One of the most unique and polished metroidvanias I’ve ever played. The art design is one of a kind, blending pixelated retro graphics with neon colours and modern smoke, fluid and lighting effects, all coming together to give it this very surreal, very serene yet sinister atmosphere. There’s the open ended structure, full of branching paths and skips, I honestly can’t see any two players having the same first playthrough, and it goes without saying that it gives value to subsequent playthroughs. There’s the items, which take an almost Outer Wilds or Tunic kind of approach, where throughout the game you discover you have abilities and functions that you’ll realize were actually there the whole time. There’s the puzzles, some of which have more than one solution and encourage thinking outside the box. There’s all the surprises and hidden secrets, some of which really drive home the Outer Wilds/Tunic parallels. There’s the lack of tutorials or lines of text telling you what to do, its complete trust in you the player to figure it out yourself. All of this being made by just one guy. Billy Basso really had a thorough creative vision and an exorbitant amount of passion and talent to see it through. I think he’s made something special, I feel pretty confidently that this is among the top 3 metroidvanias I’ve ever played.

Say what you will about Dunkey, but he has a damn good eye for indies and it’s endearing to see him use the platform he’s built to prop up smaller independent creatives like this. I’m excited to see what else Bigmode publishes down the line.

Like Octopath Traveller, it’s a game I can tell isn’t bad, but I personally just found it a completely tedious chore to play, not helped by my save data being lost a couple times, sending me back hours more than once. Unlike Octopath though, I was much more invested in the story and characters, enough so to actually see this one through to the end. A very strong story about coping with loss and the cycle of death and rebirth, backed up by a colourful cast and and an even more colourful villain. Made the whole experience worth it.

Narratively, this was a treat to experience for the first time over covid. Few pieces of media can keep me guessing through to the end the way this game did. It lets you know early on that it’s willing to nosedive from its lighthearted tone directly into some truly shocking, depressing places, completely change the scope of the narrative without warning, and that nothing is off the table when it comes to its world ending stakes. The characters as well are so diverse, memorable, developed and have a familial band dynamic comparable to that of The Last Airbender. The game is constant surprise after surprise and it never lets up until the credits roll. Gameplay-wise it’s great as well. Turn based games usually have to work a bit harder to win me over, but then again, this game isn’t really turn based. The active time battle system and all the different ways you can mess around with materia and summons gives you tons of freedom to customize to your whim, think outside the box and break the game in creative ways. Oh did I mention the OST? Top 3 of all time, and it ain’t #3. I whistle some of these tracks to myself at work all the time.

I do have a couple gripes. I played the Playstation Classic version, which is based on the original release, which was littered with translation errors which especially made the game’s midsection a bit tough to follow. It’s also a very minigamey game, and I found them inconsistent in quality. I’m really glad the Playstation Classic had it’s own save scumming feature because without it, grinding the Gold Saucer for the Omni Slash most definitely would’ve seen a hole punched in my TV. And for as much as it subverts a lot of my least favourite JRPG tropes, it still features some of them in full force, like random encounters.

It’s flawed, but it’s high points hit high and there’s a good reason why Square has milked this game like few others in their catalogue.

“ You came out to put your memories behind you and they're still right there in front of you.”

This is my second time playing Firewatch and I can without a doubt promise you it will not be my last.

The story of a man so wrought with grief and despair that he ventures out into the secluded wilderness so he can try and forget what he’s tried to leave behind. While there he meets another lookout on his radio named Delilah and they get wrapped up in a strange and twisty mystery.

The stunning visuals only compliment the already perfect story and create an environment that is just as serene as it is haunting.

The gameplay elements are surprisingly great for something so simple as a walking simulator. It’s very straightforward, but how it’s implemented is great imo.

Overall, Firewatch is simply fantastic in every way possible. A beautifully animated intimate and introspective game filled with just as much mystery as heart. Definitely a high recommendation from me.

It’s not peak fiction, but you can see it from here.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon — referred to as Yakuza 7 from here on — was pitched to me by a couple of friends as one of the greatest games ever made. That’s a tough sell, largely because I’m a miserable dickhead who seriously (don’t laugh!) writes about video games. Putting forth anything as being one of the best is a fucking gamble, because you’re not playing with good odds. There are a lot of works out there, and only a couple get to be the best. It tends to make it hurt worse when, almost inevitably, it’s not actually one of the best; you get your hopes up, and then the work doesn’t live up to the inflated goals you set for it, and then you’re left feeling disappointed.

Luckily, though, that’s not the case here. I don’t think Yakuza 7 is as good as I was told it was, but it’s certainly still pretty good. Great, even! There are some pacing and writing issues that drag it down, but what’s here is legitimately impressive. I don’t really care for RPGs as a genre, and I especially don’t care for games that ask for thirty to forty hours of my time, so the fact that this is still scoring as high as it is may as well be a sign of the end times. The four horsemen are a yakuza, an ex-nurse, an office worker, and a triad boss.

It’s immensely funny that, in an era where the largest development studios are playing it as safe as they possibly can, RGG Studios decided that Yakuza is no longer an action game. It’s such a ridiculous fucking idea. Some positive reception to an April Fool’s joke was all they needed to go all-in on this? What the fuck? You aren’t supposed to make games like this. And yet, they did; and yet, it works. It works really well, actually. There’s a bit of a problem that AoE skills are absurdly good compared to their single-target little brothers; obviously the single-target skills are king in boss fights, but those are pretty far and few between. Autobattling still takes a while and uses up precious items, and low-level mooks don't run away even when you've got a massive numbers advantage over them; most of the street fights are little more than time wasters, ultimately. Expect to spend the majority of the endgame running away from random encounters simply because they don't pay out in resources more than they take.

Ichiban is a wonderful character, and it's frankly no surprise that many people have latched onto him as hard as they have. Most of the cast is strong, really. I certainly wasn't expecting this to handle social issues as well as it did. It's more than a little hamfisted at times — discussions about "gray zones" and "bleaching white" tend to lean on wordplay a bit too heavily — but it's a pretty solid takedown of blind idealism. Bleach Japan's goals sound, from the outset, to be pretty reasonable. It's only once you dig in and find out what they're actually working towards that it becomes apparent that they're interested solely in enforcing laws, not in ensuring that people benefit from the law. Sure, women being forced to turn to sex work is bad. Homeless people not being able to find a safe spot to sleep is bad. Yakuza gangsters shouldn't be running the streets. The solution, though, is not to deport them, arrest them, and incite a gang war in the hopes they all kill themselves off, respectively. The gray zones are astronomically far from perfect, but blindly adhering to already-oppressive laws serves only to worsen the problem. It's rare to find a work with a positive view on criminal activity that isn't individualistic "fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want" id slop, but rather calls into question the legitimacy of the laws being broken.

I do have a problem with the writing in that it feels mean, sometimes. It happens often enough to be noticeable, and it clashes hard with a lot of what's written elsewhere. Nanba, for example, never really stops being a "homeless guy", even after he manages to get two(!!!) different houses that he stays in. The game just keeps reminding you how bad he smells, because he's homeless: he can debuff enemies because he stinks; he can breathe fire because his breath is just that potent; he can revive allies because none of them want him to give them CPR. It's weird. I don't really feel a sense of malice here, because the game is otherwise pretty fair to homeless people — certainly more than most, as low of a bar as that is. It's more like the game needs a smack upside the head and for someone to tell it that it's not being funny. I feel like it'd smarten up pretty quick.

Yakuza 7 has a bit of a habit. It’s definitely not a good habit, but I’m a little hesitant to call it a bad habit. Yakuza 7 just really loves killing off characters. Whenever a character’s arc comes to a close, they just get merked. The Geomijul goon who shakes down the bar owners? Shot to death. Arakawa? Shot to death. Hoshino? Shot to death. Ogasawara? Probably shot to death. Characters just start dropping like flies the second that they’ve served their narrative purpose. I guess I can understand it, considering that this is ultimately a game about organized crime — nobody walks away from Goodfellas wondering what was up with all of the indiscriminate murder — but it makes it a little difficult to stomach the feel-good ending that follows in the wake of such a bloodbath. Yakuza as a franchise is kind of renowned for being over the top, so this might just be a case of me going to a steakhouse and complaining that they don’t have enough vegetarian options, but I think there’s a bit too much melo in this melodrama.

Where it really came to a head for me was in the final stretch of cutscenes — as good a place as any for it to come to a head, I suppose. After going through a lengthy boss sequence, and then a second boss sequence, and then a third boss sequence, Ichiban finally manages to corner his young master. Masato pulls a gun, points it at Ichiban, and then points it at himself; his life as he knows it is over, and all of his hard work has been pulled out from under him, and he sees no reason to go on. Ichiban, who’s spent the entire game desperately trying to make this fucking stupid asshole see the light, breaks down in tears. He tells Masato that he would have done anything for him, that Masato needs to start over, that he believes Masato can turn a new leaf and be a better person. He caps it off with the line “please don’t make me watch my brother die”, which is so insanely good that I’m getting choked up again writing it out. It’s a phenomenal sequence. It’s written really well, it’s paced really well, and it works. It works better than any single moment in the preceding thirty hours.

Masato then gets stabbed by a lackey and bleeds out. Ichiban punctuates the moment with a slow-motion “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”. I roll my eyes because the game is now being stupid. Take it down a notch. You had something really good going, with the whole “choosing to be a better person after spending twenty years fucking up” angle. You don’t need to spoil it by going full soap opera, pretending like you’re gonna kill off the character after all of that. Just roll these obviously fake credits, and show us the scene where Masato is out of the hospital, and — oh, no, you actually killed him off. Jesus. Really? What a waste. I can’t really articulate why this complete bloodbath bothers me so much if not for the fact that it all feels at odds with the fact that this is supposed to be a happy ending. I guess when you’ve got a franchise that’s been running for this long without the universe being reset, it does you well to just kill off as many named characters as you can; people who play the next game won’t be asking where the old characters are if they know that they’re all turning into compost.

A severe difficulty spike right near the end also necessitates a good dose of grinding to get to a point where you can (un)comfortably clear it, which doesn't help the pacing much. You're more-or-less forced to complete the battle arena at least once, and then subsequently forced into the Kamurocho sewers to farm Invested Vagabonds. It's certainly not as egregious as some other RPGs when it comes to how much grinding you're expected to do, but it's still a hefty ask for a game that's already about thirty hours when you're going straight down the critical path. Add in the obscene amount of substories and minigames — some of which are great, some of which very much aren't — and this is a long game. I was definitely starting to lose patience with it by the end.

It's not perfect, but it's not far from it. There's a lot here to love. I think if this had ended somewhere around the halfway point, I wouldn't have a single bad thing to say. The first ten or so hours of Yakuza 7 are masterful, and the remaining minimum twenty are only pretty solid. It's easy to be a lot worse than this.

Don't piss me off. I'm close to leveling up and you look like just enough XP.

This is a review for the campaign. It's like I've watched my childhood die right before my eyes. I unabashedly love the COD campaigns. They're simple stupid fun that I can just turn my brain off and play. This however was anything but that. It was Warzone, nothing but Warzone. It had a shit story, kill streaks, Field upgrades. THATS NOT A CAMPAIGN!!! COD:Black Ops Cold War was the last good campaign and I'll stand by that.

The multiplayer is outstanding though. 4.5/5 I'm having so much fun playing it. Hardpoint is fantastic, the maps are phenomenal. It's all great in that department.

I kept hearing that this was some sort of secret Elder Scrolls-killer, a cult classic, “Oblivion on steroids” it even says on the back of the box. And I gotta say in all honesty: No it is not.

The graphics and animations look worse than a lot of PS2 games. Seriously, some of this shit looks like it belongs in GTA 3. Yet despite that it runs at a framerate of about 20 most of the time and still constantly freezes and stutters, rendering the game almost unplayable. Combat sucks. Attacking is incredibly imprecise, the attack animations are floaty and stilted, you look like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber, and whatever you’re using, swords, spears, clubs, your attacks have dismal range, which is especially infuriating when you’re trying to chase down something that keeps running away from you like an archer. When either you or your enemies get hit, you jitter awkwardly in place and there’s a low res blood effect that looks like it’s from an early version of After Effects, and bafflingly, the sound when you hit enemies, again with anything, swords, clubs, whatever, is a stock cartoon punch sound effect, like something out of a Nostalgia Critic video, as if it was a placeholder sound that they just forgot to replace before the final release. There’s also a backstep with stupid long i-frames that’s easy to abuse and isn’t even animated, just has you rubber band backward. The enemy AI can also be really stupid, and they’ll sometimes just sit there throwing attacks while you’re out of range. Under normal circumstances, I found most enemies were fodder, I found myself getting screwed over by the janky mechanics a lot of the time, but when things lined up (aka, I abuse the backstep), regular enemies could be dispatched by the dozens with ease. But then it’ll hit you with these really abrupt difficulty spikes and suddenly throw you up against enemies far higher a level than you that can kill you in two or even just one hit. The game also theoretically has an open ended main quest structure, but the level and reputation requirements for each area roughly constrict you to doing them in a certain order unless you plan on grinding insubordinately. There are debuffs too, which I think are supposed to immobilize you, based on the animation, but you’re still able to move through them so it’s you sliding around in the animation of you standing there, covering your eyes or something. Quest design is basic at best and repetitive at worst. Most quests are just you talking to a guy, then he sends you to talk to another guy, who sends you to another, then another, then another, and it just keeps repeating ad lapidum, until it culminates in you being sent to fetch or kill something. The whole experience is also buggy as hell. Animation glitches, audio glitches, several moments had me or my horse getting stuck on nothing and having to reload a save.

To top it all off, the writing is awful. On the surface the story is basic, find the mcguffins, save your oddly sexualized sister. In practice, it mostly just boils down to exposition, you being told things that you’re almost never explicitly shown. And it feels like every character is drunk, as characters make some of the dumbest, most baffling and counter intuitive decisions I’ve seen in a game like this. The dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like they wanted to make it old timey, but couldn’t be bothered to do the research, so they just threw words like “pray” and “verily” into sentences at random. The delivery makes it worse, this voice acting is some of the most horrendous I’ve ever heard, I have to mention a particular npc in the Japanese part of the map, who cycles between like three different accents in the same conversation. Then again, you’re probably not even going to hear all of it though, because the volume is hugely inconsistent, I had frequent cases of the music drowning out the characters voices.

This game is a complete disaster. But I hate to end on a completely negative note, so if there’s one positive I can think of off the top of my head, I found it amusing that bandits had a pocket sand attack.

A short while ago I read that article about Naughty Dog and how they literally suppress use of the word “fun” within the studio. I think it paints a picture of a company so up its own ass, so out of touch with the medium they’re working in, and I think it stands in stark contrast to a game like Tekken, which is so unabashedly a video game above all else. It’s combat is refined and technical, yet accessible enough that a new player can jump in and jazz up combos on the spot. It’s got a full roster with all my favourites from Tekken 3 back. It’s full of customization options, side modes like the arcade mode, Devil Within (which isn’t as good as Tekken 3’s Tekken Force, but it’s still a fun little bonus) and it even comes with the first three Tekken games. It’s so full of content, creativity and fun-loving character, and I love it.












It was also neat of them to give the final boss a move that straight up just wins him the round, fucking Jinpachi with your fuckass stun and your fireball.

I got our old PS2 working again, so I decided to pick a couple titles up from a retro games store near me. The guy at the counter told me this was one of his favourite games and said he was excited to know what I thought of it. That’s probably going to be an awkward conversation.

The good first, it’s a damn incredible looking game for its time. It honestly looks better graphically than some early PS3 games, and it’s running at 60 frames a second? Damn the PS2 was a good ass system. The general feel of hitting things is good, and the ragdoll physics are pretty funny. Kicking dudes into groups of other dudes like bowling pins was always fun, and watching your character do a cartwheel and flop around when he dies always made me laugh and softened the blow a bit. Other than that though, this game isn’t very good. Movement is sluggish, made worse by an automatic lock-on that means you can never really control what you’re aiming at. The timings for attacks and combos are very weird and unreliable. You basically have to throw the whole combo before the first hit even lands, so you can’t cancel out of it if it doesn’t connect. But on top of that, this is one of only a handful of games to use the dualshock’s pressure sensitive buttons for some combos and attacks, and I’m not talking some complex Tekken-style inputs here, I mean basic attack combos. They’re hard to pull off correctly at such a fast pace, so fighting is really awkward with you just finnicking around, trying to get the correct inputs and throwing out wrong moves left and right. All of this I found led to a lot of cheap deaths where I’m finnicking around trying to get combos to connect properly, and I just get screwed over because of it. It was especially bad during the boss fights. In addition to that, the game has a leveling system where you get points to spend on your stats, except you only get points for enemies you land the final blow on, so you have cases of your AI partners stealing your kills on you and you not having enough points to keep up with the escalating difficulty curve. A particularly frustrating incident was when I was fighting the first boss Echidna (who, by the way, straight up uses Eddy Gordo animations), and after dying to her again and again and again, I get her health down, about to land the final hit and….Volt kills her. There goes my big bonus.

This isn’t a particularly good game, but if nothing else, between the hilarious ragdoll physics and that incomprehensible, out of left field Nomura writing, I was laughing for much of the time. And it’s short. Even with all the trial and error and frustration, I beat the campaign with Sion in like a night.

I feel a bit guilty still giving this game a rating this high. I’ve become really disillusioned to Bethesda in recent years, and this game still has huge, at times game ruining issues that they still just have not bothered to fix across any of its remasters and rereleases. I don’t care how good the water looks, I just want to be able to complete the fucking Bloodline quest damn it. And yet I can’t deny how this game still manages to suck me in. It’s so massive in scope, so dense with things to see and do, so many choices and customization options available to you, and with an atmosphere that just takes me back to a different age. It takes me back not just to that era of gaming, but also to that era of internet culture, all the animations and machinimas from people like Freddiew and Psychicpebbles. The fandom and excitement this game garnered was real and it was hard not to get sucked into.

Now THIS is the Devil May Cry I’ve heard so much about. Fast paced and full of style, energy and character. The combat sandbox is fluid, satisfying and allows for a fair bit of improvisation. I do think the style system is a bit rigid, I would’ve loved to combo the Trickster’s aerial warp with the Swordmaster’s aerial combos, but even as is the system has a lot of depth, and each style offers something for every playstyle. Against that is a diverse assortment of creative enemies that get more and more challenging as you progress, and not through just reskins with health and damage turned up, they’ll actually behave in more challenging ways, they’ll flank you, they’ll rebound and counter attack, etc. Dante himself is such a goofy, shit-talking, pizza loving frat boy, someone who loves to show off, perfect for a game about kicking everything’s ass in the most stylish way possible. Vergil as well is a great contrast, cold, self serious, he and Dante play off each other well. The story itself isn’t some masterpiece, but it is well structured and implemented in the context of the game, with Vergil, getting strong enough to beat him, hanging there as your ultimate goal through everything.

As great as this game is, I did still have a couple flaws with it. A couple of missions I found really obtuse, #15 in particular I had to look up a guide for after running around like a headless chicken for a half hour. The camera, while a vast improvement on 1 and especially 2 solely for the fact that you can actually adjust it this time, did still sometimes dick me over, sometimes it was in too tight and I couldn’t see all the enemies around me, sometimes it would drift into an awkward spot in the middle of the action, when I couldn’t focus on adjusting it back. I also thought some of the bosses were a touch weaker than others, Arkham was an especially underwhelming runner up to the true final boss.

As a whole, this game was great. I can easily see how it set the standard for this type of game and in many ways still does. I’m looking forward to playing DMC4 and 5 somewhere down the line.