Kinda pushes the limits of how little they can do and still make one of these games. I'm too attached to Kiryu and the world to dislike it, and the way it ends nails both the climactic finale hype and good emotional heartstring-pulling, but there's not much leading up to that. Most of the story is busy inventing reasons to shuttle you to interacting with the minigames and side activities they made, which definitely feels contrived and makes pacing a little wonky. Lots of running back and forth for the sake of it with little happening at the destinations. Still, it has its charms. Yakuza is just good by default. If anything Infinite Wealth looks like it's going to be overstuffed to the point that I might miss this bite-sized adventure.

Also this is a niche complaint but I played this in full Japanese, continuing my language learning, and for some reason pausing during cutscenes now hides the subtitles and there's no text log, unlike Lost Judgment. Very annoying since I still need to look some words up or take the occasional complicated line a little slower.

It's so hard to rate this as a whole. The updated salmon run is perhaps the best co-op experience I've ever had in my life. PvP is an annoying mess of terrible maps, frustrating matchmaking, and no effort at balance at all. The campaign plays it safe, but it's pretty enjoyable. Tableturf is a mode that exists in the game that they spent time making. Ultimately I think the movement and feel of the game is the best it's ever been, but in every other detail they're coasting on how Splatoon's core gameplay and aesthetics have always been incredible while messing up just about every detail it's possible to mess up and falling short of even modest expectations with every update. I'm still playing way too much of it.

A fun concept executed terribly. The roguelike direction is a neat idea for Splatoon and it carries enough strengths of the series that I can't truly hate it, with strong aesthetics, music, and core movement that generally feels nice.

Yet it's entirely underbaked and disappointing. Floors repeat immediately, the boss count is too low, and the story borders on nonexistent. Cute character moments for Pearl and Marina are all we get, with Acht as much of a non-character as the silent protagonist. The only variety comes from the weapon builds, but even those feel too limited. Pearl drone builds playing the game for you are just boring, the scoring system based on matching chip colors is annoying (sometimes no matter how much you reroll it just won't give you what you need, and some chips do literally nothing if not comboing with chips of different colors), on and on.

I love roguelikes but this one is just tedious, especially because there's nothing to make the early floors interesting (no way to play them better to scale harder, or manage resources, etc) and no scaling challenges after beating the game. The latter is especially a problem because runs take about half an hour and it's not all that hard to just win on your 2nd or 3rd run. Being only given the challenge to win without permanent upgrades is insulting when you already won with few, and several hacks unlock whole new mechanics or make you more likely to get synergistic builds, which might make the game easier but also make it more fun. All you are left with is a big task list to do it again and again, if you have the patience. What happened with the Splatoon devs?