This is a totally competent open world game if you like driving around and collecting things and completing objectives but oh my god Aiden Pierce is, by far, the least-likable video game protagonist I have ever seen. Any time I was reminded that I was playing as him it made me want to stop playing. He is terrible and the story written around him is awful. It's so bad that it's to the point that I feel this game is barely worth playing. There are so many other equally-competent open world games that people should play literally anything else before this.

While Wandersong begins with pitch-perfect puzzles and story beats, its writing quickly becomes quite one-note, and the dragging coda will likely dissuade players from enjoying repeat performances.

Wandersong is the story of a young bard whose mission, in the face of a looming apocalypse, is to gather the pieces of the mythical Eversong, the united musical intonations of all the living, to repel disaster. The bard is joined by Miriam, a cynical but talented witch, and they visit a great many locales filled with unique denizens to seek out the keepers of the pieces of the Eversong, the Overseers.

Early on, it is established that the bard is not the hero of this tale—that would be The Hero, who wields a sword that shoots lightning and wishes to kill the Overseers to accelerate the end of the world and the creation of the next. The bard and Miriam pursue their mission peacefully, with the bard’s musical stylings the key to their success (reflecting the game itself, which with a couple notable exceptions, excels most in its choonz), whether it’s in convincing townspeople or animals to help them or by generating magical spells.

Thus, the game has a very simple subversion as the core of its gameplay and narrative. While the concept of the traditional video game hero as a raging murderous psychopath and the player’s insertion into an unbecoming, non-traditional hero isn’t new, the game uses it well enough for the opening hours. The bard and Miriam are likeable enough characters and play off each other well. You really get to share the bard’s stupid optimism and distrust of The Hero. And then it’s fun to suddenly find yourself playing as The Hero for a brief section, playing a serviceable action platformer.

As the bard, you will constantly be met with pastiche of different genres. While you’re basically always playing a puzzle platformer, some towns will have light life sim elements with day/night cycles or require small fetch quests or play more like a narrative-focused “walking sim” like Night in the Woods. The dungeons, if you can call them that, always have a new singing-controlled gimmick. Boss fights and Act-ending puzzles (used to actually learn the Earthsong) are varied enough to stay fresh, and when they work, they work well. The gameplay never gets particularly interesting, but the novelty is entertaining enough for a while.

What’s really going to make or break the game for you is if you enjoy its writing. While, like all things in Wandersong, it starts off delightful, a nagging sensation begins to form as you get deeper into the story. The problem for me is this: every single character speaks in exactly the same voice. For a game like Wandersong, where a large part of the appeal is in charming dialogue and character writing, it’s a huge issue when everyone sounds like a standard online millennial. Every single character has the same obnoxious, vaguely sarcastic way of interacting with one another. When it comes time for a character’s arc to develop, no matter what the character’s troubles or ostensible personality traits, they become unbelievably emotionally intelligent and open. I can certainly understand and appreciate that the bard is a wonderful, charming force for good in the world, but these kinds of characters typically need foils, and even the gruffest and rudest denizens of one of the half dozen or so locales the player visits talks in the same, y’know, um… voice. I certainly would never ask a game with the charm and optimistic aim of Wandersong to create emotionally ambiguous resolutions for its characters, but having the characters be characters instead of vehicles for snappy dialogue and repetitive themes about accepting themselves would be greatly appreciated. While the character designs are lovely, and I admire the ambition of creating a great ensemble cast the player would become invested in for the grand resolution, simplifying the game to include fewer characters might have helped to add to the variety of proceedings and allowed some time for characters and their arcs to breathe. By the end of the game, I found myself completely disinterested in hearing the same fucking tone of voice from another town full of people and trying to keep it down when it was force-fed to me during required story interactions contained to the main few characters.

The gameplay similarly sees the wheels fly off by the end of the game. The challenge never develops at all, and instead puzzles just cycle through new gimmicks. This is perfectly fine, but just as a mechanic seems to feel like it’s working and producing some interesting gameplay, the game cuts it off. So you’re constantly teased with fun scenarios with new abilities, just to have them ripped away for an exhausting stretch of dialogue before you move on to the next puzzle gimmick that will be completely under-utilized for a good 75% of the time you’re using it. The ending stretch doesn’t even feature fun gimmicks to begin with and often feel like tedious, simplistic slogs. It’s in these moments, where you’re sitting there doing something stupidly simple, that the little quirks start to feel extremely irritating.

My performance in the game is not really impacted by my ability to keep up with a piece of music or gameplay (the worst penalty is moving back about twenty seconds in a boss encounter at absolute worst), but I’d like to hear this song properly or react to this boss quickly (mostly so I can get one of Wandersong’s horrible boss battles over with faster). Why, oh why, does Wandersong’s metronome feature for pointing out which direction to mash your right analog stick not function like any other rhythm game ever? And why did they put dead zones between the eight input directions of the controller when your stick is resting at center? I’m not playing this on the GameCube. I’m not gonna be able to switch from one side to another (through dead center, always, for boss battles) with pinpoint accuracy if you make the dead zones show up when they’re most cumbersome!

Honestly, if Wandersong were a bit tighter, trimming off some of the more redundant areas to make a solid, say, four-act story with varied and interesting characters, these gripes about the mechanics and dialogue would probably be much more minor. But subjecting myself to seven hours of this felt like complete misery by the end. And for those of you who have finished the game, I’ll just let you imagine how red my face was as I played through that endless, tuneless epilogue cutscene… twice…

The best way to describe Wandersong's gameplay is that it's like an RPG without battles. The obstacles that the player has to overcome mostly consist of figuring out how to progress, usually by talking to townspeople in order to trigger some sequence of events. Does this mean there's nothing to the gameplay? Pretty much. This isn't a dealbreaker, as there are some dialogue-focused games that I do enjoy, but Wandersong is not one of them. The reason for this is because the dialogue is not good. There's been a recent epidemic of certain indie games all having the same brand of terrible writing- every character speaks like a teenager on the Internet. You know exactly what I'm talking about- lowercase letters, being overly "wholesome," usage of quirky language like "heck." It's all lazy, and it's all in an effort to create artificial charm and likeability that isn't really there. It's bearable in something like A Short Hike because of the gameplay around it, but when there's nothing to distract from it, like in Wandersong, it just gets really, really grating. Couple it with a boring meta-focused plot that wasn't clever the first dozen times it was done and it's almost painful.

Let's focus on the positives now- after all, that's what the game's main character would want. Although the puzzles are extremely easy, the way they're all integrated in with the singing mechanic in different ways is pretty well done. Likewise, certain wacky turns of events, like suddenly being in a non-linear platformer, or being trapped in a Majora's Mask-esque scenario, or sailing through the world map with a band of pirates, are pretty appealing and give you a reason to keep playing in spite of the dialogue. All in all, it should've fully been a rhythm game with some puzzle elements instead of just having occasional rhythm segments that are oddly impossible to fail.

Bounced off this pretty hard, abandoning it as Act 4 was about to begin. The biggest problem is the rpg sections take up a huge portion of the game-time despite being largely insipid. I'm given no reason to care about this quest beyond saving the world being a generically good thing to do, and no reason to care about these characters who are at best shallow and one-note (he's the happy one, she's the grumpy one, etc) and at worst have a habit of all blending together and sounding the same. I spent the majority of the rpg sections just bored.

The platforming and puzzle-solving sections are largely fine but rarely achieve much more than that, with the mechanics I saw varying from decent but underdeveloped, to pretty awkward. That said, I strongly disliked the song portions, which depending on which approach the game takes either lack a sense of rhythm or lack a sense of my actions actually mattering at all. Also encountered few small bugs, and the controls for the singing did not feel very smooth requiring you to be very specific with you control-stick movements.

Honestly talking myself down on this the more and more I type.

Absolutely nothing is interesting.

The hacking is lame, the only thing I recall being pleasing is hacking the city lights which looks visually cool. The writing is terrible, the characters feel like they're from some 2020 Netflix show with no budget.

I don't know what they were going for here or who they were targetting, it's looks like they wanted to be edgy and dark but they didn't even try.

Absolutely love the series and got a lot of time/enjoyment out of this but I bounced off of it a few months back and haven't been able to bring myself to return or start over. I've never stopped playing an Animal Crossing game in less than a year since I first began.

The mixture of the severe lack of content (the amount of stuff from previous games that's missing from furniture series, characters/buildings, and so on) and the crafting focus did a lot of damage. Having to constantly craft new tools (or the Fisher Price looking furniture for your house) gets old quickly and is never something that goes away. Sure it's something that can be sidestepped a bit in different ways but there's a general lack of quality of life improvements in the game. There's so many little things that could be changed for a better experience but it isn't meant to be I guess.

Stuff like the expanded terraforming and island design are nice and I'm glad they exist for those who are enjoying it but I'm not feeling it. I wasn't crazy about a lot of the stuff that came with being a mayor in New Leaf and this is just a doubling down on that. I want to chill/inhabit a town that doesn't live or die on my input while talking to villagers and doing assorted activities, not fight with the half baked systems while trying to line up a house placement. (Why they couldn't just let people use a grid, who fucking knows?)

Again, it's hard to say I'm too disappointed as I did get a lot of enjoyment out of this in the first month or two when I was playing this. I definitely got my money's worth. I guess I was just hoping for something more up my alley. I'll be watching for the future updates, still. Maybe something will bring me back.