I Wasn’t Prepared for Wuthering Wave’s Brand New Quest About Loneliness

As much as I enjoy action games with a gacha slant like Wuthering Waves, I have found that the storylines can be entertaining but not often emotionally stirring. It’s not a knock on the genre. I guess, for me, humanity can be lost in the tremendous scale of the stories.

That is why a small part of the new Moon-Chasing Festival in Wuthering Waves caught me by surprise for the delicate way that it explored the idea of guilt and loneliness. The recent update added a festival that revolves around people making wishes and one man, a new character called Xiangli Yao, who attempts to grant them all. As a scientist with a deep interest in automation, he has developed some helpful robots to ensure as many wishes as possible come through.

When we meet him, he has a problem, as something has stalled the process. A wish has come in that works against the nature of the system. The robots have been designed to help people, but someone has wished to disappear, directly contradicting that idea. It is up to us to find out who this poor person is, why they might wish to disappear, and see if there is a way that we can help them.

I’m not going to massively spoil the story, as I’m sure plenty of folks want to play it without knowing all the details, but it’s tough to talk about without mentioning certain elements, so if you wish for a completely clean experience, you should probably go play it now and come back to this when you are done.

What I found very touching about this story was that it’s a very nuanced and balanced look at the issues of loneliness and being alone, which are two very different things. The quest is used to introduce us to another new character, Zhezhi, and she is presented as someone who might just be our mystery wish-maker. When we meet her, she is painting alone and is presented as someone who is a little shy and socially awkward, but it is quickly established that just because she has these traits doesn’t mean she is a person who is filled with sadness and wishes to disappear.

Related: How to Uninstall Wuthering Waves

Instead, the person who is suffering in silence is actually quite an outgoing and happy-seeming person, but they are punishing themselves for the guilt they feel about an accident a friend of theirs had in the lab while they were working together. His guilt has caused him to push his friend away, and now he lays awake at night, filled with an emotional tug of war as he wishes to finish the work he was so passionate about, yet feels he doesn’t deserve to do so because he has struggled to process what has happened to his friend and knows he hasn’t dealt with it all well.

He has taken to going onto the Wuthering Waves version of the internet and posting sad messages, trapping himself in a cycle where he is not adequately dealing with his emotions and is avoiding taking on the tough challenge of making a positive change in his life.

It’s a nice story and does a good job of highlighting the fact that just because someone chooses to be alone doesn’t make them lonely and that just because someone is eager and outgoing doesn’t mean everything is fine for them. At the same time, the person who is happy to spend time by themselves will later enjoy being a little more social as part of the Moon Chasing Festival, and the person who was punishing themselves will learn that even that was an egotistical thing to do instead of just talking their friend and finding out how they felt.

While this is all just a small part of a bigger quest in the game, it is nice to see how delicately it was handled, and I feel the writers did a good job of giving the characters humanity and depth when many teams will struggle to see beyond the things that turn characters into caricatures.

Even the fact that two characters decided to take the time to try and help a stranger and correctly interpreted a cry for help as meaning far more than just someone wanting to disappear, but instead find a new path to happiness is a powerful message that matters a lot in an age where it’s very easy to just dismiss anyone who isn’t managing to keep their own spirits up.

Wuthering Waves is available now for Android, iOS, PlayStation, and PC.