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I have felt for many years that the tumultuous backstage world of professional wrestling would make an excellent RPG. All wrestling fans have heard the stories of events like Hulk Hogan pulling his creative control clause to refuse to lose to somebody the promotion wants to put over. Ultimate Warrior famously got fired after trying to hold up Vince McMahon for a ton of money the night of a pay-per-view. The entire real life rivalry between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. In many ways, the stuff going on behind the scenes is more interesting than what happens on our television sets.
So when WrestleQuest was announced, and the concept of an up and comer in the business's journey through the political mess of the wrestling business was on the table to say I was excited for it would be an understatement. On paper this game is practically tailor made for me. An easy 10/10 GOTY. However, in practice, it became one of the most disappointing and frustrating titles I've played in a long time.
The story primarily sticks out as a down point. A video game in a genre primarily focused on storytelling, about a industry that is entirely about telling a story in the ring. The eternal struggle of heel and face. Good vs Evil. On paper this story should be an easy tale to tell. Unfortunately what WrestleQuest gives the player is a story that probably could have been told in 10 hours, and pads it out for damn near 40+. Every time it feels like the plot is going somewhere you are immediately without fail yanked in a completely opposite direction. Sometimes story arcs don't even complete before you're bouncing multiple times between different parties doing completely different things. Characters just do things with the most trivial and barely developed motivations possible.
The game has a karma system where you can choose responses to make yourself a face, or a heel. For the most part this does absolutely nothing. The game doesn't even have any indication of if a choice is a heel choice or a face choice. Even a green border versus a red border or something would be sufficient. And yes sometimes the dialog is semi obvious as your choices will be something like "donate money to the orphans" and "literally burn a child alive for no reason" but there are plenty of them where it's a slightly differently worded insult and you're still insulting somebody so neither feels like a clearly marked face option.
Side quests also continue this trend of being padded out. You'll get a side mission, and you won't even be able to access the area you need to go for 10+ real time gameplay hours. Instead you'll go there as a different party ensuring that by the time the person who has to go there actually arrives, you will be so massively overleveled for this side quest you got so long ago you don't even remember the story context for it existing that you'll one shot everything immediately. Some side quests throw a bunch of dialog choices at you, and if you answer any one of them wrong ONCE it completely ends the side quest with no way of trying it again, locking you out of summons, gear, and content. Half the time it's not even clear where you're meant to be getting the information that is asked of you and if you don't know the question is coming and haven't saved in a while whelp your choices are to simply miss the content or redo hours of gameplay to get back to where you were. This is straight up poor game design. If I'm trying to stop a kidnapping and I fail to persuade an NPC to believe a lie, why does the game not offer alternative methods of completing the quest? Maybe I could break into the base and defeat everybody and save them directly, where as persuading the NPC skips a bunch of optional battles. Maybe you allow the player to have a mulligan where they can get the option wrong once. An auto save when you leave or exit a screen would be sufficient. I would even accept letting me go all the way back to where you get the quest and having to do the whole thing over again rather than the current method of "whoops, did you misclick? That's it mate".
These things could be waved away if the game play is solid. And to a degree it is. However, the over reliance on certain mechanics combined with just how long and padded out the game is very clearly makes fun battles become tedious. Every move you do has a QTE, as the game attempts to do something akin to Super Mario RPG. You hit the QTEs for higher damage, or better defending. However the timing for these QTEs varies in speed, and which button you have to push. Every. Single. Time. You have zero chance of developing any sort of muscle memory. This has been noted as a problem so often that the devs added a slow QTEs accessibility option (with no indication on if turning it on or not will void achievements), and they've also announced they're gonna just add a no QTE option.
This also carries into the pinfall mechanic. Some enemies you can't fully defeat until you pin for a three count. This is represented via a bar that slides right to left. You line a cursor over a green square and click three times. The game implies it gets easier every time somebody kicks out on follow up pin attempts but honestly I never noticed a difference. like the QTE timing the timing for this is also very erratic. The devs have also announced an auto pin is coming, as again, the mini game gets tedious very quickly. The other big mechanic is hype, and hype types. Hype Types are sort of like special modifiers you can apply to a character to determine what the fans like about them. So when they do specific actions they'll get a hype bar benefit. Reaching certain points on the hype bar unlocks big buffs (and if you go into negatives debuffs).
However, this has two major issues. The first is every hype type has massive negatives listed, such as you take double damage and the like. So when the hype types are first introduced somebody is gonna take one look at that and figure using no hype type will likely be better, to avoid taking massive damage for what they won't understand is a MASSIVE buff. The other, more critical problem is when the game puts dramatic moments in front of you. Dramatic Moments are special boss fight events where you have to do certain objectives to complete a story line, akin to a real wrestling match. Sometimes these are skip able, and you merely get a bonus item drop. Sometimes, however, these are completely mandatory - and hype type can break things completely. In one boss fight you are tasked with continuously getting negative hype. You cannot complete the boss fight until you accomplish this. However, while I had the hype type active for my character I was intentionally just doing basic attacks and putting the controller down and intentionally missing every QTE to try build up as little hype as possible so that when the boss did his moves his negative hype would get me there. Unfortunately even failing to do things garnered so much hype that I was always in the positives.
And all of this is before the bugs. Achievements not unlocking even though you have hit the points where they should have. Moments where the literal entire ring background simply doesn't load and any attempt to do any special move causes the game to endlessly softlock the characters can't move into position. An entire town that randomly might teleport you to the wrong area entirely and render you unable to leave. Janky mini games where your car won't even be on camera but still taking damage when you have no way of seeing what you're driving into. And that is just the stuff I've personally seen, or personally seen people mentioning.
This game has so much potential. An amazing concept. But the devs did almost nothing with it. I want to like it. I want to love it. But nothing short of completely re-writing the game is gonna fix all the padding issues. So at this point I'll just settle for being able to play it, without it just feeling like a slog at all times.