Outer Wilds is one of those games that gets hyped up to the moon and back. People call it "life-changing" and "the best game ever" so naturally I had to see what the fuck was going on..
First off, the good stuff: The game is polished to a shine. Even though I'm not a huge fan of the lack of voice acting and the cartoony graphics, the game still manages to pull you in with its charm. The alien characters, though, felt a bit off to me in terms of art style.
Now, the bad part: I spent way too many hours just wandering around aimlessly, trying to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do. And let me tell you, I'm stubborn. I refused to look up any guides. So, there I was, re-reading map logs like a madman, trying to connect the dots.
Eventually, I did figure it out, and I have to say, the puzzles in this game are pretty fkin clever. Piecing everything together to uncover the grand puzzle was a satisfying challenge.
But then... the ending. Maybe it's just me, but after all that build-up, the finale felt kinda average. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was cool and all, but it didn't quite live up to the hype people were shilling..
Overall it's a great game with some flaws. It's a must if you're into puzzles and exploration.

ok lets see, this is one of those temtems yeah? cyber sleuth? …palworld? no guns in this one?

i was a bit optimistic when starting the game up, despite getting jumpscared by a botw stamina bar when hitting the run button. never do this, please. but the tone was ultimately set by the soothing vocal song signalling everything’s going to be alright. sure, i believe you, game i’ve just met for 10 minutes. on that note, there’s a gimmick here where vocals come in when you do the obligatory mega evolution/z shmove/dynawhatever mechanic. or limit break if i wasnt trying to pigeonhole this into pokemon so badly. other jrpgs learn from this please! im deducting points tho because the audio is clearly too high quality to be coming from a cassette player. da diegetics...

upon setting out, you realise you’re going to spend a lot of your time in a fairly humdrum open world, encountering wooden npcs, getting into double battles (colosseum/xd fans eat your heart out) where your monsters have like 8 moves each (half of them unusable while you watch your AP bar filling), being rewarded with like 5 different currencies stuffed into the same menu as your level-up moves. a type system where hits aren’t merely “super effective”, they cause shit like stats dropping, contact damage being taken, induced type changes, leech seed, you name it. and you get some bonus AP? did that sound overwhelming? should pokemon be overwhelming?

a looooot of thumb twiddling in a game where i had both difficulty sliders turned all the way up anyway. i think pokemon is smart in being dumb. you get 4 moves. they are always accessible (unless you have 0 pp. but then you just have to get it up) and predictable. you only get exp and money. i didn’t find the strategising in this game particularly rewarding or necessary, so a lot of the complexity just felt a headache to trawl through. your tms can only be sorted alphabetically, and you get so many of them that i just… stopped wanting to look there. yes my room is still messy.

idk. id probably forgive the excess here (it is an open world game) if i had a stronger reason to keep going. i found the writing somewhat stale, but the political bent funny. area music unmemorable but still vibey. quests sorta boring, but passable. the monsters are cute. i like them. i could finish this and have a decent time. but i probably wont! (it is an open world game)

oh also they added scald to this game. and made it 90 base power. im just saying.

So uh, I don't know what happened here. I've been playing through the yakuza series and even though I was so-so with Judgment I've had a good time with all of them so far. Kiryu is one of my favorite characters in all of gaming and while they certainly weren't without faults I thought all the other games were at the bare minimum pretty great. This ones not. In fact, its bordering on being a bad one. I imagine not many share the sentiment but to put it simply while playing this I was just straight up not having a good time.
The first issue is the plot. Its really really really (and I cant stress this enough: really) stupid. Now, the previous yakuza games have had their fair share of silly moments but Yakuza 4 goes past that. The moments arent dumb fun, they're just plain dumb. The same exact plot twist happens MULTIPLE times, and it was already barely believable the first time. Not to mention some incredibly baffling character decisions and poor writing. I am gonna refrain from going deeper into this to save my remaining braincells but the amount of time I stopped paying attention to the game to text my boyfriend about how stupid what just happened was, was astronomical (he's currently playing through it too, he's enjoying it more than I am at least!) Beyond the frequent stupidity was that the actual plot was just kinda boring? and uninteresting? Out of the five or so main antagonists, only one of them was actually interesting and they didnt even make it to the end. Out of three that are in the finale, one of them is about the most pointless character ever and nothing is done with him, while the other two are incredibly dull and forgettable. Then theres our new protagonists. And honestly? All of them are interesting. I wanna know more about them. But Yakuza 4 only gives you 4 chapters with each of them, which is absolutely not enough time to get attached to them or any of the side characters in their respective stories, so the big meetup in the finale while cool didnt really felt earned and the whole game I was just waiting for daddy Kiryu to show up. (it was glorious when he did) But as awful as the plot is told, I cant say I disliked all of it. There were a couple moments, particularly the end of Tanimura's section that I really liked a lot and at some point I had even considered giving the game as high as a 4/5 (before the disappointing finale) but.. if only the bad plot was the worst thing about the game. No no, that award goes to the gameplay.
Yakuza 4's final boss consists of said boss running around the arena shooting you while you 10 armored goons, some with knives, swarm you, stun lock and knock you down constantly. He respawns these endlessly until you are able to defeat him first. This is what I believe to be the worst final boss fight I've ever partaken in. Bloodborne while blindfolded would be a less infuriating experience. Now Yakuza 4 isnt the hardest game, as you have a large inventory you can easily stock up with healing items and essentially stall your way through the whole thing. But I would be lying to myself If I said I had a fun time with the combat. If the final boss was the only example of garbage game design, I could be pretty forgiving. But what if I told you: the entire game is like that. From bosses that spam evade to stunlock you from behind and then repeat the same combo over and over again knocking you down (this is literally every boss) to swarms of enemies that just spam grapple you and, because of course, one of the sections ends with an hour long fight full of bullshit grapple enemies and shotguns that you do indeed to have to restart in its entirely if you die. This section happens right after I began getting invested in the story. As you can imagine, after finally getting through it I wanted nothing more than for it to be over
Now, there are some redeeming qualities to the game I haven't mentioned. Obviously its not the worst thing ever as a 2.5 isnt exactly the worst score. The music is fantastic and the music reminded me of Danganronpa(non-derogatory) and this is the first of the series to my knowledge that actually lets you skip the mini game tutorials, which after forced golfing in Y3 was very appreciated. There were also a handful of genuinely funny scenes. But these dont make up for the rest of the game and if anything only make my disappointment in it greater. After this review Im gonna try to remove Y4 in its entirety from my memory. I beat it on normal difficulty, and I wont ever be beating it again. I hope Yakuza 5 is better, I'm still looking forward to it.

Also I couldn't figure out where to add this in the review, but nearly every finale taking place at the millennium tower is really getting old. It doesnt really affect story quality but it is way overdone and makes it hard to take seriously

Trophy Completion - 21%
Time Played - 20 hours 53 minutes
Nancymeter - 49/100
Game Completion #24 of 2022
March Completion #3

Boy, do I love listening to the same three terrible soundtracks for hundreds of hours.

Do you enjoy aimless stories?
Do you enjoy pointless and over-the-top rape scenes in every second chapter?
Do you enjoy characters changing their mind after listening to redditor villains?
Do you enjoy endless exposition about irrelevant shit?
Do you enjoy your cast being full of flat characters?
Do you enjoy neverending lectures regarding swordsmanship in the middle of a fight?
Do you enjoy said fights being decided by random asspulls?
Do you enjoy every single chapter ending in the same identical manner?
Do you enjoy small screen resolution?
Do you enjoy reading from even smaller text box?
Do you enjoy your main characters falling in love with little girls at first sight?
Do you enjoy little schoogirls beating elite soldiers to death with bare hands?
Do you enjoy edgelords perpetually wallowing in self-hatred?
Do you enjoy forcefully thrown flashbacks that add virtually nothing?
Do you enjoy hyper generic and tone deaf vocal tracks?
Do you enjoy dilemma being resolved with cop-outs?
Do you enjoy random CGs and backgrounds that tell you nothing aside from people having figures?
Do you enjoy 'caricature villain of the chapter' plot structure?
Do you enjoy every single sorry excuse of an antagonist dying immediately after they do something minor?
Do you enjoy stories about heroism where there is not a single character representing the population?
Do you enjoy adult trying to act like an animal by writing a poem while fucking a schoolgirl?
Do you enjoy juxtaposition being presented as some deep argument?
Do you enjoy themes set-up in initial chapters never being brought up ever again?
Do you enjoy non-main characters looking and being bland?
Do you enjoy 'I am not like other girls' route system?
Do you enjoy choice system that does opposite of what is generally done and considers itself as subversion?
Do you enjoy said 'subversion' (of harem tropes, allegedly by some readers) having literally zero cohesion and correlation to this story's narrative?
Do you enjoy climax of your choices being off-screened and bearing zero consequences?
Do you enjoy a curse that kills closed ones attached to a person who does not know a single person and has no attachments whatsoever?
Do you enjoy plot randomly making up jobbers just for MC to bypass the curse?
Do you enjoy plot for some reason demanding from the cursed to kill people he just met instead of you know, people he has been chilling with at government?
Do you enjoy relatively grounded and self-serious stories snowballing into Dragon Ball?
Do you enjoy routes being heroine centric and abandoning literally everyone else?
Do you enjoy sprites that do not ever move?
Do you enjoy lack of dynamics and dialogue not having a semblance of interesting or/and likable conversations and banter?
Do you enjoy 3D toy transformations?
Do you enjoy repetitive and flashy closed-up special effects?

Then this product is for YOU!
(Special cheers to people who enjoy it for being funny rather than considering it as something 2deep4u and well-written, though)