Nothing offensively bad about the game, but it just never really grabbed me or made me want to see it through to the end. Its a left to right scroller where you do various puzzles to keep your boat moving past obstacles. The puzzles were fairly uninteresting and didn't really excite me. Game looks pretty nice, but the default distance is too far away, I had to change it in the options to close, and even then I was zooming in to see what the hell was happening on screen most of the time. A seemingly small thing like that can make a huge difference whether i want to keep playing or just uninstall and move on, which is what I did after a couple hours of FAR.

For the first couple of hours its an intriguing, enjoyable, if fairly standard detective story, more a Noir visual novel than a game. And that's fine, I love Noir films. But then the big twist happens and im just like "......uhhhhh ok then......" and the entire story just kind of collapses into a steaming pile of WTF is happening right now??? Huge tonal twist that ruined the entire experience for me, and felt so disjointed and unconnected from the first two thirds of the game. It felt like they ran out of time or money, and just had to tack on this weird rushed confusing and really unsatisfying ending. So unsatisfying, like all the plot threads that have been built up to are just disregarded or brushed past, its unbelievable.

Plus its super short, like between 2-3 hours. So yeah, its way too short and has a really out of nowhere crazy-ass twist that completely ruins the rest of the game and leaves you watching the credits roll and saying to yourself "is that it? are you fucking serious bro?"

What a weird game, if you can even call it a 'game'. Firstly, cool graphics, really pretty visuals at times. Music is....I dunno. The whole game revolves around you walking left to right playing a guitar through some trippy space levels. The music itself is kinda cool, its essentially just a dude noodling a solo endlessly on a loop. Its cool, but it does grow monotonous pretty fast. So you walk through the levels, then face a 'boss', which is just like a game of simon says with the controller buttons. Very very easy, never even a hint of a challenge. And that's it, that's the 'game'. There's very little interactive elements to it, its always on rails, and its over in about 2 hours, including getting the Plat. There is zero replayability.

The story is just, kinda weird and stupid. It does have a few funny moments, but mostly the writing is trying wayyyyy too hard to be kooky and weird and trippy, plus there are dialogue choices which you quickly learn have absolutely zero influence on the story, so you just end up button mashing to get through dialogue scenes ASAP. I will say, the voice acting is top notch, especially my man Carl Weathers (!?), who is excellent.

But yeah, its a quick and not particularly interesting 2 hour game. When its over you're kinda just sitting there saying "Is that it???". But you're also glad its over so you can move on to a better game.

Sea of Stars starts out a little sluggish, and after the first 5-10 hours I was almost ready to drop it. But it gets better and better the longer it goes. Its essentially a clone of Chrono Trigger with Super Mario RPG hit timing but has influences from many other 16 bit RPGs too.

The overall presentation is sublime. Graphics are beyond anything a 16 bit machine could have cranked out, and the music.....man, the MUSIC. Every single piece of music is incredible, and will definitely stand along side anything Uematsu created for Squaresoft during its golden age. Just sublime. No surprise, as its the same composer that created the unforgettable soundtrack for Chrono Trigger.

Story is a little generic and formulaic, but its still pretty effective, with some great emotional moments too. I will say the two protagonists are fairly bland, and the dialogue isn't going to win any awards, but it gets the job done. I don't know if it was really worth grinding for hours to get those stupid conches just to see the "true" ending, but hey I did it anyway, and no regrets.

Overall, its just a really solid love letter to classic 16 bit RPGs, which i enjoyed for most of the 40 or so hours I put into it. Honestly, I would play like another 10 of these games.

You already know its fucking trash. Like every year.

They should release 2 different versions. One with just actual basketball, nothing else, just a sim and an arcade mode. And the other one with all the bullshit stat grinding micro-transactional pay to win and horrible cringe as fuck career story mode and all the other game modes they invented just to keep you grinding for a hundred hours until you get so sick of it you either quit the game and uninstall it in disgust or pay another $100 just to make the game actually playable.

Guess which one would sell more?

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?

Same boring shit as the last 5 FC games, although Ill admit I did play FC5 all the way through., and quite enjoyed that one. But 6 is just....boring? Like, all the ingredients are there but its all just so recycled and barely tweaked from game to game. Ok, new characters and new setting, but the gameplay loop is just boring to me now. Its playable, but in no way is it exciting or interesting. Like I got bored of this one very quickly, about 5 hours in. maybe it gets better, I might go back to it but probably not.