Ichiban Kasuga is simply one of the best protagonists a video game has ever had, i love him so much. the previous game's narrative was one of my favourites in any game - so when it was revealed that Ichi would be sharing protagonist duty with Kiryu, i was upset. i know this is sacrilegious to Yakuza fans but there are like ten other games where you play as Kiryu and one of them released three (3!!!) months before this one! i've had enough of his ass and wanted more of Ichiban. unfortunately, my fears that the story would more-or-less throw Ichiban to the sidelines so that Kiryu can have one last ride (again(again)) were proven correct.

Kiryu's story is the beating heart of this game. he has a beautiful narrative about coming to terms with is own mortality, fragile after years being the underworld legend of coolguy action and masculinity (positive), learning to rely on others and forgive himself so that he can fight on. Infinite Wealth tells you loudly, just like with Ichiban's impassioned tear-jerking ending monologue in LaD, that you have to live. i haven't played the entire Yakuza series, but Kiryu's sections with Date were really strong. old, lonely men learning to finally reach out and find a reason to keep going. i can't imagine how rewarding his 'bucket list' stuff must be to longtime fans, it had me tearing up over the pocket fighter guy. its villains are pretty weak, but its side-characters and themes are spectacular.

Ichiban's story, sadly, just isn't as fleshed-out or strong as Kiryu's. which sucks! it starts off strong but loses its focus as it goes. the early shit with police brutality, Hawaii's colonial issues, and poverty really felt like it was going somewhere special. when the true villain is revealed, a religious cult lead by a creepy white dude with violent fanatics shipped into every upper echelon of society's hierarchy (notably including the police) it really seems like Infinite Wealth is about to say something. but once that villain is revealed, and after the Vtuber twist, it feels like its story runs out of ideas. especially considering how Kiryu's side has a villain with far more personal relevance to Kasuga (which barely even registers in the plot), it's odd how much this side flatlines. i love its main characters, Tomizawa and Yamai are great new additions, and i love the side-stories. i love hearing these characters just chill out, i love them!!! its setting is wonderful, even if Hawaii more-or-less feels like Japan 2. after a certain point though, it didn't feel like taking place in Hawaii really had much relevance at all.

there's gameplay with that story, too. they fixed every issue with 7's combat and made one of the most fun RPGs there is! i love how it plays, though i think some of its balancing is questionable. cash goes from something so hard to get it's brutal (in a great way) to comically overabundant past the midpoint of the game, especially post-Dondoko Island. i really enjoyed Dondoko Island though! genuinely more fun than New Horizons was. there's so much to do in this that it's almost nauseating at points. honestly, it might've made some complaints i have with the story's pacing exist in the first place - i spent five days just on Sujimon and Dondoko. i just love that these are big RPGs now though. there's so much goofy, creative shit it does.

the ending was extremely heartwarming, i'm very excited to play as Ichiban and never as Kiryu again. leave him alone!!!!!!! let me play go on more Kasugadventures please!!!!!!!!

one of my favourite aspects of the N64/PS1 era was just how hangout-able so many of its platformers were. i just want to inhabit a world like Peach's castle, the hubs of Spyro 2, and most of Banjo-Kazooie. that shit all had such delicious atmosphere, music, neat lil secrets, and great movesets to explore with. Cavern of Dreams fully embodies all of those great elements of its forefathers but fully cranks up the mysterious, slightly-spooky feelings playing games could give off up late at night on a CRT.

Cavern of Dream's tone and visuals are simply too good, its colour palette makes me want to cry. it's pulling from lots of N64-era games (particularly Rare's) but its main inspiration seems to be "the astral observatory in Majora's Mask", which might just be the single most beautiful location ever put in any game so i heavily fuck with the dev's vision. nearly every new location made me go "woah!!! pretty!!!" out-loud and take a couple screenshots. that made me like the game by default, but i was overjoyed to find out just how smooth of an experience 100%'ing Cavern of Dreams was. its areas are really compact, full of sharply-designed puzzles and challenges that never go too far in frustrating the player or boring them.

Cavern of Dreams isn't very long, getting 100% took me around 6 hours and very little of that time was spent aimless or upset. aside from maybe two stand-out sections that annoyed me (the final boss, the whirlpools in an end section that send you back a minute of walking) and a few qualms with the player's movement (it's really easy to bounce off a wall when trying to ground-pound) this was an absolute joy. i want to put this game in my mouth.

i've never played another game published by Private Division - but my wife LOVED Kerbal Space Program, so i was a little afraid when i saw their name on this after KSP 2's botched early-access release. and i should have been! this game is really neat, but it just wasn't ready. going fast while platforming in Penny's Big Breakaway (atm) is to get stuck on a slope, or get stuck in a platform, or just completely overshoot it and fall into the abyss. it's frustrating!!!!!! even without its bugs, i think its control system will filter out a lot of players. it's not that immediately satisfying, it requires a certain level of understanding to be rewarding and i love games like that! i love when they make me learn things! i just don't always know if performing well in-game is even that rewarding. maybe i just have bad depth-perception? regardless, i hope Evening Star make more 3D platformers cuz this is a really cool one. insanely gorgeous to the eyes and ears, but not as fulfilling to my soul. fully willing to accept that as a skill-issue tho.

i only really watch youtube videos about video games. Bubsy 3D is a game i've been hearing about since i was eight, serving as the arch-enemy of many a white boy with a camera and a zelda t-shirt. Bubsy 3D has, more than any other game on earth, been forced onto gamers by their evil clones while they plead to play 'anything but THAT game!!!', a game routinely branded as "THE WORST GAME EVER?!?" - which it could never actually be because it makes me feel things.

i love Bubsy 3D's goofy soundtrack, its oddly evocative minimalist landscapes, and i kinda love Bubsy himself but i'd never pretend it's fun to play. it's fun to think about, to imagine how hard it must've been to develop. everyone brings up how shit it looks in comparison to Mario 64, but you gotta remember the only "3D platformers" before its development began were Bug! (not an actual 3D platformer) and Jumping Flash! - neither of which had third-person 3D platforming, both of which had really exciting exclamation points. i just don't think Bubsy 3D really deserves the scorn late-2000s internet gave it. maybe a marginally better reputation, not a good one.

i feel like my fellow gay bitches online are all lying to me on this one. big issue: i think its story kind of sucks. Signalis is more interested in ominous poetry, mysteriously censored documents, and spooooky german words than actually setting an atmosphere or crafting a world. the protagonists' romance is supposed to be the beating heart but it read as very bland and hollow, you never get to know much about them and (SPOILERS) they all used to read Word Up magazine anyways. i'm not interested in filling in its blanks because none of it made me feel emotions. this would be fine if it was better to play but Signalis is too easy - its toughest element is its limited inventory, combat is largely avoidable and not too challenging if engaged with. there's not enough friction here, your android girl is a great runner and a great shot. the art direction is very nice, the models and lighting look gorgeous, but there's not enough unique assets in the game. it felt like i was mostly in the same few places fighting the same few enemies the entire time. i do think it succeeds at having some pretty inventive puzzles and i do love the first-person segments, i wish there were more (non-narrarive) setpiece-oriented ones. Signalis had one last thing it could do to hook me, but it loses me here too - none of this game is fucked up! there's never any freaky shit going down, no psychosexual pervert nightmares or nasty stuff or even anything slightly disturbing. i like yuri, i crave that sicko shit!!! Signalis felt like a dystopian teen YA with a bit of sprinkle of Twilight Syndrome and sci-fi militarism, very tame for what was supposed to be a hellish pseudo-reality.

feel like i got catfished. the gameplay loop here entirely kills this for me - i was under the impression Pacific Drive was gonna be a linear(ish) journey to the heart of the Stalker Zone but it ends up being an almost roguelike experience centred around going out on missions from your garage hubworld. it's more of a loot-centric game than a driving one, one way less lonely and more game-y than i hoped. i'm not into crafting survival games at all but the concept really intrigued me, just not enough to not groan at its opening garage tutorial segment or not feel like it was getting tedious after two missions. not bad, if you're into these sorts of games you'll defo find something valuable here, just really let me down personally.

the jump button was the best part of Elden Ring, Another Crab's Treasure very clearly proves that soulslikes were meant to be 3D platformers all along - and that stamina bars are overrated. i enjoyed Aggro Crab's debut title Going Under a fair bit, it had a great sense of humour and perfectly committed to its corporate satire but ended up let down a bit by being a roguelike (with the inherently sloppy area/encounter design that follows) and having combat that needed a lil more extra to it. Another Crab's Treasure has the same bitter hatred for the structure of society and scavenge-heavy gameplay as Going Under but with way more depth in every aspect. i'm a sucker for exploring colourful, cute areas and collecting stuff. its got intricate levels, a healthy variety of enemies, a very appealing artstyle, a final boss who would own a tesla, and a really adorable crabtagonist. it has some issues with balancing (the tentacle adaptation is busted) and boss design depth but i liked it a lot!!! enough that i played about 20 hours of it in four days, it's really meaty for an indie of its size. felt very well-realized, extremely charming but a lot more sincere and sad than i expected. very clever with its allegories in how it uses Souls tropes. it was kinda like the crab version of Char's Counterattack, in a way.

no game this pretty should have to suffer from writing THIS bad. i don't like to be too hyperbolic, i love video games and i just wanna be chill about em, but Solar Ash has some of the most aggravating writing i've experienced in a game. the core appeal here, to me, is getting to effortlessly glide around gorgeous landscapes and soak in the atmosphere - but your protagonist NEVER shuts up!!!! you'll see a glowing red eye on a goop obstacle and she'll blurt out "that must be its weak point! i should attack it!". the game constantly patronizes the player with obnoxious hand-holding quips, the tone of which never really matches the world's. there's an area with hazardous green acid that causes a vignette and a warning indicator to appear on screen - obviously, that isn't obvious enough of an indicator of danger so she says "Even the water here is hazardous, because... of course it is."

Hyper Light Drifter managed to have an interesting world without any dialogue. it's strange to see how much of an emphasis this game places on story, with a fair amount of sidequest NPCs and text logs that no human being has ever read. a lot of its meat ends up being exposition and a stream of meaningless sci-fi proper nouns. the back end of its narrative has that YA-fiction blatant stating of themes in an attempt to be about 'something.' the final boss is the manifestation of the protagonists' self-hatred and guilt that gets defeated by reaching out to others, i couldn't help but groan.

part of me thinks this game's focus on story is more a reflection of how empty the rest of it is. a lot of its systems seem entirely superfluous - health points never matter (why can you even take damage?), the only thing you can spend currency on is on getting more health, you can collect more suits but they have a negligible effect on gameplay. there's a lot of time spent on boss fights but all of them play the exact same way - you home in on a bit, glide around hitting little needle things, and then home in on their eye. it's fun the first couple of times but gets repetitive. for a roughly 5-6 hour game, a lot of it feels like filler. it never stops looking gorgeous, it never stops being fun to skate around in its world (tho i disagree with how its momentum is so easy to lose & never really builds in a tactile sense and nothing you really DO with the movement is engaging, the world itself isn't particularly fun to explore), but i wish it was designed tighter. and that whoever wrote it is never allowed to communicate in any language ever again.

one of my most defining traits as a human being is my obsession with Undertale/Deltarune. i grew up loving EarthBound, had unregulated internet access WAY too young and would browse the starmen.net forums never knowing how to post (which was a good thing!), and the ways both Undertale and Deltarune have shaped my life can't be overstated. i don't know if there's any single artist whose work has impacted me like Toby Fox's. this is all to say that i went into Undertale Yellow excited, i had heard a lot of great things, but i felt a lil cautious to see if it really had that sauce.

and Undertale Yellow does not have the sauce.

i think one of the most interesting aspects of Toby's design is how tight the pacing in his games are, Chapter 2 of Deltarune in particular being absolutely perfect. the way it builds and escalates its bits, the constant forward yet fulfilling momentum, the delicate balance of exploration to scripted events, and the way (aside from the music robots) every character is introduced and explored are my favourite in any game. you never forget walking past a dumpster and having some weird little fucker pop out at you, you can't not laugh at Berdly and Queen - two of the funniest characters ever to be coded into Gamer's History.

it's impossible for me not to compare that to Undertale Yellow. Yellow's nearly decade-long time spent in the oven shows, with its first half feeling extremely sloppy. there's not much in terms of interesting characters, story hooks, level designs, or setpieces. it gets more exciting as it goes to more original places (ie not the ruins or Snowdin) but the pacing only improves towards the end. i really like the concepts at play with the Wild East but it's a SLOG. reminiscent of the wrestling part in Thousand Year Door where you just hang around doing a half a dozen lame fights/mini-games. it feels like you spend half of the game in that town. everyone talks too much. dialogue isn't as punchy as it should be, conversations and scripted sequences tend to drag on. there's not much humour in it either.

Undertale Yellow's characters and story never come together in a satisfying way. Asriel Dreemurr made me cry and feel funny when i was 13, but the way everything ties into him and leads up to that final confrontation in Undertale is one of the greatest emotional payoffs in any game. Clover is more of a character than Frisk, they're not a kid who simply wandered into the underground - they came here for Justice. to save the souls of those other kids who died! i think this isn't very good? it never feels like a goal of the game, it never has any relevance outside of the genocide route. Flowey's aware of it but he feels like an afterthought in this (unrelated but Asgore is esp OOC and it bothered me). the real central story of the game is Ceroba's backstory, it's just that she only starts to get built up in the game's last 40%. it's not as focused as it should be, much of its time is wasted on disparate characters and segments that never satisfyingly connect or resonate with the player.

one of the only areas that Yellow gets close to Undertale in is its combat. there's some fun bullet patterns, great boss gimmicks, and the neutral/pacifist routes are pretty reasonably balanced (maybe a little too easy?). i gotta commend the unique content in its main three routes, especially the clay parts of Flowey boss fight in neutral (the parts where it looks like it came from newgrounds suck tho). genocide route also slightly makes me feel better about Martlet.

Martlet is the stand-in for Papyrus, a wannabe royal guard captain stationed outside Snowdin who's never met a human before. her first section is rough. Sans/Papyrus are possibly the most beloved characters in any indie game, it's easy to see why when you look at how well-paced their section is. they're introduced in exciting ways, have an escalating set of setpieces/mini-games, and have great designs. i can't say any of that for Martlet - who only makes an impact after her section is over, mostly in the genocide route for me. all you see of her before her fight are a couple scenes where she sets up a lame puzzle that, unlike Papyrus', are not jokes. it never builds to anything, instead it wastes time introducing the fuckass cuphead guys and the "made before Spamton but is a scummy salesman so i'm gonna think of Spamton" guy. Martlet is just Papyrus if he was a wholesome, boring furry woman without autism.

i am going to talk about Dalv now.

i don't think every character Toby cracks out is a total winner. Cap'n Cakes aren't very thrilling, Chapter 1's King is mostly there to be an evil guy you need to fight, and Alphys' dialogue in hotland can go on a bit too long (tho i do love her). they're all, at worst, a little boring but either don't have much of a major role or are merely slightly flawed. Dalv, Undertale Yellow's first major original character, does not have any redeeming factors. i straight up hate him. his design? looks like an Adventure Time OC a 16 yr old boy would self-ship with Marceline. his dialogue? boring as hell. the way he's supposed to be Yellow's Toriel stand-in? absolutely shameful. the way he's just a lame human-looking vampire and doesn't fit in? the way his only relevance to the rest of the game is that he used to hang out with little girls? the way he just has lightning powers for some reason? i had seen almost every major character in the game online in fan art at some point prior to playing EXCEPT for Dalv and i see why. despite being the game's first important new character he never shows up again or has any relevance to the game so he doesn't fuckin matter, he sucks ass bad and i hate him.

Ceroba's sorta neat, though. she's easily the strongest character in the game, her story plays off a few aspects of lore from Undertale that are fun to see explored - her having a daughter who ended up as one of the Amalgamates in the True Lab is great drama. she's also the most Toriel-like on the surface, having lost her husband and child through tragedy. she's very un-Toriel like in how she actually still loves her late husband, the ways in which she still clings to his memory and (undeserved) dignity in death is relatable. if my wife died, i'd be gassing her up constantly. her section is the stand-out portion of Yellow as well, the Steamworks have the best momentum and variety of gimmicks. i gotta ask tho - why is she japanese? how does she know what japanese culture is? monsters have been stuck underground for a millennia, she and her dead husband should not know what a kotatsu is. the game is defo too happy to reiterate her backstory but she's the sole character who has an actual motivation to fight you, which is nice. still feels horribly unearned when her boss fight theme starts incorporating aspects of Hopes and Dreams though. like you are NOT him.

that unearned feeling captures how i feel about it as a fan follow-up to Undertale. i don't think Yellow has enough ideas of its own to stand apart from Undertale, it spends 3/4 of its major areas retreading Undertale and most of its characters feel like lesser copies of Undertale's. mechanically, it harms itself by adhering too close to its inspiration. its design isn't ambitious or experimental enough. there's not many moments where i found myself surprised, feeling like i haven't already played this before. it doesn't have enough of its own identity and i found a lot of its original aspects to be really weak. it's like the Blue Shift of Undertale.

i think Undertale Yellow is okay. it's a remarkably professional feeling game. it seems like teenagers online really like it, tho it has been nearly three years since Chapter 2 dropped and UT/DR fans are starving. it's well-made but it's not cohesive or compelling, it feels more thrown together than particularly inspired. makes me appreciate Deltarune as a follow-up even more than i already did. if you're an Undertale fan and you haven't played thru some of its inspirations (ESPECIALLY MOON!!!!!! PLAY IT!!!!!!) i'd recommend you just do that over this. Undertale's writing is maybe its most important aspect and Yellow's writing simply isn't very good, there's no glue holding it together.

plus i don't remember any of its music and there was a really bad fnaf at freddy reference