Try to think of yourself as around 6-7 years old playing this hot new fighting game that came out on the PlayStation after you had played the demo over and over again on the sampler disc that came with your console, you decide you're gonna finally brave through the arcade mode against the CPU that you're terrible at dealing with.

You do fine against the first several opponents, maybe struggle at some points, but you're moving along. You eventually fight the sub-boss, which could either be a bear, a muay thai kickboxer, or an infinite kicks spamming jerkward named "Lee" depending on who you picked. Your conflict is exhausting, but you eventually persevere against your unlockable rival. The loading screen suddenly becomes the piercing eyes of the final boss who awaits you, they are an asshole in a purple suit known as "Kazuya". He absolutely manhandles you, your world constantly getting rocked with sudden blows to the stomach that make you reel, and the sight of your body going flying from a dragon uppercut becomes commonplace. Your frustration grows, but the amazing music keeps you in the game. Through sheer force of will and youthful stubbornness, you finally defeat him. Whether it was through skill or luck, it doesn't matter. You Win!

...but the loading screen returns....with demonic red eyes staring a hole straight through you....

One last opponent awaits, they simply go by "DEVIL". The sight of a purple winged demon takes the place of Kazuya, whom slowly stands up from a kneeling position to glare at you while ominous sorrowful music fills the empty void that makes up the stage. A stage of pitch black darkness, with only a screen in the background playing back your fight in real time as it stretches into itself for infinity, all while his infernal sounding voice filter and lasers install fear into your heart.

Chills, every single time.

It is easy to be dismissive. Be it art, people, food, events, the rapid, continual pace of consumption necessitates the compartmentalisation and categorisation of happenings. One can be dismissive in the positive and in the negative. The complex emotions elicited through our lives fade as quickly as they arise. Perhaps it is a consequence of language, an inability to express the phenomenon of experience. A meal's interplay of tantalising nostalgic aroma and comforting warmth in the belly is, for most of our lives, recalled as good - if it is remembered at all. A film is so bad it's good, some self-fulfilling label that sets expectations and ebbs the need for analysis of artistic merit and failure. A book is well-written. Your ex is a bitch. Last Christmas was good.

In the new hyperactive mode, wherein consumption happens largely for the sake of consumption, categorisation happens more readily, more aggressively, less critically. A director is washed. Your favourite is 🐐-ed. Films are kino or coal. Aesthetics are reduced to haphazard strictures, art pinned as frutiger aero, frasurbane, girlypunk neo-Y2K vectorheart nu-brute. Games are flavour of the month, kusoge, kamige, kiige, bakage, normiecore. Bring something up, and everyone has an opinion, a rote repetition of regurgitated refuse. Exhibit passion for that outside the zeitgeist, and be lambasted. Convey discontent with the beloved, be accused of poor media literacy. Are we even partaking of that which we parade around, or are we playing an elaborate game of telephone?

Even Burger King Orientation CD-i Training cannot escape unharmed. A wave of ironic praise and genuine befuddlement at why this exists, why it is revisited. One must be seeking attention for having such a quirky thing on their profile. It is impossible that it is enjoyed on a deeper level, as a response to a wider fascination, as a dive into historical (non-)import. The new hyperactive mode intentionally seeks signifiers which mark the self as interesting. An intentional facade which begs it won't be scrutinised.

But just because you have constructed this mask does not mean we all wear it. And perhaps I am being dismissive of your own thoughts. The truth of the matter is you don't care what I think, or why I feel a certain way. And to be fair, I feel the same animosity towards you. We are strangers at the conflux of comparison of preference.

I am filled with a genuine glee when I 'play' Burger King Orientation CD-i Training, but maybe it is best I keep the reasons to myself, as with so much else.

After all, you care not for what I think, so what is the difference if those thoughts are no longer laid bare.

The main thrust of this game is about learning how to deal with deep, alienating tragedy, reconnect with a sharply divided community, and understand the repressive structures that actually enable disasters instead of turning on the visible small fry. The notes are about this, the game’s loop is rebuilding a community and helping in ways big and small, and there’s a truly moving sermon you can find that lasers in on this. It’s telling a pulpy, X-Files-esque plot about barely-greeked versions of Theranos and CRISPR and Henrietta Lacks, and it’s genuinely committed to that vibe. The open world was designed with the intent of feeling like STALKER or Far Cry 2, but the co-op and loot mechanics make it easily recommendable, especially when it’s on Gamepass.

It’s an ace pitch, and it’s ultimately unworkable in the final execution. This is probably how 1313 would’ve turned out, or the original project Titan, and definitely how the original Duke Nukem Forever would’ve turned out. Games like Redfall are therefore unique in the ways that it shows what happens when those games make it to the finish line. It’s educational to witness, in its own way - the design and scope have so many disparate aims that feel in there out of obligation or as a way to paper over other underdeveloped parts. The stealth is undercooked, so instead there’s a focus on the shooting, but the shooting (while fun!) is undercut by the very simplistic AI, so instead there’s a focus on the open world, with lots of downtime where you’re reading notes and looking at graffiti and paying attention to the movements and sounds of this world, but there’s fucking co-op so you can’t soak that in without feeling like you’re being the weak link.

Any given individual part being half-baked would be something I could overlook if there was an overarching vision that guided it, or a single mechanic that was successful, or the narrative felt focused, but it’s just... not. The world itself is really well-considered and there’s great intentions in a lot of this, but the final product has nothing be truly standout without immense caveats. A series of ponderous Sunday School lesions that discussed with children how the Bible can be used to find peace in the game’s events are underneath a wall texture that takes thirty seconds to pop in. A moving sermon is protected by a vampire who pathed into the couch, stopped moving entirely, and docilely let me kill them unimpeded. Quests can be genuinely cute in their intentions - offering somebody whiskey and cigars one of their closest friends attempted to gift them before their untimely death - but there’s no reactions to them, and all you get is a cold stare and a bark you’ve already heard.

A lot of big canceled game stories are told in ways that focus on the pitch, and don’t discuss the realities of game development, which is about using state-of-the-art technology, legions of artists, musicians, and writers, and designing rules and systems in ways that tangibly cohere. Sometimes it just doesn’t come together, and most of the time it gets rebooted, massively reworked, or just canceled. Playing this game is a reminder of the infinite difficulties that underpin every game that ever releases. Even the most slapdash studio releases require sincere intentionality in itsdesign and direction. We all know who made this - it’s Arkhane, for crying out loud. More than any possible gamer out there currently despairing... you can bet money that everybody in the Austin department didn’t want the game to be like this even more.




Addendum - a rundown of the issues I ran across while playing: The game’s issues are there from the first seconds of playing. Multiplayer sessions do not save progress for anybody but the host, so you’re either forced to play in lockstep with them or spend however many hours grinding out the missions you just did, and there’s no matchmaking so if you want the full experience you need a four-stack. This makes the act of picking the damn game up and hitting “play” an unexpectedly intense investment. Neither singleplayer or multiplayer feel fully coherent to the design and gameplay loop, too. Singleplayer is always-online, with no pause button, with constant little interruptions that beg for other players to be there. Dying sends you back to the last fast travel point, which is always minutes away. Enemies are drastically undertuned - if you use the loot you’re showered with, you can one to three-tap vampires well past its opening hours even on Midnight, the hardest initially-unlocked ability.

Multiplayer is overtuned, by comparison. The same difficulty in a four-stack suddenly has HP and damage seemingly quadruple, which makes it difficult in ways that aren’t very engaging, either. As mentioned prior, the game’s pace and worldbuilding are drastically less effective in co-op, and the mission structure and progression feel more fitting for drop-in drop-out, if not for the fact that co-op is not drop-in. Every time you wanna invite somebody, you have to quit to the main menu and make a new session, which causes you to lose progress and spawn back at the most recent fast travel-point.

Lighting is half-baked and the lack of proper indirect lighting makes NPCs look flat and environments feel artificial, texture pop-in feels like it’s from a late-era Unreal 3 game, and the star of the show is the AI, which fundamentally does not function. Enemies are universally defeated by moving tangent to them in a straight line, and they stand around for five seconds before attacking and wait just as long between each attack. It's artificial and completely unengaging to fight. Enemy designs are uninspired and the possibly interesting ones don't show up very often, and encounters never take advantage of them due to the open world conceit destroying most level and encounter design.

The world design is fun to traverse but massively underpopulated with meaningful enemy compositions, and there's no point to stealth because everybody is stupid and inconsistent and there's no point to gunfights because you don't get a ton of exp from enemies and the only real rewards are weapons that perform identically to what you have and the ammunition you spent on fighting them. Despite its compressed scale most houses and buildings are still closed-off and serve as little more than time-wasting set dressing, which grows worse when death resets you to the nearest fast travel point and you have 30-60 seconds of just holding sprint.

Movement is barebones and standard for a 2023 FPS and the world design rewards paying attention and being creative about as much as your exploring leads to empty rooms whose objects have broken collision. Notes can be amazingly written or completely perfunctory, another sacrifice to scale and scope. Character writing for people you actually talk to is nonexistent and completely unreactive in ways that harm immersion AND what possible enjoyment of the narrative you can have.

Performance is terrible for the game's graphical quality, and Arkhane's usually-sharp art direction is let down by unmotivated lighting and difficulty in merging their heightened art style with realistic modernity. It's occasionally really good, the opening does it fantastically, but most of the time you're looking at photorealistic cars and using chunky versions of realistic guns and then enemies look much more painterly.

It's just... not a good game on any level and it pains me that there's not something I can really single out as unambiguously good. Arkhane really, really struck out here.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is incapable of escaping comparison to fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons, and it clearly doesn’t want to try. It aestheticizes the act of rolling dice, offers cosmetic skins for when rolling them, and the d20 polyhedron is a core part of its narrative’s iconography. It aims to capture the Dungeons And Dragons Experience, something heavily informed by Critical Role, Community episodes, and broad parodies as much as it aims to capture the 5e player’s handbook.

5e works to take a genre renowned for fiddliness, sand off the rough edges to lower the skill floor even if it harms the ceiling, market it as a beginner-friendly experience even if it lacks common features for any other modern game on the market and has lacking systematization for non-combat sequences, use its unique market position to have eye-catching production values that no other game can attest to, and then have the canny and luck to release right in the middle of a massive upsurge of interest in tabletop roleplay. This, coincidentally, perfectly describes Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.

No game in this genre has had this much effort put into filmic direction and realistic visuals since Dragon Age Origins, and its focus on high-quality cutscenes, voice acting, and motion capture is exactly what was needed to make it sell Elden Ring numbers. Twitter artists’ attention spans have been caught by it in the same personality-altering ways as Mihoyo games and Final Fantasy XIV, which is the true mark of a culturally significant work. Doing mocap for every NPC in the game speaks to its unparalleled ambition and production scope.

Mechanically, the game attempts to offer systemic interactions uncommon to the genre. A confession: I could never get into Divinity Original Sin or its sequel and thus struggle to directly compare its execution. On its own merit, the implementation suffers because of how stifling 5e’s action economy is. Taking two standard actions to throw a barrel and ignite it in a game with a four-man party limit is very rarely the most effective use of a turn, and magic takes forever to start creating interesting environmental effects, by which point it is probably a better use of time to turn one cast Haste on the cracked-out martial class of choice and let them solo the encounter instead.

Martial classes get changes from the 5e PHB which are highly appreciated - general rebalances make some subclasses more compelling, weapon proficiency now grants combat maneuvers with each weapon type that replenish on short rest which allow for debuffs, area-of-effects, and crowd control in ways that are pretty logical for each weapon type, and the oodles of magic items synergize incredibly well with oft-neglected playstyles. An open hand monk with a three-level dip in Thief for the extra bonus action can crack 300 damage per turn by endgame, and if one has, say, a decade of Pathfinder brainrot, that’s deeply satisfying in ways not offered by the uninspiring feat and class feature list.

It’s inherited from the tabletop game, but it’s still disappointing how guided and on-rails character building feels. Feats are hard to come by and are in direct competition with ability score increases, which creates incredible opportunity costs for efforts to go gimmicky. Being guided towards picking one, maybe two build-defining feats and dumping others into ASI feels really bad, and multiclassing means losing out further and subsisting entirely off of choiceless class features or every-so-often subclass bonuses (and 80% of subclasses either have linear progression or are just picking spells with extra steps).

The lack of flavor is reflected in non-combat dialogue choices, which focus on the act of decision-making as a substitute for roleplay. Actual dialogue options are bland, simplistic, and any personality is pre-defined from the player’s chosen origin or class. The focus on full mocap, as much as it means there are truly excellent performances (shoutouts to Astarion), means individual conversations run short and utilitarian. Dialogue often lacks distinct character voice (Astarion and Lae’zel exempted), it instead gaining its sparkle from behavioral tics, quivers in the voice, or sweeping body language. Each line is usually just a short sentence or two, and conversations rarely run for too long.

Similarly, quests are often binary and offer few chances to meaningfully tinker with inputs, outputs, or outcomes, or are obscenely frustrating in the lack of consideration for alternate paths. The quest chain that defines Act 1, a crisis between goblins, druids, and refugees caught in the middle, outright resists any method of play that is not “go to druids, get quest to go to camp, go talk to goblins, kill them where they stand, teleport back to applause.” Narratively, siding with the goblins immediately loses two party members from the player’s ranks and has literally zero in-character justification past moustache-twirling villainy. There is no way to make the tieflings flee ahead of the assault, and they try to kill the PC for suggesting it. Interrupting the druid ritual similarly has no real effect on the outcome. Playing both sides and luring Minthara out into the open grants the player a harder fight with more at risk and less roleplay reason to do it. In the third act, the narrator (assumedly playing the role of game master) drops the artifice several times to clearly explain the binary choice at play and suggest there is no other route, which is, put politely, advice no GM should ever take.

This sense of railroading and resistance to straying from the beaten path is omnipresent, and further hindered by its frankly godawful approach to ability checks. Here is where the fetishization of dice comes to the fore: it outright ignores how 5e is supposed to be played solely to introduce more randomness. The Dungeon Master’s Guide (and 5e’s director) states to use passive checks for rolls that aren’t player-initiated - passive checks working by simply adding ten to the player’s proficiency bonus and deterministically answering whether they succeed. This allows the GM to conceal rolls, a valuable tool, but equally so it being non-random is important. Player’s skill choices and ability spreads affect the outcome when they’re operating on autopilot, not their luck. This is in contrast to ability checks, which are high-stakes and player-initiated.

The d20 is an inherently insanely random and swingy die, and even skilled player characters are often at risk of failure. This is exciting in a tabletop game, where failure can have unintended consequences. 5e’s DMG (and its director) knows that failure despite extensive investment can be frustrating, however, and explicitly rules that critical failures and successes should not exist when rolling ability checks. Literally none of these rulings operate as such in BG3. Passive checks don’t exist; everything is rolled. Critical failures and critical successes both apply to ability checks, and success/failure is either strictly binary (either losing out on quest progression or getting sent into combat, or getting exactly what is desired or and/or avoiding combat) or entirely superfluous (a lengthy series of ability checks in its climax has literally zero difference between success or failure in terms of animations, dialogue, outcomes, bonuses, or penalties).

It is a mantra of most actual play and most dungeon mastering guides, regardless of systems, to have the dice serve to amplify stakes but not define the game - only let the dice come out when the outcome is meaningfully uncertain, and when what is being rolled is clearly defined. There is a place for it, and systematizing uncertainty is a key part of what separates TTRPG from improvised narrative (check out Amber Diceless Roleplaying, though!). However, it defining all aspects of player expression is equally poor in execution - it smudges out roleplay, character building, and simple fun to have a high-level master of the craft still muck up something completely mundane - unless there is a factor in the scene to add tension, which rarely occurs in this game.

This is further compounded by the game embracing save-scumming. Unlike many, many other games in the CRPG space (and obviously unlike TTRPG, which is beholden to linear time) the player can quicksave and quickload at any point in dialogue, including on the ability check menu. The only thing stopping them from constant, eternal success is a belief that failure is interesting (it almost never is) or respect for their own time (an assumption challenged by the game’s mammoth length).

This is a sizable pacebreaker, but it’s mitigable by offering the game respect it doesn’t earn. By far one of the most frustrating and runtime-bloating occurrences is inventory management, a symptom of rough edges and ill-conceived QoL decisions colliding messily. Party member inventories are individualized, and logically are taken with them when dismissed. The player can send items to camp at any time (except for the final dungeon, for some reason, despite there being no reason to ever manage your inventory by that point?) and can similarly teleport to camp at almost any time.

These systems interlink to create a system that is fiddly (individual party members may overcap their inventory at any time, necessitating shuffling and sending to camp, and searching the inventory (an already-onerous task due to poor UX and lacking categorization) does not display items from the inventories of camped PCs) but also entirely superfluous (being able to visit camp at almost any time means the player can swap out party members or access their storage equally at almost any time). It lacks any actual difficult decisionmaking about what to bring, as combat-affecting items like scrolls, potions, and grenades weigh fractions of a pound while the limit even for STR-dumping characters is somewhere around eighty.

This has the side effect of completely eroding the feeling of camp as an actual space that inhabits the world, instead coming across as Fable 3’s inventory dimension. Despite its accessibility and lack of immersion, there is no way to quickly dismiss or replace party members past individually walking to each one (which can take 15+ seconds on larger camp maps) and mashing through dialogue. The low party limit means that there is incentive to do this a lot just to play the game and advance quests, but the completely RNG environmental skill checks means there is a want or need to swap people out for another reroll after all the WIS people in the party chunked a perception or survival save, the presence of locked doors potentially incentivizes a pocket Astarion to teleport in, jimmy a trap, and teleport away, and the ever-present horror of realizing the wrong person has a desired item and the player will thus have to cycle through everybody’s inventories one-by-one until it turns up.

The game is obviously not lacking in redeeming value - as a set of encounters it is unreal. Every single fight in the game has a unique compounding factor, and the infrequent instances when enemies are reused it is in very different compositions and contexts. The acting direction really is good, and Astarion might ultimately unseat Daeran as a new favorite in the CRPG canon of prissy assholes who prove that negging really does work. Some quests are enjoyable, even if many ultimately disappoint or get their conclusion swallowed up in the sea of bugs and inconsistent writing that is Act 3.

What it excels at, notably, has little to do with tabletop roleplay (unless your table has trained thespians) and rarely happens in CRPGs. This speaks to its broad appeal, but more notably gets at the heart of the matter: the commercial ideal Dungeons And Dragons Experience is not actually how almost any tabletop game, 5e or not, is played or performed. It is defined by secondary experience via podcasts and television episodes and broad parodies. This, more than anything, is what Larian offers: the ability to play a game that your favorite voice actors play, or to get the Dungeons And Dragons Experience when you’re not in a position to get a group going. It offers the idealized and aestheticized vision of it, even when that idealization makes the game outright worse.

I don't like the return of massive stun after attacking a blocking enemy and Kaito's styles just being two from Yakuza 0 disappoints. These are my only issues with what's otherwise basically a perfect RGG Studio game. This final boss goes so fucking hard it's unbelievable. Really hope that they have more short, focused expansions like this that share a similarly sharp grasp on character writing and fill out side characters. I'd pay $30 or $40 for a standalone with this little bullshit very easily. I love that this DLC is an echo of Yakuza 1, except Kaito is willing to live for other people instead of dying for them and thus has a very, very different approach to things. He's such a great character.

It’s incredible that the Yakuza Like A Dragon series exists in this form at all. It’s really easy to discuss these games as a simple comeback story where it was saved from (Western) obscurity by grassroots efforts rallying around 0, but the fact that this insane momentum was met by RGG Studio changing the protagonist and turning it into a triple-A turn-based JRPG when the studio has no prior experience making those and conventional wisdom says the genre is utter sales poison is staggering. The last several mainline games demonstrate a remarkable and admirable disinterest in providing fans with what they expected or wanted, which is doubly impressive when the series is so iterative by nature.

Infinite Wealth iterates a lot on its predecessor, especially. It’s still a turn-based JRPG, and its changes are really, really cool. 7 felt like an experiment that had some great moments but didn’t cohere, an exemplification of the divine mathematics that underpin Dragon Quest and the travails that come when they are fucked with too much. Infinite Wealth still has a major debt to DQ (and some tinges of Chrono Trigger-style enemy shuffling) but manages to be much more unique and self-assured.

For starters, the exp curve is just phenomenally well-considered this time. Gone are the days of 7’s stupid-ass back-to-back grinds, and the scaling for exp and job levels means that it’s very easy to catch up and it can be surprisingly difficult to overlevel. In my playthrough, I kept half of the cast with their default jobs and I had the other half level a side job to 30 before swapping back to default. Team OG ended the game with job levels in the forties, and Team FAFO ended the game with a cumulative sixty job levels. I didn’t feel punished for doing either, as each job kit feels well-rounded and useful even without getting into the insane potential added by skill inheritance, but leveling side jobs felt breezy.

Beyond just the math, job design and skills got so much love - each new job has a really cool and distinct aesthetic, a really fun playstyle, and AoE attacks are way more interesting than they were 7. Circle AoEs might have one edge centered on the targeted enemy, making them finickier for selecting a full group but granting finer control over who else to include, granting damage bonuses for initiating the attack from far away, or having a long line start and end at interesting points. Cone-shaped AoEs are a lot more useful-feeling in this game when their far edge can be centered on the targeted enemy instead of the front tip. It all adds up to make lining up attacks require thought and positioning, which is really nice.

Being able to move around is the most transformational part of the combat changes, easily, but it’s part of a host of other changes that all feel a little small on their own but add up fast. There’s now a proximity bonus for basic attacks that adds in extra hits if they’re made from up close, and getting a proximity hit from behind guarantees crits. Enemy AI is aware of this, and the window to get back attacks is often fleeting at the start of the player’s turn. Having autoattacks be gimped if the party member is pathed far away or wants to hit a specific far-away enemy is frustrating, and there are three major ways to circumvent this - the simplest is to just use a skill to close the gap and do reliable damage.

They can also pick up an environmental object and use that - being able to walk up to ‘em means that they’re an actually valid part of the player’s strategy this time, and on top of their positioning benefits they're a great way to hit elemental weaknesses on people who don’t have certain skills. Otherwise, they can stand nearby another party member and do a combo attack that applies their weapon effects, does full damage at range, and gives their partner a bit of MP back on hit as well. These latter two options are useful and have a variety of obvious applications, but still come with drawbacks - if somebody’s basic attacks do knife or gun damage, then using a ground weapon will override that. Sometimes proximity attacks do way more damage than a combo strike or weapon attack, or the other person in a combo attack will hit an enemy’s elemental resistance and do almost no damage.

On top of all this, there is now a visible knockback indicator for attacks, which adds in yet another layer on top of all of this: knocking an enemy down into a party member does a lot of damage and applies their weapon effect, but knocking them into another enemy does a good bit of AoE, but knocking a large enemy into a wall scores a full knockdown other party members can exploit that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Enemies who block can have their guard broken by either doing a grab-type attack or hitting them from behind; a grab will permanently break it, a back attack will just pierce it for that one attack (and any followups while the enemy is on the ground). This is all then further compounded by the incessant shuffling and jockeying for space that enemies do - every consideration the player will make is based on reading the situation as it exists and trying to capitalize on split-second opportunities. It’s fully turn-based, but it has the pace and feel of an action fight, while retaining the positional focus, comboing, and okizeme of the series’ beat-em-up roots. It’s really fucking good.

The standout is Kiryu’s default job, which exemplifies almost all of this. Style swapping changes the properties of his basic attacks in cool ways on its own; Rush lets him make two weaker attacks per turn, giving him strong AoE or letting him score a guaranteed KO on a weakling before focusing fire on somebody else, Beast lets him do grabs without spending MP and amps up his ability to use ground weapons, and Brawler is the “vanilla” set of attacks that then let him do heat actions under the traditional series rules - be nearby a specific environmental object or otherwise fulfill certain criteria, get into proximity with them, then ace a quick QTE. All three styles get additional action game flair by having their proximity attacks have a short mash or timing prompt, which sells Kiryu both as somebody with a foot firmly planted in real-time and also as a monstrous DPS machine who feels awesome to control.

This mechanical empowerment is contrasted by his narrative role. Ichiban’s stylization as a JRPG hero sells him as somebody strengthened by his friends, but it results in a constant bitter tinge when Kiryu is in the squad. He didn’t always need help, and the character writing does a lot of really satisfying stuff with this disempowerment and reliance for such a stoic, badass lone wolf. Infinite Wealth is a game defined by dichotomies like this - obviously it’s a story split between two countries and two leads, but its themes are equally defined by parallels and mirrors. Everything ultimately comes back to purification or corruption, light and dark, and the terrors and delights of both the past and the future.

It doubles down on everything that makes these games what they are while simultaneously being confident enough to downplay so many of the series’ touchstones, giving the game a feel kinda like a concert that’s half playing the hits and half showing tracks from their next album. The first time a jacket is dramatically removed to reveal the body underneath is an unthinking act of kindness on Ichiban’s behalf, performed without any intent to fight or to show off, but when the player sees the world through Kiryu’s eyes, he can’t help but see ghosts everywhere he goes. These themes of past and future cycles make it hard to not feel a bit of metatext in this being the first full game released after Nagoshi left, and this “changing of the guard” plot can spark worries of being a retread of 7’s themes - and while certain plot elements certainly evoke it, there’s always a knowing tweak to it. 7 is a game about starting over again, of living through a storm and planting seeds for the future once the rubble’s been swept away. Infinite Wealth is more about perpetuating or changing the cycles everyone inhabits - of seeing what’s been done to them and the people before them and trying to break, fix, or continue things.

The returning characters are all well-considered and, equally importantly, most feel unexpected. Few of them feel obligatory, and those that do are given angles and elements that keep them surprising and cathartic nonetheless. Plenty of them have been chewed up and spit back out, some have come back stronger and better, some are indolent, and some lucky few stroll back into the picture feeling just as magnetic and lovable as they were all those years ago. Seeing the game take full advantage of its position as the ninth mainline title in a series stretching back almost twenty years is just as satisfying as seeing how it fantastically it intersects fantastically with the character writing writ large.

Yamai manages to escape the “Majima clone” allegations with aplomb, with a great design, fantastic presence (Koyasu the GOAT), and a satisfyingly mercurial-but-coherent role in the narrative. With the exception of Saeko, whose entire character frustratingly feels like an extension of Ichiban’s arc, literally every single party member is given a lot more to chew on this time. The gap between December 2019 and November 2023 reshuffled a lot and the status quo shifts give people unexpected and lovely positions and angles to view the world. Each little skit and friendship bingo conversation is consistently funny and interesting, and the new party members are literally all bangers. Special shout outs to the job unlock cutscenes creating the implication that Chitose has a Nico Robin-style hyperactive imagination that she does not ever share with anybody; that being said, Tomizawa and Chitose are both incredibly endearing and have a lot of great dramatic and comedic chops. Tomi gets more focus in the front half and Chitose the back, which gives her a bit of an edge in terms of immediate retrospective emotional edge, but both are excellent.

Tomizawa’s arc is tied up with the Barracudas, who are kind of a nexus of the game’s more annoying issues. The gang has a really strong and sympathetic hook that is connected to pretty venomous social commentary, but they rapidly recede from institutional relevance and, just like 7, the themes of homelessness, discrimination, and critiquing the lived effects of Japan’s comically harsh anti-yakuza laws (making it basically impossible to have a normal life certainly makes it effective for killing recruitment, but guys seeking a way out certainly have their work cut out for them…) feel under-discussed after the first act. Additionally, while Yakuza has always had a heightened tone, there are times when, regardless of the player’s tolerances, there will be moments that stretch credulity; especially when combat is done with silly costumes. Sometimes it feels weird to talk about America’s crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing cost of life only to then beat up three Hungry Hungry Homeless.

These are issues, and they deserve mention, but simultaneously, this is the ninth mainline RGG game. Every issue raised so far has been present to some degree or another in quite literally every single game in the franchise. They’ll affect enjoyment to varying extents, of course, but… I wouldn’t get too mad at a fish for being bad at climbing trees, or at least when I’m neck-deep I’d think I know what pitfalls I'd fallen into.

For all the love heaped on the character writing, the main villains really falter, which is unexpected for this series. There’s good villains and bad villains, and certainly sometimes they contrive excuses for a final boss when punching out a businessman would be unsatisfying, but RGG Studio’s been on a hot streak for antagonists for a good while now. The antagonistic forces in this game feel more like an exercise in thematics than they are actually characters. It’s cool to see a contemporary political thriller manage to make themes of corruption, despoiling paradise, and battling against nature feel grounded within a real-world context and not feel too hacky about it, but despite their screentime they have a terminal lack of real presence or sauce. The villains’ big dramatic showcases pale in comparison to both the quiet and loud moments that accompany their underlings and frenemies. They do create good moments by contriving the protagonists into circumstances that showcase their amazing traits and even better voice actors, but the monologues and physical performances shown off could be bounced off somebody I actually give a shit about and I’d be into it even more than I am.

The cutscene direction, as implied above, is excellent. The stunt coordinator for every game since 6 cut his teeth on Mark DaCascos hood classic Drive (1997), a shitload of tokusatsu, and a little old game called Devil May Cry 3, and it lends the cutscene brawls a sense of physicality and flair that a lot of game cutscenes weirdly can’t do very well. The dramatic scenes have astonishingly good blocking and composition. For how many cutscenes are in this game, they find so many great camera angles, poses, and little vocal quavers to give far more weight to far more than one would expect.

It’s easy to gush about this game, and while it has its flaws and doesn’t always favorably stack up to past games, it feels like a chore to discuss them. Sure, Ichiban got a better moment in 7, Kiryu’s finest hour is still (regrettably) the final scene in Gaiden, and the enemy shuffling just inherently means that the combat’s chaotic, uncontrollable nature will create frustrating situations and missed attacks. It’s maybe not as focused as some other Yakuza games? (I mean, not really, lmao, the only games you might be able to argue that for are 2 and 6, and buddy, 2 is not as focused as you remember it being and 6 is just not interesting.) But at the same time, I don’t really give a fuck.

I love Yakuza most when it’s maximalist, audacious, willing to totally fuck with your expectations, and unafraid to be messy. That’s what I associate the series with and that’s what I want with each new game. That’s what I got here. I was so worried that Kiryu’s return would feel cheap, I was worried that losing Nagoshi would rob the games of an ineffable soul, and Gaiden put the fear of God in me that they would retain the godawful grinds that 7 had (if not double down.) Some mistakes it makes are certainly frustrating and I hope that one day the series will move on.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to not root for the game anyways. A game like this is so special to me. It never treats its past as a burden, and it plants one foot after another into an uncertain future with confidence. You can’t always cure stupid, but the way it endlessly strives towards a better and brighter path, unafraid to experience the sad, bitter, silly, and sweet in all its forms… it’s nice to see a game’s ethos resemble its admirable hero so much.

Behold… a Euphoric Bros. game…. that’s actually kinda okay?

At least in comparison. A lot of the Garten of Banban hallmarks are still present. The game is dead-set on unsuccessfully trying to run over the two-hour refund threshold: in this case, padding the experience through looooong tram rides and sections where the player is forced to backtrack, each point of interest being a lengthy ways away from whatever other point of interest you’re currently at. When it’s not doing that, it’s not really doing anything interesting, either: the game never really takes advantage of its setting to do anything unique, instead just making you do clunky drone puzzles and then whatever fuck-you roadblock will make the game even longer as you figure out what you’re even meant to do. The game is utterly incapable, writing-wise, of a lot of what it’s actively trying to do: its scares don’t scare, its attempts at delivering its Deep Lore come off as both incomprehensible and not particularly interesting. Aesthetic-wise, the game puts its effort in all the wrong places. There’s so much needless detail on what are otherwise very simplistic models (which plays… weirdly with the lighting. everybody is so shiny), yet the way they move is so rigid and basic. There’s a moment where the… antagonist? of the chapter gives what’s ostensibly a Joker Rant on why he is the way he is, from which he… stands entirely still the whole time, just kinda staring at you through the window. Rids the moment of whatever impact it was meant to have. Just a little bit.

But even amongst all that there were moments which… if not necessarily showing promise, were still honestly enjoyable to go through. The game continues the upward trend Garten of Banban 3 did in having somewhat capable gameplay segments. No section stands out as egregiously bad, or anything that seems like it’s built to kill you as many times as possible to help get past the refund threshold. And even if what’s there… doesn’t really enhance the mood, or fit in with the general setting, some segments were honestly pretty fun. They finally have a puzzle utilizing the drone that I actually enjoyed going through, even if it’s still rather annoying to control. There’s this one segment where you have to memorize all the items in the rooms around you before then trying to figure out which of the rooms had something inside change and it was honestly super fun. Like, to the point where I wanted to try and do it again after I was done. There are some rough sections, and as a whole I’d say a lot of this feels… like going through the motions, trudging down the infinitely long hallways. Is it all that great? No, but for this series, it’s certainly an improvement.

Honestly, I also had a fun time watching things unfold, as well. Gone are most of the attempts to try and be funny — having a robot say the same three fandom in-jokes over and over again because apparently repetition is the best form of comedy — in favour of what mostly seems like a sincere attempt at being a serious Deep Lore horror game. And it’s like a soap opera. You never really know what’s going to happen next, be it something wild happening in the plot, some stupid gameplay concept you’re going to have to be stuck with for the next five minutes, some silly thing the game does to try and make its runtime as long as possible… it’s a wild ride, and something deeply, deeply entertaining, whether that’s despite itself or because of that. There’s also some stuff here I do like on its own merits. The new voice actors brought in by and large do a pretty decent job (and contrast rather amusingly with the DIY voice-acting of the older characters). There’s a couple jokes that stick the landing, and make me a bit more confident in the idea that there’s a little gift for… if maybe not anti-humour, being able to catch the player off guard in such a way as to bolster what’s happening. It’s clear, comparing this to its immediate predecessor (and also their other game Introvert: A Teenager Simulator actually) that they need to lean maybe a bit against their natural instincts to make their humour work, but I’m not being backhanded here: when it works, it does work.

So, like, given all that, I’d say I had fun with this in the end. I was thinking about maybe giving a bit more of a positive score, but ultimately the persistent feeling I had going through this was still a bit closer to antipathy than anything else. The game still wants to reach past the two-hour refund threshold without actually having enough content to get there, the core gameplay is kinda clunky and uninspiring, and on all fronts it kinda fails to be as effective as a horror experience as it wants to be. But on the other hand, after the genuinely kind of awful experience that was Garten of Banban 2... I definitely feel this series is on a bit of an upward tick. The gameplay is tolerable, and at points has some genuinely fun moments, and at the very least I think on the writing end the creators are leaning into the most entertaining parts of what they have here. Is it good? No. Passable? Maybe still not there, yet, but either way I had a good time. And I don’t necessarily think that’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking. 4/10.

Music highlight. Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes.

Video games aren't fun anymore.

Minecraft was at its best in whichever version came after the first one I played, because that was my First Update and was new and exciting to me.

I will talk about the game peaking in its beta while also expressing pure insipidity as soon as the ender dragon is found and/or killed, despite the fact that this did not exist during the supposed Golden Age of Minecraft.

Microsoft ruined Minecraft by making it accessible across 8 distinct platforms and keeping the simpler combat that I insist is better than

Mojang, who ruined Minecraft with the Beta 1.3 with the Beta 1.4 with the Beta 1.8 with the Release 1.0 with the Release 1.3 with the Release 1.5 with the Release 1.6 with the Release 1.9 update. Oh, the train stopped? Just kidding, with the Release 1.13 with the Release 1.14 with the Release 1.16 with the Release 1.17 with the Release 1.18 with the Release 1.19 with the Release 1.20 update. Yes, every single one of these updates spread across the last literal decade individually ruined Minecraft. Oh sorry, I forgot to start the timeline at Infdev

Yes, I can list at least one reason for every update charted out above. I will use however much or however little knowledge I have of Minecraft to relentlessly batter these algorithm-oriented talking points inside my head as I play, so I can reinforce the growing status quo to garner clicks and views all built around a narrative of disinterest, creative bankruptcy and an inability to keep the intrinsic flame alight.

A sandbox, that contains things I am not forced to engage with, but will make it my problem despite the game letting me choose my version to play on. They made the game too easy, they made the game too hard. They made the game too directed, they made the game too wide. They changed too much, they changed too little. Vanilla is boring, modders can do better. Mods are too different, I prefer Vanilla.

Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation is ruining minecraft, how haven't Mojang fixed this yet? Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation (2012) is funny, can't wait to try this on my creative world. Minecraft was better when it was simpler and we'd make 8-bit calculators out of only redstone and torches.

Minecraft grew up, I did not. I grew up, Minecraft did not.

...

How do I live like this? I don't. Imagine being this miserable. I love Minecraft just as much today as I did over a decade ago. Dipped my feet into mods, played dozens of adventure maps, was there at the twin-birth of Battle Royale (Survival Games in MC + the mod for Arma II) and here to see the entirety of Shrek at 720p encoded as block placements in-game.

"Video games aren't fun anymore." get real. Love the gang that plays Minecraft with me who still have a sense of humor, imagination and intrinsic motivation to simply build together.

Good night.

How to host a java server: PaperMC + server flags
How to manage Minecraft Java installs: Prism Launcher (recommended) or MultiMC
How to install mods: Modrinth
Wiki/further reading: Minecraft Wiki (not fandom)

I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.

smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game

if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.

this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.

there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.

cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude