i only did the first two campaigns due to the fact that i’m not very good at micromanaging or just RTS games in general this was a bit difficult for me, but I honestly really enjoyed playing this game in spite of all these things! i kinda knew the story already from playing WoW and reading some of the books, but it was still pretty fun to play through and rediscover. also i know it’s common in many rts games, but the little barks whenever you click on a unit are so fun. overall i think i’d have more fun if i was better, but what can you do

i don’t think i could reasonably give this any sort of rating and this will probably sound lame, but i the entire time i was playing this i was perpetually reminded of being harassed while trying to skate. normally i would brush this off as correlation w/o causation, but this game feels so uninviting and inhospitable for women/fems. there is only one set of voice lines and instead of going gender neutral, it assumes you’re gonna be a man if you’re playing this, you can customize your body type, but all of the clothes revert you back to the male body type. not even to mention the constant use of the t-slur throughout (kinda comes with the territory but still). sorry if this is a bit incoherent but i really wanted to like this game but i just found myself being pushed away around every corner.

honestly this feels like an incredible ineffective remake in that even before playing the original, I’d much rather go play that instead. where i lamented yakuza 0 for being too easy, this entry does bump up the difficulty making it more tedious than anything. so much of this game feels like it was ripped from y0 that it lacks any discernible style, the flashiness and extravagance of the 80s replaced by just… nothing. this makes me a little worried for how i’ll enjoy kiwami 2, but at least i’m motivated to play the originals!

I am almost certain that this will be my favorite game i played this year and if it isn’t than hot damn am I gonna have a great year for the games that I play. It’s jam packed with so much to do and enjoy. The dialogue is generally pretty enjoyable, only bogged down sometimes by the multiple intertwining forces at work making the plot hard to follow with the constant twists and turns. This is, of course, counter balanced by the wonderful and zany humor that is at the core of this game, present in the dialogue, subplots, animations, and voice acting.

With all of these wonderful things that make this game amazing, there is also an unfortunate number of things holding this game back. The largest issue is how mindless the combat is. Playing on normal, I faced difficulty only slightly in the beginning, but quickly grew in power making all other fights a breeze, including the bosses (with the exception of the Amons). While it is a blessing to have so much to do, many of the systems don’t feel fully fleshed out, namely the skill tree, catfights, and item finding. In addition to this, the writing suffers from one of the same issues that Game of Thrones did as in introducing interesting characters and killing them off almost immediately after. Another gripe being with the writing would be that there are so many deaths and then reversals of the deaths that make it a bit difficult to feel much emotion when a character does truly die.

All this being said, this game truly hooked me in to the point where I bought the next five games before I finished this one, so I’m excited to see how I enjoy the next ones now that I know to crank the difficulty up.