been a yakuza fan since i was fifteen years old and holy fucking shit it still hits the same if not more. even with all the nostalgia and memories this could honestly be my favorite yakuza game ever and that's saying a lot
this game switches from "HOLY SHIT HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE SO COOL" into serious real yakuza shit into the most tragic and perfect writing ever all on a rotation RGG STUDIOS HOW DO YOU MAKE IT LOOK SO EASYYYY NO ONE DOES IT LIKE YOU
i am on board with EVERYTHING that changed. party and turn based system ? peak and easily better than all the combat systems of its predecessors. the way they turned this into turn based was so fucking genius and way more fun
one of my all time favorite series delivers again i'm so fucking happy i decided to circle around and continue the series 6 years after catching up
in just one game and the start of the "second arc" it shoots up to atleast top2 rgg games THANK YOU RGG
not gonna waste much time im jumping immediately on judgement and lost judgement so i can continue this series

I've given this a higher rating than Bloodborne. I know I know, it's outrageous blasphemy, but give me a minute and I'll try to explain.

Lies of P is, in general, a very competently designed Soulsbourne. The combat feels great, there's a nice diverse set of enemies and bosses, the world looks gorgeous. Everything you'd expect from a From Software Soulsborne is here. The world and story are more coherent than in Bloodborne or Dark Souls; while I do think I prefer the more abstract and mysterious style of storytelling in the From Software games, it's nice to feel like a character in the story for once rather than a nobody who appears later to clean up the mess.

There are a couple of problems in the implementation; specifically in optimisation and localization. While the game mostly runs fine on the PS4 version I played, the load times are astronomical, which is particularly annoying when the game expects you to frequently return to the hotel. I also noticed quite a few graphical glitches, especially in the early game; some skyboxes seemed weirdly low-resolution, parts of enemies would visually clip through walls, and waving flags tended to just glitch out completely. As for localization, a lot of the dialogue and item text comes off as a bit awkward and either overly flowery or overly terse. While the voice acting is mostly fine, a lot of the English language VAs sound like they haven't been given much direction and don't know what their lines mean half of the time, and I even noticed some of the VAs would pronounce in-game jargon like 'ergo' or 'Krat' differently from each other. There's nothing major, but these little things just give Lies of P a slight air of... knock-off-ness. It makes you realise that while things like level design and worldbuilding in Lies of P are good, they just aren't quite as good as in Bloodborne, a game Lies of P so blatantly apes.

So why did I give this a higher score than Bloodborne? One word: combat. I fucking hate the frenetic, aggressive and chaotic combat in Bloodborne, to an extent that it kinda ruined the whole game for me. I can't tell what the fuck is going on, I never feel in control and it just stresses me the hell out. Lies of P's combat is much, much more tactical, inspired more by Sekiro than by Bloodborne (I've not actually played Sekiro yet so don't quote me on that). Don't get me wrong, it can still be fast and quite hectic, but I found this so much more playable than Bloodborne. Combat in Lies of P also feels quite a bit more varied than Bloodborne; there are quite a few different systems all at play at once (fable, legion, the wishstone, the grindstone, a billion different consumables, etc etc), and you can choose to focus on or ignore whichever ones you want. It just feels a lot more welcoming than Bloodborne's attitude of forcing you into one particular style of fighting.

There are a few moments where the gameplay in Lies of P did frustrate me though. The puppet theme results in a lot of enemies having deliberately unnatural movement, which is aesthetically pretty neat, but it can make it quite difficult to read their attacks correctly. The game also likes to use crates and wagons and other bits of scenery to wall off the play area, so it conditions you to stop trying to break these early on... then towards the mid game, it starts to hide secrets behind breakable boxes that look no different to the invincible ones. A couple of the bosses got on my nerves too. Because I'm a filthy scrub I used the phantoms whenever available, but there a few bosses where they just... aren't there as options? It always seemed weird to fight 4 or 5 bosses with a spectre present, only to have to completely change tactics when a (sometimes much easier) boss showed up without a star fragment fountain. Also the last boss of the bad ending can fuck right off, there were so many particle effects in that arena I had no clue what was going on.

But yes... generally I had a pretty great time here. It kinda ends up being like Bloodborne for people who are shit at Bloodborne. And I'm definitely shit at Bloodborne. Should I just go "git gud" and go replay the highest rated game on Backloggd? Maybe. But from my experience of the two games, I genuinely preferred Lies of P. Please do not burn my house down.