THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON
The frontrunner for the RGG game with the least amount of play testing done. Yakuza: Dead Souls is frustrating. It's not good, despite being a strange case study for the flexibility of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series and its characters. You can take these characters and place them in the most outlandish situations, but the tonal harmony the series really mastered makes it all feel believably in character in how they react to it. It's hard to take much of the game seriously when it's made clear from the get-go this is taken with light ridiculous fun. Playing this was initially interesting because there's some unique stuff here for fans of the series to experience first-hand. This is the first time you play as Majima before Yakuza 0, the only time I think we'll ever get to explore Kamurocho Hills, and jump-started an interesting trend where it feels like RGG wanted to bring back Ryuji Goda properly in the main series but for whatever reason, this is the compromise. None of it helps prop up Yakuza: Dead Souls into something more than mediocrity, though.
What kills it is a horrid framerate, whether you emulate it or not it's still never a stable experience, and gameplay that left me miserable. You play as four protagonists Yakuza 4 style and each time I swap around I just wanted this game to be over already. You aim your gun but chances are it always sways away in a different direction for no reason, zombies spawn almost indefinitely even if you take out the mini-bosses, and the closed-in camera that Yakuza/Like A Dragon adopt for tight brawler combat doesn't translate well for shooting swarms of zombies in mostly tight spaces where the framerate gets nuked. I dunno, what I got after finishing this was that RGG should never ever make a shooter again? But then again, this experience got me buying Binary Domain out of morbid curiosity to see how they did this kinda thing again. Anyways, probably franchise bottom tier.
The Trans Daigo substory was unexpectedly memorable alright.
The frontrunner for the RGG game with the least amount of play testing done. Yakuza: Dead Souls is frustrating. It's not good, despite being a strange case study for the flexibility of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series and its characters. You can take these characters and place them in the most outlandish situations, but the tonal harmony the series really mastered makes it all feel believably in character in how they react to it. It's hard to take much of the game seriously when it's made clear from the get-go this is taken with light ridiculous fun. Playing this was initially interesting because there's some unique stuff here for fans of the series to experience first-hand. This is the first time you play as Majima before Yakuza 0, the only time I think we'll ever get to explore Kamurocho Hills, and jump-started an interesting trend where it feels like RGG wanted to bring back Ryuji Goda properly in the main series but for whatever reason, this is the compromise. None of it helps prop up Yakuza: Dead Souls into something more than mediocrity, though.
What kills it is a horrid framerate, whether you emulate it or not it's still never a stable experience, and gameplay that left me miserable. You play as four protagonists Yakuza 4 style and each time I swap around I just wanted this game to be over already. You aim your gun but chances are it always sways away in a different direction for no reason, zombies spawn almost indefinitely even if you take out the mini-bosses, and the closed-in camera that Yakuza/Like A Dragon adopt for tight brawler combat doesn't translate well for shooting swarms of zombies in mostly tight spaces where the framerate gets nuked. I dunno, what I got after finishing this was that RGG should never ever make a shooter again? But then again, this experience got me buying Binary Domain out of morbid curiosity to see how they did this kinda thing again. Anyways, probably franchise bottom tier.
The Trans Daigo substory was unexpectedly memorable alright.