Wish I liked this more. There's good humour (which was the main draw for me) but it's really spread out and usually exclusive to pre-boss cutscenes, which are an hour+ apart.
The gameplay is split between like 1/3 actual stages and 2/3 random jobs between stages. The levels can be fun but the gameplay is pretty simple and never really gets more complicated. Maybe playing with a wiimote instead of a dualshock would make it better but I don't see it being that strong an improvement. The luchador moves you get at the end of levels are really really samey and probably exclusively used against the boss you're about to fight, so they didn't add anything for me. For at least the first half or so, the gameplay was at least passable and fine in my eyes. It just wore thin with how shallow it is.
A much worse problem is the difficulty. I did play on the harder mode but I really think that just makes some parts of the game horseshit. The Rank 7 stage took me a lot of tries with the stupid fucking gun dudes with bags on their heads. I ended up trying to bait out individual enemies to slowly pick them off, which I don't think even worked and was unfun as hell. The bosses can be as bad as this, where they do the dumbass thing Yakuza does of creating difficulty by cutting all your combos short really unsatisfyingly by randomly gaining the ability to block midway through.
The rest of the game is grinding up money to pay your way into the next ranked fight. You get a random new part-time job, which is mildly passable for 3 minutes, and then you unlock the new assassination missions, which are where the bulk of the money is. This was alright with me til the latter half of the game where you have to just replay bullshit over and over. The efficiency of the second pizza butt mission you get after rank 8 isn't beaten by any mission you unlock til maybe rank 2. And no I'm not gonna be less annoyed because I chose to grind up for the late game outfits. There wasn't any other aesthetically acceptable way to take on the final boss.
To end the complaints, I'd like to mention how ass this port is. It's perfectly playable and runs fine but I got like 5-7 straight-up crashes, one of which being at the very end of a level.
The concept of this game is one that really makes me wish I liked the rest more. There are a lot of good jokes in there but they mainly hit you at the start and drip out too far apart later, and the aspects of the gameplay either start passable and get uninteresting or are just straight up shitty. I don't feel I dislike this as much as I sound, and I did finish the thing after all. I'm just underwhelmed.
The gameplay is split between like 1/3 actual stages and 2/3 random jobs between stages. The levels can be fun but the gameplay is pretty simple and never really gets more complicated. Maybe playing with a wiimote instead of a dualshock would make it better but I don't see it being that strong an improvement. The luchador moves you get at the end of levels are really really samey and probably exclusively used against the boss you're about to fight, so they didn't add anything for me. For at least the first half or so, the gameplay was at least passable and fine in my eyes. It just wore thin with how shallow it is.
A much worse problem is the difficulty. I did play on the harder mode but I really think that just makes some parts of the game horseshit. The Rank 7 stage took me a lot of tries with the stupid fucking gun dudes with bags on their heads. I ended up trying to bait out individual enemies to slowly pick them off, which I don't think even worked and was unfun as hell. The bosses can be as bad as this, where they do the dumbass thing Yakuza does of creating difficulty by cutting all your combos short really unsatisfyingly by randomly gaining the ability to block midway through.
The rest of the game is grinding up money to pay your way into the next ranked fight. You get a random new part-time job, which is mildly passable for 3 minutes, and then you unlock the new assassination missions, which are where the bulk of the money is. This was alright with me til the latter half of the game where you have to just replay bullshit over and over. The efficiency of the second pizza butt mission you get after rank 8 isn't beaten by any mission you unlock til maybe rank 2. And no I'm not gonna be less annoyed because I chose to grind up for the late game outfits. There wasn't any other aesthetically acceptable way to take on the final boss.
To end the complaints, I'd like to mention how ass this port is. It's perfectly playable and runs fine but I got like 5-7 straight-up crashes, one of which being at the very end of a level.
The concept of this game is one that really makes me wish I liked the rest more. There are a lot of good jokes in there but they mainly hit you at the start and drip out too far apart later, and the aspects of the gameplay either start passable and get uninteresting or are just straight up shitty. I don't feel I dislike this as much as I sound, and I did finish the thing after all. I'm just underwhelmed.