I'm admittedly very unfamiliar with Goichi Suda's work. There were many instances in which I tried to get into some of his games but they don't hold my interest for very long. The only one I played through completion was No More Heroes and while I respect that game for being a subversion of both the action game genre and otaku culture as a whole, I was put off by the almost intentionally archaic combat and repetitive padded busywork the player had to do before getting back into progression. I understand their inclusions however and can respect them even if its replayability for me suffers as a whole.

From osmosis through other people though, It seemed the success of No More Heroes in the western market swayed Grasshopper into writing their action games as bad Adult Swim shows you'd find thrown away to the 2 AM time slot. Games like Lollipop Chainsaw, Killer Is Dead, and Shadows of the Damned all made me write off Suda for awhile as someone who ties his wacky absurdist comedies scripts into mediocre action games. It even seemed No More Heroes 2 from what I heard misses the point of the original entirely, trading in its groundedness for a cartoonishly over-the-top plotline painting Travis Touchdown as some unlikely hero when it was established in NMH1 the dude was really a psychopathic loser.

Then I joined Backloggd.com and from here I learned about a lot of really weird and obscure games that are about as niche as this website. I learned about this whole trilogy of visual novels that kickstarted Suda51's career, that actually ties in thematically with his other games. I figured now would be a good time to jump into this unfamiliar rabbit hole. Not only because I was curious but because from the outside of it, this looked like a murder mystery visual novel, and I love reading through VNs from time to time! I'm a big fan of Phoenix Wright and I think I'm one of the few that can actually claim I enjoyed the whole Danganronpa trilogy. While I get they divorce themselves from interactive gameplay so I understand it's a very subjective genre with a niche audience, to me reading and interpreting the story is interactive enough to me to keep me engaged, and the more I can divorce myself from boring action gameplay and let myself actually enjoy the story Suda is trying to tell the better. So yes, I was quite excited to sink my teeth into a new murder mystery visual novel.

The Silver Case was not that and I think it's better off for it.

What I found instead was a game where past the prologue you join this Heinous Crimes Unit division of the 24th ward and within the same episode you learn about this alleged serial killer Kamui Uehara, who is also responsible for the mysterious "Silver Case". What was shocking to see is that you end up capturing him and the woman who was working with him, Ayame Shimohira, within the same episode. That's it? We caught our culprit within the second chapter of the game? What's going on here?

Then with each and every episode, your character starts to learn that "The Silver Case" and Kamui Uehara's identity was a much more complex and tightly woven web that's been personally interconnected with the 24th ward than you anticipated. It even ties in with another protagonist you follow with his own episodes named "Placebo", where you follow a turtle-loving private journalist with a serious smoking problem named Tokio Morishima, who is investigating the Kamui Uehara story. You start to understand that these past events the game reveals with each episode are starting to catch up to these characters. "The Silver Case" and the events that followed were a much deeper rabbit hole than discovering this game's existence, which ties into a big central theme of this game: The past and how you move forward from it.

It was honestly a shock to see how many themes this game tackled so elegantly for its time that it'd be impossible for me to list all of them in this review without it becoming overbearing, but as a taste test, It's got corrupted politics and corporations, corruption within the police force, how crime affects public perception and mainstream media, the past and how it affects the future of both its characters and their psychology, and to my surprise, it even talks about how the internet can affect people and expose them into radical ideologies. This is a game from 1999, a point in which the internet arguably wasn't as accessible nor impactful to everyday society as it is today, and reading these themes expressed here was so oddly surreal feeling it made me think this game actually was released in 2016 rather than 1999. (You join a chat room and one of the assholes in the website writes "KILL YOURSELF" to a character which then that same character proceeded to get death threats by the entirety of that website. Can't think of another game that emulates that feeling of harassment you can take by a bunch of faceless strangers without consequence due to the freedom of anonymity afforded by the internet. Scary shit.)

What also added to this game's surrealist feeling was its visual design and aesthetics for me. I loved the low-poly PS1 visuals paired with animated or real-life filmed FMVs dispersed at plot crucial moments. They all clash together to create a concoction of an obviously budgeted and compromised visual design but at the same time, these clashing art styles add to the charm of it all for me. It really feels like you're going through some scattered police logs not meant for the public eyes. I even like the soundtrack that accompanies the adventure. It may be my least favorite OST Masafumi Takada composed but it's very understated and atmospheric while still having some seriously trademark catchy melodies the man is known for.

With all the praise I've given to the game thus far, there is one big issue I had with the game that made it hard to go through at times. It's a slooooooooow burn, and there are a lot of instances that snail-like pacing didn't feel justifiable. The most egregious is the game's opening chapter. Lunatics feels so abrasive to the entire experience that it honestly put me off for a while and the thing is it doesn't even represent what the game does for the rest of its runtime. It starts out with giant rosetta stone textboxes worth of information dumps to the player about the world of TSC followed by a scenario in which your protagonist and two other dudes who never show up again hunt down someone escaping to a tower rooftop after he attempted to attack a member of the HCU. You progress through each door of the tower with this mindless and tedious puzzle that was so boring the remaster added in an auto-solve button so players can circumvent them. I say the rest of the game doesn't represent Lunatics because the game isn't as puzzle heavy past this point, and contains its exposition a lot more naturally in Placebo, so its introduction leaves a lot to be desired. This isn't the only example of bad pacing issues though. A lot of the Transmitter chapters unfortunately have instances where your character is forced to progress by reading numerous pages of logs scattered about in a room. In the last Transmitter chapter (not counting the epilogue chapters the remaster added), you are forced to go into 10 identical buildings where all you do is discover bodies and read logs until you can finally wrap the damn thing up. The unfortunate thing about this is like I stated earlier, the Placebo gave exposition to what was happening in the Transmitter chapters in a more natural way that moved the plot forward, I think that is partly due to the fact that the Placebo chapters were made by two different writers while Suda worked on the Transmitter chapters. I wished these writers would've worked together more to cut down on the overtly drawn out pacing of the Transmitter chapters to give pieces of exposition if the Placebo chapters were going to explain them anyway because the obvious padding turned what should be a 7 hour game into a 13 hour one.

Nevertheless, I say stick with it. The Silver Case left me with a positive impression of how confident Suda can be as a writer when passionate, and I'm glad to have experienced this strange rabbit hole despite how deep and long the journey felt. I'm definitely excited to get to Flower, Sun, and Rain and The 25th Ward to really see how Suda followed up on this, considering he did leave holes for an eventual sequel, with even more holes if you add in the epilogue chapters added in this remaster. I can definitely recommend this to someone who wants something lodged in their brains for a while to really think about because lord knows The Silver Case has been on my mind for a while since I've played it.

Now, can someone lend me 50,000 Yen?

A look into an alternative universe where Valve didn't fuck up the game beyond recognition with busted items that breaks the intended balance, grimey lootboxes to pry people's cash, and leaving the game in an abandoned state so bots can solve it's source code to add "xOMEGATRONICx" in random servers to mic spam earrape and frame one headshot the whole server. Basically the good ending.

Reminded me that I actually did use to love Team Fortress 2 to bits and it wasn't just stockholm syndrome and that's honestly the best kind of praise I could give it.

Real talk though, I actually think I prefer the levels in this game over Super Monkey Ball 2's, despite me growing up with the latter rather than the former.

While I very much like SMB2, I think that game's levels rely a bit too much on a either a central gimmick or playing around with physics. That necessarily isn't a bad thing until you get levels like Switch Inferno which misses the point of Monkey Ball's concept.

The level design here can be immediately differentiated just by looking at them, especially on Expert, where the levels are at their fully fleshed out. All the levels have an emphasis on turning precision, and each and every Expert level plays that to it's fullest, creating quite possibly one of the most nail biting trial by fire gauntlets I've seen in a video game.

I mean seriously, name one other game that asks the player to beat 50 of the most tightest and percise levels in it's series history without a continue then have you beat 10 more stages without a continue to even attempt to try the Master stages, the ultimate test of the physic system in this game. Even the Master stages song sounds like you ascended to Monkey Godhood. Absolute raw kino they packed this in a childrens funny monkey game. Thanks Nagoshi...

...For directing the most insidiously evil game I've ever played. I swear I get heartburn everytime I hear one of those poor monkies panic when they're about to fall off. Why would you do this to me????

Imagine having your first game be a mega success and your evil corporate publisher tasks you just a single year to develop a sequel to that said game, with the pretenses that every sequel comes with: A larger scope, refining features to what was established, and justifying a more grandiose narrative to your said first game. Most of the time, sequels with that obscenely unrealistic time crunch that leads to developer nightmares turn out to become disasters, but every now and then, you get that one game that survives that becomes somewhat of a miracle game: Yakuza 2.

Yakuza 2 succeeds in not only being a great sequel to Yakuza 1, but a great game in it's own right. Defining what the Yakuza franchise would become years down the line and is still seen as one of the best games in the series. Everything here has been improved from its open-world to its combat to even it's narrative.

Right to the first tutorial the game throws at me, I felt just how instantaneously better the game felt to play. He still retains some of the stiffness found in the original, but Kiryu's basic move set is much faster and moves locked from the original became standard such as moves that help Kiryu turn around on a dime, while still keeping that same impact felt from every punch like in the original. Not only does the combat feel more flexible, but the game balances the AI to accommodate this new moveset, as enemies are a lot more aggressive this time around and come together more in pairs, leading to faster-paced gameplay but with a refreshing new challenge on top of it. One of my favorite examples of this newfound challenge is the Goro Majima fight early on in the game, taking place in the underground arena which restricts your health items and the only equipped item you can have is an infinite use brass knuckle. You are forced not only to learn his moveset but react to his fast dodges as you try to keep on him building your heat meter, making it so you can land your powerful heat moves once built. This leads to a boss fight that's challenging, kinetic, intense, and easily one of the strongest highlights of the game for me, showcasing every improvement made to the combat to create a surprisingly good boss fight.

Sadly, there are some changes to the core gameplay I'm not exactly fond of and can lead to some frustrating moments. QTE events were added to certain scenarios, and for some reason the timing on them is absurdly strict, leading to the game taking cheap potshots at you if you don't know when they're coming. This can also be applied to enemies grabbing you, as in the original they were fairly easy to mash out of, but not once in this game did I successfully mash out of a grab as they require much faster mashing in this game. Call me slow fingers I suppose, but the mash time out of these grabs were ridiculously tight, and lead to cheap damage much like in the strict QTE segments. Then there are the boss fights that had some weird balancing choices. There was this one mid-game boss that had a grand total of six health bars that not only were hard to dwindle away, but the boss itself made it hard to do so. He had invincible attacks, couldn't be grabbed, and a second phase with long weapon-based attacks that were also invincible of course, leading to a boss fight that dragged on far too long and was a strange difficulty spike for a mid-game challenge. Despite these complaints though, I still stand by Yakuza 2 is a far better playing game than its original counterpart, but it still has some kinks that needed to be ironed out.

Narratively speaking though, whoah boy. Cutscenes are no longer plagued by an atrocious early 2000's dub and are left untouched and sub, letting its native speaking and better-directed voice actors shine. Cutscenes are also simply better directed too, leading to some clever cinematography tricks and music cues to give off a noir style feel to them. The characters here are also vastly well written too, with the developers not only exploring more to the characters already established but even having fun with some new ones. Ryuji Goda, the rival counterpart to Kiryu in this game, just absolutely steals the spotlight every time he's on-screen with his fun dialogue and diabolical delivery. He's a fantastic villain and easily my favorite character. Kaoru Sayama is an awesome new side character that plays off Kiryu's stoic tough-guy attitude well, leading to some genuinely heartfelt moments between the two, whether it be drama or (to my surprise considering this is Kiryu we're dealing with here) romance. The story as a whole is just packed with more suspense that follows up from the first game while telling an interesting new story here. I love the new characters and twists the game establishes chapter by chapter. I'd say the last chapter does go a bit overboard though. Its climax had like 10 plot twists jammed at once with no brevity that did make me roll my eyes a few times, but still, it leads to one of the hypest moments of the game for me. Its story left me intrigued and entertained all the way through, retaining a lot of the qualities I found so compelling when I played Yakuza 0, so I can say for the most part it's a success.

While both its narrative and gameplay may have some downsides to its improvements, one thing that is just flat-out improved is its open-world... or should I say open-worlds. Not only does Yakuza 2 add more new activities to the already established Kamurocho, but adds in a smaller but still densely packed new city, Sotenbori. Both these cities not only have more activities to do on the side of them, but the side stories you can find here are also better too. They feature more steps to them and have comedic writing to make them more memorable, leading to me actively seeking them out more than in the original. They are still timed events that can only be accessed depending on the chapter of the story you are in which is unfortunate but are much more rewarding to seek out, making both cities just as large as Kamurocho felt in the original while giving said Kamurocho a sense of growth in its world-building.

I seriously can't stress enough just how better this game overall just really is. It not only retains what I did like from the original, but it also exceeds all expectations I had for a sequel, which was all the more shocking to me when I read that this game only had a single year of development time. With the scope this game was aiming for, this game could have easily become a mess, and in some ways that messy rushed development time can be seen in the final product. But despite that Yakuza 2 persevered even when the deck was fully stacked against it, and what came out of it can only be described as a miracle, which is why I can say undoubtedly that Yakuza 2 is a miracle game.

Make no mistake, despite the low score I actually had a great time with the original Yakuza! However, it's also not hard for me to admit the game does kinda suck.

For context, I recently played through Yakuza 0 and absolutely fell in love with it, so I've decided to do a sort of marathon of the series. A friend of mine gifted me a PS2 copy of this along with Yakuza 2 for my birthday. If you're reading this bro, thanks again, man! Sorry if you may not agree with everything I'm about to say though.

I kinda pity those who started with either Zero or Kiwami and didn't like the combat from there, because ho boy, they really don't understand how far the series has come. Combat in this game is kind of a clunker. Kiryu is noticeably slow in this game in both turn-speed and frame-data. When you attack in this game, he will commit to swinging his fists in that direction, but the enemies you encounter are very slow too, so I can't say the game isn't designed around Kiryu's slow moveset. However, the main problem is that Kiryu doesn't have a hard lock-on like in other action games. He has to rely on a soft lock-on that doesn't give an indicator to when it activates and isn't very intelligent, as it will often break mid-combo. Combine that with the uncontrollable camera in battles, battles will often look like drunken fisticuffs where Kiryu clumsily whiffs his fists 40 degrees away from someone right up in his face. This becomes a problem when in the later half of the game you fight crowds of people with bats, swords, or god forbid guns and you get wobbled around in hit stun because your big kick didn't combo properly. Combat is still relatively easy though. Most of the problems Kiryu faces can be solved by hitting square 4x > triangle and it will eat their guards and knock them down most of the time, where you can walk up to them and hit triangle for a heat execution move. This was my end-all-be-all strategy for about 90% of the encounters in the game, which isn't exactly very engaging. By around the halfway point of the game, I would actively try to avoid walking into encounters in Kamurocho (which by the way, the encounter rate is comically high in this game, like Final Fantasy IV bad.) because they weren't exactly pounding my pulses anymore.

Speaking of walking around in Kamurocho, I was surprised to see just how hard they nailed the atmosphere in this game. The streets of Kamurocho are often dark and littered with trash, only brought to life by the illumination of neon signs and dim street lights, and the bustling crowds of noisy people. The fixed camera angles while walking around also make the city seem daunting, as the camera angles often pan above Kiryu to make the city seem larger than he is. It's absolutely fascinating stuff, and you combine that with the side quests you can find while talking to NPCs on the streets (which unfortunately most of them are fetch quests, with a scant few being memorable side stories) you really get the feel Kamurocho is a living, breathing metropolitan, crime-ridden, red-light district.

As for the story, it feels like a great proof of concept. I was surprised to see how briskly paced it all was, baring one chapter which mostly felt like filler. Maybe a little too brisk. I feel the cast of characters introduced here the devs haven't decided what to exactly do with yet, so they end off coming off more like prototypes for the larger narrative than real explored characters yet. One of the few characters that actually do get some scenes of character development outside of Kiryu and Haruka, Detective Date, gets his scenes in the aformeantioned filler chapter. It doesn't tie into the main story at all, but it was also nice to see a side character with his own struggles with the themes of family in this game.

Unfortunately, that may also be because this game has a quite frankly hilarious dub. I miss when Sega was the kings of shitty awkward dubbing, and this game offers plenty of lines that made me burst out laughing. It's still unfortunate because the actual good performances in this game like Mark Hamill as Goro Majima still have to wrestle with the horrid sound mixing. The dub does kinda ruin the mood of some scenes that were genuinely cool, there are still a lot of hype moments in this game that unfortunately get bogged down by bad voice direction or bad sound mixing. Let me share some of my favorite iconically bad lines:

"I did feel the urge to hit some balls today... I suppose yours will have to do"
"Go! Kill this arrogant mo-ther-fuck-er!"
"Women: "Are you fucking [R slur]?" Kiryu: I'm not as stupid as you."

I know this whole review seems kinda negative so far, but I was being genuine when I said I actually still had a great time with Yakuza despite all these flaws. Perhaps it was the brisk flow of the story, the atmosphere, and the discovery of all the little side content within the streets of Kamurocho is that kept me engaged throughout this experience the most. It's rare to see a game attempt to experiment with a bunch of ideas and still come out with something unlike anything back in the day.

The entire experience actually reminded me a lot of when I played Demon's Souls last year. Both games were born from internal company failure and both directors set out to create a new ambitious idea to lay the groundwork of a now iconic series, rising their studios to fame. Both games do feel a tad clunky and maybe less-fleshed out than they should be, but both games still feature experimental mechanics and atmosphere unlike anything else from their respective series. It's special to play a game like that, but I would argue Demon's is a more polished game overall, which is why I've played through that game three times as of writing this.

I'm not sure when I'll return to Yakuza 1, because while I did have my fun with it, I can also see this as a hard game to come back to if the other games deliver as much as people say they do. Yakuza is a beautiful messy blueprint and I'm ready to see how they'll iron out these kinks of this pretty solid game in its sequels.

Good lord, I tried to like this game, I really did.

I really don't see the appeal of wandering around a circular loop of a map to do one disconnected story quest that one character has to do to the next one. It's an arduous repetitive loop that Octopath just lavishes in which drags the games pacing to a slog, which doesn't help that the story and characters are just not interesting. There's absolutely no originality here, just what Square Enix believes is ye olden medieval speaking stereotypes going around on their predictable journeys, with no resemblance of having interesting themes or story cohesion. God forbid any of these characters to attempt to talk to one another. That's really the main issue with Octopath Traveler, it feels split apart by design. It makes you want to go on a journey with party members with their own aspirations and goals but never together like in a normal JRPG, at least not until its final quest that attempts to make the journey worth it, but comes off as rushed and half-hearted. It makes the whole experience at most bland or at worst soulless. It seems whenever Square Enix makes JRPGs now, they only have two choices to handle the narrative: full-on anime sicko mode, or what Square Enix believes people want from the old turn-based RPG from their old days. The looks and the setting, but never the heart that was the driving force of those games.

And good lord, the lighting in this game alone ruined the art direction for me. What is the appeal of having these neat sprites clashing with lens flares and blinding light sources out of a Michael Bay movie but he rubbed the camera with extra Vaseline? It looks awful.

You ever played a game that unapologetically reflects the person who created it? That's The Wonderful 101 for you.

The Wonderful 101 is like if Hideki Kamiya gifted himself a birthday present, and for that reason, it's why I feel this game was naturally going to sway a lot of people off from it. I mean really, how do you market this kind of game? It's like a big melting pot of action game ideas from Kamiya work fit straight into a game about controlling a crowd of superheroes you collect to fight giant aliens or mechs. Casually looking at gameplay of it, you'd think it was just a Nintendo-published Pikmin clone but with more sensory overload.

Now imagine actually booting up the game and playing it for yourself. My first hour of this game was a nightmare of fiddling with controls and testing buttons while the game assaulted me with neon HUD elements and tutorial prompts, as the game also is presenting you new gameplay ideas such as new characters with their own weapons you got to draw, and not even 10 minutes in you start unlocking new moves for them and leveling up your health or your battery gauge that's used to determine how much you can use the Wonder-Liner. Despite how much tutorialization it throws at the player, the game doesn't give you the dodge or block at the start of the game which means you have to buy these very important moves from the shop. Granted these are cheap to buy, but it's also baffling they didn't just give you these from the start. Kamiya and his team shove a lot of stuff at the player from the start with barely any breathing room to really take it all in, so I can't exactly say TW101 has a very graceful start to its premise.

But man, I was so wrong lol.

It didn't take long for the game's combat to really click with me once all the tutorial prompts got out of the way. I was surprised to see how many elements Kamiya took from his old games and managed to make it work as well as it does. You got the juggling combo system from DMC and Bayonetta, Ukemi from Viewtiful Joe, Witch Time from Bayonetta, and most notably, the drawing system from Okami but transformed into the main gimmick of this game.

Rather than a traditional weapon switching system, TW101 asks the player to draw the weapon (preferably on the analog stick) to get the desired weapon. The bigger they draw the shape, the bigger their weapon will be, which will be slower but deal more damage, compared to a smaller one that will be faster but deal less damage, but also take up less battery gauge... you see the depth here offered already by this system? The biggest skill mastery is not only learning to draw these shapes (which the game is very intelligent at knowing since they are all distinct from one another) but you also have to know which weapon is useful for each situation, as some enemies will have certain strategies that are more effective for each weapon. But then you learn how to open up enemies with each weapon, and you learn that you can use your team, or Wonder Green's gun, to stun the enemy and then put them in a juggle state.

Juggling is really when the game turned into something special for me because pulling out certain weapons to keep the opponent in the air for a long time is when the drawing system becomes outright impressive. You never feel like you are going to do the same combo in this game. They are creative spectacles of skill mastery because of the flexibility offered by the game's freeform weapon drawing system. Masters of the game's drawing system can outright demolish a giant mech with their 100 man team, and it's probably the most stylish combo system I've ever seen. Not only for the fact a team of superheroes comboing an alien dragon mech is fucking rad, but it also asks more from the player while doing so, creating a combat system that's all-around more rewarding to master.

All the little niceties the game throws to the player too also make TW101 a very welcoming experience. As mentioned before, a lot of Kamiya mechanics from his older games return here, but there's also a lot more. You have very tightly designed enemy encounters that Kamiya is known for, along with gameplay systems Kamiya has explained he likes that return, with surprisingly good and fair boss fights all guided by probably the funniest video game I've ever played. I really vibed with what Kamiya was putting on offer here. The game oozes with passion all the way through and the more I played of it, the more and more I really appreciate every bit of it. It just kept getting better and better. Even the climax of the game was like 12 endings on top of each other. It's like if Kamiya took all of his favorite toys and smashed them together, which really highlights the toy-box like wonderment the game offers here.

My main critique though is because this is a Kamiya passion project, it also features probably my least favorite Kamiya trope often and that is introducing new gameplay elements from old arcade games. There's a punch-out mini-game, an isometric 3D shooter, some side-scrolling space shooters, and of course, the fucking space harrier level Kamiya just loves to put in. None of these are poorly designed mind you, but it wrestles time away from the main combat I ended up craving the most from TW101, and I really hope Kamiya's next project isn't as egregious with these as this game featured.

But despite that, going into TW101 was a very pleasant experience, especially given that I was already a fair fan of Kamiya's old projects. But this is elevated to a whole new level. Kamiya sought out creating a game that he wanted to play the most, and there aren't many creators out there that have the balls to do that. Clover Studio, the studio he worked at before Platnium Games, was a studio designed to create wild and new ideas, but none of those games ever found their audience outside of Okami, causing their eventual shut down. The Wonderful 101 is kind of like a Clover Studio game. A very ambitious action game designed solely to introduce a brand new experience unlike anything else. It wasn't designed for everyone in mind, but only for those who would appreciate these mechanics in mind... like a Kamiya fan. Maybe that's all it needed to be in the end. As for me, I say you should stick with it. It's pretty wonderful! ba dum tiss

The idea of conveying multiverse time travel by a game of chess is a really novel idea, but the problem lies in that it's applied to a 1v1 game. I played this with a buddy of mine who bought me the game and it was really neat, for about 3 minutes. Then when you have all these boards lied out in front of you the game becomes extremely obnoxious to play, to the point where it becomes unplayable. Just a bunch of boards with one or two pieces moved that have one arbitrary piece that will checkmate another board halfway across the screen, so you have to comb through the mess you created to get yourself out of an unwinnable state... or you just forfeit because you or your opponent gets bored. This is more of a fun lab science experiment than anything, but my god does it get boring.

"If a stupid pothead with barely enough time spent enjoying this game like me can do it on Level-Die, I have no idea what is wrong with certain people whose job it is to inform the gaming public."

This quote was in the description of a video that was meant as a response to IGN's now infamous review of this game by a user named Saurian, 14 years ago. All there was to the video was a demonstration of the user's skill with the combat system. (You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyfbtSyX3mc)

Everyone knows of IGN's infamous 3/10 review. Before I knew of God Hand, I knew of that image that compared this game's 3.0 score to Imagine Party Babyz 7.5 score, which was meant to show the sheer incompetence of IGN. Now for me, I'm a little more laid back when I see mainstream game reviewers' scores since the majority of them are written by independent writers which may not reflect the whole staff's opinion, yet is put onto review aggregate websites as the companies score, rather than the independent writer. Chris Roper, the man who wrote the God Hand review, didn't even do the review for Imagine Party Babyz, but people look at both reviews as it was written by one entity, which I feel is a major problem with mainstream game reviewing outlets as a whole.

That being said though, Chris Roper's review is still awful, the whole thing is written with a clear level of frustration towards the game, to the point where it becomes condescending, but that doesn't mean there aren't valid points within the review. It's got weird tank controls that feel out of place for a 3rd person action beat 'em up. The level design revolves around basic geometry and shapes and textures look very low-res (The cage that's used for the Chihuahua race isn't even textured), the game uses random elements for spawning items and even spawning demons from dead enemies, and the game doesn't refill health upon entering new sections in a stage.

I think what caused such backlash from game critics for God Hand was its time of release. God Hand was a late 2006 PS2 release, and the PS2 gen saw what was considered the golden age of character action games. We got Devil May Cry 1 & 3, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Resident Evil 4, God of War, among other games. Comparing to all of those games that released within that time frame, God Hand's tank controls and basic level design looked outdated and primitive. The budget for this game was most likely 5 dollars and was used so Shinji Mikami could get lunch for the single day it was developed.

Here's the thing though: None of that fucking matters.

Never before have I played a game that didn't give a single flying shit about looking pretty or adding in less samey enemy types or making the game easier to give it more appeal. God Hand sacrificed all of those things to make it the game it is: a game about constantly testing the player.

God Hand's most notorious mechanic is the dynamic difficulty system. Similar to Resident Evil 4, the game will make enemy AI more aggressive, do new moves, or even group up in pairs more depending on what level you are at (it goes from Lvl 1, 2, 3, Die) but unlike RE4, God Hand doesn't hide it in the background. It's constantly in your face at the bottom left-hand screen at all times, letting the player know what level they are at and when they'll get to the next one. When playing the game for the first few hours, you'll most likely stay around the level 1-2 area, but later on, when you get more accustomed to the game's mechanics, you might start staying around the level 3 and level Die area, even if the game starts throwing more challenging enemy types at you.

That's when I realized something special about God Hand. It subtlety fixes one of the biggest hurdles in the action game genre: Ranking systems. Most action games have a system where at the end of each level, it tallies how well you did on certain aspect like time, combos, and even collecting currency and gives the player an award adjusted to how well they did (be it a higher letter or a shinier trophy.). While these are meant to encourage repeat playthroughs, they can also be frustrating to newer players, as they are constantly being told they aren't doing good enough, despite action games being about learning mechanics and repeating those levels to get better at them. You aren't encouraged to know what to look out for on each level to even get a good rank for your first time either, which that in itself causes more confusion or frustration to newer players.

God Hand instead takes those ranking systems and discards them, and rather than tally you at the end of a level, you are being shown just exactly how good you are doing, and at the end of each stage you are rewarded with more money based on how many enemies you killed at the rank you were in, rather than giving you a trophy that's only meant for bragging rights. I believe this is what makes God Hand so inherently fun on the face of it. It's not only a great action game with tightly designed combat, enemies, and bosses, but also a game that actively encourages the player to get better at it. I first feared that moment I hit level 3, but as the game went on, I kept wanting to get on level Die. Weaving effortlessly through your enemies punches and counter-attacking crowds of enemies with your sweep kicks, or launching them in the air and hitting them with a Shoryuken to a kick in the face sending them flying. Your adrenaline starts pumping as you see that meter go higher and higher. You think you are getting good at God Hand, and it's starting to take its gloves off for you, the player. But you start to feel like a god yourself. You feel like you can punch a hole through concrete, the game's challenge is just so exciting... and then it kicks your ass! You feel like you've been brutalized. I've had this happen to me with each death, but never once I did I ever get tired of this game. I kept going at it, because every time I hit level Die and survived those encounters, I never felt a more satisfying feeling in a video game.

I think about the quote I introduced in the first paragraph a lot, because despite God Hand being one of the most challenging games I've ever played, it is also a game I think anyone can enjoy, and I'm very glad I got to play it myself. It's compromised in so many areas, but what it does right left me with one of the most satisfying and memorable action games I've ever played. So, from the bottom of my heart: Play God Hand... it's probably better than Imagine Party Babyz.

"...それもラブ
...これもラブ"

Moon is probably the most frustrating 5-star game ever made, so I want to get that out of the way before I start this review that this game will most definitely require patience that some people can't afford, and I will say, even for me who considers himself pretty patient, it wore on me a couple of times too.

Anything annoying that can possibly be listed, Moon has. Tedious backtracking, a limited-time system at the start of the game, waiting for events to pan out that can only be triggered in certain timeframes, confusing and sometimes hard to read puzzles, and an economy that sometimes doesn't give you the cash you need to progress so you have to waste time playing a gambling mini-game. (but can only be accessed during the day, of course.). These problems are often listed when people criticize the game and can be factors to why people can put it down. These problems did plague my playthrough of Moon too, so I can't say these aren't valid reasons for why someone may drop the game a few hours in, I totally get it.

Here's the thing though: I can't hate this game even if I tried.

Even with all these problems, I kept coming back to the world of Moon because the game is just so inviting on the face of it. Moon breaks the traditional tropes of RPGs not to tell a darker story, but a brighter narrative. This is the game where you revive cute claymation creatures that the "Hero" of this game slain and you get "Love points" for saving these animals. This is the game where you can help out townfolks and follow along with their side stories to get satisfying outcomes. This is the game where your grandma bakes you cookies every time you visit her while you listen to "Claire De Lune" with your pet dog. This is the game where you can listen to bizarre yet catchy indie rock you bought from a guitarist on the side of the road so you can mute the ruffling grass noise you will constantly hear on your journey. You never know what you're going to get every time you boot up Moon, and Moon kept surprising me over and over again with witty yet lovely little outcomes.

Moon uses its surrealist aspects not to make its narrative more weird or dark like most games do, but to make the game more likable. Its constant enforcement on the themes of love and kindness rubbed off on me harder than any other game has. It's not the most mechanically sound game I've ever played from this genre, but Moon is probably the most likable and charming game I've ever played. Even at it's most frustrating parts, I kept wanting more and more from this weird wonderful little game.

If nothing else, Moon is a game that loves you, and hey, I love this game too.