So this game has a lot of small issues. The fight styles are hardly balanced, to the point that you can't really use them all in an effective way unless you play on NG+. And this can be seen also in the weapon manufacturing, since there's no way other than a ton of grinding to get to craft the higher tier swords and guns and armour.

But despite of these and many other flaws this is one of the best Yakuza out there. The story is great and intriguing, the city is well realized and fun to explore. It features some of the best characters in the series. And the substories and minigames are aplenty and really fun.

Don't let the title fool you, this is just another Yakuza game. Exactly the same combat, exactly the same stupid, frustrating mini-games, exactly the same kinds of characters. And that's not a bad thing necessarily, as the Yakuza games are enjoyable enough. I've only played 6, 0, and one of the Kiwami games, and I've liked them but always felt varying levels of anger and frustration with their formula, which hasn't changed in the slightest.

The story is pretty deep, lots of characters, lots of stuff happening, goes to some very dark places at times, goes to some extremely light hearted and goofy places too....Its impressive writing for a video game. Graphics and music are fantastic, its always one of the things I love about these games is the presentation and attention to detail.

These games live and die by their side content though, and a huge portion of your play time will be running around (and taxiing) to complete these side quests and mini games. I'm just gonna give a rating for each of these in Lost Judgement, so without further ado:

Dance Club: 7/10. Fun rhythm based mini game, great music.
Robotics Club: 2/10. Awful. Most frustrating and hardest (often due to bad RNG) mini game. Also running around endlessly to find random parts to upgrade your bots is so boring and time consuming, and expensive too.
Boxing Club: 7/10. Fun boxing game that is fairly nuanced and enjoyable to play, hard but not too hard.
Biker Club: 4/10. Not particularly fun, and fairly hard mini game. the awful forced camera angle ruined it for me.
Skater Club: 6/10. Way too easy, literally finished it in like 5 minutes. But its pretty fun.
Photography Club: 2/10. Awful story, only 2 easy as piss missions. Yawn.
E-sports Club: 3/10. You play Virtua Fighter 5 a few times against easy as piss AI. Boring.
Casino: 4/10. Way too short and way too easy. But blackjack and poker are fun to play.
Girls Bar: 1/10. Jesus Christ this sucks. Time consuming, expensive, annoying as fuck, all the girls are fucking robots with no brains. Made me really miss the hostess club game from yakuza 0.

yeah, so mostly very average to fucking terrible in quality. And that's about 60-70% of the total game time, so a real time sink. I mean, I skip every single cut scene and dialogue scene, because its time consuming and also really really boring, and it still takes up like 20-30 hours. Its fucking ridiculous.

One last thing that never gels with me about these games: the weird balance between super violent, super dark, at times super fucked up adult story telling. And then the absolutely ridiculous, over the top, silly, goofy side quests and story moments. Like, one minute Yagami is super emotional about a teacher who gets brutally fucking murdered, the next minute he's teaching dance moves to a high school girls club. Its just really really weird, and for me it just never really sits well. But that's just Yakuza isn't it?

He deixat el joc a mitjes parcialment no per culpa del propi joc sino per cansament dels videojocs en general (he acabat jocs molt pitjors i molt més llargs). Seguidament un bombardeig de les meves sensacions en les primeres 4h, totalment subjectives i sesgades en gran part pel context personal (no ideal) on l'he jugat:

-El protagonista és l’estereotípic heroi amb un honor irracional que el fa semblar subnormal.
-Els altres personatjes, la pilot clàssica nena d’anime antipàtica que en el fons és bona gent i la altra noia sense res destacable.
-És un joc molt estrany, fa moltes coses però tot manera superficial: puzzles, missions, roleplay, decisions on tens poquíssima agència…
-Les parts on camines les pitjors, quan estàs en la nau prou bé. Puzzles sense dificultat on només camines d’un costat a l’altre i presiones una tecla
-M’agraden les parts on vas per diferents punts de l’espai trobant altres personatjes i events, hauria estat bé un joc que profunditzés en això
-Estil artístic i música molt bé

I think the premise, writing, and game in general is cool, but found the console experience a bit frustrating.

Controls are finicky when it comes to clicking the right object, character often stops for several seconds if you walk into anything, don't feel like I can zoom into the environments enough to see important objects like keys.

During the few combat parts I have a hard time seeing what is highlighted or when It's actually my turn. I end up mashing on attack and end up healing or picking the wrong target.

For Reference I've played stuff like Disco Elysium and Norco on controller with little issue.

A below average platformer, an average experience. Wavetale's aesthetic is almost cool, but ruined for me personally by a certain "crunchiness" that it has and the clunky nature of a lot of the animations (especially cutscenes). The controls feel fine in some aspects and annoyingly stiff in others, which clashes heavily with the aesthetic. Combat is a joke, which would be fine if they didn't try to pretend like it should be a significant component of the game. Alas, you'll find yourself mashing away your single attack over and over on one of the few enemy types.

I didn't actively hate my time with it though, despite my gripes. There are certainly parts of the game where the movement is satisfying but usually its more about the spectacle and less about actually feeling in control. Finally, the narrative actually charmed me quite a bit by the end despite the previously mentioned bad cutscene animations. I can tell the voice talent cared about making the characters their own, even if they aren't award winning actors.

This game is nearly impossible to recommend at the retail price of $30, but I won't say it's not worth a try in the future on sale.

Some thoughts that I had stuck in my head:
Explore the world looking for a solution, a connection. Together. Maybe not physically, not by the same routes, maybe not delivering the same

It is difficult for Death Stranding to reach you playing it alone. Its nature emerges more easily online, and it's a great gesture and a statement of intent that you don't need a subscription to ps plus.

Kojima presents a digital world that is difficult to interpret and unite in words, a fiction that shoots directly into our reality.
Cursed, heartfelt, but also emotional. embrace the connections between things, but question them. a celebration of human duality
More prophetic than MGS2 and with better observation, generalizing and at the same time specifying the difficulties of our day to day, articulating them in the total art of videogames.
From the most abstract to the most literal, collective fears, traumas and very recognizable memories materialized. Visible, audible, and even palpable in an alien America full of dualities, of people who only intuit and show themselves through holograms and numbers.
But we are here. Maybe not next door, but in the same world. And the proof is the ladder that I have used to create an improvised bridge, I have left it here, for you, for me, for everyone. And that rope on the cliff, that capsule, that package on the ground. We are here.

Where the rejection of what forces us to leave this world is manifested in a kind of allergy for those who are more akin to these fears or have experienced them to the limit.
Where people are baptized for their present, for their office and condemned for their past. Where the heroes deliver packages and letters. They come to our futuristic shacks and install an esoteric Internet.
Everything is Sam Porter Bridges, whose name makes it STRONGLY EVIDENT what Death Stranding is about, and at the same time no, you cannot perfectly encompass anything as complex as earthly and afterlife connections, the natural and the mechanical, the Software and the Hardware, the "Ka" and "ha". reality and dreams. Much of Death Stranding's recontextualized iconography seems to suggest that.

It is a work that calls for thinking in an unprecedented way about it, because it offers an unprecedented reinterpretation of the transition and relationship with our environment, especially for gaming standards, obsessed with the mechanical-narrative relationship or the challenge, the suggestion and the satisfaction as a criterion to generate interpretations that are autopsies or descriptions. That in the best case.
At worst you have Far Cry 3.
Every species has the game in different facets and areas as a form of intellectual and emotional connection.
Children play and learn/relate, animals play to understand each other. We play to replace war.

Even before having sex we played.

Homo ludens. And Kojima welcomes a lot of this.

We need to be playful without losing focus.
There is no need for subtlety, just answer honestly to human questions. Use the forms of play as a response to the bitter obstacles of reality.
The example is the "Social Strand System", a mechanical reinterpretation of social networks where the game of deliveries and recovery of packages, manufactures and constructions has an impact on likes and statistics, but also on turning the environment into something more livable and peaceful, at the same time, shows that a more altruistic and ethical form of social interaction is possible.
It sounds naive to say that the reconstruction of the collective environment in an online video game is a lesson in altruism and community, even more so when there are likes involved, but the exercise of life begins somewhere, and now that we are waking up from this techno delirium -competitive utopian in which social networks had us flooded, now that we know how important they are to connect with each other more than to raise our ego, this "Social Strand System" shines more than in 2019.
Through the textures of slow gaming, an experiment of self-knowledge and updating is proposed, there is the unprecedented, in how the game confronts us with situations without necessarily connecting their thoughts or ideas and still achieving a certain cohesion. As in life, no one knows "what it is about" and yet we walk through it with what we own and what others leave for us.
And for a game that wants to embrace these themes without giving up the nature of its medium, its foundation, it's something really admirable.
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Not a single day goes by that I don't think about Death Stranding. Perhaps because of what has been happening in the world since 2020.
On arrival at Port Knot City.
How the corpses of people who have left explode, leaving an emotional and physical void in the form of a crater. Cities with people locked up, invisible. In the networks. In their inverted rainbows. How work becomes playing with its dozens of tools to transport, how enemies are my reflection, silence, likes, photos, stories... In life, how life can be everywhere.
And I can't even put into words practically anything that this game is for me. I plan to return to it in 2023 now that a sequel has been announced that begs the question: Should we have Connected?

the first couple hours are awesome but the second the extremely boring real estate/ second cabaret managing minigames get introduced everything goes downhill, at that point in the story the sidequests (by far the best part of the game, worth playing for them alone) suddenly stop appearing as frequently as before and so you start noticing how unalive kamurocho and sotenbori actually are when those aren't around, the same old tale of the videogame cities where you follow dots to give your characters a 1.2% boost in how hard they can punch the exact same two types of enemies. even the regular minigames seem trapped in their boxes without the back and forth from the stories (or the possibility that they might be out there somewhere), spending time at arcades and bars (as i used to in the first chapters every time the plot gave me a moment off) starts turning more unappealing when you realize they are all there is to the place, the old guy playing mahjong in the streets stops being a friendly face and becomes Content.

Better remake than several of the contemporaries, basically because it is a remix that assimilates the false -or more widespread- history of "survival Horror" (the genre names are a bit silly) that the magazines sold us here in the West batter than the last "new" games of the last few years. Think of essential pillar works of the horror aesthetic in gaming And you probably don't think of Laplace No Ma or Twilight Syndrome, god, names like Sweet Home, Clock Tower and contemporaries are probably starting to sound, but surely most say Alone in the Dark and already jumps into the golden era of Resident Evil, Silent Hill, White Day, Project Zero and all that.
It is natural, understandable due to the lack of a consistent canon in gaming, incapable of being properly created even in the puberty of a medium that is forced to a maturity that it could already reach (in fact it has already touched it).

Advertising and the Ludic factor have screwed up video games in many ways, but the worst is that accidental and unavoidable ignorance due to the lack I mentioned of a properly documented historical canon leads to constant redundancy in design planning and game direction. many "new" games. And it's not that I care too much about this lack of originality, this redundancy, nah, there are pre-rendered games with landscape Screen Orientation where the only thing you do is walk that take my breath away more than any "mechanical revolution" a-la Mario64. I don't think that quality is measured by originality, besides, bro, literally less than 50% of the mechanics that exist or were today are used expressively, almost everything is immediate gratification, fast food style.

We need more Historians in gaming, ASAP.

The adorable and beautiful thing about experiencing first works and recognizing influences on new authors is lost when they approach aesthetics with structures as closed as "classic survival horror", which always seems to result in the same sagas, with the same redundancy as I write these thoughts.

Well this brings us to Signalis. I recently came across a video on Youtube titled: SIGNALIS THE NEW FACE OF MODERN SURVIVAL HORROR

or something like that.

Modern? What ? in what sense? It is a remix of the supposed pillars of survival horror; RE structure, evocative images a la Silent Hill, hand holding sections in the first person, like horror graphic adventures or something from the golden era like White day. A Sci fi setting.
Martian Gothic.
DeadSpace.
Bro. Perhaps the only modern thing is the second round that works as a continuation and begins to suggest ideas about cycles and emotional attachment. But even in that I recognize other works.
It's not a bad thing as such. Remake and give your take, your version. I prefer it a thousand times to any remake of Vicarious Visions or BluePoint (May Arceus punish the shareholder meetings as they deserve) but Regardless of the intrinsic quality of SIGNALIS, you can see where it comes from and how little it can actually offer beyond entertaining hours: the product.

Promesa es un recorrido por recuerdos fragmentados que se expresan a través de los mementos desintegrados de una mente en deterioro. Cada paseo te invita a navegar por el mismo espacio de una forma completamente diferente. A veces son recuerdos tangibles y cercanos, con detalles esparcidos en cada esquina. Otras veces son esquivos e inseguros, como si la persona que los estuviera recreando no pudiera ponerse de acuerdo sobre cómo pasaron las cosas que relata. Y otras veces los recuerdos dejan de ser recuerdos y entran en el ámbito de la pura fantasía. Ya sea entrando literalmente en los cuadros y fotografías de nuestra memoria, ya sea volviendo a tu hogar pero a través de un velo de incredulidad que recuerda, tanto en sonido como en imágenes, a Lynch.

Los escenarios en sí no tienen un significado específico, y eso es porque la idea de este juego no es averiguar una temática. Es el acto mismo de recordar, de tratar de aunar ideas, de lo que trata Promesa.

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Promesa is a journey through fragmented memories that are expressed through the unconnected mementos of a dying mind. Each ride invites you to navigate similar spaces in a completely different way. Sometimes they are tangible and suggest closely held memories, with details spread around every corner. Other times they feel elusive and insecure, as if the person who was recalling them couldn't settle on how things actually happened. And other times the memories cease to be memories and enter into the realm of pure fantasy. Whether by literally entering into pictures and photographs, whether returning home through a Lynchian veil.

The maps themselves don't convey much meaning, and that's because the point of this game isn't to figure out a meaning. It is the very act of remembering, of trying to put ideas together into a cohesive theme, what Promesa is all about.