Got the game via a friend’s recommendation. I put off playing it for a while as I generally had games I was more interested in that I wanted to get to, but seeing as how he finished a game I recommended, it was only natural I would return the favor.

This is my first experience with a Remedy entertainment title. Right off the bat what caught me off guard was the world building. I started out kinda uninvested with what was going on (though not outright bored or anything), but the more I delved into the world, my surroundings, the pieces and bits of written and visual material, the more I started to get sucked in. It’s very much like SCP in that way, which funny enough this game takes HEAVY inspiration from. The game in general has a very eerie and unnerving atmosphere; sterile corporate office spaces splattered in blood and filled with floating bodies hovering above you, with the ambience consisting of loud chanting of bizarre incoherent phrases; don’t even get me started on those freaking Threshold Kids video tapes. I do understand that at the end of the day, it is trying to be more of an action game above all else, but personally I think it would be really cool if they leaned even harder into the horror aspect of this game (what can I say, I like me a spooky atmosphere). Despite this I also love when the game goes off the walls surreal and isn’t afraid to have a lot of fun with itself; whether it’s the Dr Darling music video, the optional movie camera mission in one of the DLC expansions, and ESPECIALLY the Ashtray maze.

And in terms of being an action game, it’s incredibly solid. 3rd person gunplay mixed with Psychokinetic abilities. These powers are all shared on the same energy bar so it requires some consideration of resource management to use effectively. Honestly in hindsight it makes something Silver’s gameplay in Sonic 2006 look even more sad than it already is. Despite how incredibly strong the psychic powers are (especially when you upgrade them), the game never felt repetitive for me despite how much I typically relied on them. This is helped in good part to the enemy variety (there are a lot of enemies that avoid the objects you throw at them) and the different amount of powers you have at your disposal, like the ability to mind control weakened enemies which ended up being a lifesaver in many hectic circumstances, especially when I nabbed the upgrade that allowed you to take control of heavy hitting big boy enemies. There’s also a lot of subtle yet conscious design decisions in how the environments are constructed and how you can maneuver around them freely as a makeshift combat arena. I also appreciate how every part of the environment is destructible which is not only technically very impressive, but also helps with your psychokinesis powers, as even with no objects around to pick up you can still yoink a chunk off the nearest concrete wall or staircase and use it just as well.

Exploration sadly isn’t anywhere near as satisfying. There are a lot of hidden chests to find around the bureau but they all contain the same exact things: crafting materials and mods. You equip mods to either yourself to boost your abilities via random perks, or to your different gun forms to basically do the same thing. I’m just gonna outright say it: the randomized loot system was a mistake. I don’t feel anything when I find a chest hidden off in the corner because my reward is the same “-20% energy reduction on using dash” fluff; it just doesn’t feel gratifying to obtain. Half of the mods I had in my inventory are just cluttered incremental upgrades to aspects I didn’t even care to be improved much. It would’ve been much more satisfying to just ditch the mod system and make it a simple upgrade chart like what they do with your abilities. I feel a better sense of satisfaction coming across a lore document or video tape or something I can read up on instead of the same generic RPG stat boosting mods with different forms of rarities on them that I’ve seen in every single other 3rd person action game to date. The boss fights in this game aren’t the most graceful (at least, the little you manage to fight anyway there’s so few of them) and some (particularly in the DLCs) are just outright terrible. The ending also feels pretty anticlimactic and abrupt, not even a final boss or anything. Just a final enemy gauntlet and all of a sudden the game just kinda ends.

Still though, it says a lot that after the game ended I went out of my way to see so much more of what the game had to offer. I wasn’t initially invested when I started playing, but after the credits rolled, I can go as far to say that I’m stoked for the upcoming sequel and what they can do with this concept.

(Also if we can get these guys to create a standalone Silver the Hedgehog game that would be great 😊 👍)

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So some personal thoughts here: this one review took a while to get out. And subsequently it also took a lot out of me. Idk, I feel like I’m starting to get burnout on making Backloggd reviews. It happened to a friend of mine a while back and I don’t think my level of burn out is on quite the same level as his was per say, my ADHD is making it extremely hard to get anything going. The worst part about this is that I LOVE putting my thoughts on a game in a detailed format like this, but I’m so behind on so many different games and I just don’t have the drive to do these as often. Maybe school has something to do with it, maybe not. I don’t really know anymore. I don’t really want to take a break as that essentially feels like what I’ve BEEN doing all this time, but I wish I could push on and keep making more as easily as I used to and I hope others that feel or have felt the same way can relate to my situation.

I'm writing this review barely an hour after having Infinite Wealth. Normally I'd wait a bit and let it sit in my mind as I try to pick it apart, and I know I'll realise that the edges are rougher, I know that...but right now I want my memory of this to remain as untainted as possible. I know that sometime in the future I'll look at this review with tainted eyes, cringing at my self but I want to write this right now so I can look back and see that I genuinely loved this game deeply.

It took nine whole games to get here, and I'm at the end of it with my emotions being a complete mess. It takes so much hard work to sell a character, much less the same one around eight times over, and each time I've fallen in love deeply with Kiryu Kazuma all over again.

"They all treat you as if you're some hero. If we ended up just like you...the illusions of the yakuza life would be stronger than ever."

Piece by piece for eight whole games, we've been building up the legend of the Dragon of Dojima alongside him. Every admiration thrown towards Kiryu doesn't feel like just cheap talk, it feels earned because you yourself earned it.

Infinite Wealth isn't an erasure of every misstep this franchise has taken, it doesn't hide it but instead puts it on full display, it shows just how much you have impacted the world around you for so long to the point where at the end of Kiryu's life, the only question that remains was "Was it worth it? Was it a life worth living?"

It's hard having the courage to do something. It's even harder to be the one to give that courage to others but this common trait, this link that runs deeper than the dragons on their backs, is exactly why Infinite Wealth isn't just talk. You've seen that exact event take place time and time again, and now all that remains is the end of Yakuza as you know it. It asks you to be brave and head towards an unfamiliar future, and let the burdens of the past be a weight on your shoulders no more.

I wish I had something more meaningful to say, and in the future I probably will, but I want a record of my feelings as they are now. A public if not embarrassing declaration of my utmost love for this entry in the series, guess I'm taking a page out of Ichiban's book in doing this. Not that it matters, I think we can all benefit by being a bit more like Ichiban Kasuga.

𝗔 𝗬𝗔𝗞𝗨𝗭𝗔 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗡𝗘𝗪 𝗔𝗚𝗘!

If you think about it, there really was no better choice than Ichiban Kasuga to replace Kiryu Kazuma, was there? Sure you could point to previous protagonists such as Akiyama or Saejima to take over the lead, and that’s not a bad idea by any means it’s just…the fact that it is someone like Ichiban that makes a lot of sense. The very prospect of filling in the boots of the DRAGON OF DOJIMA himself with a new protagonist is daunting from a development perspective, and downright scary from the player perspective. Which is why I’m so happy that Yakuza: Like a Dragon is as good as it is, that for every hole I can poke into this game’s mechanics or narrative, there’s a moment that makes me fall in love with it all over again.

So much of the praise I see lobbied towards this game’s narrative stems from a view that it’s scathing in its critique of the establishment, where in place of the typical JRPG “fight god” final boss, the god is the arm of the government itself. It’s certainly not a wrong view, but I think it’s misleading. Personally, I don’t find the critiques it delivers super meaningful, I think it buckles under it’s own weight in that regard and struggles in it’s representation of them but that’s really never been the focus for me. I’m not ignorant of the flaws of this game, I think the last two party members are embarrassingly underdeveloped, the turn-based combat also leaves a lot to be desired (although this replay was done with the Like a Brawler mod) and there’s also some of the traditional Yakuza plot devices which I don’t like…but despite all that I rarely find myself thinking of the negatives because the positives far outweigh them.

To me, Yakuza 7 is an innately human story, surprisingly intimate with it’s world in a way few other games in the series are. Like I said, it’s the original Yakuza, repackaged and rewritten for the new age and it’s that guiding philosophy of looking to the past while embracing the future works. It’s Kiryu and Nishiki all over again but not with the somber badass attitude of the original, Y7 is much more interested in exploring how meaningful even a single relationship can be. Even to people who have betrayed you, even to people who have hurt you, if you can find the strength within yourself to forgive them then why not, right? Nobody wants to lose people whom we hold dear, even if they do wrong there’s a strong capacity for good in everybody and Ichiban Kasuga is a man who will take those chances, who will take those odds. The Koi has become one with Dragon, and it will keep moving forward, holding the ones it loves close. It’s a rejection of Kiryu and Nishiki’s solitude, and a celebration of the bonds we hold dear.

𝗞𝗘𝗘𝗣 𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗜𝗡𝗚, 𝗜𝗖𝗛𝗜.

Gotta say, the way he leaps off of rooftops and flips backward to face the camera before falling into a head-first dive is just full of the exaggerated swagger of a black teen. It gives me goosebumps every time he does it.

Yeah, what'd you expect here? Wasn't a fan of the first one much at all so the extremely similar DLC-expansion-sequel-thing wasn't gonna win me over either. I do think that this game is...very marginally somewhat better than the first one at least. And no it certainly isn't in the gameplay department that's for sure LOL.

To put it bluntly, Miles is just Peter but better. He has nearly every single ability that Peter has (traversal, stealth, combat, you name it) except now he also has access to Venom powers and invisibility powers. It admittedly took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the venom bar and the instant takedown QTE meter were on separate resources so they aren't a replacement for it. You build up a meter while in combat and when the meter is full, you get a powered up version of an already existing move (punch, launcher, web zip, ground slam), pretty much all of them are a massive AOE effect (though the punch needs to be upgraded to be AOE) and enemies affected take more damage. You even get a final Venom attack that's essentially just Chaos Blast from Shadow the Hedgehog, a massive AOE explosion that ALSO fully restores your health at the cost of 3 bars. While stimulating on a spectacle level, my problem with these abilities is that they don't really do anything to add depth or nuance to the combat, but only exist to make the already easy game even easier. Like, aside from the sword and shield enemies, in what situation would you NOT use these techniques whenever you can? They're easy to build up, they make enemies drop like flies, they make the brute enemies a complete joke, and there's no sense of multitasking or risk or reward factor to these abilities. The only satisfaction I can muster from using them is looking at the pretty sparkly particle effects and watching enemies get blasted helplessly across the room. There's also a bit of overlap with these abilities as well. The Venom Punch and Venom Dash seem way too similar to each other, it's just that the dash has a larger range, AOE damage from the start, AND you can get a free Venom Launch from it which is ALSO AOE. Like, what exactly is the tradeoff here? Less damage? Not from what I could see anyway. Other than that, combat is identical to the first game, still horrendously one-sided in your favor with or without venom powers purely by launching enemies in the air and air combo-ing them to death. Not much has changed in that department. You can use a couple of Venom powers during traversal but neither of them feel like a significant enough speed or height increase to justify using while swinging. I mean I'll use them when I can but it feels like at that point I'm more so using them out of obligation rather than anything else.

Stealth sections are made slightly better and worse at the same time. Better in the sense that after clearing a stealth section you don't have to fight more waves of goons already alerted to your presence anyway, and on top of that there's no MJ section equivalent in this game either! However, I feel like there are even fewer stakes involved in these sections with the addition of the cloaking ability. No punishment if you get spotted because even if you do you can disappear at will and wait for the AI to start looking for you again. These two mechanics SOUNDED cool on paper but don't amount to anything in-game aside from just making everything a lot easier.

No, you wanna know what ever so slightly tipped this game's enjoyment over the first for me? First is the story. I know, kinda sounds crazy. I didn't really connect much at all to the story of the first game, but I feel like this one having more of a focus on Miles and his friendship with Ganke, on top of the many different people in his life (Gloria, Phin, his mom, etc) leads to me caring more about these cast of characters. It's not great or anything, I don't think this was a particularly groundbreaking story and at points, the writing can be extremely forced and hamfisted (like when Rhino starts egging on the Tinkerer about her trauma for...reasons I guess?) but y'know what? It was nice for what it was. I also like Miles' personality showing through his Spider-Man abilities, the way he twists and turns in off-the-wall show-offy ways when doing tricks and when web swinging adds just that much flair that makes it a tiny bit more fun to swing around than if I were playing as Peter for example. I also like the Underground as a faction PURELY for their cool purple coloring to their weaponry and gear. Again, nothing major on any of these points, but hey. I'll take what I can get from this series.

For the love of god though, please go and do the Uncle Aaron side quest so you can listen to the beat he makes at the end, it's unironically one of the goofiest things I've heard in a game.

The people stating that this is better than Frontiers are on massive copium I'm sorry LOL.

Hardlight's newest mobile endeavor is indeed an ambitious title for a mobile game. A fully 3D platforming-focused Sonic game is something I'm kind of surprised hasn't already been attempted at this point...though considering most of Hardlight's other titles are more simple pick-up-and-play arcade-y high score-based affairs, it's easy to see why this hasn't been attempted before. I've seen a lot of backlash against this game being Apple Arcade exclusive, and while I do agree that offering the title to more people that can play it is a good thing to do, those asking for a legitimate console port...guys, c'mon...it's a mobile game.

Should start there before I talk about anything else I suppose. Sonic Dream Team is a mobile game at its core and it is fundamentally hindered by being an experience crafted for mobile. What do I mean by this you may ask? Imagine a typical 3D Boost game (the kind that's roughly similar to Frontiers, Colors, Gens, etc) except with a pathetically weak boost, no airboost, no stomp or slide, no wall jumping, and a free camera that fights against you most of the time. That's Sonic Dream Team. It's a boost game but worse. The only things it has going for it movement-wise are the ridiculous range on the homing attack and uh...slope jumping I guess. That's really about it. It's still kinda fun to play on a basic level but like, would I rather play this if I pitted it against any of the other boost games besides Unleashed and Forces? Absolutely not lmao. Seriously, the lack of a stomp really hurts this game more than it should. Precise platforming is a chore because you don't have an effective way to stop quickly enough. And I know they couldn't add these elements in because, again, it's a mobile game. Everything needs to be extremely simple otherwise your fingers would become a pretzel trying to chain all of these different actions together. I played on a controller during my playthrough, and while it is...marginally better than using the touch screen, it only further reminded me of how much lesser this game is than the other boost titles, but I digress. You can also play as multiple different characters but their unique attributes aren't anything to write home about. Amy and Sonic can lightspeed dash, Tails and Cream can fly with a clunky feeling stamina meter, and Knuckles and Rouge can glide (heavily nerfed and plummets like a rock) and climb walls. You can also swap characters on the fly once you've unlocked them but doing so requires you to come to a complete standstill halting the pace of the stage completely. What's worse is that this is even mandatory for specific acts to complete them.

Despite this, the main levels (I'm talking like, the first stage of the act with the red rings and the blue coins) can be pretty fun and well-designed, once you get the task of “collect 3 keys to progress” taken care of anyway. I particularly had a lot of fun with Ego City and the final couple of acts with Nightmare Maze. Scrambled Shores is...fine as a starting level, does what it needs to do. Dream Factory is...also fine. Aesthetically it looked too much like Sweet Mountain and the most interesting aspect it has to offer is rising and lowering platforms. Wooo. Much like Secret Rings (and because, again, it's a mobile game), Dream Team has multiple missions within each act offering various objectives, from time trials to checkpoint gate races. These wildly vary in terms of actual quality. The "get the dream orb" challenges are pretty good. They typically involve completing a satisfying platforming obstacle gauntlet challenge to get a single dream orb. Short, sweet, and to the point. The time trials and the checkpoint gate races are mainly just an excuse to play the same level again with a slightly different goal. The crystal hunt missions are just bad. I don't have anything positive to say about them. Imagine bumbling around a giant closed-off maze looking for a set number of trinkets. It's about as exhilarating as it sounds. The game at least looks pretty nice for a mobile game and the animated intro is fantastic. The animated cutscenes are surprisingly really REALLY impressive and invoke an expressive fluid style of animation we haven't seen since...geez, Rise of Lyric on the Wii U. The problem is that there are only like, 5 cutscenes in the game and the rest of the game's story presentation is in comic book slide show mode with voice over. Hearing Michelle Ruff as Cream again was kinda jarring but I guess it's mainly due to how long she's been from this character. Sadly I don't have much to say on the soundtrack aside from the main theme and the final boss theme. It's fine I guess, nothing terrible to listen to but it just feels like background noise a lot of the time.

Again, for a mobile game, it's pretty interesting and a good step for Hardlight to develop something truly special; but as is, I dunno if I'd ever want to go back to it instead of replaying the dozens of other Sonic games I already have a lot of fun with. Such is the mobile curse.

i genuinely enjoyed this quite a lot
kiryu as a dad is very memorable and fun, thought these moments were the most enjoyable in the game
the story was a bit mid but mine was cool. liked how the dad kiryu bits ended up tying to the big crime story even if the big crime story was kind of in one ear and out the other
combat was great, after kiwami 2 i'm just glad i had to think to win and actually outplay the ai. felt like it actually mattered if i was just mashing due to the strong block. a pretty good start for the early ps3 yakuza era

Insomniac come up with substantial extra content that isn’t just recycled tired busywork challenge: impossible.

Jeez man what a complete and utter waste of time. I will say this; if you liked the original game (and I mean, REALLY liked it), then you’ll like this DLC, as it’s just…more of the original game. It has the same production values as the base game with all the really high quality cutscenes and whatnot so you’re not being skimped on that department. However, as someone who didn’t like the base game, having to play more of it in the most repetitive and unimaginative way isn’t exactly what I’m frothing at the mouth for. None of the stories were interesting (in fact I outright hated the first part with Black Cat) and all of the content presented is more of the same copy pasted open world schlock that I already hated in the first game. More enemy base assaults, more bland collectables to find, more challenge arenas, it’s like they’ve learned absolutely nothing and just went full steam ahead by doubling down. And it’s like this for every single DLC. Sure there are the introductions of like, 1 new enemy type per DLC part but apart from the kinda annoying brutes with miniguns none of them are anything to write home about either. The Screwball challenges have a somewhat interesting spin on them compared to the Taskmaster challenges but I swear the scoring thresholds change on a whim whenever they feel like it. One combat challenge had me get a perfect rank by stringing together a long continuous combo and using photobomb areas whenever I could, but another in part 2 demanded that I only KO people in photobomb sections to maximize score and it didn’t care about combo strings at all, or even if I took damage. Not to mention Screwball as a character is about as endearing as doing a cannonball dive onto a cactus. I swear to god if I have to hear her utter the phrase “photobomb!!!!!!!” one more time, I am personally going to develop an EMP that deletes Twitch off of the internet permanently.

This DLC in general is just exhausting to complete. Nothing interesting or worthwhile happens throughout any of it. Not exactly the best sign when the highlights of this entire package are the off camera phone conversations between Peter and Miles. And I know what you’re gonna say, “well why did you go ahead and play/beat the DLC if you didn’t like it?”. You know what? That’s a great question. I guess maybe it’s just very rare for me to abandon games I don’t like. I usually end up finishing everything I play no matter what.

Hearing Keith Silverstein as Hammerhead was very funny though. It’s literally just his Torbjörn voice except without the Swedish accent.