Fully playable on yuzu at 60fps, very smooth as it is no longer bogged down by 1995 hardware.
The game itself is quite underwhelming. The story sucked ass and the mechanics feel like playing a compilation of previous Platinum games but with less depth. I almost started drawing W101 shapes with the right thumbstick. The levels start to blend together after a while, especially the astral planes. I can only stomach so many sci-fi cityscapes with a purplish-blue hue splattered over them. Anything to do with the astral planes is tedious. The worst instances of "platforming" and "puzzles" are concentrated there.
Platinum games still has no idea how to break up the combat in their games without forcing you into gimmicks that overstay their welcome before theyre even introduced.
The one stand out thing is the ost. Some really great stuff here, I'd almost put this over bayonetta and nier automata.
This might be my least favourite platinum game after Vanguard, but to vanguard's credit it had a bit more personality than astral chain. At least the mc actually speaks there.

short and fun. The original game bored me but this one kept me interested enough to play through all levels, I cant quite put my finger on why though. I'm way past the point of being entertained by the VR novelty factor so that shouldn't be the reason I found Superhot VR more compelling. Maybe the gameplay concept just lends itself much better to you being "physically" in the world. Every action is done with your body; all the dodging with the motion tracking, lining up your shots instead of pointing your crosshair, punching people, throwing objects, etc. It simply forces you to be involved.

Cute lil game I guess. Kinda plays itself with how the "platforming" is just point and press a button with infinite error margin plus the puzzles and chase sequences being so funneled and lenient you couldve made them cutscenes and not lose much player agency.
Art direction and ost are top tier though, and interacting with the npcs brings a lot of charm to the world. I just wish there was more actual game "meat" to it.
The game has pretty severe issues with its frame time stability considering how short it is, but I assume itll get fixed in a later patch as is increasingly more common nowadays with new releases on pc unfortunately.

Its fine.

I generally enjoy the vibe of this game. The serious tone of the main story spiced with some goofy characters and substories is generally up my alley... if it was a movie or tv show. The open world and general gameplay(including combat) really didn't impress me.

The sub stories are amusing at times but feel too inconsequential for me. I'd be much more willing to go out and complete all of them if they tied in with the main story or were long enough to span the whole game. Sub stories flowing into each other would also be effective. As it stands though I just did a sub story here and there.

The combat is fine but it can't carry a long open world game like Yakuza.
The many unlockable abilities do very little to change up how you approach combat, and neither do the new enemies. Heat actions also become old quite fast.
I think many people just settle into 1 or 2 favourite styles for both kiryu and majima and dont bother with the rest. The game doesnt do a lot to make you use all your styles, generally you get by perfectly fine if you find a style for crowd control and one for big damage one on one encounters like bosses. What I used for Kiryu and Majima is, respectively, brawler & beast and breaker & slugger. I havent bothered searching out the secret styles since ive heard they're tied to very tedious side content.

Other than that my problems mostly extend to open world design in general, I simply dont enjoy standard open worlds. Traversing huge game spaces is tedious for me, and these games tend to be filled with meaningless stuff to make them look more dense than they really are, most egregious example in Y0 is the random thug encounters.

I will never forgive Shinji Mikami for making me go through 8-1.

Possibly the kinoest action game at the time and even to this day if not for the poopoo lockon that feels incredibly janky in extreme contrast to the smooth controls. There's not a single bad boss in this, they WILL kick your shit in but never in a tedious manner. I haven't played a single game that has such boss consistency.

Some people claim that the combat is mainly designed around 1v1 encounters and that the gang squads go against the strengths of the systems in place, and they're quite wrong. There's enough crowd control options for you to be able to deal with 7v1 non heavy enemies give or take, they're just quite obtuse to get the hang of. Late game does go overboard with the amount of enemies it throws at you at the same time, going way past the threshold of what you're equipped to handle. At that point (unless you're a speedrunner knowing each enemy's attack patterns, positions and general behaviour in and out) you start needing to rely on roulette abilities and god hand to cheese your way through. I wouldn't call playing ring around the rosie while throwing boxes for half an hour particularly fun.

It's quite funny how the difficulty scales accordingly if you save scum with save states in emulation. If you skip loading screens with save states, Instead of retaining the level you had on death you come back at the same level you walked in there with. I think I spent the majority of the game on level 3 or level die, fun times...