The Metal Gear games have been many things to me: ingenious, frustrating, poignant, juvenile, thought-provoking, hilarious, heartbreaking. But tedious? Never! …Until Peace Walker, that is.

Peace Walker is a fascinating exploration of the Metal Gear formula. It eschews the cinematic model of story-driven action present in every previous game, opting instead for a heavily-stratified short-format mission structure. Where in past games, you move naturalistically from objective to objective, learning new information, acquiring new items, and revealing new story beats along the way, in Peace Walker, capital G Gameplay and Capital S Story are mostly cordoned off from one another, with much of the dialogue being completely optional and accessed from a discreet menu. One the one hand, this shift in design philosophy makes complete sense. Peace Walker was originally developed as a PSP game, and I totally get not wanting players to get stuck in the middle of a lengthy cutscene when they need to get off a crowded bus. I’ve been that player. I’ve missed my stop because I was trying to find a save point. Shit sucks.

But. Because of this shift in design philosophy where gameplay and story feel so separate, what we’re left with feels less like one cohesive play experience, and more like a series of tiring scavenger hunt checklists, with the option to listen to the latest episode of a mostly-unrelated radio drama every so often. Which is a shame, because Peace Walker’s story is really fascinating! Though at times in danger of retreading old ground, it always finds new angles with which to examine its cast and themes. Metal Gear games have always found unique ways to blur the line between storytelling and gameplay, and having them feel so distant here makes both feel weaker than they probably actually are.

I wish I liked Peace Walker more than I do. It’s an intricate machine with a million little independently-moving pieces; I didn’t even mention the base-building meta-game that ties all your missions together, for example. If you really gel with the particular repetition that it offers, you could sink a lot of hours into Peace Walker and be happy. But ultimately, I come to Metal Gear for a Good Time, not for a Long Time, and Peace Walker seems more committed to providing the latter.

The long drag of a cigarette beneath the city's smog, the urban firmament of glitzy neon signs illuminating a starless sky. Passersby are flagged down by salesmen trying to drag the drunk and the impressionable into hostess clubs, thugs crowd around shady alleyways and dingy dives, an evil eye aimed at any fool too brazen to wander too close. The city is an ecosystem all its own, a interconnected web of the unscrupulous and the downtrodden ensuring an uneasy system of checks and balances. Stand still and you will surely hear its heart beat.

The crowd gathers, and for a brief moment, the underworld deigns to show its belly to the world above. The sound of flesh meeting pavement, of skulls fracturing and limbs breaking, of glass shattering, bullets firing, the wails of a guitar, dirty and unrefined, as overconfident goons and gangsters punch above their weight class attempting to face the dragon as he tosses them aside like litter.

Yakuza is a filthy game, rough and weathered, a stark contrast to the polish of its successors in both sight and sound. It's a raw, intensely atmospheric game full of grungy guitars and rough characters, a game that seems to truly capture the feel of the streets: Quick. Dirty. Brutal, above all else. Without the bombast of microwaving someone's skull or over-the-top action movie antics, we're left with bottles stabbed into eyes, knives jabbed into guts, curb-stomps upon skulls and the desperate wailing of fists, a much more grounded attempt to capture the swift brutality of dirty street brawls.

Yakuza is a tale of blood money, of corruption, ruthlessness and the lingua franca of the fist. A story about the dangers of ambition, the follies of old men and their pride, the glitz and glamor of the criminal underworld, and the fate such a life seals for those who partake in it. The city of Kamurocho is a city that operates on the most primal of rules: Survival of the fittest. It's a city who's history is written in the blood of ruthless and told by those left standing at the end of it all. It's a hotspot for the hedonistic, and the eventual grave of those who've intertwined their fates with the enticing allure of the criminal lifestyle. It's a city with a bloodied history of urban warfare and shady backdoor politics it's waiting to tell.

Will you listen?

Completed Platinum after Yellow, Crystal and Emerald in my brothers’ playthrough series. It’s quite clearly a fan favourite and argued constantly that it’s the best Pokemon game however after replaying, it seems that opinion is filled with a lot of nostalgia and ignoring the issues that were present.

I’m going to breakdown my biggest issue with the game: the Pokedex. (Huge nitpick of a review)

The Pokédex is by far the worst dex we’ve ever had, both at the point of release and today. With around 210, 93 are Sinnoh region Pokemon (including their beginning stages and middle stage too) and 56 are fully evolved. You’d imagine this is a good pool of Pokemon to pick from but the issue stems from the lack of viable new Pokemon and creativity. 24/93 are some sort of adaptation of gen 1 to 3 Pokemon as in introducing an evolution or pre evolutionary stage, 17 of which NEED Platinum to even access them.

As a separate generation from the other 3, it’s off putting to rely on fixing those Pokemon to fluff the Dex instead of creating new Pokemon for your region itself. I’m not saying this as if those Pokemon aren’t good because believe me, they are. I ran a Porygon-Z which is an excellent sweeper and with previous playthroughs and my brothers using some, a good chunk are so viable. However I find the approach quite polarising. They take an old Pokemon that has middling stats and nothing going for it and evolve it to be a beast. It’s a good thing that they want to essentially fix shit Pokemon but with them existing amongst original Sinnoh Pokemon, it’s hard to see why someone wouldn’t just run the updated evolutions.

This leaves us with Sinnoh’s Pokemon count of 69 including first and second stages. I mention this because no one really is going to run a Luxio over Luxray or Gabite over Garchomp. This would leave 37 Pokemon to pick from but you can only have 1 starter, not all 3, one Fossil choice out of two, Dialga/Palkia/Spiritomb are post game, and Manaphy is an event. So we got 30 Pokemon now. This is the reason why so many people have similar Sinnoh teams. The remaining 30 have some stinker Pokemon with very little reason to use them. If this was Diamond and Pearl, you could say since there’s no updated evos from old games, they could have been used. But in Platinum? No way. Why use Carnivine when Tangrowth and Leafeon are miles better and are also available?

It may seem arbitrary to complain about something so minor like Pokemon variety but I think it sets the game back quite a bit. Original D/P are far worse though. Also Mt Coronet is mid, the region design is lacking and too many HMs still needed.

Cyrus is an interesting villain. That’s it. He’s got nothing else worth talking about other than being somewhat interesting.