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WuWa combat vs. ZZZ combat; why I think it is a stupid comparison
9K View2024-07-08There has been a lot of hate thrown towards ZZZ's way after launch (it has only been like a day lol) and a lot of it is from ZZZ being compared to WuWa. ZZZ definitely has flaws, but people are discounting ZZZ as just worse in every way to WuWa. Some aspects are pretty subjective, primarily the tv exploration. I personally don't mind it, but to each their own.
However, the most egregious comparison is to the WuWa combat. It irked me since launch that people were comparing the combat of each game and dismissing ZZZ as just worse WuWa combat. I am kind of biased, since I like ZZZ combat over WuWa, but I did not know why this comparison just put me off. After thinking about it, I realized something.
They are different games.
Now this is an obvious statement, but the gacha community overall treats ZZZ as if it is supposed to be a sequel/clone of WuWa but with the urban punk vibe. It is a completely different game, with completely different combat, yet everyone is making statements such as: "It would be fine if WuWa hadn't come out a month before."(This is a paraphrase of overall sentiment I have found rather than a direct quote) I want you to keep this sentiment in mind as I break down what ZZZ does to differentiate itself from WuWa (its main competitor according to most)
Now to give a comparison to the broader gaming landscape, I think this argument is similar to saying that dark souls/elden ring has better combat than DMC/Bayonetta. Anybody who has played these two types of action games would tell you that this statement is completely stupid. Dark Souls combat is slow and methodical, trading player expression for enemy expression. Rather than the player being able to do whatever they want, they have a limited moveset compared to the many different enemies they will be facing. In DMC and Bayonetta, the enemies are a lot more limited to dark souls, but the player gets 10x the moves at their disposal. Rather than the enemies being harder, the challenge comes from the player getting an insane combo using everything they have. After saying this it should be painfully clear that these are simply different games, and comparing them is beyond idiotic.
And I believe these same principles apply to WuWa vs. ZZZ. WuWa is to dark souls what ZZZ is to DMC, and I think directly comparing the two one is objectively better is wrong. However it is not sufficient just to say this, so I want to discuss each point of ZZZ combat compared to WuWa and see why it is stupid disingenuous.
The Schmovement (thanks Iyo)
The first talking point is the movement (or schmovement). Simply said, ZZZ has more movement. In ZZZ, dashing/dodging is not simply a means for a perfect dodge, you can also use it to cancel out of basically ANY move you want, and this allows you to start and stop combos whenever you want. The perfect dodges as well don't only serve as dodges, they also stop time for a bit. This allows you to either reposition or start a new combo.
I will talk more about dodging later, but the movement in general is just more free. You have seen those Grace clips, and while not every character is Grace, you can dance around the enemies as any character. In WuWa you can also dodge cancel, but more often than not it is hard to start up another combo after dodge canceling. Additionally, characters are just slower in WuWa. You can't dash to reposition in that game as well as you can in ZZZ, and this is intentionally done because of the next point. (This entire point was pretty bad upon further review, so I just wanted to cross it out)
The enemies
Now this one is no competition. WuWa has way better enemies than ZZZ. The enemies have way more varied movesets and they can one shot you once you get to the harder difficulties. Also, the holograms gain more moves in their moveset once at higher levels. This goes back to my dark souls vs. DMC comparison earlier.
In dark souls, the enemies can just do whatever the fuck they want. To add onto this, the player has a very limited moveset, which further adds onto the difficulty. This makes it so that universally, dark souls is harder than DMC.
Yet, people still love DMC and play it. The enemies in DMC are way simpler because they don't really need to do much. You can probably just spam attack as Dante and beat DMC. The challenge in DMC comes from stringing together insane combos as Dante or whoever in later installments.
This difference can also be seen in WuWa vs. ZZZ. WuWa has way harder enemies with longer invulnerability periods. ZZZ doesn't even have invulnerability periods. I think this would be better as a subsection so:
Subsection: enemy vulnerability
This has been a very big point of contention for the people who dislike ZZZ combat, is that the enemies are often punching bags. And that is the point. It would feel like absolute shit if the enemies were not always vulnerable to your attacks when the main objective of the combat is to string together an insane combo and keep it going. Everybody just wants more WuWa enemies in ZZZ where they one shot you and you have to pause what you are doing to perfectly dodge an attack ten times and then parry, but the two games have fundamentally different design philosophies. What is also two different philosophies is the next point.
Move sets
Now, a lot of people are probably thinking that there is a massive flaw with me bringing in dark souls and DMC into this. It's that DMC has a big fuckoff move list. Comparatively, each individual character in WuWa and ZZZ have a pretty similar amount of moves, with a pretty similar amount of movesets. This has led people to just discount ZZZ combat as spammy, since each character has a similar amount of moves yet the enemies in ZZZ are way simpler. However it is the intricacies/little details between each game's combat that makes them different. There are a lot of components to this, so there will be a lot of subsections.
Subsection: switching characters
The elephant in the room, these are both three character action games. The crux of both of these games is that you have a party of three (presumably, you do not NEED 3 party members) and that you switch between them. However, both of these games wanted to differentiate themselves from Genshin.
In Genshin (I haven't played for years I am just spitballing based off of what I have seen from Vars) Your party members don't really matter, more than what random utility they could provide. Prime examples being Xingqiu and Xiangling. You don't have to do shit on either of these characters except press skill and ult and then switch to the next character.
Both ZZZ and WuWa wanted the player to use their different characters for more than just utility, and they did this in drastically different ways.
Subsubsection: concerto
Yeah this post is a behemoth and I can't be fucked to indent or format, so here is a subsubsection.
The way WuWa approaches switching characters is through concerto. Now you can switch characters outside of concerto, but more often than not this is limited to some heavy attacks after an attack animation or some unique cases, such as Encore. You can't just switch mid combo, or more often than not you don't want to switch before concerto It is a race to gain concerto, and at higher levels of play you can utilize swapping to build concerto for all three characters. The main reason for this is the outro skill.
The outro skill is where the meat of the potatoes is for WuWa character switching. These outro skills provide anything from damage fields to attacks to enemy debuffs to character buffs. Point being: you WANT to do these outro skills. However, doing these requires you to get enough concerto points so that you can do them. You get concerto points by attacking on the current characters. This is how WuWa encourages you to use each individual character, by getting enough concerto to do the outro skill.
Subsubsection: ZZZ switching
In ZZZ, there is no defined outro skill. The character icon or the switch button does not just illuminate whenever your outro skill is up. Instead, YOU define when you want to switch. Now there are some instances where this is not the case, primarily in chain attacks, which I will address in a later section. I want to focus on the nitty gritty of switching that you can always do.
In ZZZ, when you switch, there is no intro skill (basically an unique intro attack from WuWa when you switch with concerto that the character coming in does). Instead, the player can start a new combo by doing their basic attack or going into skill. However, you can switch whenever you want. You can switch after basic one, basic two, or ex skill. Only exception is ultimate, but usually ult is enough to kill or stun, or you want to use ult when the enemy is stunned.
Now where this gets intimate is how you switch. Since you can switch whenever, you can queue your moves so that while you are doing a move, you can switch. I am going to use Anby as an example and relate it to Mtashed. He has stated before he dislikes the combat, and while disagree with that the combo is ONLY mashy, he is entitled to his opinion.
Anyway, I watched back some clips of one of his streams while he was using anby. He doesn't switch after using Anby ex skill. Or before it. Anby EX skill is prime switching time. You can queue into your next character before the skill even comes out, which leads to extended combos. Now does this matter? Fuck no, you are able to easily clear this game by mashing. However, this single interaction is prevalent across all characters. Another example is soldier 11. You can queue your switch before her basic 4 (the ender of her basic chain). Same with Lucy with her basic chain and charged ex skill. There are also charged moves, such as Corin, where instead you want to wait until after you start the move that you switch, so that you get the effect of the charged move while switching to another character. The complexity of switching in this game isn't in getting concerto as fast as possible and then switching (Sanhua is the most fun character in WuWa fight me) it is optimizing your combos on each character so that you can switch seamlessly into the next one and extend that combo. A good example of what you can do in ZZZ is one of Iyo's vids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy17mVF_Gyo) which is from 7 months ago but is still relevant now.
Back to the Mtashed stream, there was a boss enemy at 5:41:00 where he said fuck it and started spamming the mouse and he said "I think I am hitting harder (than before he started spamming the mouse) because there is no downtime between animations." And yeah that is the point of this game; there is no downtime between animations (and switching) so you should switch to your heart's content. This extends further because you can do this for all characters, basically creating a flow state (and I think some more enemies and enemy combinations would highlight this aspect of the game).
To wrap up the switching subsection, I want to basically summarize it. Switching in WuWa requires you to onfield your character and get enough concerto to do the outro skill (unless you are a based Sanhua player who can just do it instantly). Switching in ZZZ is how you extend combos to continue your beat down. Each works for their respective game. One is not just simply better than the other.
Subsection: parry and dodge
Another hot button issue many people have is the parry and dodge mechanics in each game comparatively. Voldemort (I mean Tectone) said in one of his videos/ streams that WuWa has the better parry system, and I will half agree. I think getting the parry in WuWa is harder for sure, but ZZZ is not all about parries. Additionally, dodging in both games serves different purposes.
Subsubsection: WuWa p and d
WuWa parry and dodge is designed around the fact that the enemies are like darks souls enemies. WuWa parry is the main one. To parry in WuWa, you have to attack the enemy at the right time (there will be a big indicator on the enemy) during their attack. You get a little stun and a chunk of their stun meter (or whatever it is called, basically the thing in sekiro where you fill it up and then can move on to the next phase of the fight). You want to parry, because if you don't then stunning the boss is a fucking slog. Basically, WuWa incentives you to parry by making it so that if you do, then you can reach the stun state of the boss and then can do a big damage rotation.
In my opinion, WuWa parry is a double-edged sword. It is rewarding, but the game also punishes you for not parrying by having the boss not be stunned, meaning it has more chances to go into attacks where you just straight up cannot interact with it (unless you just have a Jianxin or Taoqiu and have a big shield). It rewards players for timing their attacks since these parryable attacks are usually the big ones. By not parrying, you have to sit through the bosses' many different moves, which makes the fights longer. With the timer on the holograms, this further incentives parrying. It is not my personal favorite, but I think it makes sense in the context of WuWa and is a good gameplay feature.
Dodging in WuWa is more straightforward. When the enemy attack is about to hit you, you press dash and you do a perfect dodge, which dodges that instance of damage. You can do a follow up attack, but the harder bosses have many multi hit attacks that you want to do multiple dodges and don't usually use the follow up attack. Dodging is not an inherent way to get good damage off, it is just so that you don't take a lot of damage.
Another layer to the parry and dodge system is stamina. Its the same limitation as dark souls, where you can't dodge if you don't have stamina. Parries are easier to do when you have multi hit attacks, which are usually in the middle of combos, so you want stamina to parry as well. Additionally, you use stamina to sprint, which is your main universal large repositioning tool. Overall, stamina is the limiter to your capabilities in WuWa, and it is part of the mental stack that makes it more challenging in the traditional sense.
Subsubsection: ZZZ p and d
ZZZ parry and dodge is a lot simpler compared to WuWa, as this game is not a defensive game. Even ben wants to run combos, his are just slower than others.
ZZZ parry is just a way to incentivize character switching. You are going to be switching regardless. It is simply a flashy method of switching characters. You get a follow up attack from parrying, and every time you want to do it because it just extends your combos.
ZZZ dodge is a bit more saucy. When you get the perfect dodge, it slows down the enemies' time for a little bit. This allows you to either reposition, switch, or start a new combo on the current character.
The main thing with ZZZ dodge and parry is that it is often a choice, and one that doesn't matter. The prime example of this is one of the boss enemies.
This enemy has one move in particular that highlights what I am talking about. It has a parryable move that goes into a barrage of forward advancing attacks, but only the first hit is parryable. If you do parry it, you are probably going to be hit and it will disrupt your combo. So instead, you dodge. But, instead of just spam dodging the move like in WuWa, you can just move to the side/ behind it and continue your offense. There is an optimal solution to this attack that I am outlining, but it doesn't matter for beating the boss. The boss is not going to one shot you because you parried the yellow flash and got hit, you are just going to drop your combo.
This is in contrast to WuWa, where parrying and especially dodging are necessary (unless you play Danjin). If you do not parry the attack, you have to go through more of the boss' moveset, and if you do not dodge, you die.
Subsection: now it's Reyn time
The chain attack is not really as big of an issue as the other two, but I feel like it would be worth exploring. When you fill up the stun meter in ZZZ, you get access to a chain attack which basically lets you rapidly switch between your entire party, each one doing a cool attack (I don't remember if it is just their ult or not like parry). I haven't seen as much trash on this one, and I think it is fitting for ZZZ. Some people do not like how they have to switch or wait the 2 seconds, which I can agree with. I think that the game should have a cancel button because some players might not want to do a full chain attack and just switch to their attacker character. However, I do think that the full chain attack encourages you to smartly position yourself so that you will end on your attacker, but I do not think that most people will really care about this. Overall, I think there is room for improvement, but it is a good core gameplay mechanic.
Summary/final thoughts
Whew, this post has been a doozy to write.
I think the main issue people have is that ZZZ leans towards the DMC/Bayonetta and fighting game methodology of challenge. Mainly that the player has to find the fun/challenge. Now, DMC/Bayonetta are way harder than ZZZ, and fighting games have a ranked mode. However, even in DMC/Bayonetta the fights can only get so difficult, and the main challenge is getting SSS/Platinum for every fight. In fighting games, your rank doesn't matter (like all competitive games) so the challenge comes from how much you want to put yourself into the game to rank up.
Compare this with WuWa, which follows the Dark Souls approach to challenge. Even though there are a lot of different characters in WuWa, your moveset is still very limited compared to the bosses. This allows the devs to just make harder and harder bosses that hardcore players gravitate towards. This is because you need to git gud or otherwise you cannot succeed, which people equate to a proper challenge. While this is indeed a challenge, it is not the only way to challenge a player.
Some people hate the dark souls approach because it forces the devs to just up the ante on each boss fight, which leads to people calling shadow of the erd tree too hard (I know that is a vocal minority, but I think it illustrates my point). Others hate the DMC or fighting game approach, because you do not have to be good to win. I have complained furiously about GBVSR as a Vaseraga player. People hate zoners. Slayer players can eat my ass. In DMC, you don't have to get SSS on every encounter to beat the game, and some people just do not like that because they do not feel challenged enough. They want to HAVE to play extremely well in order to progress (fighting games don't count because the equivalent to what I am talking about is the story mode when it is playable and not just Strive's)
This leads into what I stated above about general sentiment. That being "It would be fine if WuWa hadn't come out a month before." Not because WuWa has better combat but because the player base is used to WuWa. I feel (and there is no empirical data for this) that the complaining group is simply spamming buttons and winning, and then getting pissed off that they won by spamming buttons. Like yeah no shit you are bored, you are just spamming buttons and winning. Just because dark souls adjacent games place the onus of difficulty solely on the developer does not mean that all games need to conform to this. This isn't even bringing up things such as mimic tear and that stupid build in erd tree that one shots everything. These "hardcore" games have ways to make the game easier. I mean just buy Jinhsi and one shot everything in 1-2 rotations.
Now does this mean ZZZ is perfect? Absolutely not. I think there could be more enemies for sure, which will remedy itself with time. I definitely think some endgame content centered around keeping combo could also be interesting. Maybe make some duo bosses that are actually duo bosses and not the godskin nobles. But by no means in ZZZ a shallow game in terms of combat just because it is not like WuWa.
I want to sum up this post by just sort of explaining the dynamic of each party in each game, and equate it to parallels in the media I have talked about earlier.
In WuWa, it's like basically playing dark souls with a typical jrpg party. The current meta is just hypercarrying around one character and having a healer and then a coordinated attacker or Yuanwu. So you have your attacker, your buffer, and then your healer. Each one has a dark souls moveset where it is limited compared to bosses so that the bosses can be as powerful as possible. You play as three separate characters in one party.
In ZZZ, it is your tag battler. Fans of League probably know something called 2XKO, and it is like that. You have a party of three characters, and each character has a simple moveset. But the party is controlled by the player. Each character is a third of the player's moves, so it is up to the player to control their party in a way that makes them basically one big character that you would find in something like DMC or Bayonetta (obviously Dante or Bayo are still way more complex than your party in ZZZ).
Comments
View desktop siteTapTap looks better
on the app 
2024-07-08
+1
2024-07-26
I saw you getting cooked on reddit r/gachagaming. Now you're here seeking validation huh ? Insane hoyo hivemind you have there buddy.
2024-07-08
Bro, I swear it's a type of breed. They take the fun out of games, always fighting over something. Honestly, I hate arguing, but seeing how these types of people are finally tasting a piece of their own medicine, I welcome it.
2024-07-31
bro cooked hard💀
2024-07-08
it burnt lmaoo
2024-07-11