Every step a journey, every dungeon crawler a new plaque in my heart. I don't have anything new to say about Shadow Tower that I haven't said about King's Field, but oh my god it goes above and beyond with the vibes. As soon as the first title card popped up with the blotty typewriter font and the dithering, my soul was bound and I fell in love. I'm chaining myself down trying not to start Abyss right away, but it's technically irrelevant to what I'm working on right now and I can't justify it yet...

I actually got kinda burnt out with all the side content (something I didn't think would happen after playing the first game) and decided the best way to get myself forward was just to watch a playthrough of the last 6-ish hours.
It's definitely a perfect sequel, it's bigger and better in almost every way, but it still feels too close to the first game in a lot of ways that prevent it from hitting the same charm for me. I think that's why I ultimately burnt, it felt more like I'd taken a year's break from Yakuza 1 and then jumped back in right where I'd left off, instead of starting a fully new game, even regardless of the fact that there's a timeskip and new things are happening. It's still great, undeniably a lot of fun and the side content is really engaging, but I can't help but wonder how they could've pushed it further. At the very least, it's got me excited to play Y3 knowing how it mixes things up for the new console gen.