Sluggish flight sequences and hot ass platforming that feels like your character is 1,000 pounds while your analog sticks are burning out. I appreciate that this isn't all "edgy macho gritlord" like the previous few games were, but it also totally removes the bouncy fluidity which made these so fun to play in the first place. Flying around in the little contained overworld sections is actually kind of sick, art design for them is also occasionally rad - The Brink and Far Drop and all that are incredible ideas - but I'm sick of pretending that games which were impressive for their hardware are still impressive when ported to more powerful consoles. They aren't. This, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Resident Evil: Revelations - like sorry, don't want to play them! Not awful, but pointless and shoddy nonetheless. A bore.

i, for one, am thoroughly appalled that this series would ever have the audacity to feature a player character who isn't a totally morally righteous person. this is a travesty. completely out of touch

and the gameplay? it's such a shameless ripoff of the last acclaimed silent hill project that was released. what the fuck were they thinking?

i'm going to go return to silent hill 2 now - the most subtle and least blunt horror game ever created. at least that game doesn't have sticky notes with "bullying" written on them (granted, this one doesn't either, but that's not what i heard from the people who didn't play it, so it must be true)

This game feels like a student project more than a commercially released game. The assets all feel super low budget (and not in the charming way), and the game basically only does the bare minimum required to be Pac-Man, with a few extremely undercooked mechanics added in an attempt to make it even slightly unique. I seriously wonder why Infogrames even bothered putting this out when they had already inherited the obviously superior Adventures in Time from Hasbro Interactive anyways.

Of course, it's still Pac-Man, and assuming you don't have literally any other way to play Pac-Man, it's fine... is what I would say if this game didn't have the worst sound design known to man. I seriously have no idea how you manage to fuck up the sound design for Pac-Man of all things. Every other game from the past 40 years lifts its sound straight from the original arcade machine, but Quest for the Golden Maze, with it's very high production value, has decided to grace us with completely new sound effects. And surprisingly they all sound like ass. This alone is a feat so impressive that I don't really think I could call this game anything other than "bad".

We are about a fourth of the way through 2024, and so far this port of Resident Evil might be the only game I have played to completetion this year. I'm at the final stretch of getting my Bachelor's degree, so in the rare times I can actually sit down and play a game, it's typically something I can turn my brain off to while talking with friends. I have played the original Resident Evil games enough to be able run through them in my sleep, so I occasionally pop one in when I have a couple of hours to spare. However this particular version of RE1 has alluded me for a while, so I decided to give it a spin AND MAN, did I love this!

Beyond some of the more DS-specific additions, the minor tweaks Deadly Silence makes to the gameplay of Resident Evil probably makes it the best playing of any of the classic tank controlled entries.

You can do a 180° turn, the knife is bound to the left bumper and no longer takes up an inventory slot, you can reload mid-clip without having to go to the menu, you can switch auto-aim targets, and can SKIP DOOR ANIMATIONS AMD CUTSCENES! In terms of base gameplay, the is without a doubt the best classic RE games has ever played. It's so good that I'm legit angry that CAPCOM never did similar ports for RE2 or RE3.

The new Rebirth mode has a bunch of curveballs for returning fans like me. This includes stuff like new puzzles and remixed enemy encounters that now include multiple enemy variants in the same room, which never happened before! The only thing that isn't a straight upgrade (outside of the lower resolution and more compressed FMVs and backgrounds) is the music, which just sounds a bit to tinny to me.

It has always baffled me that CAPCOM hasn't attempted to make their classic entries more available. As cool as the remakes are, I don't believe they actually replace the originals (even if I think REmake is better than RE1), and people should be able to play them without having to resort to becoming a fucking nerd and setting up an emulator.

I know gamers think that just cause it's easy to set up that everyone could just emulate stuff, but I'm not gonna lie, if it wasn't for things like the PS1 Classics on the PS3, there would be no way my 12 year old ass would have gone through the effort of setting up EPSXE just to play RE1 back in 2010. Having a more convenient way for people to play older stuff is how new folks typically find classic games like these, and it's a real shame that older games are just left to languish on older hardware, which only really benefits folks selling this stuff on the second hand market to dorks with too much money to spend.

Rant aside, Deadly Silence is so good that it elevated a game that I only sorta liked enough to revisit occasionally, to one that I am itching to jump back into again! IT'S SO GOOD, DUDE!

Spooky and silly in just about equal measure, with a story so cockamamie you can't help but be roped in - guffawing at each sharp 180 degree turn into insanity, paired with a sincerely scary atmosphere that reeks with the stench of death. Both of which compliment each other surprisingly well. Just as ludicrous as the "dumb era" REs, while also still being able to maintain its status as a horror game first and foremost. The map, enemy, and character variety here is awesome - with good puzzles, music, and level design that feel right at home with the early RE games. Ugly lighting and dastardly tank controls be damned - this is actually pretty excellent. Every ounce superior to Resident Evil 4, and tbh one of the best titles in the series period.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

"6 Ways to Make Your Life Better"
"Why do I feel like this? I've never felt like this before."

The most recent entry into the "Just because your favorite YouTuber hates it, doesn't mean you have to" canon is - unsurprisingly - an honest, raw, mostly unflinching portrayal of modern sensibilities surrounding depression. This isn't easy at all for me to talk about, but I lost my mother very suddenly to the deadliest cancer in the world five months ago - and as of writing my elderly father has been fighting for his life in the hospital for over a month. My life has seldom ever been objectively in a lower point than it is right now - but even before all that I've had my struggles with depression, and this spoke to me on a level that I can't say many other pieces of media have in years. This isn't always as subtle as the glory days of SH (sure as shit beats Downpour there though), and the repeated suicide hotline screen is rather goofy; but as a series die-hard for over a decade I can safely say that this is an exciting return to form. The way Marvel fans cheer at cameos was me when Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka's names showed up in the credits.

I've seen criticisms about how disjointed and blunt this feels - but honestly there's no real tidy, clean-cut way to talk about this stuff. It should be complicated, it should be messy, it should be difficult to take at times because this isn't an easy subject to reckon with at all - and denying that fact is more dangerous than any alleged misdeeds in this imo. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of bulletpoints this ticks (even if some are handled better than others) but one aspect in particular I found to be strong here is how it depicts the looming sense of inevitably which pervades depression - I feel good now but when will it come back? Oh fuck is it going to come back?? It innovates just enough to neither alienate the recognizable series framework nor just lazily rehash old formulas.

Ito's new monster is aces, Yamaoka's music rules, art design is off-the-chain, characters are memorable, graphics are great, and like any good Silent Hill its themes are complex and haunting. I have my gripes but after years of misfires and a presumed demise of this once-proud series, I couldn't be happier with how this tight and chilling fucker turned out. I've waited so long to be able to say the phrase "The new Silent Hill is good" again. If this didn't work for you, that's okay and no one can take that away from you - this is hardly an area that has universal solutions, mental health is a spectrum after all - but for me it was clear-eyed and excellent. Prefer a lot of this to Resident Evil 7.

It’s incredible that the Yakuza Like A Dragon series exists in this form at all. It’s really easy to discuss these games as a simple comeback story where it was saved from (Western) obscurity by grassroots efforts rallying around 0, but the fact that this insane momentum was met by RGG Studio changing the protagonist and turning it into a triple-A turn-based JRPG when the studio has no prior experience making those and conventional wisdom says the genre is utter sales poison is staggering. The last several mainline games demonstrate a remarkable and admirable disinterest in providing fans with what they expected or wanted, which is doubly impressive when the series is so iterative by nature.

Infinite Wealth iterates a lot on its predecessor, especially. It’s still a turn-based JRPG, and its changes are really, really cool. 7 felt like an experiment that had some great moments but didn’t cohere, an exemplification of the divine mathematics that underpin Dragon Quest and the travails that come when they are fucked with too much. Infinite Wealth still has a major debt to DQ (and some tinges of Chrono Trigger-style enemy shuffling) but manages to be much more unique and self-assured.

For starters, the exp curve is just phenomenally well-considered this time. Gone are the days of 7’s stupid-ass back-to-back grinds, and the scaling for exp and job levels means that it’s very easy to catch up and it can be surprisingly difficult to overlevel. In my playthrough, I kept half of the cast with their default jobs and I had the other half level a side job to 30 before swapping back to default. Team OG ended the game with job levels in the forties, and Team FAFO ended the game with a cumulative sixty job levels. I didn’t feel punished for doing either, as each job kit feels well-rounded and useful even without getting into the insane potential added by skill inheritance, but leveling side jobs felt breezy.

Beyond just the math, job design and skills got so much love - each new job has a really cool and distinct aesthetic, a really fun playstyle, and AoE attacks are way more interesting than they were 7. Circle AoEs might have one edge centered on the targeted enemy, making them finickier for selecting a full group but granting finer control over who else to include, granting damage bonuses for initiating the attack from far away, or having a long line start and end at interesting points. Cone-shaped AoEs are a lot more useful-feeling in this game when their far edge can be centered on the targeted enemy instead of the front tip. It all adds up to make lining up attacks require thought and positioning, which is really nice.

Being able to move around is the most transformational part of the combat changes, easily, but it’s part of a host of other changes that all feel a little small on their own but add up fast. There’s now a proximity bonus for basic attacks that adds in extra hits if they’re made from up close, and getting a proximity hit from behind guarantees crits. Enemy AI is aware of this, and the window to get back attacks is often fleeting at the start of the player’s turn. Having autoattacks be gimped if the party member is pathed far away or wants to hit a specific far-away enemy is frustrating, and there are three major ways to circumvent this - the simplest is to just use a skill to close the gap and do reliable damage.

They can also pick up an environmental object and use that - being able to walk up to ‘em means that they’re an actually valid part of the player’s strategy this time, and on top of their positioning benefits they're a great way to hit elemental weaknesses on people who don’t have certain skills. Otherwise, they can stand nearby another party member and do a combo attack that applies their weapon effects, does full damage at range, and gives their partner a bit of MP back on hit as well. These latter two options are useful and have a variety of obvious applications, but still come with drawbacks - if somebody’s basic attacks do knife or gun damage, then using a ground weapon will override that. Sometimes proximity attacks do way more damage than a combo strike or weapon attack, or the other person in a combo attack will hit an enemy’s elemental resistance and do almost no damage.

On top of all this, there is now a visible knockback indicator for attacks, which adds in yet another layer on top of all of this: knocking an enemy down into a party member does a lot of damage and applies their weapon effect, but knocking them into another enemy does a good bit of AoE, but knocking a large enemy into a wall scores a full knockdown other party members can exploit that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Enemies who block can have their guard broken by either doing a grab-type attack or hitting them from behind; a grab will permanently break it, a back attack will just pierce it for that one attack (and any followups while the enemy is on the ground). This is all then further compounded by the incessant shuffling and jockeying for space that enemies do - every consideration the player will make is based on reading the situation as it exists and trying to capitalize on split-second opportunities. It’s fully turn-based, but it has the pace and feel of an action fight, while retaining the positional focus, comboing, and okizeme of the series’ beat-em-up roots. It’s really fucking good.

The standout is Kiryu’s default job, which exemplifies almost all of this. Style swapping changes the properties of his basic attacks in cool ways on its own; Rush lets him make two weaker attacks per turn, giving him strong AoE or letting him score a guaranteed KO on a weakling before focusing fire on somebody else, Beast lets him do grabs without spending MP and amps up his ability to use ground weapons, and Brawler is the “vanilla” set of attacks that then let him do heat actions under the traditional series rules - be nearby a specific environmental object or otherwise fulfill certain criteria, get into proximity with them, then ace a quick QTE. All three styles get additional action game flair by having their proximity attacks have a short mash or timing prompt, which sells Kiryu both as somebody with a foot firmly planted in real-time and also as a monstrous DPS machine who feels awesome to control.

This mechanical empowerment is contrasted by his narrative role. Ichiban’s stylization as a JRPG hero sells him as somebody strengthened by his friends, but it results in a constant bitter tinge when Kiryu is in the squad. He didn’t always need help, and the character writing does a lot of really satisfying stuff with this disempowerment and reliance for such a stoic, badass lone wolf. Infinite Wealth is a game defined by dichotomies like this - obviously it’s a story split between two countries and two leads, but its themes are equally defined by parallels and mirrors. Everything ultimately comes back to purification or corruption, light and dark, and the terrors and delights of both the past and the future.

It doubles down on everything that makes these games what they are while simultaneously being confident enough to downplay so many of the series’ touchstones, giving the game a feel kinda like a concert that’s half playing the hits and half showing tracks from their next album. The first time a jacket is dramatically removed to reveal the body underneath is an unthinking act of kindness on Ichiban’s behalf, performed without any intent to fight or to show off, but when the player sees the world through Kiryu’s eyes, he can’t help but see ghosts everywhere he goes. These themes of past and future cycles make it hard to not feel a bit of metatext in this being the first full game released after Nagoshi left, and this “changing of the guard” plot can spark worries of being a retread of 7’s themes - and while certain plot elements certainly evoke it, there’s always a knowing tweak to it. 7 is a game about starting over again, of living through a storm and planting seeds for the future once the rubble’s been swept away. Infinite Wealth is more about perpetuating or changing the cycles everyone inhabits - of seeing what’s been done to them and the people before them and trying to break, fix, or continue things.

The returning characters are all well-considered and, equally importantly, most feel unexpected. Few of them feel obligatory, and those that do are given angles and elements that keep them surprising and cathartic nonetheless. Plenty of them have been chewed up and spit back out, some have come back stronger and better, some are indolent, and some lucky few stroll back into the picture feeling just as magnetic and lovable as they were all those years ago. Seeing the game take full advantage of its position as the ninth mainline title in a series stretching back almost twenty years is just as satisfying as seeing how it fantastically it intersects fantastically with the character writing writ large.

Yamai manages to escape the “Majima clone” allegations with aplomb, with a great design, fantastic presence (Koyasu the GOAT), and a satisfyingly mercurial-but-coherent role in the narrative. With the exception of Saeko, whose entire character frustratingly feels like an extension of Ichiban’s arc, literally every single party member is given a lot more to chew on this time. The gap between December 2019 and November 2023 reshuffled a lot and the status quo shifts give people unexpected and lovely positions and angles to view the world. Each little skit and friendship bingo conversation is consistently funny and interesting, and the new party members are literally all bangers. Special shout outs to the job unlock cutscenes creating the implication that Chitose has a Nico Robin-style hyperactive imagination that she does not ever share with anybody; that being said, Tomizawa and Chitose are both incredibly endearing and have a lot of great dramatic and comedic chops. Tomi gets more focus in the front half and Chitose the back, which gives her a bit of an edge in terms of immediate retrospective emotional edge, but both are excellent.

Tomizawa’s arc is tied up with the Barracudas, who are kind of a nexus of the game’s more annoying issues. The gang has a really strong and sympathetic hook that is connected to pretty venomous social commentary, but they rapidly recede from institutional relevance and, just like 7, the themes of homelessness, discrimination, and critiquing the lived effects of Japan’s comically harsh anti-yakuza laws (making it basically impossible to have a normal life certainly makes it effective for killing recruitment, but guys seeking a way out certainly have their work cut out for them…) feel under-discussed after the first act. Additionally, while Yakuza has always had a heightened tone, there are times when, regardless of the player’s tolerances, there will be moments that stretch credulity; especially when combat is done with silly costumes. Sometimes it feels weird to talk about America’s crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing cost of life only to then beat up three Hungry Hungry Homeless.

These are issues, and they deserve mention, but simultaneously, this is the ninth mainline RGG game. Every issue raised so far has been present to some degree or another in quite literally every single game in the franchise. They’ll affect enjoyment to varying extents, of course, but… I wouldn’t get too mad at a fish for being bad at climbing trees, or at least when I’m neck-deep I’d think I know what pitfalls I'd fallen into.

For all the love heaped on the character writing, the main villains really falter, which is unexpected for this series. There’s good villains and bad villains, and certainly sometimes they contrive excuses for a final boss when punching out a businessman would be unsatisfying, but RGG Studio’s been on a hot streak for antagonists for a good while now. The antagonistic forces in this game feel more like an exercise in thematics than they are actually characters. It’s cool to see a contemporary political thriller manage to make themes of corruption, despoiling paradise, and battling against nature feel grounded within a real-world context and not feel too hacky about it, but despite their screentime they have a terminal lack of real presence or sauce. The villains’ big dramatic showcases pale in comparison to both the quiet and loud moments that accompany their underlings and frenemies. They do create good moments by contriving the protagonists into circumstances that showcase their amazing traits and even better voice actors, but the monologues and physical performances shown off could be bounced off somebody I actually give a shit about and I’d be into it even more than I am.

The cutscene direction, as implied above, is excellent. The stunt coordinator for every game since 6 cut his teeth on Mark DaCascos hood classic Drive (1997), a shitload of tokusatsu, and a little old game called Devil May Cry 3, and it lends the cutscene brawls a sense of physicality and flair that a lot of game cutscenes weirdly can’t do very well. The dramatic scenes have astonishingly good blocking and composition. For how many cutscenes are in this game, they find so many great camera angles, poses, and little vocal quavers to give far more weight to far more than one would expect.

It’s easy to gush about this game, and while it has its flaws and doesn’t always favorably stack up to past games, it feels like a chore to discuss them. Sure, Ichiban got a better moment in 7, Kiryu’s finest hour is still (regrettably) the final scene in Gaiden, and the enemy shuffling just inherently means that the combat’s chaotic, uncontrollable nature will create frustrating situations and missed attacks. It’s maybe not as focused as some other Yakuza games? (I mean, not really, lmao, the only games you might be able to argue that for are 2 and 6, and buddy, 2 is not as focused as you remember it being and 6 is just not interesting.) But at the same time, I don’t really give a fuck.

I love Yakuza most when it’s maximalist, audacious, willing to totally fuck with your expectations, and unafraid to be messy. That’s what I associate the series with and that’s what I want with each new game. That’s what I got here. I was so worried that Kiryu’s return would feel cheap, I was worried that losing Nagoshi would rob the games of an ineffable soul, and Gaiden put the fear of God in me that they would retain the godawful grinds that 7 had (if not double down.) Some mistakes it makes are certainly frustrating and I hope that one day the series will move on.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to not root for the game anyways. A game like this is so special to me. It never treats its past as a burden, and it plants one foot after another into an uncertain future with confidence. You can’t always cure stupid, but the way it endlessly strives towards a better and brighter path, unafraid to experience the sad, bitter, silly, and sweet in all its forms… it’s nice to see a game’s ethos resemble its admirable hero so much.

Is it close to the Silent Hills of old? No not particularly.

Does it absolutely stumble on getting across some of its ideas and concepts? Yeah.

Are the chase sequences a bit rough? Yeah.

I still really fucked with this and everything it was doing. It gave me a dose of what I've wanted from Silent Hill for a long time, it had a vision and it sees that vision all the way through while trying to mix things up a bit.

I think it handles its themes of trauma and abuse trapping someone emotionally within cycles of self destructive and self distancing behaviors causing lashing out at anything that harms the ego and whatever normalcy one can cling onto fairly well.

I feel like even if it was a bit heavy handed at times (the beginning really tries to hammer home how depressed Anita is in ways that feel really corny) I cannot ignore the earnestness and the willingness to just fuckin try something here. The art direction, the atmosphere, the music, the tones.

No it's not Silent Hill 3 but it worked for me and captured me in ways that I really didn't expect. That last chunk of the game really fuckin hit me.

MGS4 decimated all the symbols and mannerisms of the franchise, until there was nothing left to enjoy. Phantom Pain exists in a completely irrelevant space, it is a game that has no "story to tell", because all the stories are already established.

More post-modern than MGS2, it serves to prove that Metal Gear never had a "fourth wall" and canonize the player as a in-universe character. We are a phantom that repeats the steps of the legend, but we are the legend. Venom Snake doesn't take more actions than the player would, because he does what Big Boss would do... and the player has already been Big Boss -twice-.

You are Venom, Venom is Big Boss, Big Boss is Snake, Snake was Solid Snake and Raiden. Choose who you want to be today, choose the game you want to play. Let it die but with hope for the future.