Mention the words "free to play" in relation to a PC game, and people will jump to a few conclusions. One is that the game is primarily multiplayer-focused, like Fortnite or Battlefield Redsec. Another is that the game can be a single-player affair but relies heavily on the gacha mechanic to goad players into spending money, like with Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero. Titles like Once Human aim primarily for cosmetic microtransactions while still providing a substantial experience for solo players and multiplayer gamers. Where Winds Meet is a new game from NetEase that tries to deliver a substantial gaming experience while solely restricting real money purchases to cosmetic items only. Where Winds Meet seems to adhere to that economic ethos, but it falters when it comes to the actual game part.

Long ago, a renowned swordsman took you when you were an infant while he was on the run for stealing an artifact of great value. After an ambush killed one of his friends, the swordsman went into hiding in a far-off village to raise you. Your character dreamed of being a great hero while growing up, and that dream still remains, but circumstances lead your character to take that journey earlier than anticipated.

What starts off as a standard Wuxia tale of heroism ends up being a game that explores almost every facet of life during that time period. The problem is that the game doesn't have a good grasp on how to tell its story. It's fine in the beginning, but things fall apart after a major turning point in the first chapter. You'll meet characters you never knew, and they immediately start giving you tasks. Several cut scenes fade to black but fade in during the same scene and location for no reason. There are moments when time slows down for a dramatic walk, only to lead into something mundane rather than something important. The whole thing is very messy, so you don't care about the story because you have no idea what's going on, and the game doesn't straighten things out for you.

If you want to summarize the gameplay, it can be best described as taking the modern Assassin's Creed approach to the open-world genre. The lands you'll visit are vast in size, and there are a lot of things you can do throughout the game. The quest density is also tightly packed, so it's difficult to not run into a side-quest of variable sizes. These can include fetch quests for old ladies, stopping petty crimes, healing sick people, or doing some cooking. You can also engage in dialogue battles or play a few minigames like chess or pitch pot. You have an assortment of bandit camp and enemy stronghold raids, but you can also pick up almost anything in the environment and open various chests, which are great sources of XP.

The side-quests give the game a unique identity and provide many reasons to stray from the main story questline. One side-quest has you freeing a young man from his chambers to escape an arranged marriage. However, he has a change of heart, causing you to become an impromptu matchmaker instead. Another side-quest sees you taking part in a procession through a burned-out village to free the spirits of the area, whose only sin was being so devoted that they were ignorant of the dangers around them.

There are also a few non-quest-related tasks. Imitating animals by observing their movements unlocks new moves. For example, you can learn to use tai chi to throw anyone by watching a bear try to knock down a beehive, or you can deafen some enemies by watching a goose beat up another animal. Your Wuxia abilities will come into play with traversal, so you can learn to run across water or perform high triple-jumps and air dashes. You can use telekinetic powers to grab items from afar, and you can use acupuncture to freeze people in place.

All of this sounds rather neat, but that feeling of wonder quickly dissipates when you discover that the gameplay elements lack polish. A good example of this is when you're engaged in an argument minigame. You have to select cards that provide the gist of your response, and these cards determine how much you'll deplete the enemy's resolve. However, the dialogue is too spread out over the screen, so it's difficult to keep track of what's being said. The text is way too long for the text boxes, so you're unable to read everything, even if you know where to look. That lack of proper space also appears in other places in the game, so you can't see most titles clearly if you tried. Coupled with the fact that every argument is timed, and you have a situation where an intriguing part of the game becomes hectic busywork where you're selecting cards and hoping for the best, especially for the minigames where you're trying to heal someone, since they share mechanics with the argument minigame.

The translation efforts in Where Winds Meet are also incomplete. When performing acupuncture, all of your commands are displayed in Chinese, so you'll have to hit a button and guess what you did. This is especially frustrating when trying to stop thieves, since you have to stop them at just the right moment before exposing their crimes. The thing is that you don't know when that moment is. Stopping them beforehand results in you getting reported to the authorities. Stopping them after they've committed the crime results in the criminal freezing for only a second before running away and disappearing into thin air. You have to freeze them the very moment the crime is being committed, and that only happens if you can figure out the acupuncture commands.

If you're trying to tackle as many side-quests as possible, you'll be in for a difficult time. The game may be tracking them for you, but you can't see a list of quests you've discovered. This means you'll end up missing new quests that pop up while you're trying to complete old ones, forcing you to wander around to clear an area of side-quests. That can become a fruitless effort, as some quests respawn when you reload from a save file, so the act of clearing out an area becomes needlessly endless.

Then there's the matter of timing. Where Winds Meet will often provide instructions about how to do something or give you important information on a screen, but the information cycles so quickly that you can't really understand what's being shown. Like the quests themselves, there's no in-game glossary, so you can't pause the game and check to see what you've missed. The game also has a tendency to give you information about things you can't possibly do at that moment. An example is when my character saw a chest surrounded by snakes and was told to use telekinesis to grab the chest safely. The problem is that telekinesis isn't introduced until you get to a much later chapter in the game. The game does this kind of thing often, so you end up ignoring things until you stumble upon the mechanic because you automatically assume that whatever the game is trying to teach you can't be done at that moment.

Another thing you'll have to be wary of is the open world doesn't block you from going anywhere you're not supposed to go, so you can find enemies that you're not prepared for. A good example of this is a boss fight where you have to defeat an old master who mistakenly thinks that you're going to eat their donkey. This fight involved the master being at level 51, while my character was at level 30, and the fight started because I went into the boss' area without any warning that I was getting in over my head or that a fight was about to begin. The lack of warnings was annoying, but it was neat to see that the game would let you get into impossible situations, especially if it means seeing an old man summon hordes of stampeding donkeys from a portal.

The developers have estimated that it'll take over 150 hours to get through the campaign, but considering that this is an online free-to-play title, you can expect that number to go up over time if the developers add new storyline quests. That makes it a massive time sink, but the game cheats a bit to get to that number. This is because you can't access all of the story-based missions without a level-related roadblock. You'll finish a number of story missions before the game will tell you that you can't progress until you reach a specific level, forcing you to engage in side-quests and other means of gaining XP before you can continue with the story. These level-related roadblocks happen so often that they feel like padding to inflate the campaign gameplay time.

Compared to the other elements of the game, the combat feels solid. You can master a variety of weapons from staffs to swords, each with their own emphasis on airborne or ground-based combat. You can carry every weapon, but you can only switch between two of them with the touch of a button. The fighting is reminiscent of faster-paced stuff, like Devil May Cry, versus slower and more calculated fare, like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Where Winds Meet adopts the latter's parrying system to create openings for counter-attacks. The required timing is precise, but the game has the option to slow down time so you can hit the parry button properly. The success rate is high enough that button-mashers will want the option on at all times.

There is one funny and frustrating thing about combat: the bystanders. If you get into a fight in crowded areas, the innocent bystanders around the fight will refuse to move, but they'll still be affected by your attacks — and only your attacks. One example is a fight where you need to protect a shopkeeper from bandits. While fighting, my sword hit a bystander, and they immediately got up and joined in the melee specifically targeting me. They kept attacking even when speaking to the shopkeeper that I was protecting. The bystander couldn't be bribed, and knocking them out was considered a crime, so I got locked in jail until I paid the bail.

There is a multiplayer component to Where Winds Meet, but when compared to the main single-player game, the multiplayer feels tacked on. In the single-player game, you can uncover notes or leave notes of your own in any area, similar to Demon's Souls. You can also call upon other people to help with a boss fight or clearing out enemy bases. In the dedicated multiplayer sections, you can perform raids or do some PvP. There are also a few minigames, but that's it. They're neat additions, but you can restrict yourself to the single-player experience and not feel like you've missed anything.

For the most part, the game looks good graphically. The environments are impressive and varied, with loads of vegetation in the plains and cities bustling with people. There are lots of particle effects, from billowing embers to grasses blowing in the wind. The characters look good, as do their animations, and the game can run at very high frame rates if you have the right hardware for the job. Don't expect anything demanding like ray tracing, but the lighting and shadows remain good without the colors blowing out.

The flaws that show up in this area are rather numerous, though. The game has a terrible time with pop-up, as you'll see loads of environmental pieces pop up no matter the distance. This is especially noticeable during cut scenes or transitions from cut scenes to gameplay; textures and objects both large and small will appear out of nowhere. Camera transitions also reveal some lighting issues, where a brightly lit area at night can give an incorrect glow to the next scene before the game corrects itself. The mouths of characters sometimes fail to move when they speak, and some characters and objects float in the air before discovering gravity. The subtitles are very inconsistent. Sometimes they're large, and sometimes they're small, and there are a few moments when they scroll by, as if you're watching comments fly over a video from Nico Nico or Bilibili.

The audio is mostly fine. The sound effects come through clearly, so you'll enjoy weapons clashing and clay tiles being walked on. The music has an epic feel while also retaining the distinct sound produced by many Chinese instruments of the time. The soundtrack can fit perfectly during serene moments or pick up the tempo during action scenes without abrupt changes. The voices come through in either Chinese or English, with the latter being surprisingly good. The only complaint is that the spoken dialogue and translated subtitles often don't match, as the subtitles go for literal translations instead of reflecting the spoken dialogue.

The major problem in this category is that you only get a small taste of what the game is like when fully voiced. Toward the beginning of the game, after a big revelation was made concerning one of the critical characters, the game experienced a hard crash. After a reboot, all of the voices disappeared. Doing a language change did nothing, and several reboots of the game produced no voices in either English or Chinese. The lack of voices hurt the game greatly, especially since they were present earlier, and the small subtitles for incidental dialogue isn't a good substitute for hearing a bustling crowd go about their lives or reacting to what you're doing.

When it comes to microtransactions, Where Winds Meet makes it difficult to find the store in the first place. The store isn't there at the very beginning and only becomes accessible when you've made your way through a good chunk of the opening chapter. Even then, you'll need to dig through a variety of menus to find the shop, which has purely cosmetic items like new clothes, dyes, and new emotes. There's no reason to spend a dime unless you really care about the visuals. I couldn't find a way to buy any of the different currencies that the game uses, but this may be a result of playing on a press-specific preview build and not the public build that will be released later.

Where Winds Meet has potential. We're starting to see RPGs in a Wuxia setting, and this is perhaps the most compelling one yet. The number of activities varies greatly, and the combat feels wonderful. The game's vastness means that there's loads of longevity, even if the experience can feel like a grind at times. The many systems at play can lead to a confusing experience, especially since the game does a poor job of teaching you the gameplay mechanics. The spotty presentation doesn't do the game any favors when coupled with the lack of translation in places. If you're willing to put up with all of these hindrances from the start, you'll find a game that does a good job of keeping you interested. Most people will be better served by waiting to see if the team can add some much-needed polish before jumping in.

Score: 5.5/10