One part scathing histrionic takedown of the beloved Anas platyrhynchos, one part genre innovator that challenges the preconceptions of what it means to be a "rouge-like indie game."

I was immediately gumbersmucked by the title screen backing track, a haunting declaration of the core themes the game will confidently tackle throughout its ~10 hour runtime.

While drawing from other popular rogue-likes the level of choice at every intersection is staggering! Do I burn the trees? Eat them? Chop them down for some wood? The choice is yours. Here's the catch: the same answers will almost never lead to the exact same results. If try to burn those trees again they may get the jump on you and attack!

This brings me to the combat. All I can say is wow what a doozy. Simple on the surface but bonecrushing and strategic when you get to the meat and potatoes of it all. Borrowing from the obscure cult-like wonder RPG known as Earthbound the game implements a rolling HP meter. Well... not quite, in fact it's nothing like that, quite the opposite. Using items that restore more HP (such as Feastables sponsored by the internet superstar Mr. Beast) than your limit will actually allow it to overflow and increase your max health. Now that's what I call ingenuity!

Multiple endings aren't new in the realm of video games but the method at which Bird Quest handles them is absolutely masterful. Bird Quest asks the tough questions: do you TRULY understand yourself? Do you understand BIRDS? Personally I decided to align myself with Bird as I empathized with his plight. Little did I know I would be attacked by an opposing faction championing ideals such as law and rules. Zionism? Not on their watch. I wiped the floor with those vermin as me and Bird danced on their graves and stirred up chaos in their wake.

The Phoenix Rises

i, for one, am thoroughly appalled that this series would ever have the audacity to feature a player character who isn't a totally morally righteous person. this is a travesty. completely out of touch

and the gameplay? it's such a shameless ripoff of the last acclaimed silent hill project that was released. what the fuck were they thinking?

i'm going to go return to silent hill 2 now - the most subtle and least blunt horror game ever created. at least that game doesn't have sticky notes with "bullying" written on them (granted, this one doesn't either, but that's not what i heard from the people who didn't play it, so it must be true)

F tier yakuza outside the ending and a few characters p much

i was so bored to tears that i practically just skipped a shitton of the dialogue that wasnt immediately story relevant at certain points because this game is hellbent on wasting your time for no reason with random events

all the akame network shit sucks, the agent style is jank and feels bad to use, and the game feels like its 50 hours long despite being the shortest in the series because of all the stupid shit it throws at you

i will say tho, that ending is peak and prolly some of the most emotional shit in the entire series, too bad its stuck in this game.

its kind of a shame because the final boss and the ending are both like genuinely peak shit in the franchise but you have to suffer through so much worthless meandering, bad combat changes and a new style that is not worth using whatsoever.

im also disappointed a setting as cool as the castle amounted to nothing more than just window dressing for like a single mini game essentially

tldr; this game is genuinely worthless outside a kson's fat tits and the ending

I really like it but I definitely had to get used to the combat. The way they changed up Heat so that it's hard to gain but extremely powerful is a miss, in my opinion, and I think Agent style is a bit conflicted.

Like, Agent's moveset is great but its damage sucks ass, and the gadgets took me a while to really come to enjoy besides Spider (that one is awesome from the get go despite being useless for bosses). Still don't really like the drones tho, even if it's funny to summon 100 of the damn things at once when you have Heat Boost. Snake and Firefly combo well together and are fun to use in big group fights, so there's that.

Combat overall is a lot more fun than in 6 or K2, but nowhere near LJ's level. You get juggles like in LJ but they're only off certain fully charged finishers, so they're hard to pull off and, despite being fun, lack in damage compared to just busting out any Heat Action.

Anyway, I'm a side-content focused guy when it comes to the Yakuza series, and that pays off here because of how upgrades seem to be gated being doing side content. Which the game makes sure to try to get you to engage with, considering how they force you to do some of it. Nothing new for the series, though, and a non-issue for me, but I could see how people would get annoyed by that.

I did quite a bit of the Colisseum and got all non-Kiwami upgrades and pretty good equipment, and I still found the later parts of the game tough on Professional. If you were rushing through for story and didn't care for the side content, I could see why you would be suffering. But me, personally, I bought the thing almost entirely hyperfocusing on the goddamn Colisseum, tbh.

Sadly, though, no 100% from me yet. I always 100% before beating the story, but Infinite Wealth is coming out really damn soon and I wanted to catch up. I'll probably still get the 100% before IW comes out, but I wanted to enjoy my last weekend before IW by beating the story. Working chips away at my lucidity, which makes me not wanna do story content right after working, so the weekend was it for me...

Anyway, let's wrap up this long ass rant nobody will read. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are peak. The ending really fucking hit hard. I really liked the story and cast overall. OST is a banger other than Furioso (and the Yakuza theme absolutely shits all over the Agent one, but that's a cold take). I enjoyed this way more than I expected to, good times.

Lost Judgment still the best tho!

In many ways the reputation of this game exceeds it, that isn't to say it is overrated but rather that I think many will be disappointed when this game is finally translated into English.
Sayooshi is one of the main "denpa" games but it lacks many of the elements people associate the genre with. Most people that will actually play this game will be able to tell "what is or isn't real" and there are not that many moments of "absolute madness" in the game. The H-scenes are super short. There are no real moments of long text dumps based on a pseudoscience or philosophy thing the author read a wikipedia article about. There is no real mystery angle to it (most people will be able to guess the main twist almost immediately if they are familiar with this line of game). It isn't all that fucked up either, but then again people consider Saya and motherfucking Muramasa to be "extreme" so perhaps that is up to the reader to decide.
Regardless of what the game is not, much more importantly, this game is very very unfinished. The main story is under ten hours in length even if you read it very slowly and this is one of the few games where I thought "That's it, seriously?" after the credits started rolling. Still, the game is well worth playing as long as you keep in mind that it is very unfinished and don't really expect something along the lines of the other denpa stuff that is popular. I loved it overall and would rather not talk about the story (if you can call it that) and everything else as I feel this is one of the things most people should get into "blind". You either get it or you don't, that's all there is to it. Sayooshi also has what is possibly one of the best game OSTs I have heard. It's a classic for a reason, as long as you know what to expect. Also I like Jisatsu 101 more still.

Judgment is better. With that out of the way, I loved this game for the most part. Since I suck at explaining why I liked something besides "yeah shit's lit", I'll mostly be whining about the shit I didn't like, because I'm also a born whiner.

The story took a bit to really interest me, the first 5 or so chapters were kinda eh. Especially the parts about that one soapland ownder that the characters care a lot about despite knowing him for like 10 minutes, or how the characters just guess what shady shit is going on in one place instantly despite barely looking into it. I honestly was rolling my eyes at some shit in the early game, despite liking the characters a lot. It all pays off in the later half though, which is peak. Chapters 12 up to the Finale are fantastic, in particular. Ichiban is a perfect protagonist and I love the cast of characters, though I wish some of them got more time to shine instead of just kinda... being there. Especially Zhao, he's easily one of my favorites but he doesn't do much.

Gameplay-wise, I like a lot of the new minigames. Can Quest and Dragon Kart are particularly fun, but the movie theater is boring as shit. I know the whole thing is Ichiban fighting off sleep, but I shouldn't have to try to stay awake too through that boring ass minigame.

The combat's really fun, but pretty simple and mostly easy. Which fits, considering "fun, simple, and easy" are how I would describe the beat-em-up combat of the other games, for the most part.

I personally prefer the beat-em-up combat, though, especially because Yakuza is like the only modern 3D beat-em-up with decent production values and a budget higher than two peanuts. I would also say that people who are happy about the change "because the games got stale" can go suck a fat nut; if the series was stale just go play another series. Especially considering, like I said, there's nothing quite like Yakuza out there. But I gotta say, I personally really like the current state of the series. Having both beat-em-ups and turn-based JRPGs is perfect for me.

That rant aside, I do greatly enjoy the combat in this game, for the most part. However, 90% of the bosses fucking suck ASS. Pretty much all of them just require you to spam the same move and heal. One of the most important bosses in the story has four distinct phases that all actually behave the damn same because his affinities don't change so you just keep spamming the same move until he dies. Motherfucker can take quite a punishment too, so it's just a goddamn slog. Doesn't help that elemental attacks are very limited in comparison to the gazillion blunt physical attacks (which he resists), so you really end up having only one move that works at all.

It's not the only boss that's like that, the majority of them are the same. A few here or there have a nice twist or gimmick, but most of them just have lots of HP, a single weakness, and can deal good damage. Boring as fuck.

Non-boss fights are just as simple, but you usually get much more freedom to use the hundreds of skills at your disposal, on top of status ailments and what not, so they end up being much more fun and are where the game is at its most enjoyable to me. I also love the chaotic feeling with how character shuffle around and positioning is important, plus some environmental stuff like cars hitting people and kicking/grabbing shit laying around... but the game sadly underutilizes this greatly, which is a massive fucking shame that its sequel already seems to correct somewhat.

Dungeons are also a mixed bag to me. The main story ones are fucking awesome and I love them. These are, for the most part, made more like the long-battles of the older games. The first three or so are excellent.

But then, there's some sewer dungeons thrown in too. One of them is in the story and it takes like a fucking hour just to get through, it looks boring, and the music's lame. Please don't fucking put another goddamn sewer dungeon in 8, all the goddamn rooms look the exact same!!!! At least the last one (and its two post-game variations) are awesome too, though.

As a mentally-ill 100%-achiever, though, I also gotta kinda complain about how much goddamn grinding there is in this game. Almost every minigame requires you to play it waaaaaaay too much for completion metrics, such as having to win 50 Dragon Kart races and 30 time trials. Also 3000 sheep, 100 home runs (or was it 200?), playing closest-to-pin golf 20 times (I like it, but I beat every course and Bingo Golf within 6 plays)... it's like they got inspired by the baseball, Clan Creator, and Spearfishing grinds of 6.

Then, of course, doing the final post-game dungeon requires you to do a fuckton of grinding to get your characters' main job rank to lv99, though you ideally want to get at least 30 on jobs you aren't maining as well (for skills and stats).

But at the same time, this grind is chill as fuck and relaxing to me in a way. I just mute the game, pin YouTube to a corner of my screen, and grind away while watching shit. So basically, I'm saying it's relaxing as fuck and I enjoyed it but also it's a pointless unengaging grind that I would not have done if I couldn't multitask watching shit.

Another complaint from me is that your party is completely absent during substories. Sure, it's great that Ichiban gets some alone time, but I seriously wish there were more with the party member to give us more stupid interactions with them. I guess Drink Links/Party Talk/Table Talk are meant to serve that purpose, and I love those, but I still wish they showed up in at least a few substories here and there. I mean, one of the Party Talks had Ichiban telling Adachi about some guys he fought in a Substory. It felt bizarre, because Adachi was there in my party fighting the guys for me!!! At least the substories are great for the most part, though.

Graphically, this game looks good but it just... doesn't compare at all to its other DE contemporanies. I'm not gonna compared to Judgment because I played the remaster, so it's unfair, but 6 and K2 have way better environments in particular. Ijincho looks like it belongs more in the 5/0 engine than in DE. Cutscenes look fantastic, though.

So anyway, with all my complaints out of the way you might wonder "did this motherfucker like ANYTHING?". Yeah I did, it was peak, it's just easier to whine like I said.

TL;DR: you could build a mountain out of the complaints thrown at this game, but you'd only get a molehill out of the ones that are actually valid

left alive isn't metal gear. it has a fair amount of low budget jank, but outside of the inconsistent performance, some weird animations and a few ai quirks here and there, it works as intended (if you can handle literally anything made by cavia, you'll be fine.) that said - depending on your playstyle and willingness to experiment, the experience is either gonna be totally exhilarating or completely exhausting

let's dispel the myth once and for all: not only is left alive not metal gear - it's not even a stealth game. enemies are armed to the teeth. these aren't dudes in military garb - they're soldiers with armored exosuits. it'd be stupid if you could just 'stealth takedown' them. so what's the solution, especially on higher difficulties? (read: any one that isn't the casual mode that they patched in for people who refused to play the game properly)

RUN LIKE A BITCH

oh, but if only i could easily obtain tools to distract or disarm guards to avoid the constant gunfire. if only i could plant traps or obscure my trail with smoke bombs. if only i could slide tackle into enemies while sprinting as if this were vanquish and knock them on their asses. oh wait - i can do all of that. soldiers are spongy, but the sheer amount of ways you can manipulate them justifies that. sure, it'll take eight headshots to kill someone, but what about when while they're too busy shaking off a molotov cocktail to retaliate? or trying to dismantle a barb wire trap?

on paper it might seem like you've got all the tools you need to dispose of anything, but ammo is fairly scarce and you can't carry much of it. maps are visited under different circumstances by all three characters and the loot in each area is finite. stocking up on ammo or all the scrap you can find might sound like a good idea at first, but you could be giving your other characters a much harder time for lack of preparation

narratively, i don't have a lot to say without spoilers. as a front mission fan, it's certainly cool to dicaprio_point.gif at all the familiar terminology and factions. definitely feels like there could've been more on the narrative front, but what's here is cool and the cast carrying things is surprisingly high profile - even nigh animation-less sidequest npcs are absurdly well voiced. the morality decisions are also interesting and fairly pivotal (ranging from survivors killing themselves because you told them the wrong things, to actually important characters dying unjustly for your actions). i like that what you get out of the narrative is reflective of what you put into it. moreover, i appreciate that because this is a front mission game i can pilot wanzers. that's pretty cool too

look. if you're still here then your curiosity must be sparked in some manner. i'll be frank: this game gets cheap. i bought it for $6 and i'd have gladly paid multiples of that. there are great ideas here and they're not even deeply buried under jank. this is just a fun and unique experience through and through. easily recommended to anyone with passing interest and an open mind. play on the hopeless difficulty too - it isn't - it puts you in the right mentality to get through novo slava as intended. don't sweat the side missions too much - they're tough and staying alive is hard enough as is

moral of this story: never fucking trust game critics or youtube funnymen. seriously. most of the negative reviews on steam have less than an hour of playtime and yet they act as if left alive assaulted their family and left no one alive

it's embarrassing

Interesting game in that I'm very acutely aware of every bad thing it does (Obnoxious catching mechanics, long uninteresting story that only picks up mildly in the last hour, a ton of repetitive busywork, some pokemon are just real bitches to catch), yet I don't really care? Game throws me in a crusty mountain, tells me "There's 240 little creatures for you to catch!", and it just has me by the balls. It's the most ive been engrossed by a pokeymans game since, shit, I was a child, probably because it goes to such efforts to make you feel like a person in a world of pokemon (Constantly under threat of being killed by a wild animal, harassed forever)

also with like the year and a half of detachment from the arguments i dont think this game looks all that bad. it's fine.

This is gonna be a long post but I want to talk about the more unique aspects of this game that aren't the game mechanics like the emotion system it has, how unique and impressive the AI is and so on that I've already seen people talk about. Most people into "strange" PS1-era video games have heard of this one before. It is a bit of an infamous title due to still being the only video game ever to win the Seiun Sci-fi award and at the time it was just made by a bunch of random staff that somehow made a mecha-focused game leagues above any of its competitors such as Front Mission, SRW, Sakura Wars and so on. It is also sometimes mentioned in relation to Muv-Luv and 13 Sentinels. The former has basically the same alternate-history concept and the way it handles a certain SF trope is very similar but otherwise they are quite different. With the latter, it is probably the primary influence (alongside Please Save My Earth and Megazone 23) which is pretty hilarious as one of the most common complaints with 13S is that it "doesn't do anything original" despite the fact that 90% of the people who say that don't even know what those three series are.
The influence of GPM on 13S isn't a simple plot point or anything like that though and much deeper than you would expect. Take 13S and remove the mystery files and imagine if every story in the story section was totally randomized. Not only that, but imagine the gameplay of 13S except it's not piss easy and it's incredibly complicated. But enough about other games, GPM has had a pretty legendary status as a long untranslated game. I have played through the game four times including the tutorial playthrough and it has been nearly a year.

First off, similar to 13S and Persona 3 the game is split into two sections being the social sections and the battle system. A good 90% of the game takes place in the school section while the rest of it is "SRPG" stuff. This may not sound like anything special but, if you ever wanted the social sections to tie into the battles in those previously mentioned games this is what you are looking for. Pretty much everything you do in the social sections matter, and each playthrough will be a different experience. The games social-link equivalent does not give you simple stat boosts or anything like that, almost every single classmate you have gives you entire game mechanics. Ranging from being able to see into peoples hearts and seeing who likes who to being able to use the Shining Finger from G Gundam, to being able to increase your social status and forcing your classmates to listen to you. Not only that, but there is perma-death. This isn't some FE style perma-death though. When a classmate dies, they hold an entire funeral for him and the way all the other characters act changes. Every single death matters. If you liked the aspect of not being able to control your classmates in Persona 3's battle section well, this is like that but a million times more complicated. The more someone likes you, the more likelier they are to help you during battle. This isn't all however, there are as many negative aspects as there are positive aspects to it. So if you are thinking of trying to be best friends with literally everyone, I learned the hard way that this is not a viable strategy. Most of the cast has beef with each other so you have to experience and choose who you want to get close to. For example, Katou is very useful and charming but getting close to her makes Kariya hate you because he feels jealous of your character. Kariya is disabled and on a wheelchair who needs help a lot of the time. Helping him up the stairs and stuff would normally make others sympathize with you more and see you as a helpful person, but if he hates you you lose this ability. On the other hand, getting close to a psychopath like Akane puts a rift between you and the rest of the cast. Moreover, the game is filled with beginners traps. If you get close to Mai Shibamura, the "main heroine" of the game you lose access to pretty much everyone else as they all hate her. The tradeoff is that Mai is easily the best character in the game and simply better than everyone else, despite this fact though if you get close to her it also locks you into one of the few scripted battles that a beginner has next to no chance of winning. There's something like this with every single character which is what makes it stand out so much to me. You have next to no control over how the world develops in the game, and you have to manually learn who likes who and vice versa by talking to them.

However, the more you play through the game the more you acquire this "knowledge" which leads you to be able to control the world more. This in turn is a requirement for the true ending in game. Once you fullfill the true ending requirements and "learn about the truth of the world", you start being referred to as a god and all your classmates start being afraid of you. This is another very unique aspect of the game, counting things like scripted bad endings there are around a dozen endings in the game. There are six normal endings depending on how you perform as a soldier, however besides the true ending most of the endings are the same besides the boosters they give for your next playthrough. The true ending though, is anything but simple. Pretty much the entire dialogue in the game changes once you fulfill the requirements for it. The requirements for it are harsh as well, you have to kill over 300 Genjuu (the beta/kaiju/alien equivalent of the game) and make sure no one among the 23 characters in the cast (yes, including your teachers) dies.
Oh yeah, the story. If you dislike long stretches of plot infodumps that RPGs tend to have, this is your game. Possibly the epitome of show don't tell. There is an overarching story but it takes a background to the point of the game, which is that the way you connect the strange happenings of the game is the "real story". Essentially, your experience while playing it matters more than the explanation to things. That isn't to say they don't explain anything but without spoiling much this game is unpredictable to say the least. Even with game mechanics, I've never seen any other mecha SRPG have war-time tax on simple items in the store. You have to pay fucking tax in this game. Simply put, this isn't a game that revolves around twists. The amount of stuff you can do is virtually limitless, if you want to become the commander of your platoon you can do it. If you think the battle system is bad, you can take a job that doesn't involve piloting such as being an engineer and sit out and skip all of the battles. Hell, if you want you can NEET it out too, not working at all and being lazy is an option as well. Planning an assassination against government officials, working for the black market, learning the origin behind the robots you pilot, "siding with the aliens", getting real close to the cat that suspiciously has god-tier stats, cursing your classmates and setting them up to die, working out like crazy and punching aliens while wearing your piloting suit and so on. All this stuff I mentioned isn't even half of it, I recommend not looking up many guides as learning that every single action has a consequence is one of the things I liked about the game. Oh yeah, there is an "Illusion" meter in the game that is basically a schizophrenia stat. You should absolutely grind that to see some wild shit.
So in the end how does all of this come together? Well, barely. The music is very underwhelming. The visuals of the games besides the battles are in the negatives. A lot of the character scenarios feel unfinished, and it doesn't help that for some reason all the social link equivalents are in randomized order for the most part. I would say the game is complete as it is but, if you go into it expecting a set beginning and an end you will be disappointed. A lot of stuff was cut as well, going into minor spoiler territory here there are 5+1(the tutorial chara) playable characters. Originally, every single character was meant to be playable. You can still play as every character through a cheat code but all of their scenarios are unfinished and insanely glitchy. Moreover, all the ED cutscenes have a bunch of CGs that you don't see in game: all content that was cut and reproduced as an audio drama. Said audio drama is largely unavailable, I had to physically buy most of the discs and uploaded what I have on YT but I'm still missing the last two.
There's a ton of stuff about the game that I haven't mentioned due to spoilers. Some crucial game mechanics, the meta element that the entire game revolves around, etc. One final note is that if you're the type that lacks reading comprehension and whines about Muv-Luv and similar games being fascist then steer clear of this game because it makes ML nationalism seem like a joke.
Gunparade March lived up to the hype for me and I still think about it every day but, I feel like a lot of people won't really like it much. It really is a lightning in a bottle tier game. I'm hoping LOOP8 will be good but it isn't looking that great and the other sequels are not great. Still, if you like any of the aforementioned games or if anything I said about it sounds interesting it is absolutely worth checking out in the case that it gets translated. Just know that whatever the game seems like to you, it's probably nothing like that in reality.