Bit late considering I finished this game back in 2023 but good lord is it amazing. This is the true sendoff to kiryu as the sole protagonist of the franchise and gave us a phenomenal ending to his saga unlike the mess that Y6 was. Not only does it have a great story, compelling antagonists and one of the best side content / gameplay loops of the entire franchise but it has the greatest final boss fight of the series even though it was fairly obvious from the beginning who it was. Phenomenal game and looking forward to 100%ing it

One of my favourite games of all time.


Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the story of Alice in wonderland and I had remembered liking the movie adaptation (not the original) but when I had gone back and watched it recently I had found it to not represent what the story was truly about. In fact I don’t believe that any form of media other than the books themselves have ever properly touched on what made the original books so damn good. Fast forward to a few months ago and I came across Alice: Madness Returns and decided to dive in. Going in completely blind and having no expectations this game blew any notion I had of it out of the water and then some. Alice: Madness Returns is a detailed and extreme dive into childhood trauma, repression and mental illness. The story obviously follows Alice from the source material but she is clearly in a blackened mental state and unable to see the world around her clearly, falling into wonderland only to find out that her mental state has not only affected herself, but the land of wonderland too. Regarding the gameplay, it is an extremely fun hack and slash platformer that (in my opinion) never really overstays its welcome or dried out in any way. For spoiler reasons i will not go into any detail about what goes on in the game and all I can say is please okay it for yourself the game is phenomenal.

Going back to this game just makes me want to play yakuza 0. While I can appreciate that this remake was done using leftover budget from Y0 which is why it uses the exact same combat system as well as heat actions and set pieces it doesn’t make up for the fact that it feels like I’m playing the same game with an altered story. Again, there is nothing wrong with this combat, hell it’s one of my favourite combat loops ever but this game just doesn’t feel like a just remake for one of the most beloved ps2 games. Will update this when I play the original Y1