What in the world is Where Winds Meet? This is one of those world premiers featured Geoff Keighley’s shows (Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022, to be exact) that just leaves you agape in wonder and also with questions. This is the first title by new developer Everstone Studios based in China, published by one of the biggest Chinese game publishers NetEase Games, and it’s a open world action-RPG set in a fantastical depiction of historical ancient China.
But what is it exactly?
An open world action-RPG can mean anything these days, but let’s narrow that down.
Where Winds Meet is free-to-play, online-only game with a substantial support for solo play and optional (but very encouraged) co-op features where you get to do just about everything but it’s mainly revolves around combat, major boss fights (repeatable) and light dungeon exploration.
Where Winds Meet is essentially a Genshin Impact-like—a solo-able MMO-esque open world game with the option for four-player multiplayer plus MMO-style hubs—minus the character gacha and the anime aesthetic. Instead, the game depicts a vivid, semi-historical lands based on the Song Dynasty, and you play as an up-and-coming wanderer who now thrusts themselves into the world of wuxia. For those who in the know, you’re essentially stepping into the jianghu. You’ll hear and read that word a lot in this game.
Where Winds Meet has potential to be one of the most engrossing fantastically-tinged world set in ancient Chinese lore and history. But its lack of polish and throw-everything-even-the-kitchen-sink school of game design really hampers it from being really good at anything.
The potluck of a video game, as it is being served at launch, the banquet where it invites players to join for free isn’t quite the happening party it aims to be. But if those 10 million pre-registered players stick around this potentially neverending feast can evolve into something special, should they let the devs cook.
UPDATE 18/11/25: With the game now available, we discovered that the launch version is actually much better than the Early Access build we had access to for review. You can find an addendum to this review here, but most of the points brought up here, and its score, stands.
Presentation
I’m not quite sure how to react to Where Winds Meet’s presentation. At times, the world looks absolutely gorgeous with breathtaking views to take in. But it’s also technically lacking, so many pop-ins, low-res textures and NPCs animated at lower framerates. Not just in the busy city either, it can happen in the rural areas as well. I’m playing on PS5, and I’m seeing the game hitting all sorts of technical limitations.
You also may need to tinker with the brightness a bit. By default, the dark is maybe too dark, and you’ll be exploring and fighting in dark dungeons a lot. Not being able to see traps or enemies is a common issue I have. I don’t mind if visual obfuscation is a game design thing, but there are some parts of the game where the lack of visual clarity is intentional, making it really hard to look around, even when I use this cool spell that lights up the surrounding for a brief time. The aggressive fade-to-black when you go into a cave is an example of the issue I’m describing. I thought I entered a loading screen!
I don’t mind the visual flashiness you’ll see during combat, however. Sparks fly, glows of red, gold and white often fills the screen, but the lock-on camera can keep track of the action and the cinematic angles when you do cool stuff (more on that later) makes the combat even more hype than it already is.
There’s a lot of good cinematics, with motion-captured performances that elevates the quiet moments (I like that there’s one scene where a character comically leans to the side, head tilting like it’s a one those Chinese historical dramas), exceptional choreography in fight scenes that as good as Chinese and Hong Kong action cinema has to offer.
There are some spectacular pre-rendered cutscenes that really shows the majesty and splendour of the setting. The first time I stepped into the Kaifeng City, and then landed into the Revelry Hall, it gives me the same goosebumps as witnessing those cool FMVs from Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy X. I’m not as impressed by these mood-setting cutscenes for years ever since I was a young kid, I specifically name dropped those games for this reason, and the ones in Where Winds Meet leaves such a strong impression as them. It’s that good.
I also love the, from what I can tell, authentic Chinese voice overs. I don’t understand or even speak Mandarin, though I am familiar with period dramas like this and it all sounds familiar to my untrained ears. The specific inflections when someone’s showboating, or going dramatic with their rhyming poetic speech, or being a total goofball, or making sweet talk. Even if I don’t understand the words, I can feel the emotions they have and conveying, which is a hallmark for good voice acting.
There are English voice overs, but the one included in the Early Access build I was playing on didn’t have the final version, so there was a lot of missing voices and mismatched subtitles. And unlike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers which had an exceptional English voice overs in my opinion, Where Winds Meet is a bit lacking. There is a lot whimsy stuff at the start of the game that comes off cringe to my ears, but perfectly fine when I switched to Chinese VOs. Wuchang in comparison was all dead-serious which makes the English script, and voice performance, comes out good.
Another aspect of the weak English localisation is how they script translates calling an acquaintance “Brother” or “Sister” which can come off weird if you only speak English. I personally don’t find this odd (I come from a Malay and Malaysian culture that has a similar conversation style to the Chinese in regards to addressing acquaintances), but I personally believe localising some of these lines as “mister”, “miss” or “madam” would be the better call, especially when your main character oftentimes woo the “sisters” with their sweet talk. There’s a lot of flirting.
Where Winds Meet really needs another pass to make the localisation feels just right to the ears of English speakers yet still retain the meaning and intention of the original Chinese script, especially the light-hearted moments. I’ve been told that this is being worked on, but if you’re playing at launch and assuming it still uses the script as seen in the Early Access build for reviewers, it’s going to be a rough read. But there are good gems of well-localised texts in-between the rough edges. The game’s localised English name is proof that this team can do better.
I may have quite some notes for the voice acting and localisation, but I have no notes for the music, because every note composed in Where Winds Meet’s soundtrack is a majestic, breathtaking listen. This game is known in Chinese as Yānyún Shíliù Shēng (translated as Sixteen Sounds Of Yanyun, per Wikipedia and the term Yanyun itself refers to the Sixteen Prefectures) and they didn’t call it that for nothing.
The traditional Chinese instrumentals perfectly captures the beauty of this overly embellished, extremely romanticised, semi-historical period of time. The jianghu can be serene and tranquil just as it is hectic and dramatic. The opening theme of the main menu is enough to get goosebumps, your heart soaring high in adrenaline as if you are a Wuxia warrior using their Lightness skill to just fly up to the skies above. And if you’re a fan of leitmotifs, you’ll be eating good: familiar notes can be heard in various compositions to fit the mood: from tender moments to epic battles.
Having the soundtrack sticking its feet firmly with traditional-style composition, with the rare piano compositions sprinkled in, is a wise decision that delivers. It’s just fun wandering around the countryside of Qinghe and the bustling capital that is Kaifeng City when you have some jaunty, period-appropriate tunes.
The UI is both expected for a game like this (something that riffs closely to Genshin Impact and its many competitors) and also a mess. There’s so much content and systems that it’s a journey to find your way to the right menu.
It has all the free-to-play trappings, including so many red dot notifications where you can get lost in the menus just to claim whatever crumble of a reward that you need to claim before it possibly expires.
The game does make it enticing to interact with the menus by making them look cool with slick animations and art. The codex has no business to be this cool. But that doesn’t excuse the maze of menus that only MMO players, free-to-play no-lifers and hardcore players with more time than money can tolerate, which apparently is industry standard. Yes, I don’t play that many free-to-play games, hence the rant.
It also doesn’t help that the menus for some reason can stop detecting d-pad input on the controller for some reason, which required me to force close the game and reboot multiple times. I hope it’s just a pre-release bug only on the Early Access build, because this sort of bug really, really needs to be sorted out pronto.
Overall, Where Winds Meet has an uneven visual treat, but its audio department is firing on all cylinders. The UI is what you’d expect from a free-to-play open-world RPG, which from the eyes of a gamer used to play paid titles, feel awful, but it’s part for the course.
Gameplay
Where Winds Meet follows the journey of your created character, man or woman (with a pretty robust character creator that’s good enough to recreate people’s faces as well as utter abominations), as they venture into the jianghu. This is a wuxia world where you can roam about, explore, do quests, participate in various leisure activities, fight people and bosses, follow quests, join sects and, to a certain extent, do whatever you want.
This is the jianghu Where Winds Meet keeps saying over and over. The world where you can do all of this, do something more than the ordinary folks. Be a hero regardless of where your morality stands. Come and enter the jianghu and be in the jianghu. You’re in the know, right?
But it doesn’t start as such. You’ll be saddled into following the tutorial for at least 2 hours before you’re free to explore the rural countryside of Qinghe. Though the game really opens up once you reach the next region, Kaifeng, where you finally get to explore the big city the game hypes up so much in the marketing leading up to the release.
Where Winds Meet lets you freely explore the world and engage in a myriad of activities, but it’s saddled with a progression system straight out of a free-to-play open-world RPG. You naturally gain XP, even when you’re just completing parts of a quest, but there’s a level cap once every ten levels which you must clear a specific challenge (and do several objectives) to breakthrough the limit and keep leveling up. You have a power score that is not only affected by the gear you equip (you have a whole set of gear with random stats and set bonuses to loot and equip), you can fine-tune those gear to permanently increase the stats. You can also unlock passives that can be upgraded. There are also Mystic Arts (the wuxia equivalent to magic spells, more or less) which you can upgrade. You can equip two different Martial arts at time, a choice of 12 at launch which can change the moveset of the seven weapon types available at launch, each of them can be upgraded.
I keep saying “can be upgraded” a lot, but more accurately, you “must upgrade.” And to upgrade most of these, they all require some unique material that you may or may not stumble upon naturally, somehow unknowingly acquire them as the game constantly gives you some reward that you still don’t know what they are exactly.
If you think this is all “free-to-play progression bullshit” then yeah, pretty much.
I can tolerate the grind-craft nature of free-to-play games like Warframe and The First Descendant, as the path to progression and mastery is rather straightforward. However, in the case of Where Winds Meet, so many of these progressions are there for the sake of having progression. Why do the Mystic Arts also be upgradable and require materials when they barely do much damage in combat anyway?
It’s interesting that the game even offers a development path, a handy overview that gives hints on what aspect of your character you should aim to upgrade and develop. But the fact that this thing exists is evidence of how unnecessarily convoluted the character progression in Where Winds Meet is. It doesn’t even satisfy my monkey brain instinct of simply wanting to see numbers go up! There’s too many numbers!
However, there is a good reason to put up with all of this, and it’s the combat. Where Winds Meet is an action-RPG, which can mean just about anything. But let me specify that, and I hope you’re seated for this.
The combat system in Where Winds Meet is a Sekiro-style soulslike with an emphasis on parries. Yes, it’s another parry-or-die. It’s like Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. And yes, nailing those deflects to lower the enemy’s qi (stance meter) is as satisfying as its inspirations.
This does mean that boss fights in Where Winds Meet are epic encounters that rewards players that can read the opponent’s every move. Some attacks are big-and-red indicating it’s a heavily damaging one, but you’ll look like an wuxia hero for nailing the timing of that parry. Others glow gold where you must get out of dodge, where any perfectly-timed dodge triggers a slow-mo.
The bosses are of the caliber of a good soulslike, with striking boss designs (the scythe-wielding Heartseeker is a total baddie in more ways than one, while that donkey-riding Sleeping Daoist will catch you off-guard by its goofy yet deadly antics), amazingly tricky attack patterns and sneaky second phases.
Different weapons also have different parry timings, as much as I think fighting with an umbrella, just like in Wild Hearts, is a cool idea, I stuck with the reliable long sword through my playthrough, so I can’t comment much about the other weapon types. Interestingly, there’s no unarmed combat option yet.
If you’re noping yourself from playing Where Winds Meet after reading those paragraphs, please read the next one as well.
Where Winds Meet offers multiple difficulty settings. The default setting and the lower Story difficulty offers an assist where those parries become quick-time events, pausing for a moment so you can hit that button. It doesn’t make encounters completely trivial—there’s a limit to the assist. But pair that with lower health numbers for enemies and it can help you go through encounters if you’re not bothered with combat, and or find yourself not ready to fight these tough bosses.
And speaking for readiness, Where Winds Meet is lacking when it comes making players aware they are ready for battle. What I mean is that it is rather easy to find yourself locked into a quest and find out that your character is not well-prepared enough to undertake it.
In the earlier parts of the game, it wasn’t necessary to gear up and make sure you’re all levelled up in upgrades, the game scaled decently. After going past level 30, the game demands you to properly gear up or risk facing a Sekiro-style boss but they’re all massive damage sponges requiring so, so many a parry to just take off 10% of their health bar.
Or even worse, having to deal with damage-sponge mobs, where they all attack simultaneously and as such you simply can’t parry them all. Me rushing through the later chapters was a foolish endeavour, and the game didn’t even warn me before attempting a quest that I probably should think twice before doing this.
Should you able to tolerate what I consider to be an awful character progression system, the wonders of the jianghu knows no bounds. You can stumble into a side-quest that involves puzzles to solve. Some of them can be obtuse that you may need to read some signposts from other players.
Yeah, you can leave messages online like a From Software soulslike but you’re free to write anything, in any language (there’s a built-in translator). The Early Access server for media and creators wasn’t that populated, but I’ve seen enough familiar in-jokes that somehow carry over to Where Winds Meet. You’re in the know, right?
And if puzzle-dungeons not your thing, there are a myriad of mini-games you can partake in. Pitching pot is mechanically like beer pong in that players get intoxicated and then attempt to throw something (a dart, in this case) into a hole (a pot).
You can argue with someone in the Gift Of The Gab where, for some reason, it’s mechanically represented as a game of cards. It’s oddly overwhelming as you really don’t get to see the deck you have until you first play it, and the description are so lengthy to parse in a short time, and it’s all time-sensitive. I ended up just playing whatever card is available and pray for the best, it’s no Balatro or a even a deckbuilder, which it could’ve been.
There is another variant of this, where you attempt to heal people as a doctor. It’s a card game but turn-based. So this is what the early marketing means when it says you can be a lawyer or a doctor: they’re actually card game battle mini-games.
But there are other more fun card games. There’s one that the name escapes me, but it’s something a cross between Uno (whoever clears their hand of cards first wins), a bluffing mechanic where you can try and sneakily draw out the wrong suit of cards, which the next player can try to call that bluff, the penalty for wrongfully calling the bluff or caught bluffing is having to take all the currently cleared cards back to their hand, and somehow involves booze. It’s a really fun twist to more prominent card and board games usually seen in video games.
There are more mini-games on offer, some I couldn’t access due to myriad of technical issues which, again, I hope won’t be the case when the servers launch for everyone.
If mini-games aren’t enough to draw you in, the simple act of walking and exploring the world is just as fun. The lavish world has so much to see, and you’re mechanically entice to do this as there are plenty of hidden treasure chests you can open without anyone batting an eye. Taking a stroll in Kaifeng City is already a lot to take in.
Or how about just go around and jump, double jump, triple jump into an air dash across rooftops and cliffs. Or run alongside a cliff. Or run towards to a cliffedge, from the bottom. No need to Skyrim jump over and over to reach up a waterfall, you can just run up a waterfall! The lightness skill provides so much mobility, even too much, that in specific quests or dungeons they have to be disabled. A sneaking mission would be rendered moot if you can more or less fly to the destination at will.
You can just talk to NPCs, some of them can turn into an… AI chatbot. Is this the “Smart NPC System” the game hypes up about? I personally don’t want to engage with generated-AI content, but for the sake of this review I made some attempts to strike a conversation. But the AI just wouldn’t parse my inputs, simply repeating the same opening lines they have. At some point, I got rate-limited as well.
The idea here is that you can build affection with these AI chatbot-powered NPCs, something MMOs like Black Desert have (sans AI chatbots). But I don’t think the system is even working as intended during this Early Access session I was in. Or maybe it couldn’t parse English, for whatever reason. You can safely not engage with this should you, rightfully, are against such features being added in video games.
Where Winds Meet offers a good combat system reminiscent of faster-paced soulslike and a world just begging to be explored. But unfortunately, this is no Ghost Of Yōtei or Kingdom Come Deliverance II competitor.
Where Winds Meet is bogged down by a character progression system too convoluted for its own good to really let you free and explore the world however you see fit. You have to keep up with the character upgrade demands should you wish to experience the combat system at its best. Yet it does offer an immersive world to get lost to, various mundane side-activities to balance the high-intensity of its combat.
Content
Where Winds Meet boasts over 150 hours of content. I only managed to clock in 20 hours of playtime for this review, making far enough progress into Chapter 2 of the story. I wish I could put in more time, but the various bugs and issues I experienced which requires me to force close the game really dashed that wish.
The map is misleading. It may look small—at launch it only offers two regions, Qinghe and Kaifeng—but they feel massive to explore. More regions and content in general, including limited-time events, will be added down the line.
From what I can tell, Where Winds Meet will keep you busy. There’s so many things to do and try and discover (you know how in games like Elden Ring you can enter a coffin and somehow be teleported into a new place?). So many checklists to clear. Plus, there are multiplayer modes where you can do strikes and re-attempt boss runs. Heck, you can even practice boss fights, with objectives to checklist tasking you to successfully deflect specific movesets and even getting no-hit clears. There’s a good number of bosses at launch, including what appears to be a boss that makes more much sense to be in game themed in fantasy-historical ancient China instead of an Elden Ring DLC.
And I already mentioned the variety of mini-games you can attempt.
And yes, there are also plenty of side quests. Though sadly, the side quests I attempted where you do get to spelunk into a dungeon don’t really give off the length and depth of a proper level in a soulslike. These are pretty much bite-sized experiences, but you have so much to bite from.
It doesn’t stop there. Why not join a sect? If Skyrim has the Mages Guild and The Dark Brotherhood, Where Winds Meet has eight different sects (not all of them available at launch) that encourages you to roleplay by abiding to their rules. One sect demands you to share your wealth from time to time or be penalised. Another requires you to attempt PVP. Come to think of it, these are more like covenants in Dark Souls, as you can pledge to one sect at a time. Or go sectless, which is always an option.
If that’s not enough, you can just interact with the systems at play and see what you can do. You can engage in trading by buying low and selling high at the right traders. Or just pickpocket people using your item-stealing Mystic Art. Or put on a disguise and sneak into prohibited areas. Or hang out at the sauna room and heal up, chat with fellow players while you don bathrobes.
In short, there is much to do that I can see that claim of 150+ hours to be somewhat true.
But is it really worth it? The game’s free, yes. But is it worth your time?
That depends on your lifestyle. If you can no-life a game I can see Where Winds Meet becomes someone’s go-to live-service game. If you dabble in various games, Where Winds Meet takes so long until it gets good and you’ll be forced to learn and relearn the myriad of upgrades and materials you need to acquire to progress.
Thankfully, Where Winds Meet isn’t a gacha game. You don’t draw for new characters with different movesets. The things you acquire from real-money purchases are cosmetics: new hair, new head, accessories and new costumes (no mix-and-match clothing here, you just get a full set of garments) with some sets reserved for a less gambly version of a gacha, while others unlocked through the premium tier of a battle pass or a straightforward purchase. You can adjust the looks of your player character again, though a permanent change requires spending a rare item. And you need to use another rare item to switch genders, should you fancy that.
In short, no gameplay content of Where Winds Meet is paywalled. They only sell cosmetics.
The idea is that you play long enough of Where Winds Meet that you genuinely want to buy something to give something back to the devs for the good time you’d been having by buying a cosmetic pack or whatever is on offer on the store. And I’ve seen that business model work. I’ve paid good money to Warframe on the regular. Personally, the monetisation on offer here feels less scummy than buying gacha rolls, so I have no qualms with how the game monetises itself, for now at least. I haven’t seen the localised prices of the real-money purchases yet.
Personal Enjoyment
There are unforgettable moments that I had with Where Winds Meet. It’s a shame that I also experienced the game in a rough state. This is not my first rodeo, I’ve played games early before that isn’t quite in their best form yet, recently even, but judging by the Early Access version of the game that I’ve played, Where Winds Meet is dropping in hot. I can only hope you will have a more wonderful experience going through the game, because it wasn’t all rosy for me.
It’s a great shame, because I really do want to scream out to the world to say Where Winds Meet is this brilliant, unmissable game. It walks that delicate balance of tonal whiplash where you can see a real gut-wrenching tragedy in a minute and then a silly scene where dudes are letting their roosters out of the cage scored with a whimsy tune not long after. Moments of tension can be of the thrilling one (“Oh shoot my cover is blown! She’s on to me!”) to a romantic one (“Is she… flirting?”) at a drop of a Song coin.
Those majestic cutscenes that introduces you to most ideal vision of the world you’re about to see via pre-rendered cutscenes are absolute cinema. Proper tone-setters.
Maybe in a few months time, after a few updates, Where Winds Meet will truly shine as this gateway into a wuxia world where the over-the-top antics you might’ve seen in The Storm Riders (especially when these normal looking people just flies and floats like it’s normal) or any wuxia media you might’ve come across, is manifested into a fun video game. It’s not quite there yet, and still far off in quality from the best wandering hero games of this year, but the potential is there.
Verdict
Where Winds Meet has big ambitions to be an open world action RPG that does just about everything. But its convoluted progression system kneecaps its potential, and it may potentially be buggy at launch.
If you can muster through the unnecessary complexities of playing an MMO-esque free-to-play title, Where Winds Meet offers a one-of-a-kind gaming experience thanks to its breathtaking depiction of the world of wuxia.
If you are brave, willing, and have enough free time, step forth and enter the jianghu, Where Winds Meet.
Played on PS5. Review based on Early Access server which may not be indicative of the experience at launch. Access provided by the publisher.
Where Winds Meet
Where Winds Meet has big ambitions to be an open world action RPG that does just about everything. But its convoluted progression system kneecaps its potential, and it may potentially be buggy at launch.
If you can muster through the unnecessary complexities of playing an MMO-esque free-to-play title, Where Winds Meet offers a one-of-a-kind gaming experience thanks to its breathtaking depiction of the world of wuxia.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 7.5
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 7.5