Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Black Myth: Wukong Review (So Far) - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Mike is joined by Andy and Blessing to chat about their thoughts so far on Black Myth: Wukong. Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping - Black Myth Wukong Review (So Far) - Ads - Performance - Design - Combat & Abilities - SuperChats - Andy’s Whiteboard Breakdown - Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The month and year are halfway over, and that means so is the Kind of Funny membership drive. If you love the nearly 20 live shows we do each week, we'd love for you to throw a Kind of Funny membership our way on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny and YouTube. Thank you, and we'll see all of you for the happy hour this Friday on YouTube, but only members can call to talk to us. Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Monday, August 19, 2024. I'm one of your show host, Snowbike, Mike, and gosh darn it today. I got a fun one because I got Andy Cortez and Blessing out of Yo-Yea Jr. Boys, what up? No.

Blessing, how are you, fresh haircut? Thank you. I appreciate it. I want to tell you, I missed you this weekend. I missed you too, Mike. Thank you, Bless. I'll fall off playing from that 2X-K-O. You know that's what I'm going to say.

I need my partner, Mike, with me right now. We need that game to extend this beta for another week so we can play some more. Because what I was thinking, Bless, is you and I want to shout cast a little bit of this fighting game community games, you know what I mean? And I was like, well, I know the League of Legends characters. We've been playing 2XCO. What if we do a little shout casting night, a little tournament in our bedrooms, right? But, oh, that'd be sick. I thought, well, they have the little private rooms. What if we invited people in? And we all got a little custom games going on. So, hey, I'm thinking about. Riot games out there. Extend this by a week. Let me and bless have some fun.

You know, it ends today. Today's the last day. That's my problem. You have a good weekend, though. I had a pretty good weekend spent yesterday chilling yesterday was one of those days with no plans and it's funny we're doing the black myth Wukong review

Spoilers I've not played anymore since I gave my impressions on Friday during KAPD And I was thinking about spending my weekend playing more blackmuth But I was like yesterday

It was so chill And I was like you know what Let me not Let me not force it Let me not like you know play a game So I can have more to say on the show Instead I'm just gonna relax

I'm gonna screw on TikTok I'm going to watch some... I started up Scavengers Rain on HBO Max. Good show. I stopped watching after two minutes. I started it up. Turned it off.

You know? You deserve a nice chill weekend. A nice good day is right. And you know what? I had a nice chill weekend because I got to spend a little bit of it with Andy Cortez. Of course.

He knows I love spending time with him. It was a really good time together. It was a good time, actually. Yeah. It was a really great time. What did we do, Andy? We continued our Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth play through. Yeah.

Can you believe that me and Andy were lined up with Final Fantasy 7 rebirth to the point where we were like, you know what? What if we just play together? And I said, Andy, pick up the controller and play for me. Let's have some fun. Soon as the gameplay starts, Mike goes, who's this lady? And I said, oh, I met her in the last episode.

I don't know. And then immediately something in the chat goes, and Mike, you've met her. You talked to her before. And he was like, ah, you know, I don't know. Who's this lady? I know that voice. There's a lot of characters in the game. You're sharing the screen on Discord and is watching the other person.

I was sending him the feed, yeah. Yeah. I mean, when he plays anyway, it's always like, Andy, you play, like, during the whole marathon. It was like him just trying to give somebody else to control her. So I figured I'll play it. He was like, I want to experience the story. I don't want to play the damn thing, though. Yeah, I don't know.

Fine. How dare you? I'm going to do that to the game with the year of 2024. Damn, wow. Is it? It's my number one right now. It's my number one. But you don't want to play it.

But today, we're going to talk about. Wait, what do you mean? You have to play. You just said you don't want to play it. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. And then you didn't even vote it. Remember remember when HiFi rush was number one, he didn't even vote it?

That was the only person to put it in my content. There was games. Texas chainsaw mass. Only up came out. That's not true, bless. I voted for hi-fi. You know Tim did as well. That's true.

That's true. Come on. Ladies and gentlemen, of course, we have a very fun games cast topic for you today because we are giving you the full black myth Wukong review from kind of funny games. We'll be talking with Andy and Bless who've got their hands on the sticks to tell you about their experience and their thoughts with this big upcoming. title. Of course, don't forget this is the Kind of Funny Games cast each and every

weekday. We get together to talk about the biggest reviews, previews, and topics in the video game world live here on Twitch.tv.tv slash Kind of Funny Games YouTube and of course later on podcast services around the globe. If you love what we do, please consider supporting us here

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and you'll get them ad free. Consider supporting this 11-person small business if you can. For a chance to be part of our shows, don't forget you can submit your thoughts and opinions via YouTube super chats as we go on. I'll be checking those throughout the show. So if you have any questions, concerns, thoughts about Blacksmith, Wukong that you want our two experts on the panel to answer, Now is your opportunity throughout today's show to do just that.

Some housekeeping for you. Kind of Funny Games is an 11-person small business that's all about live talk shows. Today, you've gotten Kind of Funny Games daily talking about Black Myth Wu Kong's content creator restrictions with Andy and Bless earlier. So you can check that out on YouTube and on podcast services. Up next, you'll have Mike and Nick just chatting on YouTube and on Twitch talking about our weekends, talking about what's going on in the world. whole lot of fun with that one. And if you're a kind of funny member, today's Gregway, is me taking over Greg Miller's spot on today's Gregway. What will I talk about?

Not quite sure yet. Maybe about how Roger needs to be checked. There's a little teaser for you. And you can get the kind of funny podcast this afternoon and tomorrow on YouTube and on podcast services around the globe. What Roger do to you? He's just making me mad. He's just so cool now and he doesn't want to make time for me. It's like we were friends. Then he got that car. And that was the end. Just ruined it all. It always comes back to the yard. You never should have bought that Toyota.

It's Roger. I'll always remember that. Of course, thanks to our Patreon producers who make our dreams reality, Carl Jacobs and Delaney Twining. Today, we are brought to you by hymns and aura frames, but I'll tell you all about that in just a little bit. For now, let's start the show with topic of the show.

Today's topic of the show is Black Myth, Wukong, the review from the team here. here at KadaFundi. Don't forget the super chat with your questions and concerns about today's games cast, if you have any. But guys, just a quick little rundown for you. Of course, Black Myth Wukong releases August 20th, 2000,

24. So if you're on the West Coast, it's late tonight, but really Tuesday tomorrow, it's developed and published by Game Science. It's releasing on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S. Currently sitting at a Metacritic of 81 on PC

when you click in there. Andy Cortez, as someone who has not played Black Myth Wu Kong, as someone who has not seen it, I have questions about what is the game? Because I think when I first saw these trailers, I got from software, souls like vibes. But I guess it's not that from what people tell me. So, Andy, what is Black Myth Wu Kong?

Before we get into you and Blessings, Reviews, and the scores, I just want to know, what is this game? Blackmuth, Wukong is an action game with a lot of soulslike tendencies. I've seen a lot of people's sort of feedback and thoughts on what Black Myth Wu Kong is and is it a Soulslike or is it not? I still think it has plenty of Soulslike DNA in there that it can't, you can't really deny when you're facing a lot of bosses with that health bar that pops up on the bottom and then you have to dodge at the right time and know these enemy

patterns and you've got to be selective with when you're trying to attack and you're not just button mashing a whole lot or else you get punished. like that's a souls like style boss fight to me and they're all they're always very grand in nature right so it's a it's a very action like game um you don't have to uh it's definitely closer to like stellar blade and lies of p in terms of how the combat goes with all of your abilities you have so many abilities in this video game it's based on journey to the west and the sort of story of sun wukong and you fight a lot of bosses,

you experience a story that I'm sure you'll understand if you know anything about Journey to the West as somebody like me who knows really nothing about Journey to the West other than that like Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball had a lot of, they were inspired by that story. You're going to see a lot of references that you probably would understand if you are aware of the source material. I was not, but it is a very, very cinematic-like,

souls like sort of style game. The cutscenes are gorgeous. It's using Unreal Engine 5. The visuals are freaking outstanding and it's a very, very large video game. Okay. It's a big old video game. I am not done with it. Well, let's jump into it, of course. I want to know

how long you both have spent, talk about your review scores and how you're feeling right now. So bless, I'll kick it to you since Andy kicked us off. Where are you at, how you're feeling right now before we get into Andy's review? Yeah, so I'm about 11 point five hours into the game. I've been enjoying it a lot. I'm not going to give it a score because I am nowhere

near far enough in this game to give it a final score. And so like this is a review so far and I think this episode overall is going to be a review so far because I don't think Andy's beat it either. But for where I'm at in the game, I'm enjoying it a lot. I think there are pros and cons to it, mostly pros.

The visuals are insane. I really love looking at this game. The environments look fantastic. I think the character art and direction for the most part I really like, I really enjoy and the world feels super unique in terms of tone

vibe, what's going on in the story. I'm like Andy that I'm not super familiar with Journey to the West outside of things like Dragon Ball or like other things I've taken inspiration from it. But being introduced to a lot of the story elements through this game has been fun because it feels so different. It feels so fresh.

If like, you know, going through the bosses and fighting a crouching tiger and like, you know, having the bosses be like these different like animals, these different beasts, these different, um, Yagawa, thank you. The Yagwe, right? Like, so cool, I think they're fucking awesome. Um, the pace of the combat is something that I think is both a pro and a con to me,

where it is, it's been hard for me to adapt coming from a lot of the action games that I played recently, right? Because I've been coming off of, what, Eldon Ring, Shadow of the Yertree, probably being the last, like, more difficult action game that I played recently. But even before that, it was Stellar Blade. And before that it was Liza P. Right. when we're talking about the more Souls-like action games.

This game, I'll describe it as being more on the Souls-like side than the pure action-r-rpg side, but even with that, it has a completely different pace, where the light attack that you're, like, doing with your staff is, like, very swift, like, you're getting a lot of hits in, but it feels like it's not doing that much damage. But then your heavy attack takes, like, quite a second to load up and actually execute, and that'll do more damage,

depending on, like, even if you have focus points built up, which is like another system that's laid on top of it. With that, I think the abilities are cool. When you press R2, it brings up like a list of abilities that you can do that are tied to your face buttons. And so one of the first ones you start off with is immobilization, which freezes an enemy in place. And so you hold R2, press square, boom, you freeze an enemy,

and you can get some hits off of them. And when you upgrade that in the skill tree, which is pretty robust, that then provides you with, like, different, like, skills based on that, right? So, like, I think one of them is if you freeze an enemy while they're mid-attack, that like gives you a boost on like when you're attacking them. And there are other things like that run on top of that. But I found that ability to be pretty satisfying. And the other abilities that are tied to that R2,

I think have been pretty cool. Interesting to manage though, because they all take mana. And like for where I'm at in the game, mana isn't as plentiful. And he's been giving me advice to go back in like respect. And I think that's what I've been trying to do with my last time, booted up the game.

I'm like, all right, let's figure out the skill tree system. because so far with where I'm at, the boss fights have been pretty intense and have been pretty difficult. And it's a mixture of, oh man, I really like this fight. I really like the design of this boss to frustration of being like,

man, I feel like the difficulty is like scaling toward like on the frustrating side, right? And this is me coming off of, again, Shadow of the Earth Tree and Stellar Blade and Liza P. and Armored Corps and like a bunch of more difficult action games. For some reason, this one is frustrating me more than others

and it could be a get good. It very well might be a get good one but I think also part of it is just that they're going for something very different and unique in this combat system that I don't know where I land with yet because parts of it I like parts of it I don't love as much but I do like

the cinematics, I do like the visuals, I do like the tone of the game I think it has a lot going for it and as of where I'm at right now I'm having a pretty good time. Okay, well now you say 11.5 hours in there's more pros and will you return to this? Is this something where you're like,

oh, Mike, I just needed a break, I'll be back? What's your vibe right now? That's what I want to know. See, that's a deeper question that has less to do with, I think, my review of this game, because, like, I think overall, I'm saying that I think this game is great so far.

Will I come back, I think that is to be seen. Okay. A lot of that has to do with how many of games of this difficulty we're getting nowadays, where I think I've gone from, like, being super excited

to get a difficult action game. Like when Stellar Blade came out, I was so into it, right? I'm like, yeah, beat my ass, fucking rub my nose in it, fuck me up, like, let's go. I'm gonna train, I'm gonna get better and do all the shit, right?

And I think after doing, again, Liza P last year, and then Stellar Blade and then Shadow of the Earth Tree, I think I'm just tired. I think I've hit a point where I'm like, I need a break from these super difficult action games, man. Like, I can't keep doing this,

especially for review. Because it really is like draining after a while, especially now that we're getting these things back to back. I just did Elder Ring last month. And so I think I'm going to go back and probably finish it because I do think it's a really cool game and I think it has a lot of cool stuff going on with it.

Right now, honestly, I think I'm excited to hopefully soon get Astrobot and probably just spend my time playing Astrobot. Because I think for me and my mood, I'm more in a mood to play something a bit more comforting. But I don't think that has to do with the quality of game of Blackmiff. That's just the pure me thing. Okay. Yeah.

Andy, let's talk about it. You've put the most time in here in the office between you and Bless. what's the review so far what's the score what's the vibe talk to me about it based on how many chapters i know there are which i don't even think i can mention i'm assuming i'm around 80% of the way through the game got about 36 to 37 hours into it uh it's just it's really really large it's just like these areas that sort of open up near the end there's a lot of different paths to go down it's not an open world game but there are just large zones to kind of it's the feels kind of constricting with how the level design is,

but there's a lot of enemies, a lot of bosses. I think pound for pound, this game probably has the most enemy variety in a style of game like this. There are just non-stop, large enemies and bosses that you were fighting, mini-bosses, all sorts of styles,

elites, you know, there's all sorts of different levels of difficulties that's getting thrown at you. And I think that may be why, when I posted the image that I was playing the game on Steam Deck, a lot of people were like, holy shit, 120 gigs. And I'm kind of not surprised by that because of the amount of characters and unique-looking bosses that there are.

Like, you're not kind of just getting reshades or, like, you're not getting this enemy who's now blue or this enemy that's now yellow where they're just sort of changing material or a texture. It's like, this is a completely new model with a new texture set. Like, this game is really, really large. There's a lot of freaking enemies. At this point, I feel like, whenever you, whenever you take. on a couple of enemies, you'll see your journal pop up, and here's these new enemies that you just

face, and it sort of gives you the rundown on a lot of the different enemies you've faced, and a lot of them still in Chinese. There's still like a localization thing that they're trying to hopefully get done, because that part's not done yet. There's a lot of like different enemies that you can't even read what their descriptions are unless you, I was using like my Google lens to like take a photo and then like translate through the phone. But yeah, this game is very, very, very large. I don't really feel too comfortable putting a score on it right now, but if I was to do like, hey, here's where I'm at right now.

This is not a final score by any means. I would give this an 8 out of 10 great. Okay. I think it's, I think it's I think it's really surprising in what it does like exploration-wise. I always think like the special sauce for a Souls game is not only is the combat good? Are these boss fights like worth a damn? And do they kind of make me feel like this is a really special, unique thing that I can't experience in a whole lot of other places?

But are you going to extra mile and giving me a random NPC that gives me a quest line that will then open up, holy shit, this is a whole brand new area that I could have missed if I didn't do that thing. Like, that's the sort of real special stuff that I love in video games and having that discovery and having those moments of, I thought I was done with this area and God dang, there's a whole new spot with a whole new, a couple new characters that I'm talking to with a big old quest line and here's a new giant boss to take on.

All that stuff is like super special to me and this game does that, has done that quite a bit so far and I'm really enjoying those moments. I don't think I love the combat. I think the combat's okay so far which you're going to be doing it a lot.

There's not a whole lot that's bad about it. There's so many different versatile ways to kind of make your build. There's a lot of different skill trees and a lot of options to re-spec. Respecking is free, which I think is fantastic. You don't have to have a special larval tier like you do in Eldon Ring in order to respect your character. You could just go to any little bonfire or your side of grace or whatever and you can respect there.

And I both love that and I don't love that because it requires a lot of like, is what I'm doing right now working against this enemy? Should I be rethinking my strategies? Do I want to trial and error this this much? Am I enjoying it this much to want to trial and error this much? Where it's like, if I change my whole fucking build after fighting this boss for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, and I go into the fight, I'm like, oh, maybe this isn't working out. Do I go back and redo everything?

Like, I think there's so many options that you're kind of almost, you have that like decision paralysis. where there's so many things you can be leveling up that you don't really ever know what's the best most consistent way to be good. That's where I'm at right now with the current boss that I'm fighting where I'll go in and I'll exhaust all my abilities, right, like over the course of the fight

and then look at the health bar and I'm like, well, their health bar is only halfway? Is this build just not the build for this fight? And like, do I need to go back and like explore more and just level up or reallocate my skills? And I found that it's kind of tough to get the gauge. Like it's been better when I talk to you

or when I like, you know, any of the other reviews about like, hey, what are you running and maybe like speccing towards that direction as opposed to like being in the game fighting and being like, ah, fuck, I don't know what to do. Yeah. I've struggled with that a bit as well. I read Tamor Hussein's tweets who said like he thinks the game is too easy. And I think if you read his tweets and think that this game's going to be too easy, you're going to be in for a world to hurt. Like there's going to be a couple bosses that are really going to challenge you. And I think that's another problem I have with it is like there's this, there is such a wide goal

between the difficulty and all the other bosses and then the final boss of the chapter. Like, I'm one to two to three trying every other enemy or mini boss in the game and then you get to the final boss like, oh, this is a big skill check.

What the hell? Like, this kind of came out of nowhere. And I found that to be a little bit frustrating in the consistency of what the difficulty is. And I was stuck on the boss that Bless was on for about maybe an hour and a half or so. and once I respect, it sort of felt like I, you know, kind of found the right way to,

or the right way for me to play it, rather. But while you're doing that, you're still spamming the same combo, and it's the same move over and over again. And I think that's where when I hear comparisons, this plays more like a devil may cry or a bayonetta, it's like I don't agree with that at all because you're not chaining together combos in super interesting ways. Like you're still just spamming the,

the same thing and you might hit heavy here which will do something else and it'll interrupt your like combo but you're still for the most part it's you have that staff and it's swing swing and then you do like a little twirl of your staff and it and multiple hits and then you do one final hit at the chain at the end of the chain

there are other similar to like Gosa Sushima where you have different stances there's other stances you can level up in but that requires you like taking shit out of where you know taking points out of stuff that you might already have leveled up

to go into these other stances. And that may only benefit the visuals of how it looks like how you fight because for the most part, you are still just doing the same combo over and over and over again. And you might get a couple of upgrades that add on maybe one or two extra hits to that combo,

but for the most part, it feels very, very samey after a while. It starts to get very, very repetitive. And you're only really finding the joy in when the cool down is done on that one ability you really like, or you have several abilities that have these cool downs,

and that's why I found the joy in the combat is knowing, um, like, I'll put it this way, to make an Eldon Ring comparison, I sort of stopped leveling stuff up in, like,

your normal attack or your strength or whatever. There aren't really those comparisons here, but I started putting more points towards, like, leveling up your, your mimic ash and you're, you know, like the different abilities that make the combat not just I'm swinging my weapon and I'm summoning this thing or I am using this one ability that turns me into like it makes my body like sort of like a steel rock thing and an enemy hits me they bounce off and if I timed that right then my next attack will be stronger I have found more joy in all the sort of outside abilities as opposed to just swinging the staff combo over and over again because that stuff starts to get pretty tired.

And as of right now, the boss that I'm stuck at right now, I'm about an hour in, really, really annoyed with this boss. And I can't wait to break down why I'm annoyed with this boss. He's got the whiteboard. He's got the whiteboard. Okay. Well, I'd like to break down more. I want to go a little bit deeper on this game, talking about combat, world design, and more

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of funny. This is the best offer of the season, so don't miss out. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back, everyone. Guys, let's get a little bit deeper. Of course, I remind everyone watching live on YouTube and on Twitch, don't forget if you want to get involved in the conversation, if you want to learn about this game via a boss fight, world design, whatever, please get involved with the super chats over on YouTube. I'll read those out as they come in and we can ask a little bit more. But blessing, you did bring up, you said, hey, Mike, I want to make sure everybody knows that we reviewed this on PC. Yeah.

We did not have PS5 or Xbox codes. This was strictly a PC build. Yeah, it was strictly a PC build. And I believe that's across the board for all the reviewers. We only reviewed this on PC. So we can only give those impressions. Sounds good.

Game is coming on PS5 as well. We'll see how that runs on PS5. Okay. I'm very curious to see. Did it feel like it was struggling on PC? Because I read some, like, Mitchell Saltzman was playing on the big, beefy PC and was having problems with the,

you know, some of the problems. I'm not the person to ask because, like, my PC build was struggling with this whole thing as well. That's one of the reasons but I also didn't get further. It's just the fact that there was a day, it was a weekend I was playing this,

where my PC stopped connecting to my monitor. And I'm pretty sure my, like this game was just pushing my graphics card. Okay. Like crazy. But also, when was the last time you had updated your graphics card blessing?

I don't know, man. But, like, they brought it in for Kevin and Andy to, like, update and figure out. And I still, like, they're still hitching. Even after, like, they update everything, they're still, like, hitching and, like, certain stuff where I'm like, I don't know if I'm loving this performance,

but Andy being way further in a game is the person I asked about performance. Andy, performance-wise? Well, I got a big old BVPC, and it works perfectly great for me. But I know a lot of people with other PCs that are equally very highly powered that may just have a weird sort of combination of CPU and GPU. I know one of Blessing's issues on his PC was that he used to have an AMD GPU in it. And swapping over to Nvidia required like a little bit more than you would want. That's why, you know, that comes with the PC gaming, you know?

Somebody asked what the context of blessings card. I have an RTX 30. 3080 TI. So very, very powerful still. Yeah. Guys, I got a lot I want to talk about. I want to get in because I want to talk about world design. I want to know about the enemies.

I want to talk about these bosses, right? I also read a cool one with Mitchell Salsman's review about the story and how they present the story at some of these cut scenes sounds really awesome, different kind of styles of cut scenes. But I want to talk about whatever you guys want to start with, world design enemies, bosses. Andy, you brought the whiteboard. Where should we start? I mean, we can talk about

we can talk about world design. Okay. Yeah, tell me, is it levels like I've seen, is it open world like an Eldon Ring, Shadow of the Earth tree? Will there be the wow moments of level design like we've seen in previous Dark Souls games? What's this really look like? A to point A point B linear? What's this like? There's a handful of

those sort of like, oh shit, this kind of loops back over here. But it's not by any means a level of even like what Liza P was doing with shortcuts and what most Souls games are known for doing with shortcuts. So I think the design gets kind of very confusing because a lot of areas look the same. There's not a whole lot of POIs that really make these worlds look super different where you're kind of running around.

And I know some games will make you want to feel lost on purpose. And that's part of like that one area where there's like this one dungeon and Eldon Ring. I think about that. It's like, wait, what floor am I on? And the part of it is like to confuse. player. Here a lot of it is like very gorgeously rendered and arded outworld, but they're just kind of confusing in some places because you can't really tell a whole lot of the places apart. So the way it's sort of built out is it's sort of built out in like settings and locations where

here's a location and you will have three different spots you can kind of open up in that location and that and each one of those three spots will have four to five bonfires or checkpoints that you may have unlocked. Um, or in some cases you might unlock a really special secret spot because you got that one awesome item from a mission you did, you know, three hours ago. And now you can open up this one gate and that opens up a little special section for another special boss. So there's a lot of like cool little surprises like that. But for the most part, it's a really large zone with the most invisible walls you'll ever run in. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Wow. So frustrating in the way that, like, it feels like they cared more about the looks than how you would feel as the player. Because, like, of course, all this looks extremely gorgeous. Unreal Engine 5 looks freaking fantastic. And you'll be walking down a path, and there's some rocks next to you that are about a foot up high. And you jump, and it's like, oh, I can't go.

Okay, I can't go that way. I guess not. And that's the whole game. Like, the whole game has these spots. like all over the damn place. It's really, really annoying and frustrating to deal with. But it's based on like, you start off at this one bonfire and maybe there's a large open field

that lead into like three pathways and you might just pick a certain pathway and feel like you're kind of progressing and then you'll realize, oh, there was that other pathway I hadn't thought about, let me go back and suddenly that's going to open up a new sort of zone and that'll lead to other pathways. So a lot of it is like hallways upon hallways

of large outdoor areas or maybe you're sort of like in these little like I don't want to say residential but it's just like here's all these little like castle sections and things like that but much larger than I expected it to be I thought it was going to be a lot more linear a lot more just go this way maybe there's one alternate path at most times it feels like there's always like two to three alternate paths that go down and enemy variety in that Is there like generic smaller enemies that you whoop up, boop up on and then move to a larger one? Like, what does that look like throughout the world as I'm running around?

Well, I think that's where a lot of the variety comes from is that like every one of these zones and every one of these, for the lack of a better term, biomes will have their own. Here's the small, annoying dudes. Oh, here's this other sort of elite character that's a bit healthier. Oh, this other elite is there as well. And there's just like the most enemy variety I've experienced in one of the, these games in a long time. Really?

There is just so many freaking enemies in each one of these areas that you keep on discovering and running into. And are you building up, am I earning soul, some sort of currency to spend? If I die, do I lose them and restart? What is the build on this one gameplay-wise? It's right of XP. Like, you're not losing. You don't die and lose souls.

Okay, that's nice. You go through, you kill enemies. And as you kill enemies, you're just building up XP like any other action RPG. Cool. And it's nice, too, because, like, there'll be some time. where you'll hit a spot, these like meditation points, and the game's like, oh, here's one full skill point for you, right? You just have to explore and find that stuff.

And it's fairly generous with the XP. Yeah, you have those like Gosesusha meditation points where it's like, because you explored, because you decided to go the extra mile and go further down that path that you thought maybe there's nothing down, there's a little section to just like you sit down at and it cuts into this very Gosesushusha-looking cutscene

where you're sitting down and it, you know, the sort of, music changes, the vibe changes, and it's just like these slow panic cameras in the environment around you, and it's you sitting down there. And at the end of it, it's like, here's a little, uh, a little skill point. Go spend it somewhere. Go spend it on one of your million places. That's the other thing. Yeah, what's the skill tree look like. It has to be generous with the XP and with the skill points because, yeah, the skill tree, very robust. It's like, oh, yeah, so you open up the menu. Um, I forget what the menu is called. It has a specific name for it. It's like fucking personal growth or some shit like that. Um, but, you know, you go there and there's a skill tree for like all the like the different like abilities you get like I mentioned the R2 you know list of abilities like the mobilization the other things you can upgrade those individually and then also there's foundation which is like basically like your foundational skills things like health things like stamina things like basic um abilities and like I think there are a few more skill trees as well like there's a lot to upgrade in this game

any recommended to first timers to look into or maybe spend some points here maybe go play with something wild and crazy that we wouldn't be in? I would say put a lot of points into these extra abilities that you're getting, not just your combat. Don't just think that your combat's going to carry you. I'm sure there'll be some psychos out there that want to just go like a full combat build or whatever, but I just don't think the weapon hits hard enough to really feel like it matters. Like I, there's so much of me while playing this is like,

I wish I was able to parry with this staff. I wish this was just. I wish it was just the Sekiro, Lys of P, stellar blade, like, let me wear down your stance and then be able to attack more. Because, yeah, I was going to ask how you feel about the, like, defensive options in this game. Because it's mainly just a dodge. And you have a perfect dodge, right, where it feels cool because you'll do like a cool, like, a cool, like, sound effect. And you slow down. Yeah, a little slowdown.

You leave behind, like, a little clone of yourself. Which then leads to extra options to, like, oh, I want to level this ability where when I perfect dodge, now I'm stronger for a little while. or now I have a larger extra perfect dodge window or whatever. So there's like little things to kind of build up on that, but I'm with you. And that comes back to like what I mentioned about the combat system being different and like somewhat interesting, but me not knowing whether I like it or love it yet. Because yeah, like I almost would prefer just a straight up like Perry or a block or something that feels a bit more, oh, I don't have to like get out the way because then I think it turns into if you're not perfect dodging,

you might dodge right into an attack, right? Like it feels weird in that way. Yeah, but yeah, so much of me because of the essence of using this staff, which like, as you upgrade the staff, it starts to look cool and there's like different, maybe their staff will give you better stamina regeneration or whatever. I'm just sort of making up some sort of power add on. So much of it while I'm using it, I wish I was just able to thing, ding, thing, perfectly like Perry enemies. I feel like I would probably enjoy the combat a little bit more but I'd recommend for the first timer don't be

like the game wants you to use all of these abilities because there's a lot of them there's a lot of not only just abilities but these summons where you use both triggers at the same time and you become an enemy that you may have killed along the way and these are special larger ones that when you're fighting them

during the fight you're like oh your health bar is a lot beefier, you're probably going to become a dude I could summon after this fight is done, after I take your ass out. And there's so much variety there. And right now I've been using the whole time of these enemies, I'm sure you've seen in the trailers, these dudes are like these big ass heads. And they're like, their head is like almost the size of their whole torso. And one of their attacks while they attack you is like, they hit you on the ground. They like headbutt you into the ground or whatever. And I've been using that dude because not only is that ability really, really powerful

and like, man, it really hits for just one big chunk and then you immediately teleport back to your dude or you, not teleport, but you immediately transform back to like your, the destined one. But each one of these spirits also has a passive to go along with it. So this dude not only has that big move that I could summon every once in a while,

but as long as he's equipped and as long as I'm, he's in like my hot bar or whatever, he gives me extra defense. So that adds to my points and that makes me feel good. I'd be like, cool, I want to feel beefier and more defensive during these fights. But there might be a dude who shoots

that you could summon, that you turn into, that you're not summoning, by the way, you're just turning into these guys for the duration of whatever their move is. One of them I have shoots a lot of like fire arrows that lights the enemies on fire and does good fire damage. And while he's equipped,

I have, I think, like, extra jumping stamina or jumping attacks or something like that. So each one of these dudes has passives. And you guessed it, you can also level these dudes up. So these dudes use like a certain currency to level up with. And there's like six different levels, six different evolutions to their leveling, you know. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of shit in this game. And a lot of stuff to get really overwhelmed with.

Yeah. So yeah, to Andy's point about the, you know, you might not want to go all in on just like combat upgrades. Yeah, like, I think one of the things Andy mentioned during the review period was like he had reallicated the skill points to like a lot of the mana stuff because all those schools are using mana. Like all the R2 stuff is using mana. When you transform, I believe when you transform with the RTL2 that that uses a different thing. They use the different thing. They use the different I use a lot of like systems to kind of. There's a lot of meters to just like, all right,

I got to make sure that I'm, you know, keep it up to date on all these, on all these different things. But yeah, I think focusing on stuff that's going to allow you to use those abilities is probably more crucial than just straight up let me hit harder because Or uses Chi rather, sorry. Yeah. Chee and might not the same. Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, like wanting to be able to at least manage those abilities as much as you can because I think you're going to get more mileage from being able to rotate between your different abilities as opposed to just like hitting harder with that attack. Okay. Well, we talked about recommending some skill tree to look at it and try some things. I want to jump into the YouTube super chat

Mello Fellow writes in and says, what language are you guys playing on? Of course, you probably have some language options there. Is there a recommended one? Did you find maybe the English voice acting wasn't up to snuff with the traditional? What did you guys think? I almost immediately switched to the Chinese voice acting, but then I went back only because it helps out with notes. Because I was enjoying the Chinese voice acting more. Okay.

But then I switched back to English just so I could more easily kind of take notes while a cutscene was happening. Because there's a lot of cutscenes, and these cutscenes, are really stunning. Like, they're so damn good with the camera work and making a shot interesting and the motion and the animations all look freaking fantastic. And it reminds me a lot of

the god of war cutscenes, 2018 and Ragnarok, like not taking away the one shot. Like, they're not doing just the single camera thing or whatever. Like the way the camera moves, it feels where a god of war. Especially, you know, you go to open up

a little treasure chest, it kind of feels like that. You're not having cradles, like, fist into the freaking box or whatever. but so much of the way the camera moves and the way that they are presenting these cutscenes and these characters to you really, really damn good.

Like, some of the top notch, most... The way this game opens is, like, this looks like the most expensive video game I've ever played in my life. That's the thing that I think is probably most impressive about this game is that it does... It balanced so many of what a lot of different action games do well

and manages to pull it together and not, like, not have one part of it be like, oh, this is whack, right? Yeah, there's nothing like extra weak about this. Yeah, like the worst thing I could probably say is that, yeah, the combat is not my favorite, but like it's still good. Yeah, absolutely. It's still a fun time.

And you do that. You have like some of the souls like influences. You have the god of war influence when it comes to, I think, yeah, the camera work and the cutscene work and stuff. You have like, you know, a lot of those different abilities that you're throwing in there. You're transforming into these different things. You have the environments that are looking beautiful. You have the path design that isn't just straight linear. You have different paths to go through.

There's so much that this game is doing and balancing. But I have to like, it's hard. to play through this and not give it the credit for, oh damn, you nailed a lot of this. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm playing in English also. Big place, okay. What do you think?

At first, because Andy had started this game, I think before I did. And I think you had mentioned that you had switched to Chinese early on. I didn't like one of the voice actors and since then that has not really like popped up ever again. That's the thing. As soon as I started the game, I was like, ooh, yeah,

I might have changed it to Chinese, but I let it go because I'm someone who really preferred as dub over like reading just subtitles. And once I got further into the game, yeah, it just didn't become a problem. I was like, oh, this character is not speaking. And so cool. Like on all the other characters, I think for the English voice acting, again, not the most stellar voice acting, but I do, I like a lot of the characterizations because you'll

meet like a lot of goofy characters, a lot of like characters that you don't expect like that tone out of them. But they play a lot with, I think, giving a lot of the side characters personality. Yeah, like a fun, goofy, like, not even goofy, but I guess more fun personality. Okay. Well, thank you to Mello Fellow for writing in on that super chat. Don't forget throughout today's episode if you want to get involved, use that

super chat function on YouTube, ask your questions and comments about the game with these two reviewers today. Andy, I want to go in and talk about bosses with you. You brought up mini bosses and larger like end of chapter bosses on the, of course, trailers. We've seen some really incredible looking beasts

there. What has that been like? You talk about enemy variety. Is it really that awesome? What's it like? Um, I mean, one thing I continue to be impressed by is not really having a whole lot of repetition in what these bosses look like and what these bosses are doing on the battlefield. I keep on kind of expecting, which I don't mind, granted. Like, I, I know some people will knock from software, you know, reusing this boss's movesets or whatever. Like, I don't mind that at all. I'm just expecting it more and more nowadays, I guess. And, uh, a lot of these bosses just feel really, really unique. And they look. so fantastic and the large ones will have an awesome cutscene leading into it one of the ones a couple of ones i've experienced recently have had like jaw dropping like holy shit type moments um all you know whether it's like something gigantic you're battling or whether it's just a normal

humanoid sort of person that's like you got to kind of dodge around and be selective with your attacks but always doing stuff that feels really unique uh it's never just a do you with a sword kind of coming at you. A lot of them are going to be very mystical beings. A lot of them will go up into the air and then you'll see the spots on the ground you have to avoid because they're using certain abilities or whatever. Like this

the variety and not only the way the bosses look and the enemies that you're experiencing is like super high, but the variety and like these movesets are also really staggering. Okay. Awesome shit. Blessing any boss fight stand out to you during your early time with this? I think there is, they can be hit or miss for me.

In terms of the visual design, I had sent another reviewer an image of the Tiddy Kong racing character select screen and I was like, the bosses remind me of this. If you put these guys in Unreal Engine 5 and made them edgy, this is what a lot of the bosses remind me of. I do think, to get into this point,

there's a lot of variety. There's a lot of different bosses and they all have unique movesets, which is great. But I'll get to one of the bosses I spent a lot of time with was like a tiger-like boss. I couldn't help but look at this guy

and be like, oh no man you got Tony the Tiger vibes you're just the tiger but you know like I think the variety is there the movesets are wildly different I think there are some some bosses I've gone to

where I'm like ah this move set is kind of more frustrating than fun for me but again I'm also very early on I'm probably still like I'm probably what a third of the way through I'd imagine so I can't speak for the whole thing now Andy you brought out the whiteboard and I want to get to that

right now. But before that, I want to shout out TJ Tris, who wrote in with the $2 super chat and says, do we know how the PS5 version runs? We do not because these two reviewers played on PC only so you will not be able to hear from us what that is like. Of course, it comes out. And I don't know if PS5 codes have been sent out. Yeah, but I mean, the game comes out late tonight here

on the West Coast tomorrow, officially everywhere. So you will probably find that out tomorrow and the next day from others who get it on PS5. But these two right here, exclusively PC. Andy, you brought out a whiteboard. What do you want to tell me about? What's the deal? I'm going to, for audio lists, I'm going to draw a boss for everybody that is not the boss that I am talking about.

I'm going to draw a similar-looking version of it because I don't want to spoil anything. Okay. But for, I'm going to call this guy, like, who's the guy in Mortal Kombat with the horsebody? Oh, Motaro? I'm going to draw Mutaro right here. I'm going to draw Mutaro. Okay. So this dude, large, like, kind of, tall-old.

torso, right? He's got arms, but then he's got a horse body, right? Ah, yes. I see what you're drawing. A horse body. Kind of got the back legs over here. That's the horse body right there, right? What kind of head? Got a horse head? For the sake of this story, let's give him a horse head.

Okay, he's got a horse head. I don't like a duck kind of, but here. There's, there's, there's the horse nostrils. That kind of looks horsey a little bit. I still see a duck. It's fucking me up. Yeah, it looks like like a gold duck. Yeah, I was just a gold duck too. All right, well, fucking, let me give me... I see it, though.

I see it. It looks like evil gold duck. Shit. Okay. Well, I'm finding a dude like this right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I've never felt frustration with a boss like this

where the collision of the dude is so off and frustrating. Because if you think, Mike, you walk up to this gentleman, to this gold duck minotaur-looking gentleman, if you think, I'm going to walk up to you and I'm going to attack your front area. Yeah, your main torso, yeah, uh-huh.

You can't do that because I think they want to prevent the player from getting stuck in the grundle. Oh, yeah. Well, we talk a lot about Souls games getting up in the grundle and staying theirs, right? It's possible that's what the game is like preventing you from doing.

Okay. But there are so many times with how, you know, the way I play, I build up these focus points and these focus points lead to really, big, heavy attacks. And the way that I've been playing, every other enemy,

I'm talking like, probably in the hundreds. Because, you know, I think I unlock the thing that said, like, 63 out of 68 enemies encountered. Or maybe it's just like, maybe it's around like 60 or 70 different enemies or whatever. Okay.

When I try to do my large sort of attack that is a sort of over the head, bam, you're standing right in front of the motherfucker. You can't move any closer to him. You will not hit him. Okay. Because this zone is like... It's a no-no zone.

It's a no-no zone. Like the character collider is not in line with the actual like collider of what constitutes a hit on the dude. A hit box. Yeah, yeah. It is so frustrating when suddenly this dude 38 hours into the game requires you to do different stuff

because what you've been doing, is just not working. Also, he, also, dude's got a phase where your, your stamina bar is like half end, and you can't roll as fast enough, and I'm like, okay, well, you're, you're making me play a different video game now. Like, what did

I spend all these fucking points for? Like, what do I got to redo and respect all these stuff for you? Like, this is very, very frustrating, but I straight up, Alt-F4 turned off my PC last night. After about an hour of fighting this dude, and losing in ways that were valid, because I was stupid, and just didn't

dots or I think. But the amount of times that I had a full three little bar focus thing, heavy attack primed and ready to go. And I know this thing's going to stagger him. And I swing and my staff is just boom. And it just whiffs. And I'm right in front of the motherfucker. And it's just so frustrating to experience stuff like that in games. And I know that Mitchell Sossman had issues with one of the final bosses where he was like, I'm falling through the world. And that's like, that sucks when you're dying in ways that you don't feel as fair.

This boss is just pissing me off right now and I want to get back to him but I also just want to say let me take a week off maybe. Let me take a little break. Yeah. It's so frustrating, dude. Like no other boss has given me an issue like this. Every other boss has given me issues in terms of like

every other large boss, right? Because again, the way these chapters work you fight a lot of dudes on the way to these final encounters. And then you get to the final encounter, it's like, holy shit, you are turning up the difficulty.

So now I'm going from one to three attempts to suddenly, I'm on this dude for 30 minutes now. I'm on this dude for an hour or whatever. But this boss in particular is like, just the fucking worst. You talk about respecking. Is that free? Is that at a cost?

It is free. How much respecking am I really doing in this game? Yeah, as I was mentioning earlier, it's like, It's something that you can do for free at any time. Yeah. But I was mentioning like the trial and error of I'm 45 minutes into this fight doing it the way I've been doing it. Do I want to take a risk and maybe change to something that I don't, that may be a style that doesn't work for me? And how long am I going to try that out before I eventually try to switch back to something else?

Yeah. That's where some of the frustrations sort of come from. Okay. Well, let's go around the table. Some final thoughts on the game. Of course, now is your opportunity to get your final YouTube super chats in. If you have any questions, comments for these two reviewers of Black Myth Wukong, the review so far from Kind of Funny. Blessing any final thoughts on this one as we wrap it up.

Anything we've missed? I don't know if there's much we missed, you know, like I'm thinking maybe we could have gone deeper on like even just how the heavy attack works because Andy touched on it there a bit. But like that focus point system is pretty different, right? Like having it be that your heavy attack is dictated. by, yeah, how many focus points you have to, like, determine how much more damage you're going to do. And then you press that triangle button, and

you can hold it or you can let it go. And that, like, builds up to this slow, heavy attack that's either going to do a lot of damage or maybe not as much damage depending on how focused up you are. So you're building your light attacks of, like, one, two, three, four, five, and building up this number. Yes.

To then pay off on the heavy attack. Okay. Different. I like it. But it is, like, again, within a combat system that has, I think, again, pros and cons for me. But yeah, overall, I think this is one that I am very fascinated to see the conversation. Once everybody gets their hands on this game, once this game is officially out, I think it's

going to be very fun to see how people take to it. Do people, is this one that people put on that, like, contender status? Because it is, I think, a jack of all trades at some extent. Or do people get frustrated? Do you have the people be like, it's more easier, or it's more difficult or whatever it is, right? Like, I'm very fascinated to see. But yeah, overall, fantastic time.

I'm like, it's one that I think I hope to get back to before the end of the year. I'd like to see more of it because the way I, like, there are certain things that Andy has told me that happened past the point where I'm at in the game where I'm like, ah shit, that does sound pretty cool. You have to, yeah, like, I really highly recommend you continue to play because it, it hits you with some real, a lot of stunning stuff with like, the stunning enemy variety that I've been talking about that I understand where you're coming front of like, this is just a tiger.

Here's a sexy kind of muscular tiger guy. sexy muscular rat guy or whatever. Yeah, I think it really does some awesome stuff visually and just like mechanically. Yeah, and I'm also fascinated to see how's that PS5 version looking. The fact that they didn't send that out has to be worried. But we'll see. We'll see not that far from now.

I did hear, I saw in front of ours Carter Dell on the internet mentioning that he was talking to somebody from the studio saying that the game's been done for a while and they've just been kind of optimizing for a long time. So maybe the console versions do come out and work super great. And we know that PC launch issues are very common because of different specifications and people's different buildouts of, oh, you have a different combo of, we hadn't really built this game with that combo of CPU and GPU in mind. That's why you're having this issue.

Like, I feel like it's a lot easier to kind of nail down how a console game might run. And now that depends on, you know, is it going to be a fall in order situation where it, or even Final Fantasy 16, where it drops to like 720P to do 60 frames, like maybe, but, you know, hopefully it's really nice and optimized. Andy, before you get your final thoughts in, we have Samuel L writing in and says, didn't, no. No. Good one.

Did not knowing the lore impact your enjoyment? You kind of talked about at the beginning of this of both of you kind of knowing the journey. knowing the Journey to the West story, didn't impact your story at all? I would say yes and no, because the way that the game presents itself to you, it's like you're watching, for somebody who knows nothing about Journey to the West,

it's like somebody is showing you the third sequel in the movie where you have no context to what anybody is and who anybody is. But it presents it in, it presents it to you in a way that you do know. And I think that's where a lot of my frustrations come from, where

like when you experience in quote unquote the story of like from soft games it's all like this archaeological historical thing of reading

item descriptions and you might get a cool cutsee for a character that's walking in and you have no idea who he is but the game doesn't really expect you to

the way this game is presented to you and the way these cutscenes are shown to you it's like someone dropped you in 40 hours deep into God of War.

Yeah. And you're like, I don't know what any of this is or who, like, did I miss something, you know? So again, the cutscenes look fucking great and they're awesome. And I'm not watching them, not enjoying them. I just,

I wish I knew more about them while the cutscenes were happening. But I will say at the end of every chapter so far, they hit you with like a really, really large cutscene that is not in game. And they're all really stunning. and they're all so far done in very varied styles. I think that stuff was really, really cool, and I'm excited to see people experience those moments because those are...

It was very artsy at one point. I came up to Andy's desk, and I saw one of them, and I was like, is this Blacksmith? Yeah. I was just like so thrown off of like what that direction for that stuff was. Yeah, very cool. And each one of them, like the most recent one I experienced was a much different style than the first two that I had seen.

And it's a really, really neat way to kind of give you more backstory. And there's plenty of ways to learn more about this. And I'm hoping that the, as somebody who wanted to read a lot of these like descriptions, a lot of them were still in Chinese and I had to kind of like do my own figuring out. So I think that is part of like what their updates will be is like getting the localization 100% down. Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is your review thus far here at kind of funny games with

Andy Am Blessed for Black Myth Wu Kong. of course it is dropping later tonight and tomorrow for all of you listening later on. So please get in the comments down below. Let us know your thoughts if you're jumping in day one from this review. And of course, don't forget tomorrow. I've actually asked the boys if they would stream a little bit of it so we can see it live and inaction. So that will be a whole lot of fun. But that will actually happen after we live react to Gamescom opening night live,

which will go down tomorrow during your normal games cast time slot. So a big day of kind of funny coming your way tomorrow on Tuesday, August, 20th, so make sure to tune in and support and have a whole lot of fun. But your day isn't done here at Kind of Funny Games. We've got a whole lot more content coming your way right now. We're going to transition into the lab where me and Nick Scarpino. We're going to have a fun just chatting section to kick off your work week and your school week.

Then after that, later this afternoon, if you're a Kind of Funny member on Patreon and on YouTube, you can watch as they record the Kind of Funny podcast live and ad free. Until then, thank you so much for supporting us here, Kind of Funny Games. We love enjoying the game and conversation with each and every one of you. And we'll find you here tomorrow. Goodbye. What if we get Domino's? Yeah.