I’ve been quietly curious about Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. I’m a soulslike enjoyer, but I bounced off the game’s intro like it was made of rubber—still, I figured maybe with a few patches the game could be polished into something I’d like to play. Let’s just open up the Steam reviews and good lord what is happening in there?!
Alright, let me get the positive news out of the way first: The game’s latest patch aims to make the game slightly better to play, with improved invincibility frames, recovery animations, along with bug and crash fixes. It also reads; “Added dialogs for some NPCs to complete some plots.”
This is an understatement. As observed by streamer LanceMcDonald on X, huge swathes of the game have been changed. “You can no longer kill any historically significant bosses or NPCs, and instead they just get ‘exhausted’ and relax after the fight and talk to you LMAO.”
In a separate post, he adds: “Oh wow, the entirety of chapter 4 is now insanely easy because 50% of the enemies are now non-hostile to the player and you can’t attack them during the rebellion outbreak. What a mess.”
Okay, so what’s going on here?
‘A whole lot’ is the answer to that question
Here’s the simple version: A Chinese-speaking contingent of reviewers of indiscernible size have negatively reviewed and/or talked about the game because it only features the Ming Dynasty, and doesn’t see you fighting the Qing Dynasty. In response (potentially), the game’s China-based developer Leenzee has made sweeping changes to several bosses and characters from the Ming Dynasty in the game—making it harder to kill them.
It’s unclear if anyone was asking for this directly, but it seems to be the “solution” the studio came up with. In one example, the protagonist all but says “it’s fine, they’re only sleeping” after putting a sword through the Dragon Emperor. As you might imagine, this has a sweeping impact on just about every bit of the game’s story.
As to why this is happening, it’s a lot more complex: I want to preface all of this by saying that I am by no means an expert in Chinese history—I’ve done my best to suss out the full picture, but it’ll be through second-hand explanations and machine-translated social media posts. I’ve also reached out to Leenzee for comment, and will update this article if I get a response.
Starting with those second-hand explanations, provided by players attempting to translate this controversy into English on the soulslikes and characterrant subreddits: The game is set during the late Ming Dynasty—or, well, a historical fantasy version of said dynasty. I imagine there were considerably less skimpy outfits and backflips back then.
The Ming Dynasty was succeeded by the Qing Dynasty, though the transition took about 40 years of bloody warfare. As for why this is relevant to the modern-day, the Ming Dynasty was ruled by the Han Chinese—which today make up the majority of China, while the Qing was headed by the Manchu people, who are an ethnic minority in the present-day.
From the Steam reviews I could find from Chinese-speaking players, such as this one, this did seemingly upset some people: “In constructing its worldview, this game selectively and completely obscures the crucial historical figure of the Qing Dynasty, rendering it ‘unspeakably’ absent from the game’s text and setting.”
As user alanjinqq on the aforementioned characterrant thread puts it, Han nationalism “is kind of a counter culture established by the younger generation, to oppose how Chinese culture is usually depicted in mainstream media.”
User hachimi_ddj on r/Soulslikes adds: “Many Han Chinese regard the Qing era as a humiliating period of foreign rule. So what they expected from the game’s storyline was for the protagonist to help the Han resist the Manchu.”
This all seems to track with other actual sources I could find on the subject—from what I’ve read, Han nationalism and the CCP’s attempts to counteract it (at least outwardly; what a government says and what it does are two different things) is definitely a part of China’s history. A gnarly knot I am by no means qualified to divulge to you beyond this rudimentary explanation.
However, I want to point out that I did also find negative Steam reviews from other Chinese-speaking players who found this whole thing pretty stupid, and are upset about the changes, too: “Do you really not know who are the real players [and] who are the professional trolls?”
Here’s another player who writes: “The once captivating historical narrative has been shattered, the character personalities have collapsed beyond recognition, and the foreshadowing that once engendered my empathy has become rootless, as if my previous investment was all wishful thinking.”
So, in summary—the developer’s made huge changes to Wuchang: Fallen Feathers’ story, offered very little in the way of official explanation, confused and upset Chinese-speaking players anyway, and by all accounts made the game worse. Whether the CCP stepped in here (Leenzee is based out of Chengdu, according to its site) or not remains to be seen.
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