Notch really revitalized the crafting genre with this game, made it fun to build shit and I remember as a teenager watching my friends make houses in Minecraft and elaborate tunnels underneath their house in search of gold and diamonds. Hours upon hours upon hours spent overnight listening to light ambient music. So beautiful.

Of course, survival mode adds a level of difficulty as you must preserve and protect against enemies that come at you as the night grows, and they get tougher as the days pass.

Of course, Microsoft buying it out meant that there is a team behind it now that ensured it would be multiplatform, no longer requiring Java to enjoy the game, etc. I was never the type to make scale models of towns, mansions, or possess the autism necessary to develop a calculator, much less a CPU, but to know it’s possible to make in this video game is just really cool.

After playing Infinite Wealth front-to-back, it was a bit jarring to play this game, but saying goodbye to the "bad guys" never felt so satisfying.

The Yakuza 6/Kiwami 2 combat system is back, with added tech gadgets and larger-scale battles. You've of course got the same familiar minigames, side stories, and RPG elements we've call come to know and love.

With Kiryu being a dead-man and all, you learn the means in which the Daidoji faction keep Kiryu in check. Of course, it's by threatening the people he loves the most. The uneasy alliance Hanawa and Kiryu form is probably still the strongest "new" bond established in the game. Everyone else (e.g: Akame, Tsuruno) quite transparently seem to manipulate him to further their own ends.

The game is rather short (8 hours), and was made begrudgingly longer by the mandatory sidequesting halfway through the story. Alas, the fact Kiryu can do all these good deeds and noble acts for over 20 years and can live undetected as Joryu really makes me think this was among the ligher salted entries in terms of character development and introspection. Again though, this is just the appetizer, and as a canonical spinoff, it gets a little more wiggle room than the mainline games to be lacking in this department.

The big bad Yakuza this time around are men of the hour - an old school yakuza who has a scarred chudface, and a licentious sexual deviant who competes with Epstein on the weirdo scale. Both proper, I guess, to drive home the need for the "death" of the Yakzua as an organization and as an ouroboros. It splices to right around the events of Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and leaves you on the footsteps of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth's story.

Even an OK Yakuza game is a damn good time, so I'm giving this one a 4.