Hannibalmick
459 Reviews liked by Hannibalmick
those last 10 mins man...
xenogears with twice the autism
It's been 5 years and still my favorite narrative in fiction. It went 99% like I wanted it to be, basically an ideal of story I had for a long time
If you removed ailments from this game it'd be like 50× better
Honkai Impact 3rd
2016
I don't play anymore but kiana will always be five stars in my heart.
After being kind of underwhelmed with where the Luofu storyline ended up, I'm cautiously optimistic about where Penacony will go. Already there's a lot more imaginative work on display - the concept of a world of dreams with sinister underpinnings is presented in a fascinating way, from the main storyline's last minute rug pull to the side missions diving deep into individuals trying and failing and trying again to find their own meaning in a dream that might already by falling apart. This is the most excited I've been for the story in a long while. Here's hoping the devs stick the landing!
This review contains spoilers
One step forward two steps back
Yakuza 8 saw Yakuza 5's messy ass plot and said, yeah, I can beat it.
The positives are abondant. Mainly in all things concerning gameplay.
-Combat is massively improved from 7. I'd actually say it really comes into it's own in this game in a way it never really did in 7.
-Side stories are overall pretty good
-Yamai. Just. Yamai.
-I didn't dislike Adachi in 7, but I think he really shines here, he's hillarious.
-Seonhee is hot.
-The game has decent, if a bit on the nose commentary on social media, manipulated news stories and fame culture.
-Kiryu's souvenir thing is a lot fun, I greatly enjoyed doing them, even if some of them were a little contrived.
-Takaya Kuroda's best performance to date, by far.
-Soul, this game has plenty and more. Whatever it's flaws, I can say this is a game made with passion and love for the characters and universe, and with AAA games nowadays, that is excedingly rare.
But oh boy is it messy.
-The great "Ichiban and Kiryu teamup" that was advertised, is a lie. Ichiban and Kiryu are toghether for a couple of chapters and after that, they go their seperate ways, with their own seperate parties, stories that connect only very loosely.
-Which leads me into this point, this feels like it should be two seperate games, "Ichiban looks for his mother in Hawaii" and "Kiryu's real real final stand (forget Yakuza 6 was a thing)". The way they each have their own seperate final bosses, one feeling like a parody take on JRPG God monsters and one feeling like a generic yakuza final boss in the Millenium Tower.
-While this might not be a problem /inherently/, it becomes one when you realise that way more effort seem to have been put into the Kiryu portion of this game than Ichiban's. Thus, Ichiban feels like he's playing second fiddle to Kiryu in what is only his second game. This game almost feels like the fan reaction to Ichiban was negative and the devs are attempting to course correct. But that's just not the case, Ichiban is probably the single most well received sucessor protagonist I've ever seen. So I find it a huge shame that RGG seems to think he can't carry a game by himself and needs Kiryu to prop him up.
-The ending is insanely abrupt. With Ichiban just being made into a butt monkey and Kiryu's.....just not being an ending.
-The pacing is honnestly god awful, its as bad as Final Fantasy XVI. The forced tutorials for the mini games are truly a chore. Look, I respect Sujimon and Dodonko Islands, I'm sure some people got lots of fun out of them, but I don't care, that is not why I play Yakuza, and I dont feel I should be forced to do so.
-The villains suck. Bryce starts up interesting and menacing but they go too far. Him being like 100 years old with no explaination, having a giant squid in his lair just makes him unbelievable. It also makes the framing "Palekana is good actually, Bryce corrupted it" kind of moot when everyone currently alive who are part of it are indoctrinated within Bryce's worldview.
-Ebina is even worse, he is genuinly the worst villain in the series by far.
-It ruins 7 as a decent starting point for newcomers. Having Kiryu feautred so heavily makes it impossible for someone who only knows Ichiban's story to follow.
-While I'd like to believe this is Kiryu's final game, fact is: He is alive at the end of this game, and Yakuza 6 was supposed to be. Therefore, I can't truly trust RGG not to bring him back again for some stupid reason.
All and all. I have no hate for this game, it was fun. But its an absolute mess and pales in compairson to its predecessor.
Ps: releasing this game next to Persona 3 reload is certainly a choice. I thought P3R was gonna be overshadowed by Y8, but tbh, no, the opposite happened. Releasing the best written persona game with an improved gameplay experience really does this game no favor.
Yakuza 8 saw Yakuza 5's messy ass plot and said, yeah, I can beat it.
The positives are abondant. Mainly in all things concerning gameplay.
-Combat is massively improved from 7. I'd actually say it really comes into it's own in this game in a way it never really did in 7.
-Side stories are overall pretty good
-Yamai. Just. Yamai.
-I didn't dislike Adachi in 7, but I think he really shines here, he's hillarious.
-Seonhee is hot.
-The game has decent, if a bit on the nose commentary on social media, manipulated news stories and fame culture.
-Kiryu's souvenir thing is a lot fun, I greatly enjoyed doing them, even if some of them were a little contrived.
-Takaya Kuroda's best performance to date, by far.
-Soul, this game has plenty and more. Whatever it's flaws, I can say this is a game made with passion and love for the characters and universe, and with AAA games nowadays, that is excedingly rare.
But oh boy is it messy.
-The great "Ichiban and Kiryu teamup" that was advertised, is a lie. Ichiban and Kiryu are toghether for a couple of chapters and after that, they go their seperate ways, with their own seperate parties, stories that connect only very loosely.
-Which leads me into this point, this feels like it should be two seperate games, "Ichiban looks for his mother in Hawaii" and "Kiryu's real real final stand (forget Yakuza 6 was a thing)". The way they each have their own seperate final bosses, one feeling like a parody take on JRPG God monsters and one feeling like a generic yakuza final boss in the Millenium Tower.
-While this might not be a problem /inherently/, it becomes one when you realise that way more effort seem to have been put into the Kiryu portion of this game than Ichiban's. Thus, Ichiban feels like he's playing second fiddle to Kiryu in what is only his second game. This game almost feels like the fan reaction to Ichiban was negative and the devs are attempting to course correct. But that's just not the case, Ichiban is probably the single most well received sucessor protagonist I've ever seen. So I find it a huge shame that RGG seems to think he can't carry a game by himself and needs Kiryu to prop him up.
-The ending is insanely abrupt. With Ichiban just being made into a butt monkey and Kiryu's.....just not being an ending.
-The pacing is honnestly god awful, its as bad as Final Fantasy XVI. The forced tutorials for the mini games are truly a chore. Look, I respect Sujimon and Dodonko Islands, I'm sure some people got lots of fun out of them, but I don't care, that is not why I play Yakuza, and I dont feel I should be forced to do so.
-The villains suck. Bryce starts up interesting and menacing but they go too far. Him being like 100 years old with no explaination, having a giant squid in his lair just makes him unbelievable. It also makes the framing "Palekana is good actually, Bryce corrupted it" kind of moot when everyone currently alive who are part of it are indoctrinated within Bryce's worldview.
-Ebina is even worse, he is genuinly the worst villain in the series by far.
-It ruins 7 as a decent starting point for newcomers. Having Kiryu feautred so heavily makes it impossible for someone who only knows Ichiban's story to follow.
-While I'd like to believe this is Kiryu's final game, fact is: He is alive at the end of this game, and Yakuza 6 was supposed to be. Therefore, I can't truly trust RGG not to bring him back again for some stupid reason.
All and all. I have no hate for this game, it was fun. But its an absolute mess and pales in compairson to its predecessor.
Ps: releasing this game next to Persona 3 reload is certainly a choice. I thought P3R was gonna be overshadowed by Y8, but tbh, no, the opposite happened. Releasing the best written persona game with an improved gameplay experience really does this game no favor.
Definitely a case of too much of a good thing. On one hand this has the best combat of the series and Hawaii is a fun fresh setting.
But even if you stick to the critical path the game is just too much - I don't need Yakuza/LAD games to be 50 hours long. This would've benefitted from losing 10-15 hours.
The final chapter in particular is a massive tedious slog of endless fights with occasional boss fights to break things up. I was exhausted by the end.
Also the ending is pretty disappointing. The game was sold as one thing but didn't really end up paying that off. The series has always been convoluted and messy at the best of times but they got especially sloppy here.
Overall I still had a great time, but I think scaling back for LAD 9 and sticking to a one-party system would be ideal.
But even if you stick to the critical path the game is just too much - I don't need Yakuza/LAD games to be 50 hours long. This would've benefitted from losing 10-15 hours.
The final chapter in particular is a massive tedious slog of endless fights with occasional boss fights to break things up. I was exhausted by the end.
Also the ending is pretty disappointing. The game was sold as one thing but didn't really end up paying that off. The series has always been convoluted and messy at the best of times but they got especially sloppy here.
Overall I still had a great time, but I think scaling back for LAD 9 and sticking to a one-party system would be ideal.
FromSoftware's games are know for their difficulty and Sekiro is taken by most as the hardest. Difficulty is something really subjective and there are games you can say are unfair. Maybe they give you an objective and not enough resources, they may ask for precision in your gameplay but not the best tools for that.
When I played this game for the first time, sometimes I thought things like "I will never get past this". When this happened in other games I would try to find a way to cheese the fight or drop the game altogether. It's a skill issue but most of those times I could not figure out the answer. Maybe my build is bad, maybe I'm underleveled or I just don't know how to respond to something.
But in Sekiro I always knew what I was doing wrong. I never could put the blame on the game so I had to look inwards. Grind for exp can only help for some extent, the game doesn’t have different builds and only one weapon so the only answer is to get good.
“Git gud” is something the soulslike players usually say when they want to troll or they don’t have a answer to your problem, just keep banging your head in the wall until it works. But Sekiro takes this to the purest form, there’s no magic answer, you can exploit some tools but you won’t win using only that. You have your sword and your parry, learn how to use it.
It’s like a drug, the first time you fight a boss it’s a thrill to learn the patterns, figure the timing and even if you have everything memorized, it still feels good. Few games I got the urge to be good at it and really pursuit it. Beating the final boss on NG+3 charmless and with the demon bell was something I will never forget. I beat that same boss 2 times before, but I was sloppy, I stumbled my way through victory. Now one error and I was dead, I had to be perfect.
“Hesitation is defeat” is a mantra that encapsules everything Sekiro is. The game is hard but they gave you the tools and the answer, if you strive to understand your errors and keep pushing forward you can do anything.
When I played this game for the first time, sometimes I thought things like "I will never get past this". When this happened in other games I would try to find a way to cheese the fight or drop the game altogether. It's a skill issue but most of those times I could not figure out the answer. Maybe my build is bad, maybe I'm underleveled or I just don't know how to respond to something.
But in Sekiro I always knew what I was doing wrong. I never could put the blame on the game so I had to look inwards. Grind for exp can only help for some extent, the game doesn’t have different builds and only one weapon so the only answer is to get good.
“Git gud” is something the soulslike players usually say when they want to troll or they don’t have a answer to your problem, just keep banging your head in the wall until it works. But Sekiro takes this to the purest form, there’s no magic answer, you can exploit some tools but you won’t win using only that. You have your sword and your parry, learn how to use it.
It’s like a drug, the first time you fight a boss it’s a thrill to learn the patterns, figure the timing and even if you have everything memorized, it still feels good. Few games I got the urge to be good at it and really pursuit it. Beating the final boss on NG+3 charmless and with the demon bell was something I will never forget. I beat that same boss 2 times before, but I was sloppy, I stumbled my way through victory. Now one error and I was dead, I had to be perfect.
“Hesitation is defeat” is a mantra that encapsules everything Sekiro is. The game is hard but they gave you the tools and the answer, if you strive to understand your errors and keep pushing forward you can do anything.
insanely big improvement over 7, story left me a bit unsatified
Honkai Impact 3rd
2016
Great story until the writers probably took notes from Genshin's success to pad the story as much as possible. The only reason I stopped playing. Also has a great gameplay loop.
I also wish it had more body type variety. Feels like 80% of the cast looks exactly the same if you were to push clothing aside.
I also wish it had more body type variety. Feels like 80% of the cast looks exactly the same if you were to push clothing aside.
simultaneously a top 5 yakuza/like a dragon game and also the laziest and arguably the worst written. everything having to do with kiryu was peak. everything having to do with hawaii was mid. the new characters were good but also felt shallow with little development. i have so many mixed feelings about this game idek what to rate it.
Don't know wtf happened here.
Maybe this rating will change as I sit with it more, but Idk man, this game just did not do it for me. It's weird because I enjoyed it while playing, but I felt nothing reaching the ending. It was so rushed that it felt disconnected from the game I just played. It felt like the themes the ending wanting to portray were not compatible with the rest of the story. The beginning of the story has a lot of mystery and intrigue, but around the middle point it really loses its footing and just meanders for a while. I was hoping the ending would kinda make it all work, but it just... didn't do anything for me. It doesn't help that I didn't really like most of the antagonists, barring one stand out. This is the first Yakuza game where I've really just felt nothing during the ending, and that's disappointing.
I can't in good faith call this a bad game, and I'm happy for everyone who loved it, but it just didn't work for me.
I can't in good faith call this a bad game, and I'm happy for everyone who loved it, but it just didn't work for me.
The side stories were Good plenty of activites, Hawaii was beautiful. When it was over though, I couldn't help but feeling unfulfilled. Like the payoff wasn't worth the journey but the journey was definitely enjoyable