I enjoyed running around the world, killing things and the grapple is a nice utilization to navigate around the world. I was lucky to have little issues asides from a couple of stutters and no crashes thus far. And the combat is a definite highlight, pretty much the meat of the game even if its far simpler. The world is fun to explore, and I had fun exploring and looking for treasures.

Everything else is mostly subpar. There's a lot of minor annoyances that adds to the pile, including but not limited to:
- The music is simply there, in the background, and there's little variation going on. The best music is the menu, and even that is average.
- EN voices are just flat (which is the fault of the VA director honestly, considering the VA themselves are splendid in other titles)
- Voice lines that gets cutoff constantly on autoplay
- Lines that simply just gets cut at the third line of a lengthy paragraph dialogue
- Below average EN localization
- Future grind that's gonna be an absolute time consumption (not looking forward to that)

The story is an absolute bore that I still haven't finished Act 1 yet. Does it get better? Supposedly according to others but the first hour or three is far from a great impression with your goal and introducing to the lore.

Overall I wanted to like the game more, and I certainly hope it'll improve over time. Its a shame it was released in the state it currently is.

It's pretty disappointing.

While the combat flows better than similar games, a lot of Wuthering Waves still feels half-baked, ranging from technical performance to the UI and worldbuilding. The characters' voicelines repeat themselves anytime you open a menu, there are huge lag spikes and I experienced a random crash too. Like I said, it's just disappointing, considering the game already had two beta tests and it still came out like this on release.

As for the story, I didn't find it particularly engaging from what I've played. After a cool intro cinematic, you're subject to an one-hour exposition dump, which could have just easily been explained as "there's dissonance in this world, so these monsters have appeared; you can also absorb their powers", but instead you get to hear increasingly verbose explanations about everything and their cool names. (Tacet Discord? There's a lot of things you could name monsters, but why would you name them Tacet Discords?)

I'm trying to not end this review on a negative note, there's still some enjoyment to be had in Wuthering Waves - the character designs look good, the first city you visit is pretty, the combat feels smooth and the animations flow well, so if you're a fan of Kuro's previous game, Punishing Gray Raven, this might interest you. As for me, I can't really see myself getting hooked on this world because of the established reasons, so I'll continue playing my gacha of choice about some train in space. Some kind of star rail.

Not yet at the stage where in-game GPS can be used as a crutch for overly dense or visually monotonous levelling, the world design of San Andreas is all interconnected backstreets and shortcuts, and the artful use of colour and texture to suggest interest or to assist the player in building a mental map of all the landmarks across San Andreas' diverse city. To move through it is to learn it intimately, to belong in it, and to read the space and know which escape route to follow under which circumstances. Every backyard and park and underbridge. The missions carefully ripple out from Grove St, introducing new territories bit by bit, such that the player is still able to connect familiar signs and buildings with new vistas, like stars to a navigator.

Then when it suddenly all becomes too much, the story goes that it's too much too. We're miles away in the country and it's night time and the spaces are far too open and now we're lost because we're in exile. CJ cannot go home. The intricate network of passageways that constitutes Los Santos (where it's always better to move by foot or bicycle) is replaced with bare hills and long, straight highways leading to new nowheres. That which once took hours on foot because it was bustling with life takes minutes by car, and the human textures of the world are lost to a shiny sameness that actively works to deflect player interest. The passage from Grove St is to the Desert of the Real, its veins running cold and efficient with the anonymity of hyperspace.

The emptiness of much of San Andreas outside of Los Santos is testament to its overambition, but this works well for its narrative where CJ must return from the desert back home. It also gives the landscape an air of mystery that has to be actively filled by player imagination, hence the accumulation of community myths concerning ghosts, cryptids, angels, and parallel dimensions. GTA V would attempt to tap into some of these narratives in order to control them, but in San Andreas it's the organic byproduct of players, glitches, and weird landscapes. It's the perfect synthesis of broken and polished gameplay and features, and because of its homely details and manic scope, still one of the biggest feeling games there is.

Quick review:
1. Bad optimization on PC, stutters even on 4090 and SSD
2. Echo grind it's a time sink
3. Bland story, bland music, bland world
4. No 120 fps unless you tweak SQL file...
5. Nice combats
Now worth playing

i've only dedicated about 4-5 hours so far, which isn't a lot on gacha terms, but the first 4-5 hours are THE most important time in a gacha and if i feel like this after them then that's a dire state for the game itself to be in.

the story is largely incapable of being gripping, the voice acting in english is horribly directed (i believe i heard that they hired largely a british voicing studio and its very clear a lot of them are trying to hide a british accent) and i think most importantly for a gacha the character designs are all largely nothing. to use the obvious comparison, genshin designs are all overly designed messes with too many details, but they are very clearly done so in the way a kid designing their first oc is. the overdesign is out of love for the character, there is no quota trying to be hit by making a nightmare for cosplayers, they just think it would be cool as shit to have this many little fidgets and bangles. in contrast, wuwo feels heavily designed by committee. i see them falling for the same trappings a lot of hoyo designs fall for but with no willingness to experiment with color and no real risk taken. they're cluttered without any meaning other than genshin designs being cluttered.

exploration is passable, but clunky. i do appreciate the improvements over genshin insofar as the wallrunning and sprinting not consuming stamina, plus the data bank system affecting how much stamina you get is a lot more compelling than suffering in mondstat and liyue for about 5 hours with the interractive map open. but theres multiple weird bits of collision jank, the more focused movement has very low precision, and there's a fucking invisible wall with no reason given north of the map. that might sound like a silly concern but why fucking have it be an open world if i can just randomly get walled off for no reason? there's clearly region over there and a vision tower for me to put my gourd in in that area, it's not an early access thing. put an indicator on the map so i know. genshin did it with stormterrors lair. they did it with inazuma. can you not follow their example with this? cmon its SO easy to beat genshin you dont need to stumble over shit they nailed at launch???