"I wonder whether knowing the truth would have helped me overcome the grief or not. Maybe if I'd known, I wouldn't be forced to live the life I do now."

Beautiful. Amazing. So glad I managed to finish this before closing out the year, the Kyle Hyde duology is a must play during December. Didn't manage to play a chapter a day to go with the chronological events but it's still a dazzling atmosphere nontheless.

There's always a melancholy associated with the end of the year for some. You think about what you've done all year round and what you failed to do, you try to put a smile to your friends and family at get togethers while hoping the future won't weigh you down as much as your past has, and that's pretty much the main theme which both of Kyle's games work with.

Aside from the great quality of life additions (I love how this game has a novelized version of itself to read along with the backlog in case you're a dumbass like me and forget what you're supposed to do every 10 seconds), you can really tell that this is an expanded version of Hotel Dusk. This time being a lot more personal given it's about Kyle's father and him trying to have closure with the ghosts of his pasts that have been literally living under his roof.

While some might feel it's contrived that for the second time in his life, every single character in this game is directly tied with each other's past to help Kyle out in the mystery, there's a sence of mundanity to it all that makes you realize that truth is stranger than fiction. We're all sulking about the past in one way or another, having a larger, unsolved problem in our lives that we tend to put on the backburner indefinitely because we need to function in our day to day, distracting ourselves with either work, our social life or even with lesser problems, there are things we can't process and make peace with because all in all, we're just trying to get through the day.

While the anticlimax in Hotel Dusk works because you can't expect all the character's life problems be solved in just a single meeting, there is a feeling that everyone can and hopes to move on from what happened which feels even more powerful here given what we know about Kyle, while being bitter in his own way, he still unconsciously finds himself helping tenants he barely exchanged a word with off of sheer circumstance, but also because he knows no one else will do it.

R.I.P Cing. You went out too early but you shone with the brightest of supernovas. Hopefully the Another Code duology sells well enough for us to see a remake for these games too. Happy New Year, folks.

"There are so many people around the world forced to keep burdens on their own. And one thing's for sure: I'm one of them."

This game is nostalgia bait, but lacks substance.

I cannot review this game in isolation. It has to be understood in the context of FFVII: it is meant for people who have played the original and are nostalgic for it. Every character is introduced in a way that's meant for you to clap and point at the screen and say "hey that's that character from the previous game!". It is 100% fan service. Which, by itself, is not a bad thing! It's actually pretty delightful to get a chance to see more of the world and more of the characters: it's fan service, but i'm a fan.

However, in my opinion, the game falls a bit short. My main issue with it is that it is a prequel, and that it commits the cardinal sin of a prequel: by meddling with the original story, it lessens its impact. Some scenes of the original story, depicted again in this game, are made less impactful by the presence of new story elements this game introduces! The new plot points and characters it adds are serviceable at best, and cheapen the original at worst. Additionally, they make the mistake of over-explaining, of trying to come up with a rationale for so many elements of the original game that it feels artificial. This is where the name of the bar came from! This is why this character wore clothes of that colour! This is where that character got that hair accessory! It feels almost masturbatory in the way it winks at the audience every time.

A smaller point, but that i think is worth noticing, is also that this game lacks the soul of the original. FFVII was a game that, as far back in 1997, said: ecoterrorism is a valid response to a dying planet, corporations will wage war to extract capital and will militarize to protect themselves to escape the consequences of the destruction they have wrought, it is your moral duty to oppose them. This game, by virtue of being a prequel... has you work for the bad guys, has you rescue or work with the villains of the original over and over again. This is not necessarily a bad decision in itself: we follow a character, Zack, whose story in inseparable from the story of the Shinra Company. But the game feels a bit too uncritical of this at times, and a bit soulless as a result.

This could be all saved by a good gameplay. And, honestly, the core gameplay is fun, if a bit repetitive. There is enough variety in the materia system to allow for fun combos, they tried some inventive new things such as the DMW system, it works, it's fun. However, the side missions are, simply put, bad. All 300(!) of them take place in the same 3 or 4 copy-pasted generic levels, and almost all of them follow the same formula: navigate the level, avoid encounters at intersections, find chests, kill boss. Their additional value as side-quests, supposedly to expand the universe of the game, comes from the lackluster flavour text on the mission selection screen alone: the vast majority of them have no story or text or voice line or anything. With a few noteworthy exceptions (the few rare missions that deviate from the formula or offer a real challenge are actually fun!), they are all completely interchangeable, and feel like busy work.

So, yes, I am not sure i can recommend playing this game if you liked the original FFVII. On one hand it's great to see some of the places we know, and seeing more of the characters we love. But the new story feels a bit empty, the gameplay is a bit repetitive, and i think your time would be better spent watching the cutscenes on YouTube.

Pros:
- Good opportunities for the player to customize loadouts and play differently if they choose.
- A few characters have some nice moments here and there (namely Zack, Cloud, and Sephiroth).
- Pacing does not drag on if you don’t want it to (optional content is easy to skip).
- Decent art direction as well as good character designs.
- Good music.
- The famous ending sequence is indeed pretty good.

Cons:
- The game doesn’t encourage you to experiment with loadouts and playstyles very much, as spamming weaknesses or some strong abilities will cheese most enemies (besides a select few bosses).
- Optional content is incredibly vapid and mostly pointless. The content itself is boring, and the rewards you get don’t matter very much when the main story gives you more than enough tools to easily defeat all foes.
- Level design is incredibly boring.
- The UI is annoying to navigate when it comes to items in combat, as there are no item hotkeys, and you’ll have to scroll manually while real-time combat is happening.
- The plot and characters are very much half-baked at best, with character backgrounds/motivations not given time to be properly explored. Even the characters with a lot of clear potential like Zack and Sephiroth—while better than the rest—are still disappointing as the plot moves faster than we can grow to appreciate them.
- Even though vocal performances are mostly an improvement from the original Crisis Core (except, oddly, Zack by a slight margin), the voice actors cannot save the game from its cringey 2000s-era Square nature, what with the bad script and direction.
- Despite good music tracks in a vacuum, there is a somewhat odd combination of different genres that clash. It doesn’t help that transitions between music tracks are overly abrupt.

Score: 3/10, closer to a 2 than a 4.

It's shocking how much this spins its wheels. It could have added so much to the FF7 story by being a prequel but nothing is gained at all. At its worst it's ruinous to the intentions of FF7's narrative. It overexplains things that absolutely did not need to be explained. It attempts to make Shinra and the Turks more likeable and less scummy, which misses the point of them to me.

Zack is a terrible character. He has this generic Shonen protagonist persona and its insufferable. The terrible writing does not help this. It thinks it's so smart, that it has so much to say. But it doesn't, it's a mindless narrative about honor and heroism or whatever. The relationships that Zack makes throughout the journey are so insisted on in the narrative and the game mechanics but they are all so one dimensional. I feel like this game is trying so hard to pretend that it's such a beautiful and meaningful story rather than actually being that. We have FF7! It's right there!

I'm very mixed on the gameplay. It has a lot of really cool ideas, and as far as reunion goes, the action always felt really crunchy and satisfying. At its best it does feel like a good translation of FF7s mechanics into a KH styled action RPG. But what absolutely kills it is the structure and the balancing. This game was made to be played on the go, so it has to have all of these really small bite sized optional missions. They are SO boring. They are there to give Zack new materia and new items, but they all play out the same in the same like four areas each time. I think the idea is that when the main game gets really hard they encourage you to do them. But the problem with that is the game is so easy all the time! The roulette wheel feels so tilted in your favor all the time. The materia fusion system is so busted and you just get these crazy strong materia that deletes encounters and ridiculously buffs your stats. I understand FF7 was like this too, but finding the powerful materia and making them grow stronger has you put in the work to do so. In Crisis Core, it feels like everything is just handed to you immediately. It makes it's systems and enemy encounters so boring. Why should I do more missions if I'm already overpowered throughout the entire storyline? It's really silly how this game is on the cusp of some really unique gameplay but it has so many cracks that show their face the more you play it.

I really wanted to like this game. There is appealing things about its gameplay loop that could be great if it was more finely tuned. It is very ambitious and I respect some of the creative things it's trying to do within the world of ff7. It's really trying, but it never sticks the landing. It's yet another unnecessary addition to FF7s story.

I played this as an antidote to Cyberpunk, and while initially the storytelling and world were so much richer I felt great, I quickly felt an amazing sense of opinion whiplash.

I've tried three times to play this game, and three times I have bounced. The reason: the combat just outright sucks complete ass. A 100 hour RPG with terrible combat? I could get past that if the RPG systems were deep and rewarding or the sense of adventure was great. While the traversal has its strengths, ultimately you are just wandering a generic fantasy environment looking for bad loot in sacs for most of the game.

The combat is too central to this game to be written off. It's impossible to enjoy. Even the biggest fans admit it's broken and simplistic. The way Geralt's animations work with attacks being determined based on distance to enemies makes it absolutely impossible to anticipate exactly how he will attack leading to an extremely unsatisfying flow for combat.

Even movement feels awful with that GTA-style accelerated movement where you turn like a drunken sailor. At the end of the day, a game that feels this AWFUL to play is a waste of time beyond a few hours. No matter how good the writing is. If the writing is the ONLY redeeming quality I struggle to see how this is so beloved. But yes, the writing is good.

The ultimate irony for me is that after blasting Cyberpunk, I find myself drawn back to it, because while its narrative is dogshit, the gameplay is actually satisfying and isn't that the whole point?

At this point, you know what you're getting into with a Yakuza game. Difficulty curve is steep at the start, and smooth as butter by the end. Sidequests have funny writing, but too many rely on checking on a character and then coming back to them later - probably a holdover from the ps2 era.

My main criticism with Ishin, especially as this is a remaster, is the upgrade tree. I'm coming in after playing Yakuza Kiwami 1 & 2 last year. The rate at which you unlock new moves and abilities with the four styles was fairly consistent. In this game, the unlocks are more of a linear ring, and all of the interesting and special techniques are locked near the very end of the skill rings. So you end up doing the same stuff over and over.

At its core, it's a Like a Dragon game like all the rest, but man I did not like it as much as I would have liked.

The story is good. A samurai game with various series characters filling the cast is a really charming idea. All of the casting/recasting is good, they all seem to fit the characters. The only one I was iffy with was Takechi. Just 0 fan service. Shibusawa is one of the weakest final bosses in the series story-wise. I just think they should have kept him the same or replaced him with someone friendly with Kiryu, like Nagumo from 6 or maybe even Ichiban. There's probably a better match somewhere. I just wish there was more stuff from 6. 6 is good!

I did not vibe with the gameplay initially. I ended up using the swordsman style exclusively, it feels like the style the game is built around. The other styles just don't feel fleshed out. In general your damage is comically low and the damage enemies do is pretty crazy, though it's likely I was using armour with awful stats. I wish the combat was faster in general.

I couldn’t bring myself to care about that stuff with the cards. I just kinda ignored it. I did find improved healing and damage cards which I used. I also ignored the crafting. Is it good? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

Fights can be annoying, this game rivals Yakuza 3 in terms of enemies blocking attacks, although it’s easier to break through. Bosses are pretty bad about this. You’ll usually have to dodge to the side and get behind them and hit them a couple times for pitiful damage before they start blasting your ass.

The camera is bad. It's like a constant boss fight. There's a bunch of jank in general. I have to wonder how much of that is carried over from the original. This is probably the Like a Dragon game with the least polish. Also from what I've seen, the original looks better at times? I hope they go back to the Dragon Engine.

All in all, I really like gambling on chicken races, Great game.

The historical spinoff I've been waiting for in years has been finally translated into English and released worldwide. And they go and make the game inferior to the original.

Like a Dragon: Ishin does nothing to address the issues the original Ishin had, and in fact, adds more problems into the mix.

Bosses have an insane amount of hyperarmour now, making them impossible to actually combo. The damage in Brawler style has been nerfed into the ground, making it virtually unusable except for parrying/tiger dropping. The four styles still have no cohesion between them, and are imbalanced as fuck as a result. Ground attacks have been removed in favour of just swinging the sword when enemies are on the ground and having them take damage. And most of all, both the trooper card system and boss magic attacks add nothing to the game except annoyance.

The sword upgrading system has been completely fucked as well, based on random enemy drops. It was so bad, the game had to patch this drop rate. It worked fine before, why change it?

On top of this, Unreal Engine adds the usual UE jank into the mix. Although, to give the game credit, the lighting in the world is quite beautiful and it has a quite robust options menu as well.

Overall, it's just disappointing that this is what we ended up getting. 100% an unnecessary remake, even just translating the original into English would've been better. If you don't want to play the original with a guide, go for this one, the base game is still great.

I'm going to spoil the hell out of this one, so fair warning.

Our fictions set in the past reflect our thoughts, in the present, about that time. That's obvious they told me that in grade school. They were like, hey you dipshit kids don't assume everything in a book is real. There's a unique madness to historical fiction involving real people. Actual human beings with thoughts and dreams and complicated lives, all at the mercy of history, interpretation, propaganda, and literary tradition, made to dance like a puppet for whatever point some dipshit author wanted to make long after their deaths.

I guess what I'm saying it that I want to have a time machine to show historical figures really fucked up versions of themselves from video games. I could kill half the dudes in the Three Kingdoms period instantly with Dynasty Warriors. Ryoma Sakamoto would survive though I think. I think he could have been a gamer if he was born a hundred and fifty years later.

So, on some level Ishin is the test on if just throwing whatever into a LAD style of game will keep my interest, and the answer is yes. Turns out that yeah, I like the most generic possible LAD experience. This isn't my least-favorite of them, either. I enjoy learning about history, so I was happy to have a reason to kick off some light research to see just how bullshit every bit of the plot was. And honestly I expected it to be more of a drama of Ryoma Sakamoto's life rather than a whole-ass thing, but this is the RGG studio so it's on me for expecting anything straightforward from a game where Kazuma Kiryu gets to shoot a gun while spinning around. And also, I like when a dude I recognize is on the screen and I clap and hoot because it's Ryuji Goda. I remember Ryuji Goda. I saw him after punching a couple of tigers to death that one time.

Speaking of the whole "guys from those other games playing historical figures" thing, that's an interesting little gimmick isn't it? I started off thinking of it as like, all your pals are putting on a little play for you. Then I wondered if it was just the same thing is casting a bunch of the same actors in another movie, since most of those are being played by real actors. Finally I was forced to admit that it's like that time when Family Guy did the Star Wars movies. Because for the most part nobody is cast even slightly out of type. Almost everyone is the same character they are in the "main universe," to the point where I was convinced that Date was going to be a secret traitor specifically because it would represent a meta-twist. Didn't happen though! The closest thing is Mine, who is just fully on your side the whole time, but he's sinister as hell about it. Typical Yakuza series thing where a guy is introduced by murdering a guy with torture and then you just have to forget about it later because you're friends now.

I don't think this is really totally on purpose, but it all sorta ties into the plot being basically 90% dudes having secret identities. I haven't entirely figured out how but I'm sure it does. At least half of the main cast has more than one name in this sucker, obviously inspired by the fact that some of them actually did do that since they were actively trying to overthrow the government and had to avoid being arrested. It has the vibe of a major theme, and the characters go around discussing like, which parts of their lives are the real ones worth keeping, but fuck if I can really find anything more compelling in it than the simple fact that there's two Ryoma Sakamotos.

On its face, this is the sort of soap opera you'd expect from the series. Imposter using your guy's name, it's his sworn brother, something about their adopted dad's desires and one of them being the favorite etc etc. Viewed in context, it's the most bonkers this series' politics have ever been. Wild nationalism and a generally conservative worldview have always been there, of course, but that's just what you expect from a mass-market entertainment product. The big-brain liberal genius happening here is in taking the history of a handful of real guys and putting them into a blender so you can construct your own perfect revolutionary who never did anything that made you uncomfortable. Honestly it kicks so much ass. I want to show the real Hajime Saito the game at the same time as Sakamoto so they could both be pissed off about the former being the latter in disguise. That would rule.

(Note: I say disguise but it's exactly Kiryu's characterization so this version of Sakamoto is entirely gormless and everyone later reveals they figured him out immediately because going undercover in the Shinsengumi to catch a guy whose face you don't know but who knows yours is a terrible plan.)

Right where was I? Oh yeah, so we distinctly separate things into stuff the REAL Sakamoto did (think the caste system is bad, technically broker a peace between the Satsuma and Choshu although in this game it's entirely on accident) and the stuff the FAKE Sakamoto did (use force of arms to achieve political results) and goes so far as to make the fake Sakamoto be deliberately working to get Britain to take over Japan in one of the wildest ending FMV plot twists I've seen in a very very long time. When it comes to the feudal system, the plot is heavy-handed in its criticism to the point where I was thinking 'yeah okay I get it you can move on now', but that kind of criticism doesn't actually extend to the kind of force required to keep a system in place. The Shogun is ultimately presented as a super cool honorable badass who can shoot laser beams as you one-on-one duel him in Edo Castle after fighting your way through a really impractical number of wacky traps and ninjas. Oh yeah he stepped down because Ryoma Sakamoto sailed to Edo and beat the shit out of him but like, respectfully. And at the end of it all everyone agrees on two things. One is that Japan is so fuckin good bro. Two is that you simply cannot make real change without... love. Love being defined as like being really nice and only killing dudes when it's cool to do so for drama reasons. And I'm like hey this actually happened! This was a real thing!! The government DID change and it involved a whole-ass civil war and everything it really happened!!! What are you even GOING with this. I don't love everything that happens in any given historical period either but come ooooonnnnnnn

So basically it kicks ass. I had a blast the more fucked up it all got and did all the substories and did NOT do all the combat dungeons they added to the remake because life's too short but it was still like 40 hours of game for me. You wouldn't play this before a normal Yakuza game but if you really want more of that shit, it's all here and it's nice. I will ultimately, I think, always be harder on the historical drama than the dumb soap opera specifically because I will research stuff and find your bullshit out more carefully. Because I love the human stories of history! They're complex! People change and aren't clean dramatic characters and you have to take them as a whole. The lessons you take from real history will never be these pat little things that make you feel good all the time. What I'm saying is that Ryoma Sakamoto would probably think Castlevania 2 was bad. And I'd have to tell him listen up fucko