An ambitious, overstuffed wuxia simulator with gacha cosmetics

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/NetEase

Back in my university days, a few friends and I played Yulgang Online, also known as Scions of Fate. An early 2000s Korean MMORPG with a Chinese martial arts theme, Yulgang was one of dozens of free MMOs we dabbled in. While we never got beyond the “kill X number of things to level up” grind, it was novel to run around in a wuxia-themed world, which was a rarity in localised-into-English PC gaming back then.

Fast forward to 2025 and I find myself a dozen hours into another free-to-play wuxia game, Where Winds Meet. Though a lot has changed in the intervening decades. A far cry from the MMOs of my younger days, instead of repetitive fetch and kill quests, Where Winds Meet has almost too much stuff in it to absorb. Ed (RPS in peace) described it in a preview two years ago as impressive, but with the potential to be a “disjointed, overstretched mash of things,” and that’s pretty much spot-on.

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A quasi-gacha game, Where Winds Meet is similar to Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, though its anime characters have been swapped out for the more realistically-styled heroes of the Jianghu. (That’s a word this game uses a lot; it literally means “rivers and lakes,” but on a broader level in Chinese fantasy fiction, it refers to a world inhabited by righteous adventurers and outlaws who live by their own rules.) Like most modern gacha games, through its “Lone Wanderer” mode, Where Winds Meet can be experienced largely as a single-player open world affair with the opportunity to engage in occasional co-op PvE and PvP shenanigans, such as instanced raids and dungeons. However, there’s also a full-on MMORPG mode (“Shared Journey”) that I didn’t get a chance to test, but appears to mostly be for socialising, with a distinct lack of mobs or main story quests.

Speaking of the plot, while there is a overarching mission that sees you tracking down your missing mentor, I hope he’s happy to wait, because I’ve been distracted by every sidequest and activity that’s peppered my journey. In my first five hours I’d entered a sparring contest, gone fishing, shot birds out of the sky, and played a mini-game of “Pitch Pot” where me and a fellow degenerate got wasted on booze and attempted to chuck arrows into a large vase. And that’s not even mentioning the dozens of chests and collectible items I kept finding, all designed to fill a completionist’s head with dopamine.

The standout world events are when you learn certain Mystic Arts. Ever seen a Shaw Brothers film or listened to a Wu-Tang album with mentions of “Tiger Style” or “Praying Mantis Style” in the margins? You’ll embrace these animal-influenced moves in-game by observing certain creatures in the wild - a frog, bear, or goose, for example. Hit the right buttons in a brief quicktime event and you’ll learn a new technique inspired by their movements. An early highlight was when I learned Tai Chi from a bear, before immediately putting it to use and sending him flying over the horizon.

First, I studied the way of the bear. Then I lobbed that furry bastard skyward. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/NetEase

Unfortunately, this originality doesn’t shine through in the dungeons of Where Winds Meet. They seem more like cast off Elden Ring B-roll - a feeling exacerbated by the Signpost feature, which lets players leave FromSoft-esque messages on the ground. As the game has already been out in China for a year, many of the current messages are in Chinese. Though, a machine translation function is in play, so English players can learn that the Chinese guy who wrote “猫猫” - literally “cat cat” - was just referring to the feline NPC nearby and not making a cryptic metaphor. Derivative or not, the dungeons are well-constructed labryinths full of traps and mobs, and I enjoyed an early instance when I descended a well, searching for a kid’s ball, only to discover a bandit hideout stuffed with explosive barrels.

Where Winds Meet’s combat also cribs FromSoft’s style, with parry windows and dodge mechanics. There aren’t as many weapons as a Soulslike, but you can still find a generous selection, including my favourite: a parasol of death. Battles seem designed for both MMO players and Souls fans, with a number of adjustments to appeal to either end of the spectrum. If you’re more comfortable with the former, turning on Assist Deflection means you’ll get a big, handsome button telegraphed on screen whenever you can clash your weapon against your foe’s. It makes fights become a matter of watching your cooldowns and healthbars, a la World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. On the other hand, if you prefer the latter, ramp up the difficulty, remove all traces of Assist Deflection, and enjoy the experience of dying repeatedly against behemoth bad guys. If you’re having a tough time, you can summon NPCs to your assistance - but you’ve got to find them and finish their quests first.

Combat is a selling point for sure, and it’s about as hard as you want to make it. Note the Assist Deflection button in the second screenshot here. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/NetEase

The accessibility of Where Winds Meet’s combat highights the complexity of its other systems, however. There are dozens of ways to advance your character, all of which are only partially outlined in the tutorial. These include at least three different types of Mystic Arts (martial techniques like palm strikes or hovering in the sky), Internal Arts (debuffs and buffs), Sects (guilds, but they also serve as schools to learn new techniques), multiple branching skill trees for each weapon, and a Career system the surface of which I have barely scratched.

What makes these different systems harder to parse is a poor UI that feels like a remnant from the game’s Chinese mobile release. To see how my character’s attributes are affected by an illness debuff, I can’t just pull up a simple stat screen. Instead, I need to open the menu, hit the “Develop” button, navigate over to “Details”, and then open the “Constitution” tab. There’s an in-game glossary presumably meant to help find things, but it (along with the entire script) suffers from a mediocre English localisation. You can expect more than a few untranslated bits, and the English voiceover is reminiscent of a bad anime dub. NetEase has said that all of this will be straightened out prior to the final release, but I suspect that Where Winds Meet’s rough edges will still alienate many folks, especially those who already shy away from gacha experiences.

Character creation is robust, though options are initially separated into “Elegant” and “Realistic” categories that are meaningless in the long run. Outfits, meanwhile, constitute the main gacha element of Where Winds Meet. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/NetEase

On the topic of gacha mechanics, these are limited to cosmetic outfits and kept separate from your stat-enhancing gear. While you earn some cosmetics from completing quests, the more extravagant threads require successful gacha “pulls” - the gambling RNG aspect of these games when you spend in-game currency and real world money to try to nab nifty items or characters. Though, considering pulls are where Where Winds Meet makes its money, it’s surpising how hidden they are. Every time I advance further into the world I seem to unlock a new currency which can only be used for one hyper specific purpose, so I’ve had very few opportunities to make pulls.

Frequent Genshin players will be right at home and may have more success finding ways to rake in the cosmetics, but for the rest of us, know that you can totally enjoy Where Winds Meet without spending a penny, even if the game encourages you to pay $99 for a big bag of fake money so you can wear sexy robes to look like the lead of the 2005 C-Drama Chinese Paladin.

So if you’re a fan of the HoYoverse, hungry for an MMO wuxia simulator, or simply think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a decent film, Where Winds Meet might be what you’re searching for, as long as you don’t mind a large degree of complication. Everyone else will probably find themselves frustrated, but at the very least, I’ll say this - Where Winds Meet is a great deal more engaging than Yulgang Online ever was. So you might as well dip your toes into the Jianghu and toss those bears into the heavens.