Whoever is making the DLCs for the Watch Dogs series needs to be given control of the main games. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect - it's still built on the frame of the base game, meaning the mission structure is mostly the same, it's still largely repetitive and slightly too easy. But the things this DLC does right are fascinating to me, because it feels like it's getting closer to the place Watch Dogs wanted to be when it all started - a focus on how ordinary citizens are affected by the actions of society's bigger players.

Aiden Pearce is still far from being a fun-loving guy, but watching him try to reckon with how his actions have affected his now-adult nephew Jackson is compelling, human drama. Jackson is the one who introduces Aiden to the questgivers in the DLC, and together they paint a much different picture of what "resistance" can look like. With a single protagonist (well, two) to focus this DLC around, the contrast between Aiden's gunslinging and the compassionate mutual aid focus of the questgivers is especially prominent.

The result here is a story that cares much more for its characters and the connections they make than anything in the base game, a work that is supposedly all about random people coming together. Every mission feels like a lesson for Aiden or Wrench about the value in connecting with other people and learning to help others in a way that doesnt involve murder. It's not flawless - the presence of the black market dealer is an especially strange inclusion - but I was surprised at the way in which this DLC seems genuinely compassionate at times in a way I didn't expect from a Ubisoft game. If they were willing to be a little more brave and decouple this story about the consequences violent vigilantism can have from the gameplay about how fun violent vigilantism can be, there's a possibility we could've had something special. That's asking for a lot, though, and I think asking Ubisoft for a game without combat that isn't explicitly made for kids may as well be a pipe dream.

I'm looking forward to finishing this (it's a lengthy one) and I'm hoping I don't have to come back and revise this due to the story shooting itself in the foot. I would love for this to be a send-off for Aiden (and for Wrench, who has concerned voicemails from Marcus about the fact that Wrench is putting himself at risk again). But I'm afraid that Ubisoft's status as a AAA developer will result in them clinging to these series mascots instead of giving them a graceful, dignified exit that they probably don't deserve.

Given that the character select screen in Melty Blood alone is full of late-arrival spoilers, I don’t make special effort to avoid spoilers in this review. No plot events have been mentioned, but if you’re especially spoiler-sensitive you may want to avoid this. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this page wondering if you should play this game, I do recommend it, with the caveat that there is a LOT of sexual violence in this game. It’s not a factor in every part of the story, but it’s still featured prominently in both the lore and the foreground of a few scenes.

It’s been six weeks since I finished the last route of Tsukihime at this point. I had originally contented myself with throwing down some lazy notes as I completed each route, slowly amounting to a large wall of text without many of the qualities of a real review. At this point, though, I’ve realized that I’ve not stopped thinking about this game for a month and a half - any piece of media that can do this deserves a better, more thought-out review.

The first thing I feel that I should mention is that it’s an incredibly... rough game, in a number of ways. I’ve already mentioned the sexual violence in my disclaimer at the beginning, but even with a strong stomach for this kind of thing there were a couple times where I found myself actually physically cringing at the text on my screen. The dialogue is sometimes laughably weak (god help you during the H-scenes) and the art itself can also be… strange. Nrvnqsr is an unsettling presence in the VN for his incredibly long neck long before he gets to directly participate in the story.

Despite all this, it manages to shine rather brightly through strong character writing and excellent usage of the enforced route order to execute layered reveals. It takes a lot of skill to keep new plot twists coming after 4 playthroughs and 25 hours without feeling contrived, but they do pull it off. In the early routes these tend to be delivered in the form of one of the heroines sitting down to have a thirty minute info-dump conversation with Shiki, but as the game progresses the new reveals flow better with the story and can even be rather subtle. I know it doesn't sound like I'm setting a terribly high bar here, but the late plot twists are rewarding to discover as they feel logical (by the standards of the universe) and have sufficient build-up.

Tsukihime’s characters are the real draw. There’s a reason half the reviewers here have profile photos from the game. While trope-y writing weighs some of them down pretty heavily (I’m sorry, but Akiha never progressed beyond “real doujin hours”), the saving grace here is that each character is given real agency within the story, even if they fail to make full use of it. This is why I found the Far Side routes to be much more enjoyable overall - with most of the background lore about this world out of the way and a focus on life within the Tohno mansion, there’s a lot more room to drive at what makes each of the players here special. Some of the supernatural stuff is still tiring, with SHIKI and Yumizuka becoming especially grating presences, but being able to ignore “True Ancestors” and “Dead Apostles” in favor of stories about festering resentment and familial guilt is a real blessing.

A lot of Tsukihime’s biggest flaws crop up whenever sex is involved. I maintain that it would benefit tremendously from not being an eroge, as working the H-scenes into each route has a tendency to weaken them overall. When the buildup is fine, there’s still no guarantee that the scene itself will be any good - between the music, the premise, the writing, and the fact that it was apparently deserving of a “Fridge Brilliance” entry on TV Tropes, the mere thought of the Ciel H-scene is enough to make me laugh every time. The game falls back on lust to show that Shiki “isn’t thinking clearly” and while nothing usually comes of it (even the H-scenes are typically portrayed as romantic affairs) it doesn’t stop this from being gross when it comes up. I’ve seen Kara no Kyoukai, I know what Nasu can do when he doesn't have to shoehorn in some fanservice.

Even with its flaws, Tsukihime is one of the most captivating visual novels I’ve read. It is amateurish in many ways. Its characters are both tropey and fleshed-out, its world is simultaneously cozy and unsettling. I think the best parts of the game are contained almost entirely in the back half, after you’ve already played it at least twice - and I think it’s the experience of having read through four versions of this story that makes the fifth so rewarding. While the “land of contrasts” is pretty lazy media criticism, with Tsukihime I do sincerely believe that it is because it is so frequently clumsy that the standout moments are so much more interesting.

This is such a convincing depiction of confused teens & young adults trying to figure themselves out that it feels... viscerally real at times. Sitting there, biting your nails waiting for them to finish typing. Holding two conversations simultaneously, waiting for the drama from the first conversation to somehow spill over into the second conversation. Trying to convince your parents that yes, the people you've met online are genuine friends and no, you're not giving out the family address. I've never been too involved in fandom spaces and have never written fanfic in my life, but I held my breath as Alex was waiting for feedback on hers.

Admittedly, a large part of this is presentation - the dialogue choices are mostly there to give you your choice of emote flair on a preset message and thus aren't really significant choices, save for a few occasions. The narrative can be a little clunky and for people who didn't spend time on the internet pre-2008 I imagine the writing could come off as too "quirky", but it's such an emotionally honest game that I'm willing to forgive an occasional plot contrivance. I may be lucky enough to feel like I was assigned the right gender when I was born, but it doesn't mean that this story is at all unfamiliar - my friends and I too caught up in our own heads, fucking up in our efforts to be there for a friend while wanting to vent our own thoughts. And it's because I remember the experience that the presentation does so much to sell the story here - when I was this age I was also staring at some austere chat client, trying to figure out how to respond to a dear friend when literally all I can come up with is a crude translation of my teenage brain just fucking screaming.

Recommended for anyone who spent their formative years on Yahoo Messenger.

Deserves a lot better than to be called a "joke game" as the devs very clearly put in some effort to make this a game that's actually enjoyable to play. It's not bad (despite making me want to play Sayonara Wild Hearts instead) but despite being consistently engaging, it's never really fully fun. It starts off a little too slow - I can imagine a lot of people dropping this before all the mechanics have been fully revealed. The controls are a little too stiff for my liking. The music carries about half the experience - the tracks are all good, but most of them don't really fit the atmosphere of the game very well. There are a couple tracks here that sound like they would fit into the original OutRun soundtrack and those are by far the best fit - they're still funky enough to fit into this game's overall aesthetic but upbeat enough to fit the pace of everything that's going on on-screen.

All in all it's a solid game, but I wouldn't encourage anyone to go out of their way to pick this one up. If you're just looking for a chill game that plays like an endless runner then this should be your cup of tea - grab it while it's on sale.

I think a lot of the reception to this game is from the sheer weight of expectations - many fans came in expecting more of the same mechanics and story beats that FromSoft clearly isn’t interested in anymore, and others still came in expecting something new and fresh that would justify its existence as a whole new game in the Dark Souls series. FromSoft seems to have done a lot more for the first group than they did for the second, but they’re still close enough to straddling the line for both to have some significant complaints. Compared to DS1, the path to a boss feels much more like a gauntlet that you just have to get through, instead of needing to respect each room for providing its own threat. The bosses definitely got more attention - they still feel like Dark Souls bosses, but the (over)abundance of multi-phase bosses makes it feel like this is really where the challenge was supposed to lie this time around.

The combat is definitely faster than previous entries and while I know a lot of those who played Bloodborne felt the speed wasn’t suited to this game, I never really felt that there was a problem with it. The increased speed of the bosses makes me actually feel like I have to pay constant attention to the bosses since they’re able to keep the pressure on at all times, instead of getting little reprieves here and there as you get some space between you. This seems to mostly come down to personal preference, but there’s a lot here that works in favor of the increased speed, including the decision to actually let you move around (at a much faster speed) while using your Estus Flasks - that teensy bit of movement rarely makes a difference between life and death, but it does factor a little bit into your calculus of when healing feels safe.

What I respect DS3 the most for is its world. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about hollow fanservice and while some callbacks fit better than others, I think From has done a good job of integrating the old items, locations, etc into the story. Dark Souls 3, better than any other entry, really sells that the world is crumbling. Part of it is the callbacks, showing you things you’ve seen before and realizing that I just walked right through old Firelink and I didn’t even recognize it. Part of it is that the story feels tired right off the bat - not in that it’s trite, but in that from the second your character stands up at the beginning of the game, there’s a sense that everything around you has already been there for uncountable years, and that if it were to blink out of existence tomorrow it would only make sense. While this sensation of the game “playing the hits” seems to have turned many off from the game, it feels like the perfect encapsulation of the games themes about unnaturally prolonging a natural cycle - the hollow imitations of characters, institutions, and ideas from previous games feel like the world and its inhabitants holding it all together the only way they know how - by grasping at the past, taking these legendary figures and concepts and only being able to produce a shallow facsimile.

It makes me feel as if I’m seeing a different game from the others. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to enjoy this game just because I enjoy it. But I wonder if people who suggest the game doesn’t know what it’s doing with these callbacks were so blinded by this recognition of previous locations that they missed obvious markers all over the game. Linking the fire produces a pathetic, withering flame instead of the overwhelming explosion that we saw in DS1. The game retreading a location you already saw in the same game by bringing out a version of the Cemetery of Ash where everything is just...wrong. Showing you a half-eaten Gwyndolin, dodging modified versions of his own abilities, playing a corrupted version of his theme. While it’s all an excellent continuation of themes present in the games, it feels like the game itself is showing you what happens to everything with time, including the games you’re playing - do you unnaturally prolong the series against its will until it’s just a parody of its old self, or do you let it die with dignity and be replaced by new, unknown things?

I don’t want another Dark Souls game. I like that the game chose to play us a few of the songs we already knew on the way out, that it still managed to give us a new-ish take on the same formula, and that it’s bowing out before becoming a mangled mess, exhausting anything interesting the IP had to offer. It is, to me, the perfect way to cap off this particular series, and I respect FromSoft immensely for doing it with dignity - before they had dispelled the mysteries of the world, before becoming a no-rough-edges yearly fixture, before anyone can figure out how multiplayer really works.

If this shift in the series is a result of Unity and Syndicate underperforming commercially, then I'm glad they failed. This shift towards an RPG format seems to have prompted Ubisoft to start investing some time into their characters as well, and it's paid off with the most interesting main character since Ezio.

Assassin's Creed has always excelled at creating incredible open worlds that make me take an interest in the history of a place I didn't previously care about. They've managed to do it again here, but Bayek carries this fucking game on his shoulders. A story beginning with a parent losing a child has a chance to fall really flat with players who can't relate, but it's written extremely well and it makes Bayek feel far more human than earlier AC protags, who feel much closer to superheroes than anything else.

The writing does a lot of the work, but Abubakar Salim puts in an excellent performance here to bring Bayek to life - it's a combination of the two that makes it believable. You understand what his values are without needing to be beaten over the head, and you can see through his interactions with children when he's reminded of his own son, without needing some hallucination or flashback to spell it out. Bayek very often feels like a man held together by ideals and duct tape and that's what sucks me in.

I know a lot of people were turned off by the shift towards RPG-lite mechanics and to be honest, they're alright here, but they're definitely half-baked in comparison to Odyssey. There are times where the difficulty between missions spikes a little too much and it feels like you're meant to level grind since these are sudden jumps, as opposed to a slow-growing gap between player level and mission level. The system of having multiple bows is a little weird and feels kinda clunky at times, and I basically just ignored one of them for about half the playthrough.

Moving away from paired animations makes the combat feel exhilarating at times, and the hitboxes match up pretty well to what's going on on-screen (I don't know how they fucked this up so bad in Valhalla after getting it right two games in a row). Aside from the sections where it feels like you're meant to level grind, the combat is generally challenging without feeling unfair and watching the Phylakes turn from a genuine roaming threat into juicy sacks of loot is a satisfying change.

All in all, Ubisoft very clearly put work into this game and the result isn't perfect, but they made some pretty dramatic changes to their flagship franchise and managed to create something worthwhile. Some of the changes that I think worked well for Origins don't work so well for later games (looting tombs was neat for Egypt and not so cool in Ancient England), but I'm really happy that Ubisoft decided to try something new when they could have just raked in the cash by shitting out another AC game that was 5% different from the last one. I think some of the things I liked most about Origins won't return to the series for a while, so I'll let the rest of you enjoy the newer games as they hone this formula - Origins is my own personal flash in the pan.

Initial impressions look a lot like a game that allows for skill expression through simple mechanics, but the reality of it is that the rigidity of its systems makes it tough to play. Offense players with one of the normal (non-powerup) balls can alter the timing of a throw, but in a 1v1 it'll be pretty hard to trip up a skilled defensive player. Teamwork is important primarily because defense is so easy, meaning that you'll need a teammate doing something to prevent tackle-spamming or making an easy catch (the timing window is fairly generous). This game has/had potential, but without some tweaking of timing windows, new mechanics, or new interactions with existing mechanics, I think people may tire of this one fairly quickly.

This is mostly the kind of game that I've been waiting for for a very long time, a true "walking sim". Instead of using this term derisively for linear, plot-driven games where you hold W and click things, walking is instead given a full set of mechanics and is your main way of interfacing with the game world.

In that regard, this game is a fucking masterpiece. Using your tools and your mind to navigate this world is a treat and seeing those tools benefit others is one of my favorite parts of any game, period. A special mention goes out to the floating carriers, because finding a good spot to plop that bad boy down and turn this into a snowboarding game is always an excellent feeling. Even the combat with other humans is fun, as it's just difficult enough to pose a threat without being oppressive.

Where this game really falls short for me, though, is the story. It is the kind of dense throwaway lore you should probably expect from Kojima, a world that is dead set on breaking your immersion every possible moment by having everyone repeat the themes of the game back to you every time you have the audacity to interact with someone.

Any time the story ties into the gameplay, it begins to cross the line from "encouraging the player to find fun in minutiae" into straight-up tedium. The game attempts to force you to care about BB by taking him away for a couple missions, but I ended up liking those the best by far. The BTs are literally never any fun to interact with, and the fact that they become comically easy to deal with as you upgrade your gadgets doesn't make it any better. Last but certainly not least - putting boss fights in a game like this should be punishable by a substantial prison sentence.

It is an excellent set of gameplay mechanics bogged down by Kojima bullshit. It's really a shame this is the price we have to pay to actually play this game, then, because you can bet your ass that at any other studio this would be some bonkers scrapped idea that would get an employee laughed back into a coffee-fetching role. Despite all the things that make me groan and all the venom I have for the plot, it's one of the most unique games I've ever played wrapped up in a AAA package, and if every 7 out of 10 I've played was like this I'd never have a fucking dime to my name again.

One of the more palatable visual novels for someone who isn't normally into the medium.

The campy characters and eerie atmosphere lend it a compelling B-movie horror vibe, and the classic visual novel "free time" events are goofy breaks from the murder mystery. Admittedly the "mystery" aspect of this probably the weakest part - there are layers upon layers of twists, but you're doing very little detective work yourself and the minigames at the trials are really just different methods of picking pre-determined dialogue choices, obfuscated by frustrating mechanics.

Danganronpa 1 benefits a lot from novelty - if this is your introduction to the series you likely won't realize that this series really loves pulling off a specific kind of twist, that they can only draw like 5 different faces with 4 base personality types, etc. Because it's new though, none of that matters - personally I fucking loved my time with DR1 until I played DR2 and felt that this cheesy murder-filled school drama was a little less special after being re-contextualized by the sequel.

If you have the opportunity to get it cheap, do so - if you're not hooked on the story by the end of the second chapter (the first is a cakewalk and legitimately the worst part of the game) then you're welcome to drop it. It cranks up the intensity with time, but if you're not on board early you won't be at the end.

The game's biggest flaw definitely comes from an underutilization of the Play As Anyone mechanic - make the characters distinct! Characters do not have meaningful shortcomings or strengths because they are either insignificant to start, or mitigated by the environment (spiderbot machines and cargo drone launch pads). Let me fail! The game is relatively easy as-is, but the fact that you aren't allowed to challenge yourself with weak characters (or a character with a strange specialization) means that the "Play As Anyone" system feels more like you're playing somewhere between 1 and 5 different characters with 50 different faces. It's a shame too, because the gameplay is decently engaging, and could be moreso if the characters you play felt different. There is a willingness to explore by adding a new mechanic, but no willingness to allow that mechanic to meaningfully impact how you play the game (or to allow the setting to change the game by maybe making guns harder to find?).

About the politics in the game: the game itself is sort of wishy-washy with its politics when it comes to things you're going to see during the course of the main story - vague allusions to "resistance," "taking things back for the people," and Bagley's jokes about "fascist school". The in-game radio shows, however, tell you the kind of weak lib shit you're meant to believe, though - that our current media landscape prizes misinformation in order to get clicks and keep you engaged, that this landscape is perfect for authoritarians to take root, but also that nothing needs to meaningfully change. It's good actually to have clickbaity news you can't trust! It teaches you to be critical (note: if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you)! These are actual points from the game! Despite this very obvious downside to modern media that has been actually exploited in-universe to put authoritarians in power, there's nothing you can really do about the media ecosystem - you can always trust the current version of the BBC (or GBB in-game) to uh, give you fair, unbiased news that you can trust, and if authoritarians abuse this system and take over? Well, the people have to rise up of course, to restore their classic British freedoms and a capitalist democracy. If Far Cry 5 is the beer commercial version of America, this is its British equivalent.

(The audiolog I was citing can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM4UfadGDkg)

An incredible, gorgeous backdrop - it is aesthetically as cyberpunk as anyone could hope for. Towering buildings and layered streets creating a city where its citizens could spend an entire day and never see the sun.

It's a shame, then, that the game is deathly allergic to exploring any of the most interesting ideas that cyberpunk as a setting has to offer. It tells you that body modification is no issue whatsoever, go nuts pal, and refuses to let you even change your haircut. It repeatedly dips its toes into the politics of the world via sidequests, only to come across as scatterbrained (or like the writers didn't communicate with each other) - every attempt at digging into anticapitalist ideas or really just anything on a scale larger than the individual feels like it was included because they had to, because the audience would expect it, not because they actually wanted to explore these ideas by telling stories. Johnny Silverhand is as much an ideologue as he is a rockstar asshole, but the game could not care less about assigning him actual beliefs beyond "grr arasaka make me angy" and it makes him come across as arbitrary and poserish, gesturing at a vague notion of doing things "for the people" without really bothering to explain what his vision of the world without megacorps would look like. Similarly, any quest chains that suggest that you can meaningfully change the world always end in a punchline or some reason why you're unable to change Night City away from what it is, which would be fine if it felt like it was coming from Night City and not from a game developer who didn't want to implement that.

It has plenty to say about the individual, though. From the main story to several sidequests, the game is all about death and legacy and it's actually capable of exploring that in interesting ways at times. V has (unfortunately) decided that the way to become a legend is to have this rise 'n' grind mentality where you just become really good at doing a bunch of different jobs, a lot of which are just helping the police kill people for jaywalking. Unfortunately, this hyper-focus on the individual means that every other part of the story feels weird and unfocused if it's not about V. In truth, this barely had to be a cyberpunk story! It requires some sci-fi elements, sure, but you could plop this plot into a Watch_Dogs game. The complete lack of interest in Night City's other inhabitants completely squanders this setting that is dripping with charisma and a fun level of campy cyberpunk aesthetics.

I wish I had a way to conclude this, but I could talk about this game for hours and not feel finished. I wanted to write a review that wasn't about the bugs or about the (serviceable but unremarkable) gameplay - I wanted to write about the potential I saw in this game. One of Disco Elysium's biggest strengths to me is the way it weaves the characters into the fabric of the city. Cuno, Klaasje, they could only exist in Revachol and you can't take them out of the city without making them into different characters. Part of understanding Revachol is getting to know people like them. I won't ask that every game have the same writing quality as Disco Elysium, but some of the more prominent side characters get this treatment in CP2077 and I wish they had extended that treatment to those with shorter appearances as well. Making these NPCs feel integrated into the city (or like they're part of a bigger set of events) is a great way to get me invested in the setting. Night City may look hundreds of times larger in scale than Revachol, but it feels smaller, and that's a fucking shame.

Tremendously fun, the only game I've found that can really simulate being part of that action movie scene where the deal goes wrong - you've got chaotic gunfights, car chases, double-crosses, thievery, and clean deals actually do happen often enough that you can never be sure if you're being conned or not.

Some of the most fun I've had in a game recently without any of the tilt. It's actually because it's so impossible to shoot guns both rapidly and accurately that makes this game work - gunfights are chaotic, more bullets hit the environment than your target, and you can't even really be sure that numbers advantage will win you the fight. The best bet for everyone is just to make the damn deal and get out of there alive.

At its best, it's the most fun I've had with a video game in a while - I don't mean engagement, I mean actual fun. At its worst, it's just your average internet chatroom, if a little better due to the fact that most people are generally committed to the roleplaying. The controls are jank and sometimes I think the first-person perspective results in a little too much chaos, but the core idea here is fantastic and fills a niche I've wanted to see done for ages.

E: It may be worth noting that I've only truly attempted to play the round-based game mode. For one, it's the only server type that sees a population of more than 5 people at a time, and thus it's the only one where people will explain the game to you, as playing the World mode will drop you into what is effectively an unmoderated GMod server, something I can get elsewhere and have no interest in playing here.

At the time it came out there were a lot of emotions tangled up in this. It had been 10 years since we saw a game that lived up to the Hitman name, but it was served to us as an always-online, episodic release. Paris was good, sure, but we had no idea what the upcoming levels would look like and whether IO would ever let us carry over our unlock progress when offline.

It's strange to look at now because it's obvious that everything turned out fine, that the World of Assassination trilogy ended up being even better than Blood Money was, that the QOL features imported from Absolution provided new depth instead of simply making the game easier, and that the entire trilogy when taken as a single, massive game would be one of the best games of the decade (perhaps ever?).

The gameplay core of the trilogy begins here, remaining relatively untouched throughout the three games. There are additions of course - it's strange to go back and play this game without briefcases, without bushes, but you really only notice these now that they've been added in later games. There are other minor changes of course, things that don't really sound big until you've put some time into the levels - enemies won't notice your reflection in mirrors, emetics send them to toilets instead of trash cans likes in later entries, etc.

All in all, there are a number of reasons why I would recommend people get Hitman 3, purchasing the older levels and playing them there. Not only is the entire trilogy in H3 roughly the same file size as H2016 is by itself, but little convenience features and performance optimizations have stacked up over 5 years. If you're getting H2016 for free and have never played a Hitman game before, play it and have a good time. But if you're looking at these games in 2021 and are trying to figure out how to best spend your own money, getting the complete trilogy inside Hitman 3 is by far the safest bet.

I've adapted everything after this line from a Twitter thread I wrote - please forgive any clumsiness:

I've finally beat Yakuza 6 and I'm convinced I'll never be able to return to Like A Dragon/Y7 after this. Not as some kind of protest for them writing Kiryu out of the series, but because I really don't understand the allure of it at this point. The cast of Y7 is so huge and I'm like 60% of the way to caring about any of them as characters, but Ichiban permanently feels like a jester even in serious moments and the most endearing members of the cast are barely given room to breathe. The combat is decent enough but right as it starts wearing out its welcome there is a massive difficulty spike that forces you to just sit there and grind these fights that you've already been choking down for 20 hours.

I don't know man. This series has routinely been clumsy, but I made it through some of those clumsy moments because they had built up my attachment to a couple cities, characters, and showed me that they were capable of creating new attachment to characters when I least expected it. Y7 has just been an exercise in patience, fighting through some dull moments and my rewards are either interactions with a few new charisma vacuums, or trying to make my monkey brain light up by coldly bringing out a character I recognize from a previous game.

The answer to this is "you don't have to play games you don't like" and unfortunately I might just have to accept that outcome at this point. I spent a long while convincing myself I was having fun because the game was polished and I didn't actively hate the combat, but in retrospect I was just biding my time in the hopes that a Yakuza game would turn itself around and hook me as it has so many times before, only to let me down this time. It took a return to the Kiryu saga before I could put my finger on it, but seeing Kiryu's interactions with the new characters in Onomichi and being pleasantly surprised by how much I cared about them, how charming they were and how real their emotions (and their bond) felt, it highlighted how lacking Y7 is in comparison. At this point, I've given this game 50 hours of my time and completed 12 full chapters and it's just worn out its welcome. I wanted so badly to like this game, and knowing that other people see something great here and I'm just missing it leaves me feeling so tired, man.