CW: Mass shootings and right-wing ideology

Alright I've got one major problem with this game, the narrative is a little more prevalent in this one and they made it play exactly like alt right-wing propaganda. The whole narrative revolves around an unknown threat that is both all-powerful and weak, that you cannot actively fight but must permanently train and prepare for, and that you must be paranoid of those around you (especially those who disregard the threat as nonsense or not a problem) keeping your weapons on hand at all time for a supposed war you may suddenly need to fight. Ideologies like this especially do not need to be repeated at a time with mass public horrors such as when these scared armed teenagers decided to 'fight' their supposed 'threat' at schools. This alone tanks the score, like mate cultural context heavily applies in situations like this. Couldn't keep playing when the game mentioned keeping your weapons ready to turn on those around you, scared me for the fate of our warring world with just that piece of dialogue.

Outside of this, basically the same game but with graphical upgrades, enemies aren't as stupidly strong and actually easier to deal with, and the buildings feel less repetitive to traverse.

I've had a dream recently. I was driving around my neighborhood, but it was different. Vastly different. I wasn't looking at houses, I was looking at abandoned buildings. The more I explored the neighborhood, the more decrepit it became: Houses became remains of a destroyed, rotting victorian era building; establishments that were nothing but wood and the occasional gothic imagery; memories that never were, would manifest in the form of ones you would never know its full history.

Dark Souls II is exactly that dream.

Drangleic is a world that once was. You just happen to explore its end. People fight for scraps of its memories, as if there's something to salvage from what calamity has already claimed. A demented kingdom is all you will find. I fear the concept of dementia, but I'm also morbidly curious by it, much so the concept of death itself. Exploring it for the first time, I've never really realized how much these morbid curiosities are why I've enjoyed Drangleic as much as I have. I just thought it was a cool world. It's crazy how stories can be told mainly through visuals and you could totally ignore the meat of it and still get the message.

Dark Souls, as a series, explores death in different ways. Where the first one's thematic is death and how we cling on to life (perhaps a bit too much), Dark Souls 2 gives us death, and how it will eventually make us all forgotten. To me, death only comes once you're no longer remembered. In other words, you cling on to those memories, no matter how much they're degrading.

Oh, right, this is a video game. Oops.

Dark Souls 2 is also my first souls-like game. It's a game that formed me as a souls-like enjoyer. I'll always tell people to start with 2 with a win-win situation of "If you liked the others better, then at least you started with the worst and built it up. If you loved this game from the get-go, then you got a new favorite in your hands". Balance is weird in this game: it throws many bones at the player. It's much easier to get a hang of the game and breeze through it, unlike 1 and 3, and Elden Ring. But that's why it's so much fun. I get to play without stressing too much, I allow myself to get hit more often due to the existence of lifegems, and so on. It feels so much more dynamic and I got to play this game multiple times, with different play styles each time.

I've never played the Scholar of the First Sin edition, and from what I've heard, it's even more of a "gank squad central" game than before. I never had an issue with enemy placement in the original, but if it's accentuated in the new version, then I'd hate to try it out, lest it ruins my perception of this game being the best one of the series.

I'm not here to start wars about which Dark Souls is better, but I will say this: Don't trust a person who will go out of their way to tell you unprompted that Dark Souls 1 is the best one. They probably only play it for the PvP.

ethan: urgh…damn it…what the FUCK is happening in this village…

heisenberg screeching over the intercom: ethAN wintERS. have you ever desired a man carnally?

three years late but whatever. stinks. simultaneously the least charismatic and most self-serious entry in a series that usually threads a better needle with respect to its tone than whatever’s presented here. ethan is an unlikeable psycho, thoroughly unenjoyable riff on the ‘it takes a village’ proverb. forgets to be an action game for half the game and then when you get to that part you’re mostly doing a bunch of eighth gen arena strafing with minimal target feedback. semi-competent machine games campaign but lacklustre resi title and every insistence the game makes on deriving aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from re4 falls totally flat while the rest of the game is too much of a ‘greatest hits’ reel to really have much of an identity of its own. between resi 7 and resi 8 the guys over at capcoms resi team need to seriously consider couples therapy. may have been more charitable if i was from eastern europe 👍

So I played this with the Sekiro easy mod (more health, damage, better drop rates, more xp, infinite spirit emblems) and I would definitely just enjoy this game more if it was made like a character action game like Metal Gear Revengeance or DMC. The prosthetics allow for some fun subweapons, but not really because they cost spirit emblems. I enjoy the general combat (besides parrying). Getting the mikiri counter, jumping sweeps, kunai'ing airborne targets, thats all really satisfying; I just do not vibe with the parrying in this game, it just feels off.

This also makes me wish Fromsoft would do another game where there is a set protag. I really enjoyed the cutscenes and dynamics that can't be used if you are using a voiceless create-a-character.

downloading shingo dlc here comes a special boy !!
Throwing this on again as I am a born sucker who needs to at least try Shingo in this game. He still rules, his VA still rules, I think his new outfit looks good, I'm glad you can still whiff cancel cr.D, I wish his proximity unblockable was still a DP motion and was also still a proximity unblockable instead of a command grab, I wish he still checked GameFAQs during his final bankai. About what I expected. Welcome back, kiddo!
Anyway, the game: one of my major problems with it reared back up when I watched the Shingo trailer and was able to guess what the EX version of all his moves would do before I saw it. I've spoken about it previously, but there's just no surprises in this - it's a combo game, but to me it seems like there are very fixed routes you have to go down to Do the Big Combo and you're not really able to stray from them (also had this problem with XIV). XIII was a combo game too, but was more freeform, more experimental, more interesting - due in no small part to you being able to produce some real bullshit. I think games like this have to have a sufficient amount of truly stupid nonsense in them to be worth a damn. Look at Marvel 3! Any time I watch that game nowadays there's a solid chance that I'll see something I've never seen before, and I think that could probably happen in KOFXIII, and I think there's almost no chance of it happening in KOFXV. The whole thing just feels sterile to me, missing some vital spark. It doesn't help that it looks ugly to mine eyes, that there's something wholly unsatisfying about the animations, that character proportions are often freaky and alien (check out Ryo's Tetsuo Hara head to body ratio, and take a good look at Vanessa's fingers, it's fucked). The new characters do nothing for me, they didn't bring back Mian, the fucking weasels actually want you to pay extra for Kim. I dunno man, I just don't like this one. It's trite to say but 98 is better, so why would I waste the time? Let's play 98. If you haven't played 98, I really recommend playing 98, it's very cool and looks great and has a dope roster and is full of personality and dumb shit like the unblockable fireball glitch (love that one). Also the international subtitle is "The Slugfest", which is just so awesome. Try it!

this game gets really sold short just for not being as self serious as ff4 and not as grand as the series gets from 6 onward but it's a really spectacular game even outside of its stellar mechanics and practically outdoes ff4 in every way. definitely leans a bit more on comic relief than some people might like but there's some really great moments here and the cast is really strong, especially with galuf and bartz, and exdeath is undercut by fans for how interesting of an antagonist he is. neo exdeath is by far the coolest final boss design in this series to me other than safer sephiroth, and even if he's pretty stock standard on a surface level i think he deserves more credit as a villain. easily my favorite of the snes trilogy of final fantasy games and a game i can't recommend enough to fans of jrpgs

When i was younger i remember starting many videogames that i have never finished because i used to really suck at videogames, and i always gave up very easily. Sonic 1 is one of those games, so i decided to grow a pair of dingleberries and actually finish the game.

I was actually quite surprised to learn that sonic 1 is considered a mid game, because i remember having a lot of fun with it, even tho my younger self never got past marble zone.

Sonic 1 has a total of 7 zones that each has 3 acts except for the final zone. The game throws you the best zone right at the start, which is the one and only green hill zone, and why is it the best? Well its because sonic gets the chance to go fast which is yk the main gimmick of the game?

Marble zone and spring yard zone are pretty decent, sonic isn't very fast here but that's my only complaint about these 2 zones.


Labyrinth zone fucking sucks

Star light zone: wow going through this zone right after labyrinth is like eating a 5 star meal after eating school food. Sonic isn't always slow in this zone and all the acts are fun as hell. Ths is on par with green hill zone in my opinion.

Scrap brain zone: pretty fun! Honestly this zone is very underrated, and it's the 3rd best zone in the game for me.


The bosses are very very very ok, except the one in labyrinth zone fuck that one.

The graphics are very awesome and brightly coloured.

The music is obviously great as hell, like cmon is there a single person in the world who hasn't listened to green hill zone? There's other great tracks aswell such as spring yard zone and scrap brain zone.

Sonic 1 has without a doubt many problems, but i got some nostalgia for this game so i can't help but like it a lot, and it still does many things right.
8/10

I understand why people like Y1 more than Kiwami even if I don't necessarily agree. It's such a compact and interesting experiment by Sega, at the time I truly believe there was nothing like it. Calling it "like Grand Theft Auto 3" is obviously a bad comparsion, but it's hard to compare Yakuza to other contemporaries. The stiffer combat with fewer options makes every new option you obtain more important. This is the first game I've played in the series that made the dropkick feel worthwhile to use. In Kiwami, I had no clue why anyone would use the reversal options in combat, but Kiryu in Y1 doesn't have turn-tables on the bottoms of his feet so he really needs them for crowd control. The necessity of engagement with its mechanics makes Yakuza 1 the only character action game in the series (except maybe 2 IDK).
Kiryu's stiffness isn't an unfortunate consequence of fresh devs trying a new idea, it's not a weird bug that detracts from the game - it's an intentionality of the design.This wrinkle in the fabric of gameplay is what gives reversals their purpose. Forcing the player to develop an understanding of their toolkit is actually good design, not bad. Not to say that later Yakoozers are inherently worse because they're more accessible - their intended emotional responses are simply different. Later games are much more about the power fantasy of being the tallest man in Tokyo and living in a walkable city.
This is actually an aspect of later titles I prefer over the original: the pseudo-vaction escapism elements. Maybe it's just because I've played 1,000 games set in Kamuro but Yakuza 1 feels the most matter-of-fact about its settings. Kiryu's lived his whole life in and around Kamurocho - there's not much new for him to discover. It's an element they really wanted to home in on in later entries, especially 3 and 8. 3 is actually the first game in the series with karaoke because the devs wanted to showcase Kiryu finally being able to relax after two games of pure action.
I primarily play games for escapism (free Palestine, trans rights, and black lives matter though) and I find RGG's life-adjacent heightened reality to be a perfect escape. But because player choice is at its weakest in Yakuza 1, the escapist elements don't flourish as well as they eventually will. Absolute lowest number of minigames and side activities, the camera is not under the player's control, and the player has far fewer options in combat than later games - Yakuza 1 is not an escapist fantasy, it's a sobering crime genre.
Every change to the combat that I could describe as "better" comes with a change to the music or atmosphere that takes away from the overall experience. The lack of all the goofy bullshit from modern Yakuza games makes the comparitively-simple story a lot easier to swallow. Plus there's none of those stupid Super Duper Heat Moves you have to use on bosses. Also I think this might be my favorite soundtrack in the series. The remixes of the battle tracks in Kiwami are like dogshit, but Funk Goes On and Intelligence for Violence go fucking crazy..
I do seriously like the voice acting, overall I think the actors do a good job even if the editing doesn't do them any favors. I actually really like Kurylo as Kiryu, even if he's no Kuroda. Goofy as Date is pretty good too. I'm actually impressed by how much dialogue is just untranslated Japanese that they hope players understand. And they pronounce most of it correctly! The constant swearing didn't really bother me, I work in a factory so I hear and say worse than this on a daily basis. Plus I really like the combat barks enemies have. STUPID OLD FUCK would have stuck with me if I had played this game in 2005.
A shoulder camera would have been nice but these are highly-detailed environments for a PS2 game, filled to bursting with NPCs, I understand that it probably would have hampered the atmosphere and taxed the hardware if the player could control the camera.
There's very little [subst]ance to these [subst]ories, they're all stories that have been repeated in other Yakuza games even outside Kiwami. I'm sure some people appreciate that they're simple and to the point, unlike modern substories that have 30 cutscenes and 4 distinct group battles.
In conclusion, Yakuza 1 is the best in the series because there's NO FUCKING MAHJONG