When you get over how absurdly hilarious the idea of personally beating up your Pokemon and then forcing them to do slave labor with these blank, cute, stupid looks on their faces is, there is something genuinely unsettling and disturbing about driving your "Pals" to the brink of insanity as a result of overwork and slave-driver labor conditions. You can't even say it's an effective political statement - or a scathing critique of Nintendo and Game Freak's business practices - because Palworld is a soulless, empty, plagiarizing husk of a video game whose sole interest is capitalizing upon the initial shock value that comes with a hook as brazen as 'ripoff Pokemon slavery simulator with guns'. This is a Family Guy Cutaway Gag of a video game, a Robot Chicken skit turned viral, a shitty Smosh parody given a source code. Apart from the weirdly interesting and complex slavery system, Palworld is clickbait and nothing more.

Setting whatever moral opposition I have towards Palworld aside, I think its biggest crime is ultimately that it's just plain boring. For all the things it's derivative of, it doesn't especially exceed at anything. The base building and automation involving the Pals is probably the most unique concept the game has to offer, but it's extremely shallow. There's no real strategy, or depth to any of the gameplay whatsoever really. Gunplay is unchallenging and very dull outside of few instances where you may acquire a new toy, such as a Foxparks flamethrower or Mossanda bazooka. However, these moments are few and far between, and their magic fades very quickly. The level of customization allotted to the player in terms of what Pals to use and how to use them is straight forward and uninteresting. It's very obvious what passives are best on what Pals, and you'd build most Pals exactly the same no matter what. Half of the Pals are simply mounts, and the other half don't do anything particularly interesting. The most you get is bland passives like "Water Pals drop more items when defeated," or a flat damage increase for a certain type, there's not really any feeling of meaningful party synergy. Pursuing said customization is also a discouraging process, as on default settings you may be waiting up to 2 hours real time for eggs to hatch late game - an absolutely absurd time sink. I don't feel this way about the other time gated activities in the game, like crafting, because it's encouraging to find a Pal that can craft faster - that's progression! In general the game isn't too terribly grindy, but it definitely picks up later on. I will say that there are a ton of handy adjustable option sliders for tweaking these issues to fit what you want, as well as other things like difficulty. This is very appreciated, but probably not going to be a perfect solution for everyone. Moving away from customization and optimization, lets shift our focus now to collection and exploration. First of all the map is not procedural, which does mean it was actually thoughtfully crafted, but also means that once you've seen it you've seen it. This is especially bad in the "dungeons" because they use the same repetitive handful of tiles over and over again, which makes them super tiresome, and quickly. I actually forgot they existed for like my first 40 hours of gameplay, and they only do so you can get practically meaningless accessories. There is no real story, no lore, no proper world building, or really any other goals or reasons to care about the world you are plopped into. You are only vaguely pointed towards towers, and they end up just being anticlimactic boss fights which are basically just normal Pals with more stats and an irrelevant NPC on their back. Collection isn't much more interesting either unfortunately, as the pool of fresh Pals to discover dries up pretty quickly. They don't evolve, and there's no sense of growth or any feeling of a meaningful relationship building between the Pal and the player - it's all very disappointing. There are a few cool Pal designs, ironically enough they're usually the least obviously plagiaristic (Cawgnito my beloved). Something I would like to genuinely praise the game for is the Pal animations, many of them are quite charming. Despite the aforementioned distance between the Pal and player, they can still be endearing due to the level of character expressed through their animations (Cawgnito my beloved, again). They aren't all perfect, and the non-Pal animations aren't nearly as stellar, but proper good animation work is one of the main things series like Pokémon have been sorely lacking as of late I feel. Speaking of the art generally, the style is all over the place. Having highly stylized, cartoony Pals, anime-inspired character models, photo-realistic guns, and semi-realistic environments all thrown together really makes you feel like you're playing a disjointed asset flip! Music is also completely unremarkable, but inoffensive I guess. I feel like a lot of the game's long term draw is going to be banking on the PvP being worthwhile, because there's no real replayability, value, or depth in any of the present systems. Overall, the game is fun for maybe your first 10 hours at most until you get truly settled into your first base and start to ask yourself "why?" I understand that the game is in early access, and it has some decent foundations. There's a lot of potential here, and as big as those shoes are it should have the funding to fill them. However, I cannot recommend Palworld in its current state to anyone who has any respect for themselves or their time.

I give it a half star for every Pal design I actually like.

De la misma manera que Alan Wake este juego se siente super derivativo de las influencias del estudio pero en este lograron alejarse más y crear algo más interesante, siento que le dieron un giro muy propio al vibe onírico de David Lynch pero a la vez te están golpeando en la cabeza todo el rato con uno de los monólogo interno más aburridos y condescendientes que he visto, te tratan como si fueras imbécil

El gameplay psé está divertido a ratos, no me encanta, espectacular al principio super aburrido por el final, casi dos décadas después y en cuanto a gameplay siguen sin poder superar Max Payne... huh...

Once you're at rock bottom, the only place to go is up.

A few days after I lost access to the game on PS+, it went on a sale, it's like fate wanted me to finish it. This was my first venture into the Like a Dragon series, after a long time of being relatively interested on it, a result of its exponentially increasing online presence as a franchise.

Like a Dragon is a very strong story about honor, respect, and most importantly, finding your own worth in the world, with Ichiban Kasuga being at the center of it. He values those features on a person so much that it leads him to take the guilt for a crime he didnt commit, which is as much as I can say about the story without getting into implied spoilers.
This serves to kickstart an amazing RPG that balances both serious, thought provoking and very emotional moments with silly laid back side content, one moment you find yourself being wrapped into a big conspiracy and the next one you are singing on a Karaoke or participating in Go kart races.

The game plays as you would expect any turn based game to play like, if you have played one, you have played them all. However in this game part of the fun of the turn based experience comes from setting up job combos in your party that allow you to minmax the shit out of everything. On top of that, you cant just brute force your way through everything by spamming attacks, you have to rely on as many tools (buffs, debuffs, ailments) as you can use to get through the toughest encounters, which is something I appreciate a lot when its done in this genre because it helps to prevent it from getting stale.

The worst thing I could nitpick about the game overall is that from chapter 12 onwards it starts relying on increasing the level gap between you and the enemies too often, which could have used some more thought to spike the difficulty if they really wanted to, but in the end, it was for a very good reason

As an afterthought, I would like to talk about how I decided to get into it, which was actually quite funny. It all started when I saw the trailer for Infinite Wealth that reveals that Kiryu has cancer and, for some reason, hearing that this character I knew nothing about (except how popular and beloved he is) was gonna have to deal with that in the next mainline game, made me feel like it was about time I caught up before the game released so I could see his story through. While theres no way I can play an entire franchise of long ass games in one month, at least I wanted to play those who precede IW first, that being Yakuza Like a Dragon, and Gaiden (which I hope to get to play sooner than later).

And so, with you as a witness, random user in Backloggd reading this, I make it one of my 2024 goals to play through these series, because I absolutely understand what the fuss is all about now, and I wish I had sooner.