If you follow our channel, you probably saw that we had some extensive coverage on the game’s setting and lore in a previous video titled “The Mythical Origins of Black Myth Wukong“. In that video, we explained the basics of Journey to the West, which I highly recommend you watch before you play to get a full understanding of the scale of this ficitonal work.

As a person fairly familiar with Journey to the West thanks to personal interest and my extensive knowledge of asian folklore from lots of travelling, I can confidently say that this game is pushing the boundaries for the quantity and quality of content based on their source material. Seeing these legendary myths and places onscreen was thrilling and it feels like modern gaming is finally arriving at its long overdue Asian myth exploration phase. Its clear a lot of passion went into this part of the game, with literally any enemy or boss having at least 4 paragraphs of lore each in the journal section, and bosses having these cool mechanics that are probably original ideas, but just fit in so well with the mythos and setting. I genuinely cannot stress enough how well the content of Journey of the West has been used to fit into an ARPG format, and its ridiculous how a completely new studio managed to find the hours to fit all this content in.

Unfortunately though, there is one problem; the events of Black Myth Wukong will probably be extremely confusing for most people unfamiliar with the work it is based on. This is in part because the game avoids having lengthy exposition, with most of the background story explained via the Journal. I feel like the game tried but failed to give enough exposition for new players who dont want to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of lore, who will just end up floating along with the story to enjoy their cool boss rush gameplay. It doesnt help that 30% of the time, dialogue is spoken in confusing Chinese poems which are incredibly hard to translate into english with the same meaning, which means alot of exposition is just lost for most players. This was to be expected though, as Journey to the West and basically any other classical Chinese media is filled with poems that are incredibly hard to understand without a good understanding of Chinese.

In terms of the game’s plot and progression, pacing and general storytelling left much to be desired to live up to the greatness of the works its inspired by. I expect most people will be confused and only have a mild or passing interest in the creatures they are facing, as ultimately the focus of this game is the gameplay, and the story seems to exist just to support your progression. The monkey you play as will randomly appear in different locations throughout the game without much explanation as to how or why, which was also incredibly strange. All in all though, the setting of Black Myth Wukong has to be one of the best executions in recent years for gaming, but its a shame that most players wont be able to understand 90% of it.