For a Soulslike in a fiercely competitive market, standing out from the crowd is imperative to become a success. Team Ninja’sWo Long: Fallen Dynastyattempts to do exactly this by innovating some of the fundamental mechanics that fans of the genre have grown used to in recent years. Doing away with the concept of using experience points to make the player physically stronger,Wo Long: Fallen Dynastyinstead chooses to use a morale ranking system to determine how physically strong the enemy is.
The commonly accepted method of becoming stronger in Soulslikes and many other action-RPGs is to level the player’s character up through experience. Performing tasks, accomplishing goals, and overcoming enemies rewards the player with experience points which can then be used to strengthen various attributes. This is a tried-and-tested formula and isn’t necessarily one that many would feel needs a revamp. That being said,Team Ninja has done so anyway inWo Long, and its morale ranking system is certainly a bold new way of dictating the strength of the enemy.
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Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s Morale Ranking System is an Innovative Way to Encourage Exploration
Despite being fairly linear, each ofWo Long’s level maps is large, and goes some way to explaining why the game didn’t need to be open-world. Historically, a huge problem for Soulslikes has been giving the player sufficient incentive to properly explore the environment.Open-world games likeElden Ring, which encourage players to scour every inch of the map to find fresh surprises and rewards, are unfortunately in the minority. Instead, many players choose to ignore common enemies who yield low-value experience points, running past them in favor of hunting higher-value targets.
Wo Long’s solution to this is the morale ranking system, which intelligently rewards exploration by directly linking it with player strength. Each level inWo Longsees the player start with a morale ranking of zero, and this number is displayed below the player’s health bar. As the player maneuvers through the level, they can raise their morale rank, which is capped at 25 on each level, by simply killing enemies. It wouldn’t bea great Soulslikewithout a few cruel twists though, and conversely, dying at the hands of an enemy will both reduce the player’s morale ranking, and raise the ranking of the enemy who struck the killing blow.
The beginning ofeach ofWo Long’s levelsis filled with low-ranked enemies who are sufficiently weak, but as the level goes on, these enemies become stronger, sometimes having far superior morale rankings to the player’s own. A higher risk comes with a higher reward though, and if the player is able to defeat an enemy with a higher morale rank, they gain a much bigger boost to their own rank. This makes the prospect of fighting a tough opponent in the far corners of the map a much more enticing proposition than it otherwise would be.
In addition to this, the player can also increase their morale rank by finding battle flags scattered across the map. Not only do these flags act asWo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s version of save pointswhich heal the player and respawn enemies, but they permanently increase the player’s morale ranking by 1 for the respective level in which the flag is found. This means even upon dying repeatedly, the player’s morale ranking cannot fall below a certain level.
With each level boss having a morale ranking of 20, it is therefore paramount to the player’s success that they track down as many of these flags as possible, and some of them are obscurely hidden in the far corners of the level. While this is an unusual system, it has a lot of positives, andTeam Ninja deserves creditfor trying to innovate such a common formula.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynastyis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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