SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE GAME

When I first played the remastered version some months ago, I thought it was a pretty ok game and continued with my life. But for some reason, the game stuck in my mind for a long while, like it had something special in it that I couldn't wash off. Now, it allured me to play the original version this time.

After playing Yakuza 2 and comparing the two, you can feel how important this game was for the series. I have yet to play Kenzan, and I know it was the first step in introducing this saga to the more realistic approach using the PS3 engine. But from what I've seen from it, Kenzan walked so Y3 could run. This game reimagined the whole aesthetic. Kamurocho goes from this gritty, dark, kinda noir vibe that PS2 games had to a sharp, stylish, and more flashy design. The city is more dazzling than ever and adding that it was the one to introduce minigames (a whole lot of them) makes up for this "Sleepless Town" essence. Kamurocho is just a LOT of fun to be running around.

-- Narrative --
My main problem with the game is the overall writing of the criminal plot. Coming from Yakuza 2, which manages to maintain its mysteriousness, unwrapping little by little and keeping you engaged with meaningful events, this one was kind of a letdown. The premise is so interesting, but it could have been handled a lot better. All the enigma and threat that Joji represented as a character ends up disappearing since he's just... a good guy👍; They don't even try to give both Joji and Kiryu more time on screen, to at least poke at the wound of a living picture of the most important person in his life that passed away being there, someone that knew more of him, get that emotional side of Kiryu, no.
Also, the lack of Black Monday presence throughout the game and the way they don't really show or try to create a menacing aura around the organization makes you not really care that much about all that stuff at the end not gonna lie.
Anyway, I'm not going to expand much else into it. The ending, though... I really, really like it since it makes a certain parallel with the previous 2 games in terms of Kiryu's existential journey and makes it feel like the actual END of a trilogy. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. Even if it's not intentional, when I realized this, I was kinda blown away.

Both in Yakuza 1 and 2, Kiryu's afterward moments after dealing with the "main" conflict of the plot, usually ending in tragedy, he gives up; We tend to see a very stubborn, angry Kiryu that makes his way through purely with this raw violence, not really thinking things twice and is given either a reason or another chance to live by someone else. In Yakuza 1, he loses all the most important bonds of his entire life, destroyed by the yakuza world, Reina, Shinji, Nishiki, Kazama, and Yumi. Staring silently at the void, prefers to get arrested for life since nothing is left for him out there, nothing worth living. Date reminds him of Haruka. Try living for the girl.
He decides to keep going.
In Yakuza 2, he doesn't even try to escape, in this case, Kaoru reminds him ... Haruka is waiting for you, but even so, he accepts that she will never be safe with him. After all, she has been kidnapped multiple times for his past and constant engagement with the Clan's activity, so he decides to just die, right there, while everything blows away. He knows Haruka will be safer with someone like Date by his side. Even so, Terada, the very person who betrayed him "gives" him another chance to live, one that he would not regret.

In Yakuza 3, you can feel all of this in Kiryu's character, the way he talks to people, to his children, he's full of hope and wisdom from a very rough life, and he's finally trying to live a real life, one away from the yakuza, and he tries to pour all of his knowledge, values and experiences into his kids to give them a better life, one that he never had.
The situations in Morning Glory are kinda silly, and a lot of times oddly specific; But every time, at the end of these little mundane problems, Kiryu's speeches hit you in the gut, because they are messages filled with such love and a kind of complexity that surprises you coming from him, a very flawed man. Every time Kiryu watches his kids do good, smiling, it warms my heart.
I didn't remember Rikiya's death scene being so well done, I honestly think it is one of the more memorable scenes RGG has done, even if his sacrifice is not that "well" staged. First time in the whole saga Kiryu completely breaks down as he cries and his voice cracks, yes he also cries when his father dies but, this time is so much stronger as if a channel of all his reprimed emotions hit him at that specific moment like a fucking train; I also think this moment is particularly sad since his death represents a direct consequence of his yakuza past getting up to him, he remembers he can't escape and all his loved ones can be taken away from him.
Mine acts as a "what Kiryu could have been." You could even say he's the personification of Nishiki, and he's standing in front of him, once again, but Kiryu is not the same. He has grown; now it's his time to give purpose to someone's life, and he does, resulting in what we see as Mine's ending. He thinks he's too far gone to keep living but decides to end it all with a pure reason not born from hatred.
This game has an odd connection to blood relationships and orphans. Kiryu is an orphan, Mine is an orphan, obviously, all his children are orphans. An orphan is a representation of a human being left stranded, deprived of the first connection to LOVE that a person CAN (not always) have, Mine is a representation of one possible outcome, resents others, resents relationships, and is distrustful since he was taken away of this so early in life. Kiryu on the other hand, recognizes this fact and builds bonds around him, he had the luck of always having caring people by his side. ODDLY SIMILAR TO GAARA AND NARUTO... wtf, crazy.

Kiryu is stabbed at the end; he falls on the ground as he bleeds, staring at the sky, with the possibility of just dying right there. And that's when he says, "Even in your final moments, you can still learn to believe in someone." I know this is directly related to Mine, but I think he's at peace because now he has something to live for, and he won't surrender like he has done when facing death. He smiles; he has a family waiting for him at Morning Glory. All is going to be okay.

It’s long-drawn breath, not warm but dry -- cool, bitter, and numbing but all the more real. Dilapidated city ruins run serrated with long, dense history which never felt more unfamiliar. Flora and fauna have long since been neglected. Occasionally a small rodent feeds on the remains of food scrap left over from a week before. The city, (and you for the matter) is freezing, cluttered, empty, shaken, ruined, broken, matted, dirty and half-dead. You slowly inhale pollution and stench intermingled with soft, wet rain. You're still here.

Everything hurts. Revachol, Martinaise is, quite literally, dead space. The single vector on the Motorway South is slowly fading away. It's pale. The train leaves the station at 21:00 every evening, shit-pig. You've thought about it before. How much they'll miss you. Fingering the edge of the eject button. Gagging on metal. It's cold.

Load it up, and roll the dice, limp-dick! You have a job to do remember? First, get that body down, and then worry what you're going to do next after. You're not the first in this fuckfest parade, nor will you be the last. Maybe, you could use your superior intellect to conceptualise yourself actually doing your job? Or maybe, you're one of those manipulative bastards who'd get the job done for you! Still no? Maybe you're really good with your hands then. Honed abilities and skills are the backbone of any good investigation. Or, could you be one of those branched-off superior genus of humans that evolved muscles that strap the body like armour, and nudge off pain like sweat?

No. You are an amnesiac dead-drunk cop. Your brain is filled with liquor and your muscles are filled with drugs. But you know what? Fuck it. Fuck that dead body.

Ascend above cop-hood and worry about more important things. Like this sick bug you found out about the other day. It's really cool. I'm sure Kim would really love this one. Tell him about how you want to become homeless, or about your sudden inexplicable urge to adopt both facism AND the feminist agenda to fight off the - ahem - "ultraliberals" (yuck!). Nobody likes the ultraliberals.

Yes!! You've done it!! The locomotive heart of the man-engine is firing up again at full speed. Choo Choo! Strap back the expression and get back out onto the street, superstar! Tonight, Revachol is dancing to DISCO.

In short: A mechanically rough game, with an utterly nonsensical story, set in a bizarre and grating open world.

AC Brotherhood is the pinnacle of rose tinted glasses, and a return to it almost 15 years after its release reveals that, not only does it not hold up, it's impossible to see how it was ever considered good to begin with.

Structurally, Brotherhood feels disjointed and held together by fraying string. Gone is the strong underlying narrative of the rest of Ezio's three game narrative stretch, replaced instead with a vague, bland narrative of building the Assassins and fighting the nebulously evil Borgia heirs that jumps from subplot to subplot with only a bit of running around the open world to tie things together.

This is not a unique problem to Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed II similarly comes apart at the seams late on as it blitzes through an array of new characters who fail to stick around, but Brotherhood does even less. There are simply no characters in this game that matter in any way. No intrigue, no relationships, barely the faintest hint of a story lightly dusted over top.

I played this game a little over 7 months ago and I would struggle to reproduce all but the faintest, most meme'd elements of its mostly absent narrative.

Perhaps more importantly in this, however, is just how poorly constructed Brotherhood's world is. Brotherhood might have been the first Assassin's Creed game to explore the concept of a cohesive open world space, but even accounting for that it's array of uniformly cubic buildings is equal parts confusing and jarring.

New gameplay mechanics largely detract from the experience, dulling it down to a rote, 20hr-30hr slog of open world box checking. Some of the series' worst instincts also coalesce here, with the game becoming more forceful in its demand that players complete sections in very specific, often outstandingly annoying, ways in order to check the completion boxes at all.

I long held Brotherhood as my favorite game in the series, but revisiting it for the first time in years suggested the younger version of me was an idiot who liked bad things. Considering that's been confirmed by various other similar experiences, I feel safe suggesting that Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is simply a bad game that got lucky.

In the cold winter night, between 1503 and 1519, Leornado Davinci sat alone in his decrepit room, frostbitten fingers and poverty-ridden, painting his soul onto canvas fabric. And then: the moment of his passing - and then it was discovered, and revered: the Mona Lisa. It had been an unknown painting lying in wait, only honored posthumous after his passing.

Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma is not like the Mona Lisa.

It is as if it were not the Mona Lisa discovered in the room that day, but Leornado Davinci, in his final dying breaths, painting his life's work with his very own blood and sweat. And on the day it is hung in the Louvre Museum, you realise it is not a painting. It is the game called Zero Time Dilemma.

As the Mona Lisa was not appreciated during Davinci's lifetime - Zero Time Dilemma is a game the world is not ready for yet. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that this game can only be truly appreciated in retrospect after it is experienced.

What makes a game good? What interconnected and satisfying story will leave players in awe and wonder? Zero Time Dilemma throws out all conventional answers. No. It asks a new question:

"How can we make the player never predict what happens next?"

And they succeeded! The answer was so simple, so elementary, but - so daring, that it is impossible to ever figure it out yourself. It achieves something that no other game or even media has ever achieved before. It has achieved [ True Mystery ].

In that sense, it is very avant-garde - Kafkaesque even, pulling you along puppet strings in the mindless masquerade of the '9' façade.

Thus, I think Hegel's philosophy is more relevant than ever: He posits is that the foundation upon that which we must build knowledge must be that which is completely unconditional and free, which he defines as the absolute. He also states something along the lines of that the absolute is the conscience upon finalizing its own process of self examination and incremental discovery of truth until finding that which is absolute, and that the conscience understands itself and is aware of what the truth is and what the difference between the knowledge it inherits is and what the external absolute truth is.

I don't actually know what Hegel is talking about, but listening to it makes you feel smart; not dissimilar to Zero Time Dilemma.

For example, the average conversation in the game looks something like this:

"No! Junpei is dead!"
"Have you heard of the "Gilded Rhinoceros principle"?
"What?"
"In 1784, they tried to attach wings to a rhinoceros, but it didn't work. While the rhinoceros did end up having wings, they were only aesthetic, and served no real purpose. Philosopher David Harman proposed a theory: that evolution alone dictated our limits as living beings; and that forcefully implementing these changes were something beyond our control"
"I think I heard about that one in my 5th grade biology class actually! They brought the winged rhinoceros all the way from London to Egypt on the Gigantic!"

One great aspect of Zero Time Dilemma is how it is proud of it's accomplishments; one such example being it's textures. Zero Time Dilemma will remind you again and again of how beautiful the game looks by showing you the same room and ceiling over and over and over so that you never forget about it even after you finish the game. Additionally, it really loves to hammer in complex concepts so you never forget them - like the daunting mythical "force quit box".

Now that you've gotten a grasp of how amazing this game is; I have to actually admit to the truth. Zero Time Dilemma is not a good game. Objectively, it is one of the worst games I have played.

But, should reasoning lay in micro-objectivity, or should we take a step back from abstraction to look at the journey of our entire lives? Should we be bound by tags on a game and how things are "meant to be experienced"? The answer is no. Fuck that.

Shout "It's Zero Escaping time!", and then experience the same room 50+ times with friends. The first puzzle of the game is realizing that this is not a singleplayer game, and that you have to bring your friends along to experience the game together for the fun to really start. Then, relive your childhood together by solving kindergartener coloring puzzles as you learn about "Abraham Lincoln's faked assassination(?)". Zero Time Dilemma gives the most important takeaway from any game that I've ever played, and I really mean that. Zero Time Dilemma is the friends I made along the way.

To my dear friends reading this review, I give to you this quote from the bottom of my heart:

"I live to make you smile. And there's nothing I'd rather do"

-Markiplier

Playing through this piece of shit on veteran is one of the most joyless experiences I have ever had. There is nothing good here, the gameplay is some of the most bland stuff ever, the visuals are absolutely washed out and ugly, and not only is the narrative 100% uninteresting, the messaging and takeaway is as miserable as the rest of the experience.

Anti-war, but only in the way that the game is so mindnumbing, you would not want anything to do with the desensitized and distasteful garbage displayed.