Games You've Shelved 2025

[Mister Jack]

Wuthering Waves

 

This one is really frustrating to me. I caught up on my other free to play stuff so I figured I'd give this one a try. It came to steam and its community glazes it constantly, talking about how it puts Genshin Impact to shame in every way. Well, the truth is they're not entirely wrong. In terms of gameplay and quality of life it does improve a lot of things. Exploration is a lot swifter with free sprinting outside of combat and lots of field gadgets. They even added a free glider that gives you the ability to straight up fly across the map. That's great. The combat is also more active and skill based. That's also great. The cutscenes have better animation than other gacha games. There are also some good puzzles and the devs even seem to listen to player feedback when they do their patches, which I commend. So what's the problem here?

 

The story. Freaking. SUCKS.

 

This is maybe the worst RPG story I've ever seen, or at least it has the worst presentation. As soon as you begin you're overwhelmed with lore terms like resonator and tacet discord and etheric sea and given almost no chance to process what any of it means. I played for weeks and I still have no idea how the hell this universe works. I heard while looking for info that at some point in the past the developers announced they had taken player feedback into account by rewriting NINETY PERCENT OF THE STORY. If this is the after then I'd really hate to see the before. The player base claims it gets better once you reach the second continent but man I just don't know that I have that kind of patience. Even if it does, there's no way it could get THAT much better. If that's not bad enough, these characters are boring and bland. All they do is infodump on you in the cutscenes and almost none of them feel like they have a personality or agency outside of supporting the protagonist. I don't like their designs either with the exception of Lumi, who has a cute design with a light bulb tail and hair curls that make her look like a mouse, but apparently she's the weakest fighter in the game so it's pointless to even use her. I'm the kind of guy who prioritizes gameplay over story but this is an open world RPG. Your story and characters have to grab me at least a little bit to keep me invested. Genshin Impact definitely has a lot of faults that put me off when I went back to it but the Fontaine characters and story arc ended up being extremely well-written and they kept me invested until I finished that region. There's just nothing like that going on here and I hate it because I can tell this game has a lot going for it in other respects. I want to like it. I really do. But I just don't care.

Edited September 21, 2025 by Mister Jack