Mishelam
92 Reviews liked by Mishelam
you get all your favorite CAG mechanics tossed into a single melting pot and what amounts to a discount bloody palace to test them in. both regular and slash combos, a launcher, multiple aerial combos, killer bee, two different Ultimate Techniques, a dodge roll, a block, a parry, a counter, meter management, a remote insta-kill attack, also probably other shit I'm forgetting (pseudo-stinger?, uh... I think there's a leg sweep?). once you purchase the full toolkit the game becomes a Combo Mad for Dummies playset that lets you fuck around with cool-looking shit for minimal effort.
I originally started on hard and jettisoned my playthrough thanks to the beefy enemies and endless kiting required to deal damage. honestly sort of unplayable if you don't just do quick runs on easy and normal to stock up on orbs beforehand thanks to an overreliance on attack boost upgrades from the shop for nearly everything in the game. a fully upgraded kit will push you far enough to make hard a relatively comfortable experience assuming that you've got a good handle on the enemy attack timings. very hard is where it falls apart... using a very traditional CAG toolkit with a musou enemy count makes any move with an AoE instantly privileged, and then the game really turns into endless kiting. when twenty separate projectile users each stagger their attacks to block out any approach, there's not much you can do but use your second ultimate technique and wind slash everyone from afar.
biggest mechanical issue is the meter management. I've mentioned the ninja gaiden-esque UTs a couple times, but in those games they either required a long charge that left you wide open or orbs left behind by other enemies. here you have a meter that refills on basic attacks and drains via slashes or UTs. however, there's also that remote damage mechanic where any enemy that's been bloodied (aka beat up enough) will be dealt an amount of damage that scales with another meter based on your current combo (aka how long you've lasted without being hit). at the latter meter's top level, bloodied enemies will be instantly killed and release orbs/health/primary meter, and even at its lowest level it'll offer a substantial boost to your primary meter regardless. with the required upgrades, you get a whopping eight+ bars of primary meter to work with, meaning that it almost never runs out. you can more or less just spam UTs over and over again and then press the insta-kill button to refill everything for free. just not really well-designed in terms of how the different mechanics interact; there should have been a greater cost for using your most powerful attacks.
other big issue is the big enemies, who don't stagger at all until bloodied. a lot of the later waves turn into spamming guard-canceled Iai strikes in between enemy movement until they're bloodied and then instantly killing them. sorta undermines the whole cuhrayzee approach the game takes overall since the eye candy evaporates the further in you get. still a pretty cool sandbox for like two hours tho. might've come back to it but my ps+ extra expired :(
I originally started on hard and jettisoned my playthrough thanks to the beefy enemies and endless kiting required to deal damage. honestly sort of unplayable if you don't just do quick runs on easy and normal to stock up on orbs beforehand thanks to an overreliance on attack boost upgrades from the shop for nearly everything in the game. a fully upgraded kit will push you far enough to make hard a relatively comfortable experience assuming that you've got a good handle on the enemy attack timings. very hard is where it falls apart... using a very traditional CAG toolkit with a musou enemy count makes any move with an AoE instantly privileged, and then the game really turns into endless kiting. when twenty separate projectile users each stagger their attacks to block out any approach, there's not much you can do but use your second ultimate technique and wind slash everyone from afar.
biggest mechanical issue is the meter management. I've mentioned the ninja gaiden-esque UTs a couple times, but in those games they either required a long charge that left you wide open or orbs left behind by other enemies. here you have a meter that refills on basic attacks and drains via slashes or UTs. however, there's also that remote damage mechanic where any enemy that's been bloodied (aka beat up enough) will be dealt an amount of damage that scales with another meter based on your current combo (aka how long you've lasted without being hit). at the latter meter's top level, bloodied enemies will be instantly killed and release orbs/health/primary meter, and even at its lowest level it'll offer a substantial boost to your primary meter regardless. with the required upgrades, you get a whopping eight+ bars of primary meter to work with, meaning that it almost never runs out. you can more or less just spam UTs over and over again and then press the insta-kill button to refill everything for free. just not really well-designed in terms of how the different mechanics interact; there should have been a greater cost for using your most powerful attacks.
other big issue is the big enemies, who don't stagger at all until bloodied. a lot of the later waves turn into spamming guard-canceled Iai strikes in between enemy movement until they're bloodied and then instantly killing them. sorta undermines the whole cuhrayzee approach the game takes overall since the eye candy evaporates the further in you get. still a pretty cool sandbox for like two hours tho. might've come back to it but my ps+ extra expired :(
Shenmue
1999
rather than place movement on the analog stick, am2 took an unorthodox approach and mapped it to ryo's gaze. through this, the player interacts with shenmue's painstaking representation of urban japan primarily through the act of sight. ryo is a natural observer, of signs, of people, of animals, of forklifts moving to and fro and waves undulating below. when ryo focuses on an object in the world, the player gently melts into his head to embody him. you take his perspective to roll a gacha toy between your fingers, or check your watch, or browse the shelves of a convenience store. this is certainly an ADV of sorts with sprinkles of what would become "open world" gameplay, but first and foremost it is a game of sight and perception. succinctly, it is eyes entertainment.
the meticulous attention to detail and passive nature of play fosters an undeniable sense of atomization. the game does not explicitly critique capitalism, but by creating this diorama-like visage of it, the game uncovers the listlessness at the heart of this era in history. ryo's hero's journey is constantly undermined by his delinquent status, loose social bonds, and overall impotence against forces with greater means than him. outside of the sanctuary of the hazuki dojo, ryo plunges into a world where he can do little but observe those around him. crowds of people, each with unique ways to spurn ryo's questions. when ryo isn't dutifully gathering scraps of information in his notebook, he can do little else other than window shop in a market district enclosed in the influence of former US navy occupation. what can he do other than pour money into pointless tasks and have stilted conversations with his acquaintances? at best he can convert a parking lot into a makeshift practice space for martial arts. in other instances I found myself staring at my phone waiting for buses to arrive or shops to open; would ryo not have done the same to suck up his time had the option existed? there are sparks of life to find, but virtually every point of contact is transactional, every activity is gated by money, every part of ryo's life wilting from his isolation after his father's death.
it makes sense then that disc 3 represents a significant change for ryo as he shifts into employment at the harbor. his absence of purpose morphs into routine living, and he begins to form bonds with his coworkers. ryo's lack of community ties pushes him into the workforce as a sole reluctant method of social engagement, his ulterior motive to investigate the mad angels aside. at the same time, his time in dobuita becomes severely limited, and the fragments of relationships he formed previously become even more distant. one gets the sense that his lunch break camaraderie and daily forklift races fill part of this void. his primary action becomes moving the forklift and fighting gang members after prior weeks spent primarily with the action of sight, signaling the shift from eyes to hands. the inability of ryo to settle in outside of labor is telling, and the eventual termination of his employment closes this chapter before he quietly sets off on his nomadic quest to find lan di. these were the only solid bonds he had, after all.
where the game inevitably stumbles is in where it artificially blocks these bonds. limited conversations are expected (although frankly these are astonishing for the era), but to lock characterization for a person like nozomi behind phone conversations when she's so easily accessible in the world feels awkward. the game occasionally expects this kind of unusual logic in order to get the most out of its world, with missable, timed events slipping through new players' fingers. however, it's unquestionable that the novelty present at the game's release has persisted thanks to the dearth of those willing to be as daring in its recreation of life. just wish there was one more motorcycle section...
the meticulous attention to detail and passive nature of play fosters an undeniable sense of atomization. the game does not explicitly critique capitalism, but by creating this diorama-like visage of it, the game uncovers the listlessness at the heart of this era in history. ryo's hero's journey is constantly undermined by his delinquent status, loose social bonds, and overall impotence against forces with greater means than him. outside of the sanctuary of the hazuki dojo, ryo plunges into a world where he can do little but observe those around him. crowds of people, each with unique ways to spurn ryo's questions. when ryo isn't dutifully gathering scraps of information in his notebook, he can do little else other than window shop in a market district enclosed in the influence of former US navy occupation. what can he do other than pour money into pointless tasks and have stilted conversations with his acquaintances? at best he can convert a parking lot into a makeshift practice space for martial arts. in other instances I found myself staring at my phone waiting for buses to arrive or shops to open; would ryo not have done the same to suck up his time had the option existed? there are sparks of life to find, but virtually every point of contact is transactional, every activity is gated by money, every part of ryo's life wilting from his isolation after his father's death.
it makes sense then that disc 3 represents a significant change for ryo as he shifts into employment at the harbor. his absence of purpose morphs into routine living, and he begins to form bonds with his coworkers. ryo's lack of community ties pushes him into the workforce as a sole reluctant method of social engagement, his ulterior motive to investigate the mad angels aside. at the same time, his time in dobuita becomes severely limited, and the fragments of relationships he formed previously become even more distant. one gets the sense that his lunch break camaraderie and daily forklift races fill part of this void. his primary action becomes moving the forklift and fighting gang members after prior weeks spent primarily with the action of sight, signaling the shift from eyes to hands. the inability of ryo to settle in outside of labor is telling, and the eventual termination of his employment closes this chapter before he quietly sets off on his nomadic quest to find lan di. these were the only solid bonds he had, after all.
where the game inevitably stumbles is in where it artificially blocks these bonds. limited conversations are expected (although frankly these are astonishing for the era), but to lock characterization for a person like nozomi behind phone conversations when she's so easily accessible in the world feels awkward. the game occasionally expects this kind of unusual logic in order to get the most out of its world, with missable, timed events slipping through new players' fingers. however, it's unquestionable that the novelty present at the game's release has persisted thanks to the dearth of those willing to be as daring in its recreation of life. just wish there was one more motorcycle section...
Final Fantasy V
2021
Finally finished this for my 550th log- only took uhhh a year and some months.
Perhaps the most eclectic FF so far. Even compared to earlier FFs it really stands out from the prior FFs but also I can't imagine any of the later games have a tone quite as odd as Final Fantasy V. It jumps from the usual epic grandeur of the series, traveling on Chocobos and Airships, dungeon crawling, building your party and conquering titans. However, it just as easily swaps to these cheesy as hell moments during cutscenes where our cast spouts TMNT and Power Ranger references. Bizarre that this stuff got brought over from the GBA and Smartphone versions but I guess this is just how the tone of FFV will go. Part of me wonders what the game would look like without most of these and I would groan but in truth this game has always felt like some sort of enigma to me. FFs in general have always had a weird vibe in my head with regards to my understanding. I never played any apart from 4 DS as a teen (didn't beat) and then several years later I decided to try this out on the GBA port. If I remember correctly, around the same time I would have been finishing Dragon Quest III so perhaps I was looking for another class customization heavy JRPG? I didn't get too far but since then I've always had a fondness for this one in particular and had since wanted to sit down and fully commit myself to FFV. Over the course of a year and several other FFs later this pixel remaster came out and I put in the time but I did sit down and come back to this one more than I had hoped for. Thinking on Final Fantasies as a whole for a moment, there's only a few of them that really 'stand out' as titans metaphorically, the ones that jump to mind as the name Final Fantasy is brought up. FFIV, VI, VII, and X are usually the strongest in my mind, not so much in terms of quality but typically as the ones most 'stand-out' and typical to the franchise. FFs I-III try to establish a winning formula with what RPGs can manage and do for the times, while 4 sticks to a dedicated cast and decides to tell a focused story, VI and VII remain titans of the franchise with little need for explanation as to why and onward it's kind of a grabbag, although X for some reason always had a fragment in my mind even as kid for some reason. 8, 9 and 12 I don't know much about although they usually fill out a chunk of my mind as wildly differing branches of what I know about Final Fantasy. I could also talk about XIV however as I've yet to dive deep into it I barely understand what's going on whenever people talk about that game considering its 6 versions in. I bring this up because V feels like this really weird side path between Final Fantasies IV and VI, so seeing as how gamers in the west during the 90s going from the former to the latter makes a lot of sense but going from the former to V is an odd path to take when tackling this linearly. You don't transition from tropey but large scale drama to generation-defining epic as smoothly as V, this klutz of a fantasy, decides to place its sweet self between the two entries.
I can't really complain though, this game can get really neat. Neat might be the best descriptor I can give- as its customizable classes aren't necessarily new, considering III DOES exist despite how often I forget it does, AND it often falls into the pitfalls that other class-heavy japanese rpgs do. Yet, this thankfully improves upon III's systems and provides enough tools that it doesn't leave you to dry as often as I convinced myself it would. What I mean by this is that I'm kind of an idiot in a lot of ways. But also! this game does like to play around with its bosses more often, and considering how many options you might have when it comes to classes it might be easy to place yourself in a corner. Quite often bosses would seem way more daunting than they were worth because I didn't take into consideration how many simple ideas just work. A lot of these bosses feel like puzzles, and sometimes the solution is as simple as 'Spellblade + Thundaga is way more powerful than you think' but the game has so many complex build options that I tend to skew into just 'but this thing had bigger number in normal random battle' which would lead to my demise in certain bosses. Other bosses just don't care about having resistances. One particular boss (or trio of bosses) I didn't wanna deal with turned out to be susceptible to Odin's Zanketsuken! Brilliant! This does lead to quite a few moments of complex, fairly frustrating encounters in which I kinda wished my own creativeness would just prevail rather than needing to untangle and cobble together some other strategy because I might have missed a certain blue magic or I don't have an adequately leveled black mage. Or maybe I'd rather perish a slow and arduous death than try to wrap my head around the intricacies of the beastmaster class for 5 minutes. It's not too often but I have the brain disease that makes me want to keep a character as one class as long as they can so that they can be extremely great at one thing, but also to have these classes kept to these characters so as to check out as many classes as possible. Unfortunately there are times where the best solution is to just break this disease and have two characters have the same class (or maybe I accidentally made Faris both the best DPS and the best Mage without realizing it- uh oh).
My main critical problem against the game itself is there are admittedly a few stinker classes. Buff Dancer! Make Berserker more interesting! There are possible ways that these more niche classes could be overhauled or more functional so as to make them stand out compared to more traditional but practical classes like Monk, Summoner or White Mage. Most of the classes work really well and switching from class to class is a lot easier than in 3, although understanding the upsides of certain jobs takes a bit of faith. 'Chemist is one of the best jobs in the game, trust me' I saw, 'Use Zenigage! It's what makes Samurai good!' the daimyo of Bal wailed. Nonsense, all I need is Krile to grab Berserk and stay a monk and do all the work. Dragoon isn't that good? Then how come I can jump? That's rad. (I should note I typed much of this before beating the final boss- a battle I mostly won on...Zenigage + Chemist using Mix! I mostly just didn't wanna rewrite this entire section) I say much of this as admittedly an apology to Final Fantasy V, similar to other class systems in gaming as my strategizing and planning really isn't as complex as perhaps the game would want me to think on. Maybe it's because Final Fantasy was still just a matter of the turn based combat that the class system would have some oddities I didn't take into consideration which kept me from being wholly engrossed in its system and more so entertained. Maybe I sound cheeky in this regard but I did wish my understanding of the classes for FFV was a bit clearer in-game. Mostly I wish the game was just transparent in what abilities I was getting so I could fully realize the utilities of my party and its jobs, but much of it turned into a party of swiss army knives with a little of columns A-C, a specialty in D and what I would have liked to be a mastery in E but a greater need at the moment for said character to be Column F instead. Perhaps better class planning in later replays would greatly trim the sloppy catalog of abilities I ended on, but that's for a later Polaroid. I mostly bring this up not in scathing criticism or in contradiction to its strongest and generally most acclaimed aspect, I mostly bring about my hiccups in the job system- as I admit I'm not certain how I feel about job systems in general at the moment. After sitting on Yakuza 7 for a while, I came to feel generally positive about the idea, but remembering certain flops and hiccups in how some classes progressed, on top of some other oddities regarding battles. Final Fantasy 3, being the first in the series to structure a job system for later games to build upon gets some slack for how early it is, but of course has its own can of worms in terms of balancing. Tactics, while I have yet to beat it, has an immensely deep class system, but gets into the territory of needing some guidance in unlocking other classes to diversify your team. Here in Final Fantasy V, while I enjoy the ease and speed in getting new jobs- as well as the amount of good jobs versus middling; I do think there's a major balancing problem. How come certain classes end on just 'Equip Axes' while others end on borderline game breaking abilities like Rapid Shot. Red Mage has the idea in knowing that to get the insane ability in 'Dual Cast' locked at a 1159 AP level cap but the Ranger’s ‘Rapid Fire’ is not only slightly more practical but only requires nearly half that in 600 ap. By the end of the game and once several classes are mastered, a lot of it starts to click and regular battles begin to become a joke, and I love it. I really just wish I had better planned who was gonna get what classes, as a lot of the late game was spent wondering why I spent as much time as I had in certain classes. Once I had finally sat down and got that chemist class leveled up I finally saw the appeal in abilities like Mix and Revive, but I don’t know why I spend so much time trying to make Berserker work. Hell, I never even got Black Mage maxed out, which felt strange.
Otherwise the game progresses about as similarly as other Final Fantasy, although the last third is kind of the least interesting part, with a late game party change and some pretty lackluster dungeons until the final stretch.
The pixel remastered soundtrack is pretty great, and some of the remastered effects look really great but I'm still on the fence on how the actual spritework looks part of the time. I am disappointed however that the game lacks much of the bonus combat that was added to the GBA and defunct PC release.
Overall I was really looking forward to playing this, and all things considered a lot of the game's charms and structure is very enjoyable but sometimes its quirk gets in the way of taking it too seriously- it still has one last push before it reaches the heights of the series' epic status nowadays. Certainly this and other FFs prior have their stellar moments and memorable moments, but with the help of hindsight and some knowledge of FF6- its hard to really compare most of the stuff that came beforehand. This was definitely my favorite thus far, but the third act and some of the cast really keep it from being my favorite of the bunch. Would still greatly recommend it primarily for its unique battling and progression system.
Perhaps the most eclectic FF so far. Even compared to earlier FFs it really stands out from the prior FFs but also I can't imagine any of the later games have a tone quite as odd as Final Fantasy V. It jumps from the usual epic grandeur of the series, traveling on Chocobos and Airships, dungeon crawling, building your party and conquering titans. However, it just as easily swaps to these cheesy as hell moments during cutscenes where our cast spouts TMNT and Power Ranger references. Bizarre that this stuff got brought over from the GBA and Smartphone versions but I guess this is just how the tone of FFV will go. Part of me wonders what the game would look like without most of these and I would groan but in truth this game has always felt like some sort of enigma to me. FFs in general have always had a weird vibe in my head with regards to my understanding. I never played any apart from 4 DS as a teen (didn't beat) and then several years later I decided to try this out on the GBA port. If I remember correctly, around the same time I would have been finishing Dragon Quest III so perhaps I was looking for another class customization heavy JRPG? I didn't get too far but since then I've always had a fondness for this one in particular and had since wanted to sit down and fully commit myself to FFV. Over the course of a year and several other FFs later this pixel remaster came out and I put in the time but I did sit down and come back to this one more than I had hoped for. Thinking on Final Fantasies as a whole for a moment, there's only a few of them that really 'stand out' as titans metaphorically, the ones that jump to mind as the name Final Fantasy is brought up. FFIV, VI, VII, and X are usually the strongest in my mind, not so much in terms of quality but typically as the ones most 'stand-out' and typical to the franchise. FFs I-III try to establish a winning formula with what RPGs can manage and do for the times, while 4 sticks to a dedicated cast and decides to tell a focused story, VI and VII remain titans of the franchise with little need for explanation as to why and onward it's kind of a grabbag, although X for some reason always had a fragment in my mind even as kid for some reason. 8, 9 and 12 I don't know much about although they usually fill out a chunk of my mind as wildly differing branches of what I know about Final Fantasy. I could also talk about XIV however as I've yet to dive deep into it I barely understand what's going on whenever people talk about that game considering its 6 versions in. I bring this up because V feels like this really weird side path between Final Fantasies IV and VI, so seeing as how gamers in the west during the 90s going from the former to the latter makes a lot of sense but going from the former to V is an odd path to take when tackling this linearly. You don't transition from tropey but large scale drama to generation-defining epic as smoothly as V, this klutz of a fantasy, decides to place its sweet self between the two entries.
I can't really complain though, this game can get really neat. Neat might be the best descriptor I can give- as its customizable classes aren't necessarily new, considering III DOES exist despite how often I forget it does, AND it often falls into the pitfalls that other class-heavy japanese rpgs do. Yet, this thankfully improves upon III's systems and provides enough tools that it doesn't leave you to dry as often as I convinced myself it would. What I mean by this is that I'm kind of an idiot in a lot of ways. But also! this game does like to play around with its bosses more often, and considering how many options you might have when it comes to classes it might be easy to place yourself in a corner. Quite often bosses would seem way more daunting than they were worth because I didn't take into consideration how many simple ideas just work. A lot of these bosses feel like puzzles, and sometimes the solution is as simple as 'Spellblade + Thundaga is way more powerful than you think' but the game has so many complex build options that I tend to skew into just 'but this thing had bigger number in normal random battle' which would lead to my demise in certain bosses. Other bosses just don't care about having resistances. One particular boss (or trio of bosses) I didn't wanna deal with turned out to be susceptible to Odin's Zanketsuken! Brilliant! This does lead to quite a few moments of complex, fairly frustrating encounters in which I kinda wished my own creativeness would just prevail rather than needing to untangle and cobble together some other strategy because I might have missed a certain blue magic or I don't have an adequately leveled black mage. Or maybe I'd rather perish a slow and arduous death than try to wrap my head around the intricacies of the beastmaster class for 5 minutes. It's not too often but I have the brain disease that makes me want to keep a character as one class as long as they can so that they can be extremely great at one thing, but also to have these classes kept to these characters so as to check out as many classes as possible. Unfortunately there are times where the best solution is to just break this disease and have two characters have the same class (or maybe I accidentally made Faris both the best DPS and the best Mage without realizing it- uh oh).
My main critical problem against the game itself is there are admittedly a few stinker classes. Buff Dancer! Make Berserker more interesting! There are possible ways that these more niche classes could be overhauled or more functional so as to make them stand out compared to more traditional but practical classes like Monk, Summoner or White Mage. Most of the classes work really well and switching from class to class is a lot easier than in 3, although understanding the upsides of certain jobs takes a bit of faith. 'Chemist is one of the best jobs in the game, trust me' I saw, 'Use Zenigage! It's what makes Samurai good!' the daimyo of Bal wailed. Nonsense, all I need is Krile to grab Berserk and stay a monk and do all the work. Dragoon isn't that good? Then how come I can jump? That's rad. (I should note I typed much of this before beating the final boss- a battle I mostly won on...Zenigage + Chemist using Mix! I mostly just didn't wanna rewrite this entire section) I say much of this as admittedly an apology to Final Fantasy V, similar to other class systems in gaming as my strategizing and planning really isn't as complex as perhaps the game would want me to think on. Maybe it's because Final Fantasy was still just a matter of the turn based combat that the class system would have some oddities I didn't take into consideration which kept me from being wholly engrossed in its system and more so entertained. Maybe I sound cheeky in this regard but I did wish my understanding of the classes for FFV was a bit clearer in-game. Mostly I wish the game was just transparent in what abilities I was getting so I could fully realize the utilities of my party and its jobs, but much of it turned into a party of swiss army knives with a little of columns A-C, a specialty in D and what I would have liked to be a mastery in E but a greater need at the moment for said character to be Column F instead. Perhaps better class planning in later replays would greatly trim the sloppy catalog of abilities I ended on, but that's for a later Polaroid. I mostly bring this up not in scathing criticism or in contradiction to its strongest and generally most acclaimed aspect, I mostly bring about my hiccups in the job system- as I admit I'm not certain how I feel about job systems in general at the moment. After sitting on Yakuza 7 for a while, I came to feel generally positive about the idea, but remembering certain flops and hiccups in how some classes progressed, on top of some other oddities regarding battles. Final Fantasy 3, being the first in the series to structure a job system for later games to build upon gets some slack for how early it is, but of course has its own can of worms in terms of balancing. Tactics, while I have yet to beat it, has an immensely deep class system, but gets into the territory of needing some guidance in unlocking other classes to diversify your team. Here in Final Fantasy V, while I enjoy the ease and speed in getting new jobs- as well as the amount of good jobs versus middling; I do think there's a major balancing problem. How come certain classes end on just 'Equip Axes' while others end on borderline game breaking abilities like Rapid Shot. Red Mage has the idea in knowing that to get the insane ability in 'Dual Cast' locked at a 1159 AP level cap but the Ranger’s ‘Rapid Fire’ is not only slightly more practical but only requires nearly half that in 600 ap. By the end of the game and once several classes are mastered, a lot of it starts to click and regular battles begin to become a joke, and I love it. I really just wish I had better planned who was gonna get what classes, as a lot of the late game was spent wondering why I spent as much time as I had in certain classes. Once I had finally sat down and got that chemist class leveled up I finally saw the appeal in abilities like Mix and Revive, but I don’t know why I spend so much time trying to make Berserker work. Hell, I never even got Black Mage maxed out, which felt strange.
Otherwise the game progresses about as similarly as other Final Fantasy, although the last third is kind of the least interesting part, with a late game party change and some pretty lackluster dungeons until the final stretch.
The pixel remastered soundtrack is pretty great, and some of the remastered effects look really great but I'm still on the fence on how the actual spritework looks part of the time. I am disappointed however that the game lacks much of the bonus combat that was added to the GBA and defunct PC release.
Overall I was really looking forward to playing this, and all things considered a lot of the game's charms and structure is very enjoyable but sometimes its quirk gets in the way of taking it too seriously- it still has one last push before it reaches the heights of the series' epic status nowadays. Certainly this and other FFs prior have their stellar moments and memorable moments, but with the help of hindsight and some knowledge of FF6- its hard to really compare most of the stuff that came beforehand. This was definitely my favorite thus far, but the third act and some of the cast really keep it from being my favorite of the bunch. Would still greatly recommend it primarily for its unique battling and progression system.
Man, I loved the DS games. When I heard that a new one was coming out for modern systems, I was over the moon. My friends were all excited about other games announced at the same time, but all I could think/talk about was Theatrythm and how much fun I had with it. I even still have the special stylus it came with.
I had just as much fun with this one as I had on the DS, all my expectations were met, and it was a joy to play. If you like Final Fantasy and rhythm games (a Venn diagram that I had no idea intersected), definitely give this a go. Controls are intuitive, the menus are snappy, and there's customization aplenty to adjust timings to your specific needs. I especially appreciated simple mode, which turns the swipes into normal triggers, when ramping up into the harder difficulties.
It's not a perfect game, but what game is? I didn't like the Event Music Stages (EMS), because it felt like the background was way too busy/flashy/jittery to pay attention to the triggers. You can toggle off the movie sequences (which is a nice touch if you're concerned about spoilers for games you haven't played yet), but that feels like a band aid that shouldn't be necessary. The song selections for some of the titles were also uneven. Most of the mainline Final Fantasy titles have 12-18 songs, some have much less, and inexplicably Final Fantasy 14 has over 30 tracks. It's understandably an evolving MMO, but it felt like we could've seen more from other titles and less from 14 and still been fine. Some key tracks from titles were missing, and did we really need a million versions of Battle at the Big Bridge?
Still, super fun game, I'm glad for the time I put into it. It made me smile.
I had just as much fun with this one as I had on the DS, all my expectations were met, and it was a joy to play. If you like Final Fantasy and rhythm games (a Venn diagram that I had no idea intersected), definitely give this a go. Controls are intuitive, the menus are snappy, and there's customization aplenty to adjust timings to your specific needs. I especially appreciated simple mode, which turns the swipes into normal triggers, when ramping up into the harder difficulties.
It's not a perfect game, but what game is? I didn't like the Event Music Stages (EMS), because it felt like the background was way too busy/flashy/jittery to pay attention to the triggers. You can toggle off the movie sequences (which is a nice touch if you're concerned about spoilers for games you haven't played yet), but that feels like a band aid that shouldn't be necessary. The song selections for some of the titles were also uneven. Most of the mainline Final Fantasy titles have 12-18 songs, some have much less, and inexplicably Final Fantasy 14 has over 30 tracks. It's understandably an evolving MMO, but it felt like we could've seen more from other titles and less from 14 and still been fine. Some key tracks from titles were missing, and did we really need a million versions of Battle at the Big Bridge?
Still, super fun game, I'm glad for the time I put into it. It made me smile.
Not much I can say that hasn't been said before, but yeah its pretty clear why this is considered one of the greats in gaming. Very rough in some areas and felt very funny going through this on a wii (haven't touched one in 4-ish years), but after a while it just felt right.
I will note that despite the typical stuff that's brought up as being the 'worst' parts of this game- (like Ashley or the constant quick-time events) I never had much of an issue with these. Instead my least favorite segments are never brought up- like I've never heard anyone talk about this U3 fight.
Bosses can be hit or miss, but nothing feels quite as good as mowing down hordes with the shotgun or riding on the back of a bulldozer firing an smg. I'll have to sit on it before I consider it a favorite but its certainly up there. It's just hard to hate this kinda game.
I will note that despite the typical stuff that's brought up as being the 'worst' parts of this game- (like Ashley or the constant quick-time events) I never had much of an issue with these. Instead my least favorite segments are never brought up- like I've never heard anyone talk about this U3 fight.
Bosses can be hit or miss, but nothing feels quite as good as mowing down hordes with the shotgun or riding on the back of a bulldozer firing an smg. I'll have to sit on it before I consider it a favorite but its certainly up there. It's just hard to hate this kinda game.
dmc3 lies in the center of a hinge point in action game design, wedding the linear structures and rigid scenarios of before to a novel, thrillingly expressive combat system. much in the way the original dmc opened the door for nuanced and free-flowing aggression divorced from the three-hit combos of the past, so too did dmc3 give birth to staggering flexibility in combo composition and approach. the buttery smooth interruptible frames on each attack, the instantaneous weapon switching mid-combo, and the subtle additions of so many cute pieces of kit (the crazy combos! riding enemies! swinging on the pole!) comprise just the basics for how rich dmc3's combat can get.
of the updates to the first two games, the most innovative is the style system, which undergirds much of that aforementioned flexibility. this mechanic lets the player select a set of contextual actions to bind to the circle button, where each set fundamentally upheaves dante's capabilities. while the early-game toolkit for each style is restrictive, the fully-upgraded variants of each of the core styles offers a wealth of fresh options to those willing to dig. of these the most interesting are swordmaster and royalguard, the former of which gives dante a full secondary button of attacks (including aerial raves, blessedly rescued from dmc2) while the latter imbues dante with a powerful parry and rage mechanic. what separates dante's parry from many modern implementations is the stricter timing for successful parries versus blocks with chip damage, as well as the ability to release all stored rage at once with strict timing in an extremely potent "just release." the trickster and gunslinger abilities are also equally interesting, although I personally did not invest a lot of time in gunslinger, while trickster mainly serves as additional evasion for those who want to supplant dante's built-in dodge roll and jumping i-frames (which is not to say I didn't use it! I used it plenty, and air trick is cool af).
however, dmc3 still resides within the classic character action structure of item puzzles, interconnected areas, and hidden secrets strewn throughout the demon tower central to the game's narrative. like I mentioned in last year's ninja gaiden black review, this structure still dominated the burgeoning character action genre up through the end of the ps2 era. this essential contradiction between stiff scenarios and loose gameplay systems both makes dmc3 a fascinating relic of its era as well as a harder sell for someone first exposed to the genre through metal gear rising revengeance or one of the bayonettas.
the first place this becomes apparent is in the enemy design. dmc3's main popcorn enemies (the hells) help buoy the game's reputation as a combo showcase while also being formidable foes in their own right, especially the lusts with their hectic pace and dashing slices as well as the teleporting, lumbering sloths. however, the remaining foes veer into requiring stricter strategies for their defeat. the blood-goyles, for instance, mandate that the player shoot their intangible forms repeatedly until calcifying into a hardened form that dante can damage. the soul eaters are another good example of this, where they exist in an gaseous mist until dante turns his back to them, allowing them to gel into a demonic squid and charge at dante from behind. these enemies change the combat from being very player-driven to rather enemy-driven when they appear. the encounters themselves also often avoid being pure combat arenas in favor of including specific objectives, such as fighting on the runaway temperance wagon while enigmas take potshots at you from a separate rail, or the late-game hourglass fight that reverses the flow of time if you fail to clear the room in time. these areas further predicate the player's success on their ability to adapt to a specific context rather than twist the pace of the fight to match their preferences.
this is not necessarily an appealing proposition to those hoping to spend the entire game freestyling to their heart's content, and I sympathize with this point of view. however, because dante is restricted to two guns, two weapons, and a single style, the ordering of fixed encounters with predictable enemy arrangements and locations creates an interesting dilemma for the player when selecting a loadout. the desire to use comfortable tools clashes with the need to select optimal arrangements to deal with these more puzzle-like enemies, but with the vast variety of options at dante's disposal, the choices rarely feel prescribed. the soul eaters may be quickly dispatched by the handguns' backwards shot in the gunslinger style, but the player could also find spots in the environment to trap them in order to combo off of (such as the balcony railing in the altar of evil room), or they can use a few of their devil trigger orbs for a powerful devil trigger explosion. exploiting the environment and synergizing a build to match whatever encounters you're struggling with adds a mindfulness to the otherwise-impulsive combat.
exploring different loadouts for different scenarios becomes even more important when it comes to the game's many bosses. each of the bosses runs the gamut in terms of what skills they require from the player, and with that comes exploring the separate tools that work best with each. beowulf, for example, has a three-hit combo in his first phase that can easily be air parried to store up a massive just release, taking off an excessive amount of health (nearly a third on DMD difficulty!). alternatively, I found that beowulf's powerful phase 2 attacks frequently crushed my guarding, and thus found myself using trickster more often to evade the frequent wooden cages he brings crashing from the sky. cerberus at first glance seemed apt for switch canceling between the rifle and the handguns, but I also found merit in maximizing DPS with the swordmaster style, alternating rebellion and agni & rudra in the air to take out each head as quickly as possible. admittedly these are two of the more robust bosses; fights like nevan and vergil err more on the side of call-and-response, where the player can use basically any tactic as long as they can respond to the movesets of each, while the late-game doppleganger centers environmental interaction with lights on the field that are used to stun the boss. while these bosses rely less on loadout experimentation, they still require attention to detail by the player in order to maximize damage output, locate weak positions, and learn proper spacings.
dante must die, the final difficulty mode, pushes the element of loadout creation and room routing to both its highest and lowest points. unquestionably DMD's balancing is far too skewed in favor of buffing up enemy health to pure sponge levels. when it comes to rooms primarily consisting of the hells, this gives the player some room to breathe in terms of constructing more elaborate combos, but at the same time the length of these encounters and the diminished stagger on enemies that have entered their devil trigger makes repeated jump-canceled moves a safer option. enemies such as the fallen go from tests of aerial mastery to slogging through the same repeated inputs in between waiting for their sword spin to finish. the tedium approaches agony in the latter half of the game, where a boss like geryon with an interesting multi-phase moveset and time-slow traps transforms into a claustrophic nightmare where the only reasonable way to approach it itemless is by stunlocking it in a loop. the chessboard scenario late in the game takes the awesome concept of fighting off a full set of chess pieces (including pawns that respawn as other units if you let them reach the board's end) to an obnoxiously long war of attrition repeatedly spamming killer bee on the king. dmd heightens the contradiction between rigid scenario and expressive gameplay to such an extent that I don't necessarily think it's worth pursuing for most people.
by comparison, very hard was incredibly enjoyable and allowed total flexibility in approach, and its status as the american hard mode and lack of enemy DT made decision-making and routing less of an issue. that's totally fine! the game bursts to its seams with combat features that getting to freestyle more often isn't a detriment in the slightest. however, it must be said that getting to fight for my life through dmd, balancing issues aside, did satisfy that unique sense of routing and pre-planning that few others in the genre can attest to. the sheer difficulty and bulky enemies led me to incorporate techniques I would otherwise ignored, from guard-canceling reverb shocks with nevan to experimenting with artemis' upgrades in the gunslinger style; I still have so much to learn in terms of experimenting with each aspect of dante's toolkit. managing devil trigger as a resource also becomes so much more essential on dmd given the massive power of the DTE and its usefulness both for quick health and as a shield of sorts when mitigating an unavoidable attack. reading and watching the sheer variety of strategies across the game has become a meta-feature of the game's depth that has enraptured me since I began delving more into the game myself over the last few months. even the chessboard has a reasonable quicksilver strat, though to say this makes the fight significantly more interesting may be overselling it. dmc3's status as the harbringer of player-driven combat expression while still remaining entrenched in enemy-driven scenario solutions gives it a unique mechanical blend that cements it as an iconic pillar of the genre.
I certainly wouldn't hold it over anyone if they wanted to try the switch port and how it allows the player to use their entire arsenal simultaneously; the mayhem you can get up to is astonishing. hell, if I play dmd again it might be on that port just to see how it fundamentally changes the experience (I've heard that it evens out much of the annoying shit, especially regarding bosses). there certainly is something worth investigating here in its original form though that hasn't been replicated since; newer titles like astral chain that lean into the adventure elements are doing so having absorbed over a decade of AAA tropes since dmc3's release, and fresh titles like bayonetta 3 compartmentalize their setpieces while dmc3 makes them part and parcel with the combat. although the contradictory nature of this particular flavor of 3D action has unsurprisingly gone out of style, I still feel affectionate to the way it ushered in our modern conception of stylish combat while paying tribute to the RE-derived scenario design all these games owe so much to.
of the updates to the first two games, the most innovative is the style system, which undergirds much of that aforementioned flexibility. this mechanic lets the player select a set of contextual actions to bind to the circle button, where each set fundamentally upheaves dante's capabilities. while the early-game toolkit for each style is restrictive, the fully-upgraded variants of each of the core styles offers a wealth of fresh options to those willing to dig. of these the most interesting are swordmaster and royalguard, the former of which gives dante a full secondary button of attacks (including aerial raves, blessedly rescued from dmc2) while the latter imbues dante with a powerful parry and rage mechanic. what separates dante's parry from many modern implementations is the stricter timing for successful parries versus blocks with chip damage, as well as the ability to release all stored rage at once with strict timing in an extremely potent "just release." the trickster and gunslinger abilities are also equally interesting, although I personally did not invest a lot of time in gunslinger, while trickster mainly serves as additional evasion for those who want to supplant dante's built-in dodge roll and jumping i-frames (which is not to say I didn't use it! I used it plenty, and air trick is cool af).
however, dmc3 still resides within the classic character action structure of item puzzles, interconnected areas, and hidden secrets strewn throughout the demon tower central to the game's narrative. like I mentioned in last year's ninja gaiden black review, this structure still dominated the burgeoning character action genre up through the end of the ps2 era. this essential contradiction between stiff scenarios and loose gameplay systems both makes dmc3 a fascinating relic of its era as well as a harder sell for someone first exposed to the genre through metal gear rising revengeance or one of the bayonettas.
the first place this becomes apparent is in the enemy design. dmc3's main popcorn enemies (the hells) help buoy the game's reputation as a combo showcase while also being formidable foes in their own right, especially the lusts with their hectic pace and dashing slices as well as the teleporting, lumbering sloths. however, the remaining foes veer into requiring stricter strategies for their defeat. the blood-goyles, for instance, mandate that the player shoot their intangible forms repeatedly until calcifying into a hardened form that dante can damage. the soul eaters are another good example of this, where they exist in an gaseous mist until dante turns his back to them, allowing them to gel into a demonic squid and charge at dante from behind. these enemies change the combat from being very player-driven to rather enemy-driven when they appear. the encounters themselves also often avoid being pure combat arenas in favor of including specific objectives, such as fighting on the runaway temperance wagon while enigmas take potshots at you from a separate rail, or the late-game hourglass fight that reverses the flow of time if you fail to clear the room in time. these areas further predicate the player's success on their ability to adapt to a specific context rather than twist the pace of the fight to match their preferences.
this is not necessarily an appealing proposition to those hoping to spend the entire game freestyling to their heart's content, and I sympathize with this point of view. however, because dante is restricted to two guns, two weapons, and a single style, the ordering of fixed encounters with predictable enemy arrangements and locations creates an interesting dilemma for the player when selecting a loadout. the desire to use comfortable tools clashes with the need to select optimal arrangements to deal with these more puzzle-like enemies, but with the vast variety of options at dante's disposal, the choices rarely feel prescribed. the soul eaters may be quickly dispatched by the handguns' backwards shot in the gunslinger style, but the player could also find spots in the environment to trap them in order to combo off of (such as the balcony railing in the altar of evil room), or they can use a few of their devil trigger orbs for a powerful devil trigger explosion. exploiting the environment and synergizing a build to match whatever encounters you're struggling with adds a mindfulness to the otherwise-impulsive combat.
exploring different loadouts for different scenarios becomes even more important when it comes to the game's many bosses. each of the bosses runs the gamut in terms of what skills they require from the player, and with that comes exploring the separate tools that work best with each. beowulf, for example, has a three-hit combo in his first phase that can easily be air parried to store up a massive just release, taking off an excessive amount of health (nearly a third on DMD difficulty!). alternatively, I found that beowulf's powerful phase 2 attacks frequently crushed my guarding, and thus found myself using trickster more often to evade the frequent wooden cages he brings crashing from the sky. cerberus at first glance seemed apt for switch canceling between the rifle and the handguns, but I also found merit in maximizing DPS with the swordmaster style, alternating rebellion and agni & rudra in the air to take out each head as quickly as possible. admittedly these are two of the more robust bosses; fights like nevan and vergil err more on the side of call-and-response, where the player can use basically any tactic as long as they can respond to the movesets of each, while the late-game doppleganger centers environmental interaction with lights on the field that are used to stun the boss. while these bosses rely less on loadout experimentation, they still require attention to detail by the player in order to maximize damage output, locate weak positions, and learn proper spacings.
dante must die, the final difficulty mode, pushes the element of loadout creation and room routing to both its highest and lowest points. unquestionably DMD's balancing is far too skewed in favor of buffing up enemy health to pure sponge levels. when it comes to rooms primarily consisting of the hells, this gives the player some room to breathe in terms of constructing more elaborate combos, but at the same time the length of these encounters and the diminished stagger on enemies that have entered their devil trigger makes repeated jump-canceled moves a safer option. enemies such as the fallen go from tests of aerial mastery to slogging through the same repeated inputs in between waiting for their sword spin to finish. the tedium approaches agony in the latter half of the game, where a boss like geryon with an interesting multi-phase moveset and time-slow traps transforms into a claustrophic nightmare where the only reasonable way to approach it itemless is by stunlocking it in a loop. the chessboard scenario late in the game takes the awesome concept of fighting off a full set of chess pieces (including pawns that respawn as other units if you let them reach the board's end) to an obnoxiously long war of attrition repeatedly spamming killer bee on the king. dmd heightens the contradiction between rigid scenario and expressive gameplay to such an extent that I don't necessarily think it's worth pursuing for most people.
by comparison, very hard was incredibly enjoyable and allowed total flexibility in approach, and its status as the american hard mode and lack of enemy DT made decision-making and routing less of an issue. that's totally fine! the game bursts to its seams with combat features that getting to freestyle more often isn't a detriment in the slightest. however, it must be said that getting to fight for my life through dmd, balancing issues aside, did satisfy that unique sense of routing and pre-planning that few others in the genre can attest to. the sheer difficulty and bulky enemies led me to incorporate techniques I would otherwise ignored, from guard-canceling reverb shocks with nevan to experimenting with artemis' upgrades in the gunslinger style; I still have so much to learn in terms of experimenting with each aspect of dante's toolkit. managing devil trigger as a resource also becomes so much more essential on dmd given the massive power of the DTE and its usefulness both for quick health and as a shield of sorts when mitigating an unavoidable attack. reading and watching the sheer variety of strategies across the game has become a meta-feature of the game's depth that has enraptured me since I began delving more into the game myself over the last few months. even the chessboard has a reasonable quicksilver strat, though to say this makes the fight significantly more interesting may be overselling it. dmc3's status as the harbringer of player-driven combat expression while still remaining entrenched in enemy-driven scenario solutions gives it a unique mechanical blend that cements it as an iconic pillar of the genre.
I certainly wouldn't hold it over anyone if they wanted to try the switch port and how it allows the player to use their entire arsenal simultaneously; the mayhem you can get up to is astonishing. hell, if I play dmd again it might be on that port just to see how it fundamentally changes the experience (I've heard that it evens out much of the annoying shit, especially regarding bosses). there certainly is something worth investigating here in its original form though that hasn't been replicated since; newer titles like astral chain that lean into the adventure elements are doing so having absorbed over a decade of AAA tropes since dmc3's release, and fresh titles like bayonetta 3 compartmentalize their setpieces while dmc3 makes them part and parcel with the combat. although the contradictory nature of this particular flavor of 3D action has unsurprisingly gone out of style, I still feel affectionate to the way it ushered in our modern conception of stylish combat while paying tribute to the RE-derived scenario design all these games owe so much to.
Yakuza 5 Remastered
2019
Technically finished this on 2/18, but it took me a while to finalize a review.
The pillar of maximalist design in video games, and a shining standard for the RGG studio for years to come. Yakuza 5 feels like an enigma of a title, bizarrely sitting in place of the Yakuza series prior to many other entries and yet standing atop many of these with regards to how imperative this of a moment this is for the series. Even playing a bit of the Judgments, Yakuza 0, other Dragon Engine games, etc. 5 feels like a game changer. It doesn't take long to hear about the insane amount of content and variety that's been sewn throughout Yakuza 5, even compared to other titles, although this begs the question as to how the quality stands. If you saw my Yakuza 4 review you might have an idea that I don't like that game, and you would be correct! However, more than that I felt as though Yakuza 4 trips over many of its ideas- not really knowing where to strike hard and floundering in terribly paced vignettes and a frankly claustrophobic idea for where the franchise should leap to. 4 characters with the same Kamurocho, a plot as shallow as it is nonsensical, and a single handful of neat new ideas that I wanted to interact with. It's known that this project wasn't originally supposed to even involve Kiryu but even so 4 feels like such a troubled title and particularly because over the horizon I knew something else was coming. 5 succeeds so much over the corpse of 4 I'm frankly embarrassed for it. Quality is not sacrificed for quantity in Yakuza 5 and most dips in quality I can brush over. There's a lot to talk about so I figured I'd just divide each portion of thought into the games 5 acts.
Kiryu
Opposite to Yakuza 4, we start out with Kiryu for the game and I think that's an immediate improvement. We also see that he's been placed in a situation much more intriguing than we last saw him, as we've moved to a completely different location, he's taken up a new job, and neither Haruka nor any of the Morning Glory orphans are anywhere to be seen. He's also got an extremely stylish new coat- definitely appreciate the new look. Kiryu's story is overall fine, although I think the biggest boon is just how much Yakuza 5 wants you to know they want to keep you in its embrace, with these fairly long, entirely voiced cutscenes as Kiryu talks with his boss, Nakajima (great character) or other yakuza trying to egg Kiryu out of his hiding. Yakuza 5's plot is... intricate to say the least and it certainly wants you to know it but I can respect how much it wants to feel like its closing its curtains. Lotta cameos and references from the last few game pop up, even in Fukuoka- including a relative to Komaki with Sosuke, Date shows up for a side story questioning what his next steps in life are, and more as the game continues. Despite these returns from the past- Fukuoka still makes for a refreshing vacation from Kamurocho. I don't know if I entirely prefer this or Okinawa with regards to Kiryu locales but it certainly has more side content for people to gorge on. Most of the staples are here, along with a new taxi driving side story with two different playstyles, along with a funky 'trash' collection feature and a whole 'Soba Noodle' minigame, all exclusive to Kiryu's segment here. Kiryu also plays pretty well here, although his ‘Climax Heat Action’ didn't really set in for me until much later in the game (i.e. the Finale).
Saejima
Similar to Yakuza 4 on the other hand, Saejima is our follow up to the first part- and just like last time we have to go through a prison segment. This one isn't nearly as grating as the prior game’s escape but it's probably the slowest paced part of the game, maybe my least favorite segment. That said it's an IMMENSE glow up from his prior appearance; no cop chases in sight, the prison segment doesn’t end in a horrible boss fight, no gross sexual tension with a minor- Saejima just needs to fight bears and have imaging trips of the outside world! Speaking of the latter- I appreciate just how many weird stylistic turns this game takes. There's a whole meditative- inner looking segment in the prison in which we take a trip through Tsukimino and even go on a date with our mental hostess. It's just a bizarre trip to take as it lasts a good 30 minutes and happens twice while you're in the prison, but it's a really neat segment that I don't think the series has done before. We also get quite a bit of insight as to how Saejima plays, and again MAN did they improve upon his moveset. He's still kinda wonky at first but once you upgrade his kit he becomes an immense force, with easily double the health of others with less chance to get staggered. Of course it's also hard not to bring up the whole hunting village and its sidequest, I basically chugged this entire section down when I first arrived but its so astounding. Overall minigame is great, I genuinely can't believe just how much effort all of these sidequests get, with their own side stories and research done to liven up the new locales. I will echo Zapken's point however that the translation doesn't take the opportunity to mention that they’re a Matagi village, which I think would have been a great opportunity to dive in on and talk about this specific section of Japanese human geography.
Haruka/Akiyama
Time and time again we come across the same argument in gaming about 'non-violent' approaches to combat or progression and I do applaud such efforts, even though I generally prefer some kinds of action/combat systems in my games. SMT might have you talking with demons however those systems are a nice compliment to a phenomenal battle system, while Undertale takes a simplistic but effective combat system to contrast the very specific and puzzling ways to converse and befriend your opponents. Non-combat can be quite fun when done in a manner that feels suitable and engaging. So listen, as cool or funny as it might sound to have Haruka take on Yakuza and big swarms of baddies, I genuinely think her main gameplay be these dance battles is such a nice break in the game.
By this point I'm maybe 30-40 hours deep into a game that's known for pretty frequent enemy encounters/pop-ups. It was so goddamn nice to play as a character that could walk around Sotenbori and not be interrupted at ALL, with dance battles just being an optional encounter in fixed locations. Hell, a good bit of Haruka's gameplay is pretty optional, as you can quit at the last minute of the Princess League and the story progresses as normal.
This part also merges with Akiyama's section so the two share Sotenbori and it's actually really neat! It would have been easier for Kiryu and Haruka to have shared a part and maybe have the narrative be like "Haruka and Kiryu move from Kamurocho to Sotenbori, but Kiryu has to distance himself so blah, blah." and "Akiyama travels to Fukuoka to open a new branch of Sky Finance!" but I think Akiyama being the one to meet up and connect with Haruka is actually really neat and connects the two considering their relation to Mirei Park and overall philosophies. The two didn't share but so much screen time (if any i dunno) in Y4, so it's pretty cool when Akiyama's segment just so happens to bump into Haruka's and we can start swapping between multiple characters for the first time. The one thing I'll say about Akiyama is that because his section is merged into another it kinda feels like he gets less overall content comparatively. Each character gets an insane amount of content to go along with each of their parts, and Haruka is different enough to feel like a different game. Akiyama doesn't have much else to fall on for unique minigames or sidequests. I guess if you lump new features into parts rather than character then each part feels fulfilling in that sense bar the Finale, but personally I would have liked each character to have had at least one side game to tinker around with. It doesn't matter too much by the end of the game, although there was a noticeable difference in levels between every other character and Akiyama.
Shinada
Ah. The odd one of this collective. Like Tanimura in the prior game, 5 contains a character with no other appearance outside of this collection and as such I wasn't sure what to expect going into his section. Not only is he the odd one out of the bunch, but he's not Yakuza, he doesn't seem all that influential and he's the last segment until the finale. While I'm not entirely sure I'd call this my favorite part, I might just say Shinada might be my favorite addition to this game as a whole. I really didn't get Tanimura and I'm not certain I ever will. Meanwhile, Shinada immediately piqued my interest- he's a sad sap brought down by forces outside his control despite his clear talent. He's an earnest and almost childlike man, working in the sex industry as a journalist. His ass is broke as fuck and his stomach empty, but his heart is as big as ever. He...was classmates with Daigo? Huh.
Shinada's a weird ass character and his whole arc feels very bizarre considering its placement here at the end. But once his part gets going I think its placement makes a little more sense. I do wonder whether switching Parts 3 and 4 would have made more sense but I don't have any major issue with Shinada being so late in the game. His part's incredibly weird, starting off with very little money and seemingly having little to do with the plot- it really feels like you just transitioned into a whole different game. After some baseball side stories and other sidequests- it becomes really funny to see broke boy Shinada suddenly carrying around 20,000 dollars in his back pocket. Shinada's moveset is fine overall, and I think his weapon specialty in theory is neat, but not really something I engaged with too much. I did enjoy getting the pole charging move and running around in circles to stunlock enemies though.
One last note: There was a tiny moment, and it's not hard to notice or encounter naturally where you can just pick up a baseball bat with the intent to use it as a weapon; however, Shinada- as a former baseball player, disgraced and barred from his dream career- simply picks it up, inspects it and lays it down and can't be picked up again. I'm an absolute sucker for tiny details like this, and I feel like I miss them so often but just seeing this small interaction with Shinada and his past during a combat section was just one of the several shining moments from Y5 that'll stick in my mind as I look back at the series. I think his arc at least ends on a solid note, as Ill get to later, so I can't be too hopeful in him returning to another game. But if he ever does a cameo in a later title I'll pop off. Very glad to finally understand who Shinada is.
Finale
Finally, all the pieces come together...kinda. All throughout this mass of a game I gotta be real honest, the story has not been the major strength so far- at least when it comes to conciseness or any kind of... it's not the hardest to follow or the most absurd, it's just a lot to take in and by the time it reaches the final few hours there's a lot of stuff that feels REAL loose. I was really uncertain as to how much of it would actually tie in or matter as much as other throughlines. Maybe there would be a massive epilogue to help? Maybe the finale would be some Metal Gear Solid 4 mass of cutscenes? I wasn't too sure, all I could do was press forward into Kamurocho for the first real time in the game (You start Saejima in Kamurocho but I didn't bother exploring tbh). Most of these finale chapters act to provide a final few stretches with each character before the grand finale, but there's still some stuff to explore and tinker around with. Firstly, I must say bravo to RGG for instilling a deep sense of fear within me in a way I didn't expect. As I was doing the rounds in Kamurocho, I decided to use a taxi and head up towards E. Shichifuku St. I was half paying attention but instinctually marched forward, only to notice someone by Kamurocho Hills run off screen. I had only just noticed that for a half second but his pathing looped back around that small park area in the front to start chasing me from behind and this random guy's encounter procs. This wouldn't have frightened me if it wasn't for the fact this dude is jacked, has a really intimidating face and as I described, will chase you once he notices you. All the dude does is fight you as part of the Victory Road storyline but from then on this guy continues to patrol Kamurocho but unlike say, Mr. Shakedowns there's no way to really track this guy. For the most part this guy appeared whenever I had just gotten out of a taxi so there's just this sense of keeping a guard up for whenever I fast travel and the guy loading into crowds right behind whichever character I'm using. Yakuza 5, continuing to surprise me even to its last few hours!
This finale is dumb, a few reveals that are either too obvious or kinda just too stupid, the usual endgame dungeon fighting segments- the Yakuza norm for most of the final chapter. However, the literal FINAL chapter is something to write home about. Easily my favorite finale in the series. Just a great collection of action and character moments, the only fumble maybe being the final boss. It's alright but not the most insane fight in the series. Otherwise every other character has a fantastic final cutscene to conclude the game with, with equal parts sincere, heartfelt moments like Takasugi letting Shinada know people truly miss him, and equal parts absurd GAS like a large crowd of Omi Alliance, Yamagasa, and Kitakita family members kneeling to Akiyama for felling Kanai. The only thing more absurd is knowing this isn't really the end of Kiryu's story, which does make me hesitant to what direction Y6 and eventually Yakuza Gaiden take.
Needless to say, I really enjoyed this entry. It's not unheard of in this industry that a series can ping pong from one of its worst entries to one of its best (DMC2 to 3 more notably so), but I'm so glad that it was the case here.
It’s nowhere near perfect, far from it. However with how big of title this is it’s got one hell of a batting average with only a few segments or elements I really ‘dislike’. Hell, there’s a lot of stuff I still hadn’t sunk my teeth into like any of the cabaret games, chicken racing or snowball fights.I'll have to take a break from playing more of the games with how heavy this one felt but man is it great to have it off my back now. 80 hours of playtime and only ~50% completion, baby!
(Sidenote: I had plans to discuss how much of a ‘Dream’ game this felt- thinking my acknowledgment on how often the game uses ‘dream’ was solely my own idea. Little did I realize much of the fanbase already beat me to the punch- and the subtitle of the game is even called ‘Fulfiller of Dreams’ in Japan! Here I thought I was clever…regardless I enjoy how that's the theme of the game, some people are just haters)
The pillar of maximalist design in video games, and a shining standard for the RGG studio for years to come. Yakuza 5 feels like an enigma of a title, bizarrely sitting in place of the Yakuza series prior to many other entries and yet standing atop many of these with regards to how imperative this of a moment this is for the series. Even playing a bit of the Judgments, Yakuza 0, other Dragon Engine games, etc. 5 feels like a game changer. It doesn't take long to hear about the insane amount of content and variety that's been sewn throughout Yakuza 5, even compared to other titles, although this begs the question as to how the quality stands. If you saw my Yakuza 4 review you might have an idea that I don't like that game, and you would be correct! However, more than that I felt as though Yakuza 4 trips over many of its ideas- not really knowing where to strike hard and floundering in terribly paced vignettes and a frankly claustrophobic idea for where the franchise should leap to. 4 characters with the same Kamurocho, a plot as shallow as it is nonsensical, and a single handful of neat new ideas that I wanted to interact with. It's known that this project wasn't originally supposed to even involve Kiryu but even so 4 feels like such a troubled title and particularly because over the horizon I knew something else was coming. 5 succeeds so much over the corpse of 4 I'm frankly embarrassed for it. Quality is not sacrificed for quantity in Yakuza 5 and most dips in quality I can brush over. There's a lot to talk about so I figured I'd just divide each portion of thought into the games 5 acts.
Kiryu
Opposite to Yakuza 4, we start out with Kiryu for the game and I think that's an immediate improvement. We also see that he's been placed in a situation much more intriguing than we last saw him, as we've moved to a completely different location, he's taken up a new job, and neither Haruka nor any of the Morning Glory orphans are anywhere to be seen. He's also got an extremely stylish new coat- definitely appreciate the new look. Kiryu's story is overall fine, although I think the biggest boon is just how much Yakuza 5 wants you to know they want to keep you in its embrace, with these fairly long, entirely voiced cutscenes as Kiryu talks with his boss, Nakajima (great character) or other yakuza trying to egg Kiryu out of his hiding. Yakuza 5's plot is... intricate to say the least and it certainly wants you to know it but I can respect how much it wants to feel like its closing its curtains. Lotta cameos and references from the last few game pop up, even in Fukuoka- including a relative to Komaki with Sosuke, Date shows up for a side story questioning what his next steps in life are, and more as the game continues. Despite these returns from the past- Fukuoka still makes for a refreshing vacation from Kamurocho. I don't know if I entirely prefer this or Okinawa with regards to Kiryu locales but it certainly has more side content for people to gorge on. Most of the staples are here, along with a new taxi driving side story with two different playstyles, along with a funky 'trash' collection feature and a whole 'Soba Noodle' minigame, all exclusive to Kiryu's segment here. Kiryu also plays pretty well here, although his ‘Climax Heat Action’ didn't really set in for me until much later in the game (i.e. the Finale).
Saejima
Similar to Yakuza 4 on the other hand, Saejima is our follow up to the first part- and just like last time we have to go through a prison segment. This one isn't nearly as grating as the prior game’s escape but it's probably the slowest paced part of the game, maybe my least favorite segment. That said it's an IMMENSE glow up from his prior appearance; no cop chases in sight, the prison segment doesn’t end in a horrible boss fight, no gross sexual tension with a minor- Saejima just needs to fight bears and have imaging trips of the outside world! Speaking of the latter- I appreciate just how many weird stylistic turns this game takes. There's a whole meditative- inner looking segment in the prison in which we take a trip through Tsukimino and even go on a date with our mental hostess. It's just a bizarre trip to take as it lasts a good 30 minutes and happens twice while you're in the prison, but it's a really neat segment that I don't think the series has done before. We also get quite a bit of insight as to how Saejima plays, and again MAN did they improve upon his moveset. He's still kinda wonky at first but once you upgrade his kit he becomes an immense force, with easily double the health of others with less chance to get staggered. Of course it's also hard not to bring up the whole hunting village and its sidequest, I basically chugged this entire section down when I first arrived but its so astounding. Overall minigame is great, I genuinely can't believe just how much effort all of these sidequests get, with their own side stories and research done to liven up the new locales. I will echo Zapken's point however that the translation doesn't take the opportunity to mention that they’re a Matagi village, which I think would have been a great opportunity to dive in on and talk about this specific section of Japanese human geography.
Haruka/Akiyama
Time and time again we come across the same argument in gaming about 'non-violent' approaches to combat or progression and I do applaud such efforts, even though I generally prefer some kinds of action/combat systems in my games. SMT might have you talking with demons however those systems are a nice compliment to a phenomenal battle system, while Undertale takes a simplistic but effective combat system to contrast the very specific and puzzling ways to converse and befriend your opponents. Non-combat can be quite fun when done in a manner that feels suitable and engaging. So listen, as cool or funny as it might sound to have Haruka take on Yakuza and big swarms of baddies, I genuinely think her main gameplay be these dance battles is such a nice break in the game.
By this point I'm maybe 30-40 hours deep into a game that's known for pretty frequent enemy encounters/pop-ups. It was so goddamn nice to play as a character that could walk around Sotenbori and not be interrupted at ALL, with dance battles just being an optional encounter in fixed locations. Hell, a good bit of Haruka's gameplay is pretty optional, as you can quit at the last minute of the Princess League and the story progresses as normal.
This part also merges with Akiyama's section so the two share Sotenbori and it's actually really neat! It would have been easier for Kiryu and Haruka to have shared a part and maybe have the narrative be like "Haruka and Kiryu move from Kamurocho to Sotenbori, but Kiryu has to distance himself so blah, blah." and "Akiyama travels to Fukuoka to open a new branch of Sky Finance!" but I think Akiyama being the one to meet up and connect with Haruka is actually really neat and connects the two considering their relation to Mirei Park and overall philosophies. The two didn't share but so much screen time (if any i dunno) in Y4, so it's pretty cool when Akiyama's segment just so happens to bump into Haruka's and we can start swapping between multiple characters for the first time. The one thing I'll say about Akiyama is that because his section is merged into another it kinda feels like he gets less overall content comparatively. Each character gets an insane amount of content to go along with each of their parts, and Haruka is different enough to feel like a different game. Akiyama doesn't have much else to fall on for unique minigames or sidequests. I guess if you lump new features into parts rather than character then each part feels fulfilling in that sense bar the Finale, but personally I would have liked each character to have had at least one side game to tinker around with. It doesn't matter too much by the end of the game, although there was a noticeable difference in levels between every other character and Akiyama.
Shinada
Ah. The odd one of this collective. Like Tanimura in the prior game, 5 contains a character with no other appearance outside of this collection and as such I wasn't sure what to expect going into his section. Not only is he the odd one out of the bunch, but he's not Yakuza, he doesn't seem all that influential and he's the last segment until the finale. While I'm not entirely sure I'd call this my favorite part, I might just say Shinada might be my favorite addition to this game as a whole. I really didn't get Tanimura and I'm not certain I ever will. Meanwhile, Shinada immediately piqued my interest- he's a sad sap brought down by forces outside his control despite his clear talent. He's an earnest and almost childlike man, working in the sex industry as a journalist. His ass is broke as fuck and his stomach empty, but his heart is as big as ever. He...was classmates with Daigo? Huh.
Shinada's a weird ass character and his whole arc feels very bizarre considering its placement here at the end. But once his part gets going I think its placement makes a little more sense. I do wonder whether switching Parts 3 and 4 would have made more sense but I don't have any major issue with Shinada being so late in the game. His part's incredibly weird, starting off with very little money and seemingly having little to do with the plot- it really feels like you just transitioned into a whole different game. After some baseball side stories and other sidequests- it becomes really funny to see broke boy Shinada suddenly carrying around 20,000 dollars in his back pocket. Shinada's moveset is fine overall, and I think his weapon specialty in theory is neat, but not really something I engaged with too much. I did enjoy getting the pole charging move and running around in circles to stunlock enemies though.
One last note: There was a tiny moment, and it's not hard to notice or encounter naturally where you can just pick up a baseball bat with the intent to use it as a weapon; however, Shinada- as a former baseball player, disgraced and barred from his dream career- simply picks it up, inspects it and lays it down and can't be picked up again. I'm an absolute sucker for tiny details like this, and I feel like I miss them so often but just seeing this small interaction with Shinada and his past during a combat section was just one of the several shining moments from Y5 that'll stick in my mind as I look back at the series. I think his arc at least ends on a solid note, as Ill get to later, so I can't be too hopeful in him returning to another game. But if he ever does a cameo in a later title I'll pop off. Very glad to finally understand who Shinada is.
Finale
Finally, all the pieces come together...kinda. All throughout this mass of a game I gotta be real honest, the story has not been the major strength so far- at least when it comes to conciseness or any kind of... it's not the hardest to follow or the most absurd, it's just a lot to take in and by the time it reaches the final few hours there's a lot of stuff that feels REAL loose. I was really uncertain as to how much of it would actually tie in or matter as much as other throughlines. Maybe there would be a massive epilogue to help? Maybe the finale would be some Metal Gear Solid 4 mass of cutscenes? I wasn't too sure, all I could do was press forward into Kamurocho for the first real time in the game (You start Saejima in Kamurocho but I didn't bother exploring tbh). Most of these finale chapters act to provide a final few stretches with each character before the grand finale, but there's still some stuff to explore and tinker around with. Firstly, I must say bravo to RGG for instilling a deep sense of fear within me in a way I didn't expect. As I was doing the rounds in Kamurocho, I decided to use a taxi and head up towards E. Shichifuku St. I was half paying attention but instinctually marched forward, only to notice someone by Kamurocho Hills run off screen. I had only just noticed that for a half second but his pathing looped back around that small park area in the front to start chasing me from behind and this random guy's encounter procs. This wouldn't have frightened me if it wasn't for the fact this dude is jacked, has a really intimidating face and as I described, will chase you once he notices you. All the dude does is fight you as part of the Victory Road storyline but from then on this guy continues to patrol Kamurocho but unlike say, Mr. Shakedowns there's no way to really track this guy. For the most part this guy appeared whenever I had just gotten out of a taxi so there's just this sense of keeping a guard up for whenever I fast travel and the guy loading into crowds right behind whichever character I'm using. Yakuza 5, continuing to surprise me even to its last few hours!
This finale is dumb, a few reveals that are either too obvious or kinda just too stupid, the usual endgame dungeon fighting segments- the Yakuza norm for most of the final chapter. However, the literal FINAL chapter is something to write home about. Easily my favorite finale in the series. Just a great collection of action and character moments, the only fumble maybe being the final boss. It's alright but not the most insane fight in the series. Otherwise every other character has a fantastic final cutscene to conclude the game with, with equal parts sincere, heartfelt moments like Takasugi letting Shinada know people truly miss him, and equal parts absurd GAS like a large crowd of Omi Alliance, Yamagasa, and Kitakita family members kneeling to Akiyama for felling Kanai. The only thing more absurd is knowing this isn't really the end of Kiryu's story, which does make me hesitant to what direction Y6 and eventually Yakuza Gaiden take.
Needless to say, I really enjoyed this entry. It's not unheard of in this industry that a series can ping pong from one of its worst entries to one of its best (DMC2 to 3 more notably so), but I'm so glad that it was the case here.
It’s nowhere near perfect, far from it. However with how big of title this is it’s got one hell of a batting average with only a few segments or elements I really ‘dislike’. Hell, there’s a lot of stuff I still hadn’t sunk my teeth into like any of the cabaret games, chicken racing or snowball fights.I'll have to take a break from playing more of the games with how heavy this one felt but man is it great to have it off my back now. 80 hours of playtime and only ~50% completion, baby!
(Sidenote: I had plans to discuss how much of a ‘Dream’ game this felt- thinking my acknowledgment on how often the game uses ‘dream’ was solely my own idea. Little did I realize much of the fanbase already beat me to the punch- and the subtitle of the game is even called ‘Fulfiller of Dreams’ in Japan! Here I thought I was clever…regardless I enjoy how that's the theme of the game, some people are just haters)
Mighty No. 9
2016
In preparation for playing and finishing certain games on my docket and basically assuming I'll leave them with mostly high to perfect scores for these games, I figured to even it out by playing a lot of just pure mid or garbage. Perhaps then I can get a better perspective on things- widen my scope and truly come to appreciate the wonderful things in life.
I didn't play much of this though, maybe 30 minutes. I think I had better level design in custom stages for that flash Ben 10 Alien Force game on Cartoon Network's site.
I didn't play much of this though, maybe 30 minutes. I think I had better level design in custom stages for that flash Ben 10 Alien Force game on Cartoon Network's site.
Pandora's Tower
2011
girls love to eat monster flesh of dubious origin their mostly silent protagonist boyfriend brings them from thirteen cursed towers located in a land the military aristocracy denies exists
Japan OCG: July 2001
NA TCG: March 2003
(Pre- "Joey-Pegasus" format)
Another good simulation of the Yu-Gi-Oh format at that point in the series, although it's held back slightly by the delay of getting new cards from the updated card list. Labyrinth of Nightmare isn't the most groundbreaking of packs with regards to the Yu-Gi-Oh meta, however it contained a handful of neat additions and themes that would have been nice to experiment with if these cards didn't take a while to obtain. At the very least, there's not necessarily a main goal or so much as a story to really gauge where you should be at- it's fundamentally the most open YuGiOh game to date and would have been the perfect game to have on car trips/vacations, with the usual chunk of neat packs to open but also a lot of extra goodies to unlock and achieve through grinds. Really the only 'end-game' (and when I decided to put the game down) was when the 'Pyramid Puzzle' event concluded, the only real story even to occur that mirrors the Marik/Card Hunter section of Battle City, but doesnt go past that into finals or any major tournament or anything. Beating this just unlocks a few more features like allowing once randomly encountered card hunters to be fought more easily on the map, a new tournament type and a new completion status element appears at the top of your options menu, filling out symbols once you achieve feats such as opening every type of pack, obtaining every card, beating a tournament 10 times, etc. Otherwise the game continues the same, with no other end goal. Mainly the game consists of you traversing a map screen with several districts, populated by random citizens to talk to and duelists to battle. Every action taken moves the player to that district and allows them to see the adjacent districts, but also moves the day forward. The only things distinguishing the days are Saturdays hold tournaments in a random district and Sundays will always give a free weekly pack of 5 cards. Otherwise it's off to the races, duel as much as you want.
Much like Eternal Duelist Soul, you are given the choice between 3 decks (although the actual contents is determined by several pools of random cards), and just like EDS this doesnt skimp out on the good stuff. Depending on which of the 3 decks, you're given the same amount of cards but 5 cards are different out of 3 colors, each color having two pools of 5 cards to fill the gap. Most of these 5 cards are extremely powerful and relate to the color of the deck: green is good spells, black is monsters and red is traps. Before I knew the card pools I picked the green deck and found myself grabbing maybe one of the best pools as it contained Pot of Greed, Snatch Steal, Nobleman of Crossout, Premature Burial and Harpie's Feather Duster. Other cards in the pools include the San-Witch combo, Jinzo, all 5 Exodia pieces, Torrential Tribute, Imperial Order, Mirror Force Bell(??? not called Ring oddly) of Destruction, Upstart Goblin and Swords of Revealing Light. Doing the math, EDS has a bit more variability but still give you a ton of power cards, but SDD's main 35 cards still contain a ton of power cards, including Graceful Charity and MST.
In general the 'good stuff' cards you can get are way easier to obtain, which is nice but can completely steamroll a lot of the competition early on. I didn't go without losing a few times, but you can easily make a meta deck that trounces most of the cast. I'm glad that the decks begin as good as they do, and the opponents aren't immediately weak, but after the first chunk of the game (lets say after 20 battles) your deck can have most everything you need to counter most everyone else. Probably the best way to go through the game is to save clearly stronger opponents for later- however my idea was to just battle each opponent in a row so that they all had the same level of victories at a time, then beat them a 10th time all in a row and unlock the Destiny Board pack, which includes most of the . Mako, Rex and Weevil are probably the easiest with Tea, Grandpa following ahead and the rest having a solid line-up of counters and range of strong offense/defense. There is a better sense of flexibility here, and if you lose a couple of times then Mokuba appears in the world map to act as a noob-friendly fight as none of his cards really top higher than 1400 attack and his AI doesn't seem to understand card effects, so this can serve as a means to earn easy packs, but he's not exactly an engaging duelist. Overall the curve is slightly better, as I do recall Eternal Duelist Soul having pretty competent duels right out the gate in the first wave of duelists with only those 5 to pick from- whereas this has several more opponents ranging in difficulty to pick, and an 'easy mode' to fall back on. That said it does begin to plateau once you've fought each fighter a few times, so I kinda wish the duelists evolved and changed their strategies after a while. Maybe have X duelist have an additional strategy they could load up after you win Y times against X duelist (eg have Mako's 'penguin soldier/'flip-centric' strategy lean more into that at first but after 5 wins turn into a standard beatdown with Umi? not sure). Rather it seems like most duelists use a combination of two strategies that aren't incoherent but don't exactly have a solid win-condition. Funny enough I think the clearest two win-cons in the game come from Kaiba which makes sense and Tea of all duelists? I saw her Fusion sage and get out her Joan way more than a few times and it didn't seem like other duelists had such a plan. It is funny how certain characters have their own strategies that can be easily countered, though. Using Kaiba as an example: he would be this ultra scary boss, utilizing Cyber-Stein to pay 5000 LP to bring out Blue Eyes Ultimate turn 1, towering over any conventional monsters and jumping further in tempo than the other characters do. That said this is such a hilariously easy strategy to read and counter, his only backrow is usually a 'Negate Attack' or 'Mirror Force' which isn't that scary as this allows you to either Snatch Steal, Change of Heart (even funnier than SS since Kaiba pays the 5000 for BEUD but the difference in you stealing and attacking with BEUD against the leftover Cyber Stein kills him), Trap Hole, Dark Hole, Copycat, Raigeki, Man-Eater Bug, etc. the threat away. The amount of removal that just deflates this strategy is hilarious. Genuinely, Joey is a much harder opponent in this regard since he often carries a wider arrange of spells and traps.
To try and differentiate from the prior Eternal Duelist Soul strategy, I tried to think of a different goal from the hand control I utilized then. Unfortunately there's not as many great options at disposal as 'Good Stuff' medley. GOAT format hasn't fully matured and there's a lot of strategies that only come into play a few packs later. Labyrinth of Nightmare contains most notably the mask spell/traps, and the 'Destiny Board' cards. The former being a series of equip spells and traps that contain a variety of buffs, debuffs, battle tricks or control options, while the latter is an alt win conditions that procs once the player plays all 5 destiny board cards in the backrow and spells 'F-I-N-A-L' (or D-E-A-T-H in jp). This pack also contains the 'Revival Jam' cards that was most notable in the anime for Yugi's victory against a seemingly impenetrable defense (Sadly Lava Golem isn't out until later). Unfortunately none of these strategies are really that notable outside of the anime. In reality the best Labyrinth of Nightmare cards are actually pretty underrated, or otherwise didn't become staples until much later. Cards really begin to see a shift toward utilizing the graveyard as a source of power and the banish pile as the true final destination for cards. Monsters like Bazoo the Soul Eater and Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer boast a strong 1800 atk but really benefit having abilities that banishes your cards for a buff or sends opponents GY cards to the banish pile, respectively. The pack also contains Gemini Elf but she's been in games since Dark Duel Stories which is really fucking with my perception of how these cards are released, only compounded by me not realizing Ring of Destruction also wasn't released until a few packs later in the TCG. Torrential Tribute being a board wipe upon summon, Magic Cylinder being a redirect of battle damage, and the large equip totals you can reach with Mage Power or United We Stand (see Maha Vailo), are pretty notable releases in the pack. Along with these are other infamous such as: Gilasaurus which would eventually help bolster the 'Magical Scientist FTK', Amazoness Archer which can do burn damage multiple times a turn for tributing 2 monsters (only banned in OCG), Jowgen the Spiritualist, which became a standard in Spellbook decks and helped get 'Last Turn' banned, and Card of Safe Return, which allows a draw if you Special Summon from grave (not once per turn??? of course its banned). Above all else though this game would have been a must buy if you were a duelist, as the game came bundled in with cards- but not just any cards. Valkyrion is a neat boss monster for the magnet warriors but nothing too special, Sinister Serpent is deceptively powerful as 'discard' fodder as it returns from the GY to the hand each turn, and Harpie Feather Duster is a must-have, destroying all spell and traps on the opponents side, a staple that continues to see play (or at least side deck rep) today. Overall the card additions to SDD are pretty solid, but much of the standout cards take a while to grab or aren't the most explosive. Still, Labyrinth of Nightmare and this game do mark a pivotal shift in the metagame and way cards function.
The main issue is just that I look into the typical decks by the end of GOAT format, and much is still missing by this point in YGO, we still haven't gotten to the Gravekeepers, the Chaos cards, PAC-MAN, pure Hand control, Umi beatdown, Zombies, Monarchs and other finalized decks in GOAT format by the end of 2005. I guess you can do Clown Control, Last Warrior lock-out, and some other neat decks but much of the deck building still falls on very proto-thematic philosophies where the best deck is still a 'Beatdown' deck but maybe with a specific flavor of a given attribute. Each subsequent pack still gives the same amount of 'good' cards from this point on (mostly, kinda) so this isn't the fault of the game or the distribution of cards but I do plan as later games (given that all other variables remain positive) begin to have larger times gaps between releases and more booster sets fill out the pool, will just get better as the access to more variety will incentivize more kinds of playstyles and in a sense, replayability. Sidenote, why is mystic tomato so hard to find? There's a lot of cards like these that seemed pretty essential during the meta around this time and Tomato has yet to really show up in my playthroughs despite stuff like Sangan and Witch being pretty easy to snag in this game. All three of these are some of the strongest 'recruiters' (ie cards that pull another card from the deck according to a given criteria, such as any monster with less than 1500 atk/def or have 'dark' attribute). It's just fairly odd to not see it at all in the game during my playthrough not in any pack early on nor in any opponent's deck (afaik), but Shining Justice (the light attr. equivalent) and Giant Rat (the earth attr.) are pretty par for the course. The card is only available once you reach 10000 duelist points, which isn't difficult but was about where I put the game down. It does get me thinking about how the strategy and thought about the meta has evolved over time; was Mystic Tomato considered superior over several other cards in the meta, even other staples? I do know about certain battling philosophies such as Solemn Judgment not being as universally played due to a mindset where the 'pay half your current LP' condition was deemed too risky. Maybe the self-replacing 'pull from deck to field upon destruction' was considered more lucrative than Witch/Sangan's more broader but perhaps slower 'pull from deck to hand' effect? Very interesting/perplexing to think about, especially since the latter cards were more limited on the banlist at the time anyway. Also funny to think about how many of the much harder and grindier packs to get contain cards that aren't really all that good, just kinda fan-servicey or subpar. At the end of the day at least, most cards are available anyway through the password system, but I do try to avoid that myself. By the end of the game much of my deck looked similar to how I left EDS, although I did try to swap in a few different flavors here and there to spice things up, like Toll/Chain Energy burn (terrible idea), Clown Control (very impractical when incomplete) and Maha Vailo. Maha Vailo is a very funny card, gaining an additional 500 attack points for each equip spell attached to it, including stuff like Premature Burial. A Premature Burial Maha Vailo on top of Sword of Dark Seated and Axe of Despair turns a 1550 attack card into a 3050 and then its effect puts it to a whopping 4550, and this isn't the worst it can get. Sadly, Mage Power and United We Stand are fairly late in the game to get, otherwise I would have run as much as I could. I wish Ben Kei was available to create this juggernaut of an equip spell deck, but alas.
I also wish there was an actual calendar or any way to see how many weeks have passed. You can only tell what day it is but there's no other measurement of what time has passed, and certain packs and events go off a weekly timer as to when you first see them, like the KC Cup. Trying to find tournament locations and proc events such as the Card Hunter encounters can be kinda odd as I swear its only in one corner of the map and might take a week or two after the warning announcement to pop up. In this regard its kind of hard to get a feeling as to how you actually progress into the Pyramid Puzzle quest, especially when I encounter Lumis and Umbra twice but it didn't seem like a different encounter. Of course, this is in reference to a duo during the Battle City arc this is based off of and you can't really fight two duelists at the same time so it could have been a fight against Lumis and then Umbra but as two separate card hunter encounters? I'm wasn't sure at first, the dialogue and play-style didn't seem any different. It only took me a while to find out that certain townspeople will appear as Rare Hunters. I had figured these encounters were based off a random encounter, but you'd fight each member in a set order from Strings to L&U to Exodia guy to Arkana to Odion, etc. Nah, actually I found Arkana last despite Odion being like a second in command for Marik, very weird and I'm glad I realized that sooner than later because I didn't talk to any towns person between then and the start of the game.
The tournaments are kinda hard to find at times, but they're a neat function once you do find one on a Saturday. I still don't entirely think the side deck is necessary against any of these opponents but its still neat you can set one up just in case you have a specific but flawed strategy in mind and need potential backups in a best of 3 format. More interestingly I think are the 'Target' weeks where you're asked to seek out two specific duelists that are given to you and beat them for a special pack. This is a neat idea, and got me to understand the kind of patterns that each of these duelists follow. What does confuse me is that there's supposedly interruptions that can happen if two duelists are on the same district on the map? I tried seeing what I could get but each duelist was matched already to a certain combination. Tea was always in the same area as Bakura, Kaiba was usually alone or with Ishizu, Joey was usually alone, Yugi was usually alone, etc. I don't know if that's a case of me playing the game onVBA or what.
Overall it's slightly better than the Eternal Duelist Soul, but only by a slight degree. It's got more cards and a lot of the best cards are extremely easy to get once you know what packs have what, but because of this much of the later chunks of the game feel like a grind. Originally I was gonna place this about similarly to EDS but the lack of any major story kinda just frees you to do anything, at your own pace. Once I realized this, I figured this would actually be an excellent game to have had as a kid or on a long trip, definitely has that 'On a deserted island' feel. It's not as big a jump in card pool as I had hoped, but all things considered it's an improved game and better intro to the card game than Eternal Duelist Soul.
NA TCG: March 2003
(Pre- "Joey-Pegasus" format)
Another good simulation of the Yu-Gi-Oh format at that point in the series, although it's held back slightly by the delay of getting new cards from the updated card list. Labyrinth of Nightmare isn't the most groundbreaking of packs with regards to the Yu-Gi-Oh meta, however it contained a handful of neat additions and themes that would have been nice to experiment with if these cards didn't take a while to obtain. At the very least, there's not necessarily a main goal or so much as a story to really gauge where you should be at- it's fundamentally the most open YuGiOh game to date and would have been the perfect game to have on car trips/vacations, with the usual chunk of neat packs to open but also a lot of extra goodies to unlock and achieve through grinds. Really the only 'end-game' (and when I decided to put the game down) was when the 'Pyramid Puzzle' event concluded, the only real story even to occur that mirrors the Marik/Card Hunter section of Battle City, but doesnt go past that into finals or any major tournament or anything. Beating this just unlocks a few more features like allowing once randomly encountered card hunters to be fought more easily on the map, a new tournament type and a new completion status element appears at the top of your options menu, filling out symbols once you achieve feats such as opening every type of pack, obtaining every card, beating a tournament 10 times, etc. Otherwise the game continues the same, with no other end goal. Mainly the game consists of you traversing a map screen with several districts, populated by random citizens to talk to and duelists to battle. Every action taken moves the player to that district and allows them to see the adjacent districts, but also moves the day forward. The only things distinguishing the days are Saturdays hold tournaments in a random district and Sundays will always give a free weekly pack of 5 cards. Otherwise it's off to the races, duel as much as you want.
Much like Eternal Duelist Soul, you are given the choice between 3 decks (although the actual contents is determined by several pools of random cards), and just like EDS this doesnt skimp out on the good stuff. Depending on which of the 3 decks, you're given the same amount of cards but 5 cards are different out of 3 colors, each color having two pools of 5 cards to fill the gap. Most of these 5 cards are extremely powerful and relate to the color of the deck: green is good spells, black is monsters and red is traps. Before I knew the card pools I picked the green deck and found myself grabbing maybe one of the best pools as it contained Pot of Greed, Snatch Steal, Nobleman of Crossout, Premature Burial and Harpie's Feather Duster. Other cards in the pools include the San-Witch combo, Jinzo, all 5 Exodia pieces, Torrential Tribute, Imperial Order, Mirror Force Bell(??? not called Ring oddly) of Destruction, Upstart Goblin and Swords of Revealing Light. Doing the math, EDS has a bit more variability but still give you a ton of power cards, but SDD's main 35 cards still contain a ton of power cards, including Graceful Charity and MST.
In general the 'good stuff' cards you can get are way easier to obtain, which is nice but can completely steamroll a lot of the competition early on. I didn't go without losing a few times, but you can easily make a meta deck that trounces most of the cast. I'm glad that the decks begin as good as they do, and the opponents aren't immediately weak, but after the first chunk of the game (lets say after 20 battles) your deck can have most everything you need to counter most everyone else. Probably the best way to go through the game is to save clearly stronger opponents for later- however my idea was to just battle each opponent in a row so that they all had the same level of victories at a time, then beat them a 10th time all in a row and unlock the Destiny Board pack, which includes most of the . Mako, Rex and Weevil are probably the easiest with Tea, Grandpa following ahead and the rest having a solid line-up of counters and range of strong offense/defense. There is a better sense of flexibility here, and if you lose a couple of times then Mokuba appears in the world map to act as a noob-friendly fight as none of his cards really top higher than 1400 attack and his AI doesn't seem to understand card effects, so this can serve as a means to earn easy packs, but he's not exactly an engaging duelist. Overall the curve is slightly better, as I do recall Eternal Duelist Soul having pretty competent duels right out the gate in the first wave of duelists with only those 5 to pick from- whereas this has several more opponents ranging in difficulty to pick, and an 'easy mode' to fall back on. That said it does begin to plateau once you've fought each fighter a few times, so I kinda wish the duelists evolved and changed their strategies after a while. Maybe have X duelist have an additional strategy they could load up after you win Y times against X duelist (eg have Mako's 'penguin soldier/'flip-centric' strategy lean more into that at first but after 5 wins turn into a standard beatdown with Umi? not sure). Rather it seems like most duelists use a combination of two strategies that aren't incoherent but don't exactly have a solid win-condition. Funny enough I think the clearest two win-cons in the game come from Kaiba which makes sense and Tea of all duelists? I saw her Fusion sage and get out her Joan way more than a few times and it didn't seem like other duelists had such a plan. It is funny how certain characters have their own strategies that can be easily countered, though. Using Kaiba as an example: he would be this ultra scary boss, utilizing Cyber-Stein to pay 5000 LP to bring out Blue Eyes Ultimate turn 1, towering over any conventional monsters and jumping further in tempo than the other characters do. That said this is such a hilariously easy strategy to read and counter, his only backrow is usually a 'Negate Attack' or 'Mirror Force' which isn't that scary as this allows you to either Snatch Steal, Change of Heart (even funnier than SS since Kaiba pays the 5000 for BEUD but the difference in you stealing and attacking with BEUD against the leftover Cyber Stein kills him), Trap Hole, Dark Hole, Copycat, Raigeki, Man-Eater Bug, etc. the threat away. The amount of removal that just deflates this strategy is hilarious. Genuinely, Joey is a much harder opponent in this regard since he often carries a wider arrange of spells and traps.
To try and differentiate from the prior Eternal Duelist Soul strategy, I tried to think of a different goal from the hand control I utilized then. Unfortunately there's not as many great options at disposal as 'Good Stuff' medley. GOAT format hasn't fully matured and there's a lot of strategies that only come into play a few packs later. Labyrinth of Nightmare contains most notably the mask spell/traps, and the 'Destiny Board' cards. The former being a series of equip spells and traps that contain a variety of buffs, debuffs, battle tricks or control options, while the latter is an alt win conditions that procs once the player plays all 5 destiny board cards in the backrow and spells 'F-I-N-A-L' (or D-E-A-T-H in jp). This pack also contains the 'Revival Jam' cards that was most notable in the anime for Yugi's victory against a seemingly impenetrable defense (Sadly Lava Golem isn't out until later). Unfortunately none of these strategies are really that notable outside of the anime. In reality the best Labyrinth of Nightmare cards are actually pretty underrated, or otherwise didn't become staples until much later. Cards really begin to see a shift toward utilizing the graveyard as a source of power and the banish pile as the true final destination for cards. Monsters like Bazoo the Soul Eater and Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer boast a strong 1800 atk but really benefit having abilities that banishes your cards for a buff or sends opponents GY cards to the banish pile, respectively. The pack also contains Gemini Elf but she's been in games since Dark Duel Stories which is really fucking with my perception of how these cards are released, only compounded by me not realizing Ring of Destruction also wasn't released until a few packs later in the TCG. Torrential Tribute being a board wipe upon summon, Magic Cylinder being a redirect of battle damage, and the large equip totals you can reach with Mage Power or United We Stand (see Maha Vailo), are pretty notable releases in the pack. Along with these are other infamous such as: Gilasaurus which would eventually help bolster the 'Magical Scientist FTK', Amazoness Archer which can do burn damage multiple times a turn for tributing 2 monsters (only banned in OCG), Jowgen the Spiritualist, which became a standard in Spellbook decks and helped get 'Last Turn' banned, and Card of Safe Return, which allows a draw if you Special Summon from grave (not once per turn??? of course its banned). Above all else though this game would have been a must buy if you were a duelist, as the game came bundled in with cards- but not just any cards. Valkyrion is a neat boss monster for the magnet warriors but nothing too special, Sinister Serpent is deceptively powerful as 'discard' fodder as it returns from the GY to the hand each turn, and Harpie Feather Duster is a must-have, destroying all spell and traps on the opponents side, a staple that continues to see play (or at least side deck rep) today. Overall the card additions to SDD are pretty solid, but much of the standout cards take a while to grab or aren't the most explosive. Still, Labyrinth of Nightmare and this game do mark a pivotal shift in the metagame and way cards function.
The main issue is just that I look into the typical decks by the end of GOAT format, and much is still missing by this point in YGO, we still haven't gotten to the Gravekeepers, the Chaos cards, PAC-MAN, pure Hand control, Umi beatdown, Zombies, Monarchs and other finalized decks in GOAT format by the end of 2005. I guess you can do Clown Control, Last Warrior lock-out, and some other neat decks but much of the deck building still falls on very proto-thematic philosophies where the best deck is still a 'Beatdown' deck but maybe with a specific flavor of a given attribute. Each subsequent pack still gives the same amount of 'good' cards from this point on (mostly, kinda) so this isn't the fault of the game or the distribution of cards but I do plan as later games (given that all other variables remain positive) begin to have larger times gaps between releases and more booster sets fill out the pool, will just get better as the access to more variety will incentivize more kinds of playstyles and in a sense, replayability. Sidenote, why is mystic tomato so hard to find? There's a lot of cards like these that seemed pretty essential during the meta around this time and Tomato has yet to really show up in my playthroughs despite stuff like Sangan and Witch being pretty easy to snag in this game. All three of these are some of the strongest 'recruiters' (ie cards that pull another card from the deck according to a given criteria, such as any monster with less than 1500 atk/def or have 'dark' attribute). It's just fairly odd to not see it at all in the game during my playthrough not in any pack early on nor in any opponent's deck (afaik), but Shining Justice (the light attr. equivalent) and Giant Rat (the earth attr.) are pretty par for the course. The card is only available once you reach 10000 duelist points, which isn't difficult but was about where I put the game down. It does get me thinking about how the strategy and thought about the meta has evolved over time; was Mystic Tomato considered superior over several other cards in the meta, even other staples? I do know about certain battling philosophies such as Solemn Judgment not being as universally played due to a mindset where the 'pay half your current LP' condition was deemed too risky. Maybe the self-replacing 'pull from deck to field upon destruction' was considered more lucrative than Witch/Sangan's more broader but perhaps slower 'pull from deck to hand' effect? Very interesting/perplexing to think about, especially since the latter cards were more limited on the banlist at the time anyway. Also funny to think about how many of the much harder and grindier packs to get contain cards that aren't really all that good, just kinda fan-servicey or subpar. At the end of the day at least, most cards are available anyway through the password system, but I do try to avoid that myself. By the end of the game much of my deck looked similar to how I left EDS, although I did try to swap in a few different flavors here and there to spice things up, like Toll/Chain Energy burn (terrible idea), Clown Control (very impractical when incomplete) and Maha Vailo. Maha Vailo is a very funny card, gaining an additional 500 attack points for each equip spell attached to it, including stuff like Premature Burial. A Premature Burial Maha Vailo on top of Sword of Dark Seated and Axe of Despair turns a 1550 attack card into a 3050 and then its effect puts it to a whopping 4550, and this isn't the worst it can get. Sadly, Mage Power and United We Stand are fairly late in the game to get, otherwise I would have run as much as I could. I wish Ben Kei was available to create this juggernaut of an equip spell deck, but alas.
I also wish there was an actual calendar or any way to see how many weeks have passed. You can only tell what day it is but there's no other measurement of what time has passed, and certain packs and events go off a weekly timer as to when you first see them, like the KC Cup. Trying to find tournament locations and proc events such as the Card Hunter encounters can be kinda odd as I swear its only in one corner of the map and might take a week or two after the warning announcement to pop up. In this regard its kind of hard to get a feeling as to how you actually progress into the Pyramid Puzzle quest, especially when I encounter Lumis and Umbra twice but it didn't seem like a different encounter. Of course, this is in reference to a duo during the Battle City arc this is based off of and you can't really fight two duelists at the same time so it could have been a fight against Lumis and then Umbra but as two separate card hunter encounters? I'm wasn't sure at first, the dialogue and play-style didn't seem any different. It only took me a while to find out that certain townspeople will appear as Rare Hunters. I had figured these encounters were based off a random encounter, but you'd fight each member in a set order from Strings to L&U to Exodia guy to Arkana to Odion, etc. Nah, actually I found Arkana last despite Odion being like a second in command for Marik, very weird and I'm glad I realized that sooner than later because I didn't talk to any towns person between then and the start of the game.
The tournaments are kinda hard to find at times, but they're a neat function once you do find one on a Saturday. I still don't entirely think the side deck is necessary against any of these opponents but its still neat you can set one up just in case you have a specific but flawed strategy in mind and need potential backups in a best of 3 format. More interestingly I think are the 'Target' weeks where you're asked to seek out two specific duelists that are given to you and beat them for a special pack. This is a neat idea, and got me to understand the kind of patterns that each of these duelists follow. What does confuse me is that there's supposedly interruptions that can happen if two duelists are on the same district on the map? I tried seeing what I could get but each duelist was matched already to a certain combination. Tea was always in the same area as Bakura, Kaiba was usually alone or with Ishizu, Joey was usually alone, Yugi was usually alone, etc. I don't know if that's a case of me playing the game on
Overall it's slightly better than the Eternal Duelist Soul, but only by a slight degree. It's got more cards and a lot of the best cards are extremely easy to get once you know what packs have what, but because of this much of the later chunks of the game feel like a grind. Originally I was gonna place this about similarly to EDS but the lack of any major story kinda just frees you to do anything, at your own pace. Once I realized this, I figured this would actually be an excellent game to have had as a kid or on a long trip, definitely has that 'On a deserted island' feel. It's not as big a jump in card pool as I had hoped, but all things considered it's an improved game and better intro to the card game than Eternal Duelist Soul.
Not only is Theatrhythm a great rhythm game with great music, but it also does a great job of adapting the systems of Final Fantasy into a rhythm game while retaining the series identity.
Dancing Eyes
1996
the obvious summary is "qix but porn," but a little digging yields something more subtle: "qix but a tube." classic early-3D era mix-up on a tried-and-true formula, with a little more maze-chase flavor thrown in. you surgically dismember a woman's (often cylindrical) outerwear by slicing panels out of it on predefined paths while various animals chase you around, with the removal of all panels signaling the end of a level. the big downside of the tube aspect is that the camera can't actually show each of your pursuers because said tube is opaque + not often really a tube. it varies height with the physique of the woman or whatever she uses as a covering, obstructing the player's view at certain angles while causing unforeseen traps from the edges of the screen to frequently occur. enemy design and differentiation show promise but more often than not get overshadowed by their erratic behavior and the general monotony of the maze design. also, quick enemy spawn-ins in randomized locations turn into ways to inescapably pincer the player with no warning.
most interesting aspect to me is your "trail," which you use to section off panels in order to destroy them, doesn't need to to be connected head to tail. rather, any panel completely surrounded by a subset of the trail can be destroyed at any time simply by releasing the trail button; you never need to return to the point where you began dropping the trail. useful for trapping enemies that specifically follow said trail, since they can easily be baited by using the trail head as a red herring. didn't really get to explore this much though because the game loses its flavor about halfway through; this didn't need to be 15 levels long. by the time i reached the end (spoiler: you peel a pineapple from around the head of a chibi guy with a disproportionately sized and respectfully rendered head?) the joke was sorta over. might be worth a look if laura harris from D turns you on
most interesting aspect to me is your "trail," which you use to section off panels in order to destroy them, doesn't need to to be connected head to tail. rather, any panel completely surrounded by a subset of the trail can be destroyed at any time simply by releasing the trail button; you never need to return to the point where you began dropping the trail. useful for trapping enemies that specifically follow said trail, since they can easily be baited by using the trail head as a red herring. didn't really get to explore this much though because the game loses its flavor about halfway through; this didn't need to be 15 levels long. by the time i reached the end (spoiler: you peel a pineapple from around the head of a chibi guy with a disproportionately sized and respectfully rendered head?) the joke was sorta over. might be worth a look if laura harris from D turns you on
Super Mario Bros. 2
1988
To know that Super Mario Bros. 2 is an altered version of the Japanese game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic is knowledge. To understand that Super Mario Bros. 2 is the true successor to the original Super Mario Bros. is wisdom.
Sin and Punishment
2000
A friend of mine once declared, half-jokingly, that the entire purpose of games is to shoot progressively bigger and more interesting things. They've never played Sin & Punishment, but in their own way they've been playing Sin & Punishment all their life. Good game!
This review contains spoilers
Im very conflicted. In this same year I've played a bit to fill out my ideas and thoughts on the massive open world jrpg, ranging from spectacular to mind-numbing. I've gotten a massive knot in my brain over how I've wanted to tackle the open world of the games I come across, namely because I still have that completionist gene that wants to see everything a game will allow me to see; quests, locations, storylines, bosses, everything. The year started with Pokemon Legends Arceus which would intrigue me throughout the first few weeks until interest petered out as I got further in, Eldenring would take the concept of the Dark Souls romp through treacherous lands to a whole new level, and around the same time frame I started up Xenoblade 2. These games took way too much of my time this year I can't play games this large again, goddamn.
So then Xenoblade 3 comes out.
After the third entry of a subsection in a decades long franchise that is constantly pushing the boundary of jrpg bullshit and delusions, I can certainly say I just about love all these games equally! At least, this was almost the case.
Originally I had planned a section where I would delve into how my thoughts on 1 and 2 have led me to compare 3 in a similar light and that because of this I thought the game would fit nicely into a triad of pretty great experience with some hangs up across each of the three games. Make no mistake that I do still have some issues with the game, but a lot of those are beginning to weight less and less on my mind now that I've finished it properly (note: original draft of this was typed up the morning before I got around to beating the final boss and seeing the ending).
Firstly I'll tackle some of the hang ups. Not necessarily complaints but things I wished to note/compare to prior games. The biggest probably being the role of Moebius throughout the game. Honestly I do really enjoy what they represent as far as villians go, and they got some tough/engaging fights throughout, but man I do REALLY hate that they all look like that. I really wish they were more distinguishable because having your constant antagonists be letters with these weird ass geometric body suits is incredibly underwhelming. It feels like Organization 13 but if everyone wore a gimp mask. It did get some points in my head upon meeting Triton at least. The 'villains' of Xenoblade also generally are hit or miss, the mechonis of 1 are essentially Metal Face, Gold Face and Zanza who I think are alright, 2's got Torna which are fine but Malos/Jin steal the show, and 3's Mobius has a larger array that juggles between good and pretty mediocre members. It's not so much that they're 50/50, I just wish that the 50 that were middling were more distinguishable in my head. Similarly, the colonies are really hard to remember personally compared to the areas in XB2. Going back to the 'Colony' naming schemes of XB1 wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't 15 of them across Aeonia. Off the dome I can remember Lambda, Gamma, 40? 12? Actually just do away with the numerical names. I also do wish the chapter pacing was cut up a bit more, 7 chapters is much shorter than I thought was happening until I decided to look it up AT chapter 7. Originally thought it was gonna go up to 10 chapters and I was incredibly confused that we were talking end game nonsense while having the assumption 3 more chapters were on the way. Not really that much of an issue but I was so confused at how exactly the game was gonna go. It's arbitrary but I think stretching it to chapter 10 or doubling it to 14 with better save breaks would have been nice. There's a lot of moments where it seems like the chapter's about to end only for the game to continue onward.
Secondly, the stuff I'm actually a bit let down by. To be honest, I really wish the world was as interesting as Xenoblade 1 or 2. While Aionios has a lot of neat locales and call backs to the prior two worlds, yet I can't really say I was all that invested in where I was quite like XB1 or 2. There wasn't a moment like the Satorl Marsh or Urayan titan where I couldn't help but stick in one area and just feel like I wanted to explore the place and world surrounding it. Every area is kinda just alright, but props to the Erythia Sea for having a nutty Final Fantasy ass ship section where you can just island hop. Kinda wish it were easier to start combat while in the ocean segment as its annoying to going in and out of the ship to go up to mobs. I also do wish the material/mob management was a lot better, considering the gem system has been morphed into something a bit more palatable, as the items required to level up gems are pretty easy to miss imo. It's hard to really remember the best spots for X enemy or Y type of enemy unless it was distinct enough in a region like brogs in the Pentelas region, having a compendium would do this game a huge solid in trying to track down certain monster types. Finally, I do think some of the tutorial-ization is overkill, the start of the game has so much nonsense hand holding you into certain things that should be kinda obvious and/or explored already by the player like how to navigate your menus, what kind of equipment you've got, how shops work, etc. It's incredibly excessive and I can only imagine a response to the backlash on XB2's lack of clear tutorials and gameplay mechanics. I get trying to let anyone understand how the game works but I really dont think I need to be shown that I can buy items in Colonies like its a Pokemon game.
There's still a few things I'm a bit hung up on but that covers most of it. Above all this we have maybe one of the tightest combat systems in RPGs I've tried out. I absolutely love how the game just continues to pile on mechanic after mechanic, just constantly updating the way you think about combat. The classes have some duds but for every dud there's two that are either really good or at least fun to use. Classes like the Lone Exile, the Flash Fencer, Signifier and the Martial Artist are really fun to check out, and customizing movesets around these classes. On top of that we get systems like the interlinking, kaiju like ability where you wail on your opponent with your Ouroboros form. These are alright but once I got into the rhythm of when to cancel their attacks it felt super satisfying. Getting to cancel each of Noah's Ouroboros arts to fill out the last art and just chip several chunks off bosses health bars several times in one sitting is super satisfying. I do wish there was a better indicator to show that you were able to unlock a node in the skill tree though. The chain attack revamp is also one of this game's coolest features, having you plan out what order to send out certain party members to optimize the amount of damage and length of the chain attack, going through this pattern of Attack -> Healer -> Defender but then having to adapt once that cycle has a link missing but you still want to get the gauge above 150% for extra party member's to return. It's an incredibly intriguing system to tinker with and really satisfying once you get your damage multiplier high enough and then send your DPS guy in to shred HP like it was nothing. I think it's really misleading when your first squad of Noah, Lanz and Eunie have the less interesting of the two art recharging styles, as that is one of the more iffy parts of combat, and playing XB2 got me hooked on that style of attack cancelling to speed up charging arts.
I am a bit whelmed by the world overall but I am glad that the game is constantly unlocking ways for you to traverse the world, and you aren't constantly needing to switch in blades to keep these abilities around.
Above all I am really glad that we have a JRPG where straight up you just have every party member at the very start, you don't see those too often and it's really cool we get the chance to see everyone in action throughout the entire game. By the end of the game it doesn't feel like one character gets shafted too bad, even if some members might have stronger ties to the central plot than others. The hero quests and ascension quests help out a lot to build up both our party and the overall cast. I think these act extremely well parallel to the blade system from XB2, with maybe a lot less 'unique' designs but a better chance to see all of them play out (KOS-MOS be damned). I kinda wish I had more time to go back and do the ascension quests of some heroes and fill out the classes but I'll probably save that for when later updates drop. I do really like the entire party though, I had some that I thought were weak at the start but over time I grew to enjoy them all real well as they grew more and more into a group of friends. I am really glad how normal and likeable the narrative beats go, like the transition from 'uneasy sudden partnership' to 'group of comrades' to 'close friends' feels really natural and there's no narrative twist or quirk to try and reignite any distrust for some reason. Maybe its paranoia but in a lesser story that exists in a parallel timeline there'd probably be some contrivance where one of the members early on still doesn't trust the plan and tries to convince the other two from their respective nation to turn on the group or some bullshit. Like I get why it happens in 2 when Rex loses Pyra and there's this whole 'weh...what if I'm not good enough...' moment and it leads to some good bits but there was a part of me during that bit where I was just thinking "this feels REALLY cliche, I'd prefer if Rex got through his self-depreciation some other way". Nah, instead we get a story that just feels like it was intelligently handled where the characters acted fairly logical throughout (although Noah you really shoulda figured out the whole N bit like immediately).
The major conflict and what makes my opinion on this game feel very difficult to grasp comes post-credits. I enjoyed the ending a lot, probably my favorite ending chunk in the series (kinda wish the dungeon itself was neater but w/e) and I was kinda left feeling an odd sensation. Like even after 95% of the game I was just kinda coming at it from the perspective of a critic or by comparing from how the other two games felt, rather than letting XB3 breath as it's own game. When it was time to say goodbye that grip on my heart started to tighten, an all too familiar one I remember back when I first started to get into Persona. I wanted way more of these guys, and I really wish I could have spent the time I did taking the game all in or trying to immerse myself more properly. I had this tinge of regret going through the credits wishing I did go through the game a bit more properly- but I snuffed that quickly. Just as the game was about the dangers of wallowing in ones past mistakes, the what ifs and why didn'ts, and the importance of detaching yourself from those regrets, I too can't be harsh on myself for the way I went about playing this.
The best way I can put it is that when finishing XB1 back in 2018 it was like capping off a good book after weeks of just nonstop grind because I had nothing better to do during summer break of college. When I finished XB2 earlier this year, it was like detaching the weights after climbing several mountains -finally being freed from weeks of nonstop trial and tribulation- and reminiscing in my journey of understanding this enigmatic and arcane piece of work. When I finished XB3 a few hours ago it was like departing from a friend, one I didn't realize how close I was to until it was gone. But instead of wishing I had noticed sooner, I'm just looking forward to when I get to see that friend again, because there's certainly a lot more I haven't done yet and there's an entire expansion pass to still get back to at some point in the future. Once that all's out I'll be happy as ever to explore Aionios with Noah and the gang.
So then Xenoblade 3 comes out.
After the third entry of a subsection in a decades long franchise that is constantly pushing the boundary of jrpg bullshit and delusions, I can certainly say I just about love all these games equally! At least, this was almost the case.
Originally I had planned a section where I would delve into how my thoughts on 1 and 2 have led me to compare 3 in a similar light and that because of this I thought the game would fit nicely into a triad of pretty great experience with some hangs up across each of the three games. Make no mistake that I do still have some issues with the game, but a lot of those are beginning to weight less and less on my mind now that I've finished it properly (note: original draft of this was typed up the morning before I got around to beating the final boss and seeing the ending).
Firstly I'll tackle some of the hang ups. Not necessarily complaints but things I wished to note/compare to prior games. The biggest probably being the role of Moebius throughout the game. Honestly I do really enjoy what they represent as far as villians go, and they got some tough/engaging fights throughout, but man I do REALLY hate that they all look like that. I really wish they were more distinguishable because having your constant antagonists be letters with these weird ass geometric body suits is incredibly underwhelming. It feels like Organization 13 but if everyone wore a gimp mask. It did get some points in my head upon meeting Triton at least. The 'villains' of Xenoblade also generally are hit or miss, the mechonis of 1 are essentially Metal Face, Gold Face and Zanza who I think are alright, 2's got Torna which are fine but Malos/Jin steal the show, and 3's Mobius has a larger array that juggles between good and pretty mediocre members. It's not so much that they're 50/50, I just wish that the 50 that were middling were more distinguishable in my head. Similarly, the colonies are really hard to remember personally compared to the areas in XB2. Going back to the 'Colony' naming schemes of XB1 wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't 15 of them across Aeonia. Off the dome I can remember Lambda, Gamma, 40? 12? Actually just do away with the numerical names. I also do wish the chapter pacing was cut up a bit more, 7 chapters is much shorter than I thought was happening until I decided to look it up AT chapter 7. Originally thought it was gonna go up to 10 chapters and I was incredibly confused that we were talking end game nonsense while having the assumption 3 more chapters were on the way. Not really that much of an issue but I was so confused at how exactly the game was gonna go. It's arbitrary but I think stretching it to chapter 10 or doubling it to 14 with better save breaks would have been nice. There's a lot of moments where it seems like the chapter's about to end only for the game to continue onward.
Secondly, the stuff I'm actually a bit let down by. To be honest, I really wish the world was as interesting as Xenoblade 1 or 2. While Aionios has a lot of neat locales and call backs to the prior two worlds, yet I can't really say I was all that invested in where I was quite like XB1 or 2. There wasn't a moment like the Satorl Marsh or Urayan titan where I couldn't help but stick in one area and just feel like I wanted to explore the place and world surrounding it. Every area is kinda just alright, but props to the Erythia Sea for having a nutty Final Fantasy ass ship section where you can just island hop. Kinda wish it were easier to start combat while in the ocean segment as its annoying to going in and out of the ship to go up to mobs. I also do wish the material/mob management was a lot better, considering the gem system has been morphed into something a bit more palatable, as the items required to level up gems are pretty easy to miss imo. It's hard to really remember the best spots for X enemy or Y type of enemy unless it was distinct enough in a region like brogs in the Pentelas region, having a compendium would do this game a huge solid in trying to track down certain monster types. Finally, I do think some of the tutorial-ization is overkill, the start of the game has so much nonsense hand holding you into certain things that should be kinda obvious and/or explored already by the player like how to navigate your menus, what kind of equipment you've got, how shops work, etc. It's incredibly excessive and I can only imagine a response to the backlash on XB2's lack of clear tutorials and gameplay mechanics. I get trying to let anyone understand how the game works but I really dont think I need to be shown that I can buy items in Colonies like its a Pokemon game.
There's still a few things I'm a bit hung up on but that covers most of it. Above all this we have maybe one of the tightest combat systems in RPGs I've tried out. I absolutely love how the game just continues to pile on mechanic after mechanic, just constantly updating the way you think about combat. The classes have some duds but for every dud there's two that are either really good or at least fun to use. Classes like the Lone Exile, the Flash Fencer, Signifier and the Martial Artist are really fun to check out, and customizing movesets around these classes. On top of that we get systems like the interlinking, kaiju like ability where you wail on your opponent with your Ouroboros form. These are alright but once I got into the rhythm of when to cancel their attacks it felt super satisfying. Getting to cancel each of Noah's Ouroboros arts to fill out the last art and just chip several chunks off bosses health bars several times in one sitting is super satisfying. I do wish there was a better indicator to show that you were able to unlock a node in the skill tree though. The chain attack revamp is also one of this game's coolest features, having you plan out what order to send out certain party members to optimize the amount of damage and length of the chain attack, going through this pattern of Attack -> Healer -> Defender but then having to adapt once that cycle has a link missing but you still want to get the gauge above 150% for extra party member's to return. It's an incredibly intriguing system to tinker with and really satisfying once you get your damage multiplier high enough and then send your DPS guy in to shred HP like it was nothing. I think it's really misleading when your first squad of Noah, Lanz and Eunie have the less interesting of the two art recharging styles, as that is one of the more iffy parts of combat, and playing XB2 got me hooked on that style of attack cancelling to speed up charging arts.
I am a bit whelmed by the world overall but I am glad that the game is constantly unlocking ways for you to traverse the world, and you aren't constantly needing to switch in blades to keep these abilities around.
Above all I am really glad that we have a JRPG where straight up you just have every party member at the very start, you don't see those too often and it's really cool we get the chance to see everyone in action throughout the entire game. By the end of the game it doesn't feel like one character gets shafted too bad, even if some members might have stronger ties to the central plot than others. The hero quests and ascension quests help out a lot to build up both our party and the overall cast. I think these act extremely well parallel to the blade system from XB2, with maybe a lot less 'unique' designs but a better chance to see all of them play out (KOS-MOS be damned). I kinda wish I had more time to go back and do the ascension quests of some heroes and fill out the classes but I'll probably save that for when later updates drop. I do really like the entire party though, I had some that I thought were weak at the start but over time I grew to enjoy them all real well as they grew more and more into a group of friends. I am really glad how normal and likeable the narrative beats go, like the transition from 'uneasy sudden partnership' to 'group of comrades' to 'close friends' feels really natural and there's no narrative twist or quirk to try and reignite any distrust for some reason. Maybe its paranoia but in a lesser story that exists in a parallel timeline there'd probably be some contrivance where one of the members early on still doesn't trust the plan and tries to convince the other two from their respective nation to turn on the group or some bullshit. Like I get why it happens in 2 when Rex loses Pyra and there's this whole 'weh...what if I'm not good enough...' moment and it leads to some good bits but there was a part of me during that bit where I was just thinking "this feels REALLY cliche, I'd prefer if Rex got through his self-depreciation some other way". Nah, instead we get a story that just feels like it was intelligently handled where the characters acted fairly logical throughout (although Noah you really shoulda figured out the whole N bit like immediately).
The major conflict and what makes my opinion on this game feel very difficult to grasp comes post-credits. I enjoyed the ending a lot, probably my favorite ending chunk in the series (kinda wish the dungeon itself was neater but w/e) and I was kinda left feeling an odd sensation. Like even after 95% of the game I was just kinda coming at it from the perspective of a critic or by comparing from how the other two games felt, rather than letting XB3 breath as it's own game. When it was time to say goodbye that grip on my heart started to tighten, an all too familiar one I remember back when I first started to get into Persona. I wanted way more of these guys, and I really wish I could have spent the time I did taking the game all in or trying to immerse myself more properly. I had this tinge of regret going through the credits wishing I did go through the game a bit more properly- but I snuffed that quickly. Just as the game was about the dangers of wallowing in ones past mistakes, the what ifs and why didn'ts, and the importance of detaching yourself from those regrets, I too can't be harsh on myself for the way I went about playing this.
The best way I can put it is that when finishing XB1 back in 2018 it was like capping off a good book after weeks of just nonstop grind because I had nothing better to do during summer break of college. When I finished XB2 earlier this year, it was like detaching the weights after climbing several mountains -finally being freed from weeks of nonstop trial and tribulation- and reminiscing in my journey of understanding this enigmatic and arcane piece of work. When I finished XB3 a few hours ago it was like departing from a friend, one I didn't realize how close I was to until it was gone. But instead of wishing I had noticed sooner, I'm just looking forward to when I get to see that friend again, because there's certainly a lot more I haven't done yet and there's an entire expansion pass to still get back to at some point in the future. Once that all's out I'll be happy as ever to explore Aionios with Noah and the gang.