Franchise crossover gacha games have a way of taking mechanics from their respective series and flattening them into fig leaves to be placed in front of the "real" game. That is to say, always roughly the same incremental meta-progression engine meant to be run over months and years.

This is often detrimental, but with the SaGa series, there's a strange alchemy at work. The thing is, SaGa games have their charms but they're rarely GOOD in a traditional sense. At best they're cool and experimental, at worst they feel like beta builds that accidentally shipped. In a weird way, putting the best parts of SaGa games (neat characters, off-beat gameplay systems, Kenji Ito bangers) into a generic gacha template actually ENHANCES the experience. It doesn't make it great; gacha is what it is, but it's all weirdly... potable?

GACKT: I want my character to be this dramatic guy who's such a tortured soul he's can't directly express himself, so instead he's always quoting Shakespeare.

KAZUSHIGE NOJIMA: Well Shakespeare doesn't exist in our setting, but we do have this play we could expand for him to reference all the time.

GACKT: It's going to be really deep and artistic and cool, right?

KAZUSHIGE NOJIMA: Oh yeah for sure.

Had a good time with this one as usual, and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of content in a game that was advertised as a "small" LaD game (besides the main story, which is indeed much shorter than usual). The ending is also a powerful payoff to Kiryu's entire story to far!

Besides that, I'm not sure the game does a great job justifying its own existence. It answers the question of what Kiryu had been up to between Yakuzas 6 to 8, and the answer is "some cool stuff, but mainly the sort of thing you expected". I normally wouldn't mind having another excuse to trawl the streets of Sotenbori and sing karaoke, but this game comes sandwiched right between Ishin and Infinite Wealth all coming out within the span of a single year! So I feel like I might be reaching a LaD saturation point and we haven't even hit the "main event" yet, so to speak. Well, we'll see how I feel in January, I suppose.

A grim realization of several of gaming's worst trends. What was once announced as a really cool concept-- a faithful, no-frills remake of FFVII and its spinoffs, including the yet-unlocalized Before Crisis --is instead those games chopped up to be parceled out over several months, likely years, mixed with a truly heinous amount of F2P filler, grinding and sleeve-tugging bullshit.

So why haven't I uninstalled it from my phone yet? Because I'm morbidly curious about the Before Crisis storyline and, more importantly, because shut the fuck up, I don't have a problem.

Five stars! Got all shrines and lightroots! The modern gaming landscape would be in a much better place if all games were allowed to be given this level of love and polish! Now, here are a bunch of complaints:

-Nonlinear story beats mean the same information is provided over and over and over, meaning some dramatic "reveals" are painfully obvious when they finally occur. Similarly, NPCs probably shouldn't prompt me to ask what Zonaite is sixty hours in!
-Underground and sky areas feel too sparse and repetitive.
-Reward structure, carried over from BotW, means more often than not your reward for exploration and overcoming challenges feels like a consolation prize.
-Also carried over from BotW, lack of a glamour system means that most armor pieces you get will sit in your inventory completely unused from the moment you get them. Some kind of ability to hotswap between gear sets would also have been nice QoL too, especially by endgame.
-Shrines hidden in caves are a pain and I hate them!
-I get that part of the game's appeal to some people is its comforting rituals, but there really should be an option to auto-skip, say, the cutscene for getting shrine rewards and such.
-For all the hubbub about the unbridled creativity the game's building system allows for, my experience was that it was rarely worth the time and resource expense to build anything other than what the game telegraphs you should. A to-scale Metal Gear looks super cool in pictures on Twitter, sure, but in-game it's just a very expensive statue.
-Sages were a great idea but the implementation left a lot to be desired, especially in the visuals and the addition of yet another context-sensitive use for the A button.

Overall, too many irritants for me to call it the greatest game of all time, but it's undeniably great. Now I hope Rare takes a hint and releases Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts 2.