecting every curio. Most of these are found in chests, or dropped by bosses, with a few being missable. Some however, have a chance of being dropped by regular enemies. I don’t know if I am just unlucky, but the last few of these I needed, took hours to drop. I can live with this though, I platinumed Dark Souls 3, I farmed Silver Knights for days to get drops for the covenants, and like in Dark Souls enemies respawn when you rest so it’s boring but not hard. The trophy that really annoyed me was “Seeds to Sow”. Throughout the game there are plants you can gather from, that will give you ingredients for crafting potions, and sometimes, they will drop a seed as well. Around halfway through the game you can do a small side quest that unlocks a hub area, and an old dragon will use these seeds to grow plants for you. As expected, you need to collect them all. It doesn’t sound too bad, until you learn that these plants do not respawn when you rest. They respawn every 30 minutes, and what makes this worse, is that the drop rate is abysmal, and that for some of them there are only a few places these plants even grow.
There are also 2 soaks for your healing gourd that can only be found from these plants too, and though most of them came without too much trying, I was left, at the end of the first playthrough missing three. Celestial Pear Seeds, Fire Date seeds, and the Steel Ginseng soak. These took me nearly 20 hours of real time to get. Running to pick 3 pear trees, and 8 ginseng, before teleporting to chapter 5 to farm a good route for Fire Dates. Then having to wait for 30 minutes before I could do it again. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea but it felt like such a colossal disrespect of the players time.
Hopefully, you get luckier than I do when farming these, but once you are finished you will earn the platinum trophy, “Final Fulfilment”.
Despite some glaring issues with frustrating trophies, Black Myth: Wukong is an incredible effort from a studio for their first AAA game. When the action is at its height it feels great to play. As great as these highs are though, it often feels mired down by periods of repetitive combat. The game is a visual feast, but the locations you explore often are just backdrops for rushing through your 30th Yaoguai troop. I definitely feel like my experience has been marred by the trophy hunting experience, which I know is a self-imposed thing, but it was just another example in the list of things I think would have been really cool, with just a bit more tweaking, and for all my griping, by the time I finished Black Myth: Wukong, I do feel really positive about it, and I would be really interested in seeing the DLC that Game Science Studio have mentioned.
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