A game that had a lot to live up to. What was supposed to be the "final" game in the series had to wrap up so many things that was introduced by the ending of MGS2.

I love this game, warts and all. There's so much good in it, but there's also a ton of stuff that does not live up to its potential. The first two acts of the game are great, but essentially a tech demo for the scrapped "living battlefield" idea. Things like being able to influence a proxy war to benefit you in different ways by siding with different factions is an awesome idea. I would love to see a game realize that idea some day.

I was so hyped for this game. It was basically all I could think about during the last month or so leading up to launch. This was my summer game of 2008 that I would play every day after a really shitty day at my minimum wage job, so I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for it.

This game has some of the best setpieces in the series. The game suffers from levels being made first and then having the story written around it, though. At launch there were was a really bad issue with how aiming worked that made shooting a lot more difficult than it should have been. If you spun the right stick in a circle you'd get Drake's aiming movements coming out in a square, if that makes sense.

Sadly the multiplayer in this game isn't nearly as good as 2's. The time-to-kill got changed and that altered the dynamics of so many other parts of combat in a way that I didn't like.

The gameplay is fine. It has some cool ideas it doesn't really cash in on. It's cool to have an open world game in Chicago. Everything that is memorable about this game is focused around the protagonist, the story, and how tonally strange everything is.

It's very clear that Aiden's sister was originally written as his wife and there was very little done to the script to make it feel that way. I love that you can get experience points for non-lethal takedowns as tons of innocent civilians die in a horrible car crash that you caused by hacking the stoplight at an intersection. Technically it's the cars exploding killing them, not you.

It's a really good game where you can tell Naughty Dog wanted to take the game in a slightly different direction. It felt like the game was sometimes responding to the criticism of Uncharted games having you fight way too many guys. There are a lot more sections in this game where you are just walking around and platforming.

I think the biggest flaw for me is that these platforming segments are a little too long for how mechanically simple they are. They add a grappling hook and eventually a tool you can use to dig into certain surfaces to climb them, but it's just not enough.

I'm both annoyed that it took me so long to get into this franchise, but also glad that this is the game that I started with. Yakuza 0 is a perfect starting point, especially with how the remakes of 1 and 2 incorporated new elements from 0 into them to make the prequel game feel more natural.

Yakuza is what the later Saints Row games wish they could be. It nails the delicate balance of a mostly serious crime story with over-the-top action and extremely wacky side stuff.

Kiryu is one of the greatest game protagonists of all time. He's up there with Solid Snake.