Inhae's blog

It has been some time now that I want to get into wuxia novels, but it sounds inaccessible to me. I can read mystery novels without any problem now, but wuxia fiction feels very intimidating. So I thought that starting with a video game would be a good idea, I thought it would be much easier than a book. So I searched for wuxia games on mobile, and the first result was Where Winds Meet – 燕云十六声.

(It turns out that not all Wuxia novels are difficult to read after all. Someone on Mastodon – actually the same person who recommended 紫金陈 and 周浩晖 to me 🙏🏻 – recommended 流星蝴蝶剑 by 古龙 and it’s very easy to read, much much easier than playing WWM. If I had read Gu Long first, I might never have picked up this game, which all in all would have been a shame because I enjoy playing it a lot.)

Where Winds Meet is a gacha game, but contrary to Genshin or Reverse 1999 (the other two gacha games I’m playing), the gacha is purely cosmetic (you buy outfits for your MC) and can be ignored entirely. The gacha looks also very whale-oriented, and the free outfit you get from playing the story looks so cool anyway!

So I started the game in Chinese, and it is so hard 😱😭. The dialogues are much harder than the ones in Genshin. I understand our MC quite well (Cn VA for male MC is 萧翟 Xiao Zhai), but some NPCs are really tough to understand. And there are dialogues, sometimes voiced sometimes unvoiced, where the text just continues on auto without the option to pause, and it goes so fast too, there’s no way I can read that fast. Or sometimes text just pops up on screen when nearby characters are talking, and it’s often very hard for me to read it fast enough.

But despite all that, I’m still following okay enough I think, and I’m proud of myself for that. I haven’t progressed the main story much, because I’m more interested in exploring the regions I have unlocked so far, doing the side quests and completing the journal. But for now, I’d say I understand the main story and the side quests or NPC dialogues good enough to follow, though I’m far from understanding everything for sure.

The real problem is everything else: the menus, the interface, the skills and levelling, the online mode… Most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing, there are so many menus, every time I think that I understood what a menu is for, I unlock or discover a new one. There are so many options for everything, it’s crazy. I prefer to not watch guides though, and discover everything by myself. I feel that games are more enjoyable this way for me.

I have decided that for this game, I would not use Anki, and I would not keep an adventure journal like I do for Genshin (where I write what happens during world quests) because we have recaps in-game already. Instead, I’m keeping a glossary with Chinese words, pronunciation and meaning of characters I didn’t know. I also add the official English translation for all the terms (so I do switch my game to English from time to time to check these).

For now I’m focusing on these things:

Completing the exploration (Sentient Beings – 众生) for the regions I have unlocked:

Completing the Wandering Tales – 万事知 for those regions:

This is typically the kind of content for which I would take notes, given that I often complete them over the course of several days, but there’s a recap in-game!

I’m so grateful for this menu! Like I said, I don’t complete the quest in one go, so it’s good to have a recap to know where I had left it, but it’s also much easier to understand these texts than the dialogues with the NPCs. So even if I missed some information when talking to them, I can always check here to know what they were talking about lol.

I’m working on listing the name of all the Qinghe subregions and the Wandering Tales associated with each one:

I’m also thinking of working on the names of collectibles like plants or dishes… I also started working on the antiques we can collect:

As for levelling, I think the easiest thing would be to follow the different Paths – 流派?

I’m listing all the requirements for each path: the corresponding Martial Arts – 武学, Inner Ways – 心法 and the Gear Sets – 套装.

I haven’t played a lot yet, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out the different menus, but I’m loving the game so much! It’s definitely not the smooth, newbie-friendly introduction to wuxia that I wanted, but I won’t give up!

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.