u/BroadVideo8

I'm currently wrapping an eight week training course of doing shaolin wushu in China. You may have seen instagram reels of people who've done these sorts of courses, usually highlighting exotic training techniques doing iron body training underwaterfalls.
I had a very good experience, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everyone.

1. The Training
   At my school, we train 5-6 hours a day Monday through Thursday, and a half day on Friday. Our teacher trained at the Shaolin temple proper for something like 14 years, and the curriculum is a milder version of the curriculum there. Tai Chi every morning from 6-7 am, before breakfast. Forms training in the morning for 2-3 hours. Sanda training in the afternoon for 2-2.5 hours. At the end of the day, I have about three hours to myself before it's time to go to bed and start it all over.
   These are intermixed with various once-a-week classes; gymnastics, qi gong, deep stretching, and a very intense calisthenics class on Thursday afternoon. These classes range in intensity; the morning Tai Chi is very chill. Thursday calisthenics involves hopping up a 480 step flight of stairs on one foot, then bearcrawling back down. Several times.
   Overall, I would say it's about 50% forms training, 30% combat training, 20% miscellaneous. The kickboxing classes aren't bad, but they're not as intense as you would get going to Thailand; if you're only interested in learning to fight, that is a better use of your travel time and budget. I've spent several years in Thailand training Muay Thai, and I love it, but I wanted to mix things up with how I spend my traincations. I find the forms and gymnastics training to be the more physically demanding part of the curriculum, but I also have much less background in that area.
   Comparing this to training in Thailand, training is less intense, but higher volume per day. I do less cardio, but I do (a lot) more stretching.

2. The School
   The school I'm at is located in the mountains of interior shandong, in quite a beautiful location. I don't want to sound like a schill, so I'm not going to name my school, but feel free to reach out to me if you want details. There are a number of "kung fu boarding schools" around China; some of them cater to Chinese students, some of them cater to foreigners, some of them have a mix. The place I'm at is very foreigner-oriented; there's only been one Chinese student here, and she was visiting with her German boyfriend.
   I first came to this school in 2019, after leaving another kung fu school that had an extremely toxic environment. I spent six months training here then, before leaving due to COVID.
   The environment was quite rough back then, and I'm happy to say that things have quite improved in the intervening six years. When I first arrived, the school was in an abandoned factory; now we're in a resort hotel in the mountains. In 2020, the air pollution was horrible, with regular AQI over 300. Now we have blue skies every day.
   Accommodation, meals, and training are all sold together as part of one package. The food consists of of rice, tofu, and vegetables, three times a day. It's not exciting, but it is quite healthy.

3. Costs
   My program is around a thousand USD a month, with reduced pricing for students who are staying longer. This is roughly about how much I spent when traveling and training in Thailand.

4. The students
   There were about seven students when I first arrived in March, and there are currently around fifteen. As I mentioned above, virtually all of the students are foreigners - primarily Europeans, though a surprisingly large number from Mexico. Some of them work remotely, or work seasonally (like myself), or just taking advantage of those long European vacation periods. Because it's a small school, students to form strong bonds very quickly. Gender balance is about 50/50, which is refreshing coming from the Lads-On-Tour-intensive environment of Muay Thai gyms.
   Almost none of the students here had any background with martial arts when they arrived, though they tended to be very physically fit from other practices; I've met a lot of gymnasts, crossfitters, and yoga instructors. One guy was a professional breakdancer, and another gal was a professional contortionist. This creates an environment of "talented beginners," where most people are learning martial arts for the first time, but are able to push themselves hard and progress rapidly.
   Almost none of them have any background with China, either. I speak Chinese, but I've only met one or two other people here who also do, and most of them don't seem to have much cultural or historical interest in China.
   This struck me as strange (why would someone with no China background or martial arts background come to China to train martial arts), so I started asking my classmates why they came here. The typical answer was wanting to do something different, and this struck them as a Very Different. Which, definitely, it is. One girl came here specifically to break a depression spiral.
   We also get some influencer-types, but they usually only stay for a week or so and don't train particularly hard. Most people are here for 1-2 months, though there are a few who've been here for close to a year.

So if you've been wondering about running off to train kung fu in the mountains of China... that is an option. It's hard, but not impossible. I've enjoyed my time here quite a bit, and made some serious progress in terms of my physical fitness. If you're planning on running off to Asia to train martial arts, and you just want to get good at fighting, or want to mix your fitness with vacationing, I'd recommend Thailand or Cambodia over China. But if you're looking to really get away from normal life, or want more Art than Martial in your training, then kung fu mountain training might be a good fit for you.

I'm going to be passing through Shanghai this Wednesday and Thursday, and I was hoping reddit could recommend me some good or unique martial arts schools that are worth dropping in on. I've done everything from Tai Chi to MMA, so I'm not super particular about style, though I do gravitate most towards things on the MMA/kickboxing side.

CW: There are a lot of words in this post. I wrote all of them. If you're the type of person who gets mad about having to read more than one paragraph, consider yourself warned.

Tl;dr: I liked it but it’s also kind of a slog.

Part 1: The Good

I enjoy drama. And to me, the core of drama is people feeling Some Kind of a Way about Some Kind of Stuff. This seems like a pretty low bar, but it’s one that media continuously manages to limbo under. FF16 is one of the most emotionally charged video games I’ve played in a while, and Clive Rosfield is by far one of the most emotionally video game protagonists I’ve encountered in a long time. He’s angry, he’s guilty, he’s sad, that boy has a lot of feelings and he wears them on his sleeve. This is especially true in the first act of the game where he’s dealing with the death of the his brother, the destruction of his home, being sold into slavery, and generally running a gauntlet of Shakespearean tragedies.

On the “Big Fights” side of this, the Eikon fights are absolutely top tier. Someone once described the movie Redline to me as a constant process of saying “that’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen. No wait, that’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen.” For a while, I had an issue where the game was crashing after Eikon fights, and I wasn’t even mad; fighting Titan and Bahamut twice in a row felt like a bonus.

For me, the peak of this was the conflict with Hugo Kupka in the middle of the game. There’s a concept in pro-wrestling of “heat”, which is how much anticipation and animosity has been built for a match beforehand. The Clive and Kupka fight has more heat than almost anything I’ve seen in a video game before. Kupka and Clive have spent the first half of the game building up grudges and transgressions against another, leading to this intense mutual hatred which I absolutely adore. We get top tier trash talk – Kupka smashing Clive’s throne with his bare hands, Clive telling Kupka he killed his wife and he doesn’t even feel bad about it – followed by an escalating series of multi-stage boss fights culminating with some shit straight out of Attack on Titan.

Part 2: The Bad

Ok, now that I’ve said nice things, my criticisms in the order they emerged.

I had a hard time getting into this game, and set it down for about six months between starting and finishing it. While it’s very dramatically strong, especially in the beginning, it’s very aesthetically weak. FF16 is very informed by the “gritty medievalism” aesthetic of The Witcher III and Game of Thrones, and this meant a lot of extremely drab palettes; black and gray outfits set against beige and gray environments. This is made worse by that aesthetic feeling extremely worn out in the 2020s; so not only does it feel like it’s riding the coattails other media, but media that feels years out of date at that.

I also bounced off the gameplay pretty hard. It’s a single-player action RPG; It got compared a lot to Devil May Cry, and I guess that’s a fair comparison, but it to me it further drove home the idea that this was Squenix trying to make their version of the Witcher III – a game which I also found very drab and ended up setting down after eight or so hours.

Clive has a very limited toolkit – one melee weapon, one ranged weapon, and a set of cooldown powers which you slowly accrue by the end of the game. This made a lot of the combat feel very samey and repetitive. The only real configuration options are choosing your loadout of Eikon powers, and many of these you don’t gain access to until the latter part of the game.

More than the Action RPG side, it’s the lack of multiple playable characters which really seem to hamstring the gameplay. FF7R had a similar character-action style, but it was given variety by having a playable ensemble cast with distinctive play-styles, and quite a bit of flexibility in terms of build and loadout. When I was outside of a boss fight, combat felt like something to be endured rather than enjoyed as a price of admission to getting to the next exciting part of the game.

Which brings me to grievance number three: the side quests. Truly, These are the Foul Attaints which cannot be Sublimed through Gainstanding. After the game’s halfway point, the game starts giving you an ever-expanding pool of sidequests, most of them lacking either gameplay variety or dramatic weight. You will be asked to pick flowers for someone half a dozen different times. You will be asked to talk to someone twenty yards away from the questgiver. You will go on no less than four side quests to buy things for your local blacksmith. Not since Mass Effect Andromeda have I encountered a game that was so bogged down in doing menial tasks for minor NPCs. And there’s an obvious solution to dealing with this type of game-filler, which is don’t go on the sidequests. But it feels like a design flaw when the solution to making the game more fun is to play it less.

I found myself reflecting on the history of Final Fantasy side quests; in earlier games, side quests were usually hidden dungeons or bosses, accessed late in the game that rewarded you with new abilities; things like the lost submarine or the Weapons in FF7, or the entire back half of FF6. In FF16, the side quests are almost always going back to an areas you’ve already been to, fighting an enemy you’ve already fought, gather an item and return to it to an NPC. They’re not adding content, their reusing content.

This abundance of filler content illustrates what is lacking from FF16. The Eikon fights are amazing – I wish there were more of them. Not having a proper Eikon fight against Odin was particularly disappointing, and I would’ve traded every single side quest in the game for one. Likewise, there’s a lot of story that seems to be happening off camera; Dion is going through a whole separate story arc that we the player don’t really get to interact with. We are shown some interesting areas in cut scenes – such as the royal palace of San Breque where Dion is having his plot – while the actual playable areas are limited to half a dozen or so fields and villages which we continuously revisit while more interesting things are happening in more interesting places that we cannot access. It really feels like this game wanted to be bigger in scope, but faced either time or budgetary restraints, and then filled out it’s runtime with cheaply produced filler.

Part 3: The Thematic

For all of it’s stylistic influence from Game of Thrones and The Witcher, FF16 is very much a JRPG when it comes to it’s themes and conflicts. There’s a running joke that every JRPG is about teenagers killing God, and that’s not far off; FF16 only breaks the mold in that it’s about a 33 year old killing God. Yahtzee Crenshaw theorized that this is because RPGs are about fighting an escalating series of more powerful foes, and God is the most powerful foe you can fight and thus serves as the logical end-point for any JRPG.
But JRPGs are also often about liberation in the face of tyranny. Overthrowing Evil Empires have been a staple of the Final Fantasy franchise since FF2 in 1988. Defeating a mortal tyrant on earth is often a first step to defeating an immortal tyrant in in heaven; sometimes this happens by way of a divinely ascended emperor (FF2, FF6) or through a series of escalating rulers that leads you to a god or demiurge as your end boss (FF Tactics, Xenogears). It’s a very “mankind will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” kind of mood.

Persona 5 probably hit these themes this hardest of any JRPG I’ve played, with its villains being an escalating series of larger-scale tyrants: starting with an abusive gym teacher, up to CEOs and politicians, and finally (as always) God.

This is often done in the name of personal freedom as a highest good, and this freedom exists in opposition to power over others. To exert one’s will over another’s life is to prevent that person from exerting their own will over their life. Gods and Emperors are all-powerful beings, and that power to exert their will over the lives of others so broadly comes at the cost of broad freedom. If your goal is anti-authoritarianism, there's no higher authority to overthrow than God or His closest fantasy analog.

And this is certainly the case with FF16; We go from a political conflict about liberation (the end of slavery) to an existential one (stopping Ultima from turning the human race into zombie-like Akashics).

The game really hammers these themes home during the fights with Barnabas and Ultima; beating up a king while arguing about free will, and then beating up God will arguing about free will.

FF16 did mix up the first half of this formula in a way that I appreciated; there is no single “Evil empire” in FF16 who’s collapse will trigger liberation. Instead, tyranny is exerted through the widespread practice of slavery across all nations, which Clive is struggling to abolish. It’s very heavy on the idea that systematic problems require systematic solutions; killing an evil king in a sick duel on top of an ancient tower in the rain might be part of that process, but liberation is a much longer struggle which involves changing culture as much as changing institutions. It was more nuanced than typically rebellion narratives and I appreciate that.

This also got me reflecting on FF16 in contrast to FF15, and how much 15 broke from the traditional anti-authoritarian mold. Clive’s arc is all about exerting free will and defying destiny; Noctis’s arc is all about accepting destiny. Maybe I’ll save that essay for another day.

So overall…. It’s a 3/5 for me, but a very inconsistent one. It alternates between absolute 5/5 action-drama and absolute 1/5 nothing burger side quests about collecting flowers, with very little in between. Clive is hands-down my favorite Final Fantasy protagonist, but the supporting cast all feel underdeveloped. It’s aesthetics are a departure from Final Fantasy’s norm while somehow feeling worn-out, and it’s themes are a return to form which -for me at least - felt refreshing. I’m left with a positive overall impression, but no real desire to replay it.

I'm going to be in Shanghai for a few days next week, and I want to visit some gyms/schools while I'm there. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm not super particular on style; Muay Thai, MMA, wushu, HEMA, and weird shit that no one has heard of are all of interest.