Polaroid's Mega Rush to the 2023 End!! Game 5
Finished: December 24th

I don't really hold much interest in Touhou, nor had I for most of my life, although I've certainly known about it for most of my life- since I first started getting into gaming really. Outside of playing Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, I haven't really dabbled in the property or read into the lore of Touhou proper...but I do know my Megaten.

What you have here is a best case scenario revival of classic Megami Tensei gameplay, while painting everything with the flair and mythos of the Touhou series. A combination I didn’t really expect yet blends surprisingly well once I started getting into the later sections of the game.

Generally when going back to older SMTs I appreciate them for establishing such strong, abrasive worlds- sending casts into wastelands of a familiar world, getting caught in dogmatic wars fought on loop for time indefinite and metaspace infinite. There’s not a lot of mythos as convoluted and cool as Megami Tensei in the gaming industry and I’m glad that it's persisted as long as it has (if overshadowed by a golden Morgana idol in ATLUS’ office building, but I'll take it).
The issue would just arise from how oddly paced or cryptic some of these games could get. Shin Megami Tensei difficulty remained prevalent throughout the series, however modern gaming design would help alleviate or spice up the monotony. The advent of the 'Press Turn' mechanic along with other unique combat mechanics helped to further distinguish SMT from other franchises with a new array of ways to exploit waves of demons. The older games, by comparison, just get to a point where the combat feels a bit too thin for my liking while dungeons get actively more complex by comparison (or in other cases way too simple if you just Divine Judgment everything).

Where classic SMT remains, a new take on the formula helps breathe some life into the idea, from Touhou of all things. Touhou: ADiA takes many of the mechanical ideas and elements found from the first Digital Devil Story to Strange Journey in 2009- and makes a game that well encompasses while actually avoiding some of the pitfalls I feel these titles all too often dig themselves into.

The general gameplay style reflects the usual first-person dungeon crawling of the older Megami Tensei games, with sparse bases surrounding a dungeon rife with enemies, treasures, NPCs and other opportunities. Your equipment and stats are a mix of several games throughout the series- you don't have to buy individual types of bullets separate from the guns you wield although armor will often come with their own unique properties outside of boosting defense/attack. You generally have less armor than the usual SMT title but there's enough distinguishing from certain armors that you might prefer the cat ears that give a giant AGL boost to something that might have more DEF, but lack that agility boost. Your main character, Sumireko gains abilities and resistances/weaknesses off your Sleepers (demons), however you have to sacrifice them in order to gain them, so use these wisely (or just grind money for database splurging).

The use of Grimoires to toggle on 'risk/reward' type passives is a very cool addition to the mix, and can be well exploited if you know when to turn on certain Grimoires. These can range from 'expands your Map discovery radius but gains less SP throughout battle' to 'Damage against a Sleepers' weakness is further increased, but you otherwise deal less damage' they're a fun way to spice up your dungeon crawling. I would recommend against using the explorer grimoire, alongside a careful use for the ‘Map’ item. Both of these help clear up the map and fully exploring a map does get you a monetary reward, much like Strange Journey. These are fine in practice, especially with clearing out dungeons that are much more obnoxious, although part of the manual cleanup without these tools gains you additional battles with which to gain exp. Exp isn't everything in this game- especially if you're better than I am at party building but its always nice to have the level advantage at all times.

There's maybe a few hiccups in difficulty although I think this happens quite often in these kinda games. Where you have a strong party going through a dungeon or two but run into a snag where you wanna fuse your guys into stronger 'Sleepers' but something about the party composition just isnt giving you the 'Sleepers' you want. I never memorized or figured out a pattern(?) for how you should fuse demons and would often run into this problem of never having a new wave of demons to fuse into, usually just stuck with results that were the same as sleepers from the dungeon I just came in from, maybe one new sleeper? I’m not sure.

The music is mostly fine- there's some tracks early on that feel a bit grating but I was quite elated when- as soon as you hit the halfway point of the game- a new battle theme starts popping up. Always enjoyed whenever RPGs shake up the usual battle themes partway through- and here it happens twice! I would have also liked maybe some better indicators as to who everyone actually was when I was fusing. Somewhat embarrassing on my part, although I still have a hard time remembering most of the characters that weren't from EotSD. On the fusion screen all that's shown is their name and their placement in the party menu, but not levels or any showing of what the characters you’re using look like outside of going back to the status screen. Earlier SMTs also had this trouble before they grew into more iconic designs, with a lot of recolors, some generic looking designs and a lot smaller of a database to choose from- although I would have liked a better indicator as to who I was sending out to be fused not just off name/moveset alone.

Story wise its nothing too complex, and I don’t really know how to comment on any fanservice or continuity or anything like that as someone that is not privy to the Touhou mythos. What I will say is that it somewhat succeeded in piquing my interest for later on- I might actually look further into what Touhou gets into or the importance of certain characters. Why was (X) character the final boss? Why is there a lunar colony with a bunch of rabbits on it (why am I playing another game where this is the case)? What’s up with Torifune? The game itself doesn’t dive too deep into this madness and I think it's better for it, not clogging up the main premise for too many in-jokes or needing to explain everything to the main player if they’re someone like me. Certainly not everything is left in the dark and there’s plenty of nudges I think touhou fans will enjoy but its not too overindulgent which I appreciate, letting this game stand on its own.


Overall, Artificial Dream in Arcadia, while a callback for those longing for another kind of RPG like classic SMT, might ironically serve as a good starting point for those that might wanna try out the old style of Megami Tensei for themselves. It's certainly got its learning curve and a lot of the dungeons can feel somewhat arduous, but with the addition of some Quality of Life features mixed into its mechanics, it doesn't take too long to understand what this particular take is asking of you. I was pretty surprised with how much the game had to offer and how many new things it had to show me- it wasn't a parody like I had been expecting but a full on homage to SMT and hell, the JRPG genre. While not a series I generally have interest in, I'm glad that something I had only seen gifs of during its development turned out less as some kinda gag-crossover, and moreso as a fully realized title that improves upon what it homages.

So, what exactly is the "wonder" of the title? Put plainly, it's one unusual, psychedelic bonus area per stage, usually where you are empowered or altered in ways that no Mario title has ever tried before. Is that addition enough to justify the game, and set it apart from the NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. series? Sure! I was compelled to play every new stage for more than just completion - I was genuinely interested to see what was next. Can't always say that for these latter-day 2D Mario games. Is it challenging? No, absolutely not. Aside from the unbelievably cheap and pointless bonus levels you get for 100%ing the game, nothing here is going to give anyone any trouble, even if you're a completionist. But does that matter? Not for what the game is going for. It wants you to feel wonder, and that doesn't require any meaningful challenge, really.

So, it's fun! And it's gorgeous. And the platforming is as tight as ever - so it's good! But is absolutely anything in this game going to stick in your mind for even as little as a week after you beat it and put it on a shelf? Probably not.

Polaroid's Mega Rush to the 2023 End!! Game 2!!!

Its a bit unfair to review since it seems to be going through the works after a rough launch- im sure a lot of it will be ironed out a year or so later. However, even with as large of a bone as I wanna throw to Colossal Order, I really don't see any large reason to pick this up at the moment. Cities 1 is a pretty fun tool to mess around with and I've sunk 80 hours into it which im sure is baby numbers compared to others. It's got the simulator expansion pass mania that many others in the genre are privy too but it was pretty fun whenever a sale went around and i felt like filling an extra 5 bucks to round out my cart on one of these DLCs. I never had the full experience but what I had was enough to make cities of a satisfying size and quality to please the management part of my brain for 10s of hours.

Cities 2, while being in its 'vanilla' state integrates a lot of mechanics from the expansions of 1- some of which I hadnt seen yet, and while these were fun enough to toy around with still didn't make up for many of the issues that are plaguing it since launch and the main question haunting it: why would I play this over CS1 right now? I was hoping to get maybe 15-20 hours in before I logged it but after 11 hours on one city I was pretty content to just go ahead and write down my issues/notes and the overall 'loop' got stagnant.

-Game has several performance issues, my computer isnt beefy but there's no way in hell I should be needing to play this in mostly Low settings. Theres a lotta detail that'd be nice to appreicate but comes at a performance cost.
-Lot of vague 'warnings' and bizarre logic behind the simulation aspects. I still don't really understand the idea behind businesses 'not having enough customers'.
-Lotta buildings feel too misleading of their 'range'. I place a recycling center just outside the scope of my city but none of the vehicles seem to reach a building a few blocks away.
-Lotta buildings are WAY too big for their own good. I never really liked how much space certain specialized buildings took up. Maps are larger but the size disparity just never sat right with me. Skyscrapers can still be 4x4 pencil thin monoliths but for some reason a
-I dont know why they took out the detailed 'profit' and 'population' numbers on the UI
-I don't know why there's WAY less policies this time around, arguably one of my favorite mechanics from the last game
-No 'official' mod support at the moment, there's certainly some out there right now but nothing through the steam workshop
-Traffic is sorta improved but only until you hit a certain population, I ended at around 50,000k people in my city. Parking spaces help but aren't a panacea for your traffic woes.
-The changes made to road editing are also pretty nice although I didn't really notice some of these until much later in my city building.

I'm logging this right now pretty low as I think there just isn't enough at the moment to really compel anyone to try this out immediately. Definitely wait a while before picking this up as it's currently more expensive, and has way less support or functionality than the first cities skyline. Maybe I'll do another log in the future once things that been ironed out but I wanted to cap it here after a month of playing this on and off.

The whole coins thing in this game is interesting because you couldn't really pull it off with any other series and have it be this effective. For so long, Mario coins meant exactly one thing to us and were precious in a very specific way and doled out and withheld from us in a very specific way. This exploits those multiple decades of history in kind of a profound psychological trick, just showering you with them in a way that, upon starting the game, if you have any experience with the series at all let alone a long and deep connection, is going to give you an undeniable dopamine dump and shoot lightning through your most base lizard gaming brain like nothing else. And the excess extends to everything - NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII was already insanely generous with powerups (seriously, you were never more than a screen away from at least a Fire Flower in that shit) but they crank it up even further here, and for what I believe is the first time in the series, the lives counter goes up to three digits. And boy, you're gonna need that extra zero on there, because besides getting multiple hundreds of coins per level now and green mushrooms flying every which way, this game is just absurdly easy. Comparing it to its two immediate (extremely, extremely mechanically and structurally similar) predecessors, this feels like the same game on some kind of baby mode. Levels are flat out designed in a much more forgiving way, and the focus is squarely upon arranging fun and surprising ways to earn more and more coins rather than any kind of meaningful platforming challenge. I went through multiple worlds in a row - WORLDS, not levels - without losing a single life. Without even getting to small Mario status!

All of that together certainly does amount to a new vibe for the series. Levels feel less like gauntlets and more like playgrounds, or silly high score events. It's almost like some kind of joyful celebration of the series, a game-long bonus round, a veritable Mario heaven. But really, that high only lasts for a little bit. At some point the novelty wears off, and it isn't replaced with anything else, leaving you playing a very, very easy carbon copy of the first one where you wade through a neverending sea of coins, caring less and less every level about about how many you're getting. You plow through areas barely even noticing the themes behind the waves of gold, get to world bosses so simple you might think they're a first phase or just a joke or something, and then the series' second consecutive auto-scroller final boss, and then that's it. There's no way you're as pumped by the end of this thing as you were when it started.

Credit where it's due - this is more "New" in some respects than the other ones, but cashing in (har har) on our hardcoded expectations of video gaming's most ubiquitous item, while clever, isn't really a compelling basis for a whole game, let alone one that we have otherwise already played more challenging and better versions of.

Played this game back when it launched initially on PS4 and loved it, but over the years I've come to develop some retroactive opinions on it that soured it in my mind. A friend recently gifted me the game for PC however so I decided to take the time to re-assess how I feel about it and I came out of it pleasantly surprised. Here's a hodgepodge of my feelings towards the game split into positive, neutral, and negative sections.
+ Still arguably the best story RGG has ever written, everything's so well thought out and the mystery that's built and slowly unraveled is intensely interesting at all times. Nothing that is mentioned is forgotten and everything ties up really neatly by the end.
+ The final long battle and final boss segment is one of the best in the series, the stakes feel incredibly high for Yagami and the stormy setting fits the tone perfectly. I'm also a fan of the little story bit in the middle since it brings the plot back around from Yagami's start, but I know that part's a bit divisive.
+ The English voice cast is amazing and I struggle to think of any particularly bad line reads. The main characters have great chemistry and the VAs definitely seemed like they enjoyed themselves while recording. Yagami, Kaito, and Sugiura are standout performances but I also loved Ayabe and Saori too. All of the antagonists also do an incredible job at being conniving and downright evil at times.
+ The theme of the importance of friends and allies really shines, even with 7 directly following it and using a similar theme. Building up your reputation through both the story and side content really makes Kamurocho feel like it's important to Yagami and vice versa. Scenes like the one after the amour fight or the Golden Mouse side case are great examples of that.
+ The SP and money grind weren't nearly as bad as I remembered, if you're using growth extracts during the story you'll get tons of SP and only need to chug a dozen or so of the expensive hug bombs to top off the required SP.
+ The OST is insanely good from beginning to end, better than most games in the series. Standouts include Destination, Alpha, and It's Showtime, but I'd say every track is really good at worst.

= The combat isn't as frustrating as I remembered but your options are more limited than I remembered, there aren't a lot of heat actions and comboing is limited due to the lack of any useful juggle setups without the use of EX mode and style switching being incredibly slow. Wall grabs are also incredibly overpowered and it feels like you're meant to rely on them waaaaay too much.
= Extracts are cool but their use is still pretty limited, I wish there was more variety and the materials for making them were both less rare and less frustrating to get while also letting you hold more.
= The story pacing is very inconsistent, the first half of the game is glacial in pace (most notably chapters 1, 2, and 3) while the second half is in constant "go-mode", which is when it's at its best.

- Street fights are fucking incessant and never end and the extract to get rid of them is too costly to craft constantly. To add to that, the Keihin Gang system is awful and doesn't add to the game at all. It needed a toggle once you completed a certain side case so you aren't forced to engage in it.
- Damage output is incredibly inconsistent and unbalanced. Having no damage ups in the early game was fine but midgame I needed at least one for a few notable battles. This lead to a certain mid-late game boss getting decimated while the buildup to him was an actual challenge. Late game I decided to max out my damage for Amon and proceeded to crush the final boss. Most Dragon Engine games have this issue, having damage ups as an upgrade is never good.
- Side content sucks in general, the selection of minigames is incredibly weak, uninteresting, and unrewarding. The side cases don't fare much better, I'd argue 3/4 of the side cases are forgettable at best and downright boring at worst. There are a handful of standouts but I'd say they don't outweight the bad ones.
- Yagami's characterization in the side content is incredibly inconsistent. They sometimes just decide he's a perverted creep for no reason and act like it's a funny joke, then you play the story or do another activity and he's nothing like that. The girlfriend system also sucks and none of the women are written in an interesting way, plus it feels creepy for 39 year old Yagami to be dating a 19 year old.
- Some incredibly important skills are unlocked waaaaaay too late, with chapter 5 and 6 being the main point for a lot of them with the requirement of Quickstarter. I shouldn't need to go through almost half the game to be able to increase my Heat Gain or get Re-Guard, and I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be if I missed getting Double Quickstep since if you miss it in chapter 1, you can't get it until chapter 5.
- Tailing is downright miserable and used far too much. I don't think a single tailing mission is fun despite the fact you do more or less at least one per chapter in the story alone. The one you do in chapter 12 is a desperately miserable example of the mechanic at its worst, with the tailing mission lasting nearly ten whole minutes.
- The Amon fight is terrible due to inconsistency. His gimmicks are neat but he's either a brick wall that's a frustrating ordeal to even get to phase two or he decides to be incredibly docile and you can nuke his ass from orbit in seconds. The reward for beating him also isn't worth it since you can easily get ¥1,000,000 from a single good King Koro-Nyan in VR.
- Too many enemies have too many stun attacks. Some bosses can decide to stunlock you by repeating them over and over and you can't even block them with Re-Guard once you've been hit by the first one. Some of the Keihin Gang members and the final boss are notable examples of this.
- The completion process is downright terrible. KamuroGO formats store completion TERRIBLY and makes it annoying to keep track of every location. I desperately wish it was an alphabetized list instead of a grid, but it's at least separated between restaurant and minigames. City completion is even worse, with garbage requirements like "Defeat 1000 enemies with each style", "Play 300 minigames", "Destroy 1000 objects in battle", and "Use EX Actions 300 times". I love 100%ing this series but I genuinely did not enjoy 100%ing this game both times I've done it.

All-in-all, Judgment is really damn good. I think the game's a must play for the sake of the story alone and it stands as a really solid entry in the series, but the side content isn't something worth bothering with aside from a handful of decent side cases. Definitely a solid entry in the series but I'd struggle to find where I'd place it in order from best to worst.

Starting: Polaroid's Mega Rush to the 2023 End!! A game-filled December to Remember!!
...or something like that.

I had a larger review in mind however the draft I have of it isn't currently on me and to be honest, there's a lot of other stuff I wanna beat before the year end so I'm going micro for reviews this month.

Like A Dragon Gaiden is: Like A Dragon condensed into as meaty of a package as you can get, without much of the structure to keep it as held tightly as other games in the series. It begins strong enough, has a neat new cast of characters and has a strong enough finale- but what fills this gap is maybe less nutrient dense than the usual affair.

Exploring Sotenbori and having a mini package of the usual Yakuza affair is never gonna be a 'bad' time per se, but there's very little that hasn't been done before and a lot of that 'before' isnt really what I wanna do again. Pocket circuit? Fine. Cabarets? Fun! Mahjong..uhh Darts has a lot of content...?
...
Hey theres still Master System games and Sonic: The Fighters at least!

Actually though the worst part filling in this middle chunk of the game is going to the castle; I really didn't care about most of the content here and the Tournament gets incredibly grating. There's quite a bit I could complain about with this being the primary moneymaker + minigame filling the two ends of the package- the four kings boss fights mostly suck, I don't really know what the hell rumble mode is for, I don't think the 'power' numbers make much sense, I don't like that some allies can just hit and slow you down, etc.

I think this is a Yakuza with a lot of 'fighting' rather than a lot of 'action' and I don't really think that amounts to much in the long run. The agent style is neat but once you get into the late game you can just wash most of it by throwing your cigarette bombs everywhere. Yakuza style is. Also, it doesn't really help that I did plat the game- I had a lot of money to spend on attack upgrades and man does stuff just get washed if you beat Amon as early as chapter 4.

At the very least I will say it concludes on a much more fulfilling and intriguing note. Kiryu's character is finally facing the latter half of his life and its still tackling the stuff he's been wrestling with for most of it. The worlds changed a lot but he really hasn't, and all the baggage throughout his life has remained, compounded as a weight around his neck. He goes through the wringer throughout the game, and with as dispirited as he is, he figures its about time to just accepts what's finally come to him.
....
Now yakuza is still a wacky franchise now, right?
....
I dunno, I don't usually complain about this sort of thing but with how short of a game this is and some of the stuff Kiryu is given, its really hard to appreciate the mellow tones of the game with Kiryu jet-boosting his way into dynasty warrior hordes of goons. Maybe its just because of how condensed this whole package feels that the intervals between free time and story are shorter? Idk. After the final boss there's one final cutscene of Kiryu meditating at the palace and a part of me wondered briefly...what if there's was near zero combat? The gameplay doesn't even need to be interspersed with like, Judgment style investigation, it could honestly be just Kiryu plot/side story with some additional adventure elements, maybe with some of the agent gadgets to play around with. But I guess there's gotta be someone to clean up the yakuza-inundated streets of Sotenbori...

I really think this could have stood as a DLC for 7, or hell 8 even. It's short enough that I appreciate parts of it conciseness (and also the fact that you can plat it in one go), but bloated enough in other parts throughout the middle that I don't know if I really see myself wanting to play this again in the future. Yakuzas are long ass games yet there tends to be a lot of stuff I miss in each title, good for a second playthrough. Here the stuff I missed didn't feel worth checking out and by all means it seems like I've 'completed' it anyway, no need for a Premium Adventure.
Still, if you just glide through the main content you've got a pretty brief adventure, filled with a middling middle chunk topped by overall satisfying last chapter. I wouldn't say don't check this out, certainly not, but I would definitely note it's 'half-gamey' nature, and that the supplemental content for this RGG title isn't nearly as fulfilling as others in the series. Still, really excited for whats to come in Infinite Wealth.



Extra note:
I had a whole section in my initial draft talking about the rise in season pass/expansions/ DLCs as supplemental steps in certain franchises (comparing the content packs of early PC games, the rise of 'cosmetic' DLC like the obvious horse armor bit, into series like Xenoblade or Shovel Knight making what are practically whole ass new games but are considered 'just' expansions). I felt like this would have worked well in describing why this game feels so weird as a 40 dollar title rather than as DLC to something else. Also wanted to play through Kaito Files to compare and contrast with something like this in terms of 'fulfillment', I guess. I don't know, felt like I was getting to in the weeds and these games go on sale for like, Little Caesar prices after a while- the 40 dollar price tag is fine.
Extra (2) note:
This game DOES have Kaito so its at least GOOD

After SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 was essentially nothing more than a nightmare-difficulty levelpack, they took it upon themselves to REALLY go big on this one, and damn. An H-bomb explosion of creativity and ideas blown across an absolutely epic adventure that feels like it has about twenty times the content of its predecessors. To this day, it is dazzling in its scope, but it also suffers from a bit of bloat and hit-or-miss stuff, as anything this big (for the time) must. Not all the new core design choices are good (short stages but a trillion of them, no mid-level checkpoints, weird continuing), but plenty are (world map, inventory, bonus games), and the mechanics from 1 and 2 have been tuned juuuust a little bit to the point where playing is now a breeze, but it still feels so recognizably Mario that you barely notice a change.

It's an eternally top-tier platformer and introduced about 90% of the stuff that we now think of as Mario mainstays, so it's legendary no matter what ... but it also invented the thing where the mushrooms run away from you when they come out of the block, so it's not seeing a perfect score from me, fuck that.

A perfectly nice vertical slice of Yakuza whose storytelling is split between really good, powerful character stuff for Kiryu and then some clumsy tablesetting for the upcoming mainline game LIKE A DRAGON: INFINITE WEALTH.

Gameplay-wise, there's not quite enough compelling content for it to feel full-featured, but you don't exactly feel like you're getting short shrift either. There's 40 good hours of classic Yakuza stuff if you're looking to plat, and none of it is as bad as the lows of the series' other side content. If you wanted to main path it you could quite quickly, though.

As for the story, it starts out VERY strongly with Kiryu in a depressing, captive limbo existence and with some actual honest-to-God character growth for once. Seeing him bitter and bitingly apathetic about his situation is great given how long he's been around now without changing a whole lot. The game also does quite a good job at putting him at a distance from the rest of the RGG universe in lots of subtle ways (even though the meat of the game is quite traditional) reinforcing his frustrations and hopelessness. It feels like some kind of Yakuza version of LOGAN (Mangold, 2017), with Kiryu living on uselessly in the aftermath of his world, but maybe finding some small bit of purpose anyway. This first section of the game ends with (spoilers) an excellent, extremely dark sequence in which it looks like he's going to be unceremoniously executed in a dank basement by people who are supposed to be his allies for basically no reason and without anyone he cares about ever even knowing he was still alive. Of course you know it's not gonna happen because, come on, but even the idea of it is powerful.

Unfortunately, after this awesome stuff, things take a bit of a turn and becomes a much more traditional RGG plot and much less grounded, eventually tying into Kiryu's surprise guest appearances in LIKE A DRAGON. It's not as good, but so it goes - this is the identity of the series, and it certainly feels appropriate in that way. Can't blame 'em too much.

Eventually, however, that hamhanded world-building gets out of the way and it switches back into shockingly good mode for an ending that hit me so hard I think it may or may not be the first video game I've ever played that made me actually drop a tear. If you're invested at all in this series, you're gonna feel it.

So, overall, it's pretty good! I'm interested to see where they go with Kiryu from here. And this made me cautiously optimistic about INFINITE WEALTH. Some of the beats in this little half-game went to places that the series never quite touched before, so if they've got this in 'em I think they've justified Kiryu's continued presence. We'll see!

3 months 156 hours of struggle & frustrations

absolutely worth it.

That is this, and this is that. One of the lines of all time that bring the themes of this games character and plot together with just one line.

One of most unique combat systems ever combined with card building + card fights and on top of that dice rolls. The story is absolutely amazing following Lobotomy Corps Game which is a must to be able to play Ruina and enjoy it to its full. The music is one of the best I've heard and if you pay attention to it as well, its not just music for it to be just be music, its interconnected to the current battle, mood, whoever's characters battle theme it is and a lot of importance.

The story is one of my favorites of all time and I love it so dearly so much including all the characters in it. It's very difficult to describe my feelings for this game right now even after finishing it.
Roland & Angela are my whole heart.

Poems Of A Machine.

It feels like a bit of a sin given all the nerd stuff I'm into as well as the attendant affinity for/beginner's knowledge of/interest in the country's culture, but I have never been all that big on historical Japan stuff in media. Can't pin down why, but it never really appeals to me, and I usually go out of my way to sidestep it where possible. So, while I was never gonna NOT play this game (or KENZAN, which I'll get to at some point), I was expecting more of a dutiful observance than anything.

But, not so! This game rules and I loved it. Maybe I'd just played too many of the new-school RGGs in a row but damn if this didn't feel like some old time YAKUZA goodness. Some Y3-5 stuff, just tons of dumb crap to do and minigames and almost triple digit sidequests and that viiiibe. It really hit the spot for me.

And I ended up loving the story, despite my prejudices. The mystery plot was fun and the standalone nature of the game made the stakes astronomically higher than a mainline game, with the characters dropping like flies. It's easy fanservice, but seeing all the old (and some quite unexpected) faces pop up in this world (and then get taken out) was awesome.

The combat is 100% broken and the game is beyond easy with the right loadout but I just don't care about that stuff - really just not at all why I play these games. I can see why people who do would be rankled. But not my problem! Dumping on dudes with the equivalent of the Robocop gun while my invisible Shinsengumi trooper squad fry them with chain lightning and instaheal me is fun, lol.

I'm sure the original is better - just kinda how these things go - and I'll probably try it at some point (I do have it!) now that I would know what's going on. But on its own, this was a real good time for me. Love my Y games.