KoiTatsu
2011
The game's progression system is incredibly tedious, and it's quite stingy with the amount of ores and loot you receive. The day and night cycle feels too quick, and the combat system makes it nearly impossible to avoid getting hit, turning it into a turn-based game. Additionally, your character takes excessive fall damage from just falling two blocks. The menus and options are confusing, and crafting and storing items is too slow. You can't run, and the double jump is sluggish. Your character dies too easily, and the enemy spawn rate is excessively high. If you're looking for a more RPG-like block game, consider playing Terraria or modded Minecraft instead.
2017
The game's progression system is incredibly tedious, and it's quite stingy with the amount of ores and loot you receive. The day and night cycle feels too quick, and the combat system makes it nearly impossible to avoid getting hit, turning it into a turn-based game. Additionally, your character takes excessive fall damage from just falling two blocks. The menus and options are confusing, and crafting and storing items is too slow. You can't run, and the double jump is sluggish. Your character dies too easily, and the enemy spawn rate is excessively high. If you're looking for a more RPG-like block game, consider playing Terraria or modded Minecraft instead.
2011
Positives:
-Fast progression system up to the endgame.
-Scary atmosphere.
-Even though mining is the main way to progress through the game, killing enemies does give ores and ingots.
-Your jumping height is like three blocks, and you can double jump, making cave exploration easier.
-Sound design for most enemies makes them terrifying.
-Wide variety of guns to use, with the shotgun being the best and most fun to use.
-Enemies are always challenging.
-Tools do good amounts of damage, so you don't need to completely rely on swords and guns.
Negatives:
-Endgame content revolves around finding a very rare biome and mining for several minutes while endless enemies that two shot you repeatedly spawn.
-Even though the game is centralized around exploring, the sprinting bar runs out in less than two seconds and takes four seconds to recharge.
-Armor doesn't exist, so you constantly have to deal with enemies three-two hitting you.
-Enemies lunge at you from insane distances.
-Every time you're too close to an enemy, your character either moves way too slowly or just completely stops moving.
-Dragons always spawn once you go far away enough, and they follow you FOREVER.
-Enemy spawn rate is way too high, even during the day.
-Once you've obtained the best weapons and pickaxe, there's literally no reason to keep playing since there's nothing else to do.
-Melee weapons break too quickly and are awful.
-There's very little building blocks that you can craft.
-Hell biome is just filled with hordes of enemies that spawn right next to you and from above.
-Endgame gear requires you to find the same very rare biome to replace gear and refill on ammo.
Summary: It's only fun for like a day, but after that it just becomes either boring or tedious.
-Fast progression system up to the endgame.
-Scary atmosphere.
-Even though mining is the main way to progress through the game, killing enemies does give ores and ingots.
-Your jumping height is like three blocks, and you can double jump, making cave exploration easier.
-Sound design for most enemies makes them terrifying.
-Wide variety of guns to use, with the shotgun being the best and most fun to use.
-Enemies are always challenging.
-Tools do good amounts of damage, so you don't need to completely rely on swords and guns.
Negatives:
-Endgame content revolves around finding a very rare biome and mining for several minutes while endless enemies that two shot you repeatedly spawn.
-Even though the game is centralized around exploring, the sprinting bar runs out in less than two seconds and takes four seconds to recharge.
-Armor doesn't exist, so you constantly have to deal with enemies three-two hitting you.
-Enemies lunge at you from insane distances.
-Every time you're too close to an enemy, your character either moves way too slowly or just completely stops moving.
-Dragons always spawn once you go far away enough, and they follow you FOREVER.
-Enemy spawn rate is way too high, even during the day.
-Once you've obtained the best weapons and pickaxe, there's literally no reason to keep playing since there's nothing else to do.
-Melee weapons break too quickly and are awful.
-There's very little building blocks that you can craft.
-Hell biome is just filled with hordes of enemies that spawn right next to you and from above.
-Endgame gear requires you to find the same very rare biome to replace gear and refill on ammo.
Summary: It's only fun for like a day, but after that it just becomes either boring or tedious.
2021
Love the realism, but the AI wall bangs you from very far away with pinpoint accuracy, they don't flinch when shot and one tap you in the head with an extremely quick reaction time. Every time you die you have to: wait for the point menu to finish, go through three loading screens, two countdowns, and you have to move all the way from the headquarters entrance to the briefing room. If you want to change weapons, you have to go from the headquarters entrance to the shooting range and then to the briefing room. The best strategy that I found is to let your aim bot teammates do all the work for you. Even while hiding in a corner with a shield, I would still get shot in the head through a wall from an enemy I didn't even see.
2016
Extremely tedious and repetitive, takes several hours for it to get "fun".
Negatives:
-Once you reach level 20 the game significantly reduces how much base level and job XP you obtain, making the grinding at level 20 very tedious, even after progressing the story.
-You only get an XP or job boost of 20% per accessory, with a max of 40% if you equip both. In Yakuza 7 each one gave 50% and if you had both of either equipped you would get 2 TIMES MORE XP, meaning that you get LESS THAN HALF as much XP in Infinite Wealth compared to Yakuza 7.
-Smackdown which is the game's take on quickly killing weak enemies, is not fast enough; it still takes like 10 seconds to do it, for both the unnecessary animations and the result menu to finish.
-Navigating the long list of menus is too slow and tedious for armor, accessories, items and weapons.
-They removed the feature to quickly use skills with keybinds that was in Yakuza 7, a game that is more than 2-years-old.
-You can't change your character's job/class until chapter 5, which is almost halfway through the game.
-The "Street Surfer" which is the electric scooter, can be completely missed if you never complete a specific substory.
-Despite XP boost items helping, they still hinder how much MP you have by a lot, making fights a lot slower and painful.
-Crafting the best weapon for each job requires you to find and fight a specific boss at specific points on the map in a specific city.
-There's only like two weapons per star tier, which gets rid of the freedom of having multiple great weapons.
-There's too many different recovery items, and the amount of space you have for each one is too little. This creates the problem of constantly scrolling through the item menu to recover your team's HP and MP outside of battle, and having to waste multiple minutes going to several shops on the map to restock.
-The "Nostalgic sites" that you encounter as Kiryu later on literally just boils down to Kiryu saying "Ah I remember when that happened, those were good times..." which adds nothing to the story.
-Sujimon battles are the most bare-bones turn-based Pokémon rip-off.
-Enemies have a lot more HP, making grinding to level up a massive pain since it makes fights last too long and forces you to waste too much MP, use up too many items, and constantly upgrade everything. I understand that bosses as a whole and the enemies that appear in the story need to be strong, but outside of that, it becomes excessive.
-The amount of items you get from enemies is too little, even when equipping multiple pieces of equipment that boost drops.
-Dondoko island is a lot like a mix between Minecraft and Animal Crossing, but more tedious. I completed it, and it just boils down to spamming the attack button and choosing the buildings with the greatest satisfaction. You have little to no freedom to build what you want, since there's too little space to build and guests ask for too much.
-Each Sector in Hawaiian haunt and the Yokohama dungeon has a big difficulty spike. Despite grinding each floor for so long, each new sector made my party feel extremely weak.
-Both Hawaaian and Yokohama dungeons always place enemies in very small rooms which makes it impossible to run away from fights in most scenarios, unless you constantly useon smoke bombs to escape.
-Some rooms have obstacles in the way making it impossible to walk around enemies that are blocking your way. Other rooms have enemies continuously facing the entrance of the area they're blocking, which forces you to fight them.
-The more simplistic layouts of the dungeons from Yakuza 7 are better than the procedurally generated ones because they don't lead to so many dead ends, and they are easier to navigate.
-There are enemies inside two specific dungeons that give more XP (Transcendent Transient hobos), but instead of being easy to kill with the right skill like in Yakuza 7, this enemy ALWAYS gets their turn at the beginning of the fight and the first thing they always do is protect themselves and reduce like 80% of damage you do, just to run away on their third turn.
-The safe rooms are mostly a waste of time since one out of two safes contain a boss that only gives basic enemy loot and one safe that gives the same loot you earn by just finding the exit of each floor.
-Eventually both Kiryu and Ichiban separate into separate teams; the problem with this is having to grind both teams levels to progress the story since once they separate, they won't be getting back together for the entire game.
-Another problem with your team separating is that you have a lot less freedom to choose your party members, since you only get two to one additional party member on both parties throughout the whole game.
-Personality stats are just the game's way of locking good jobs behind tedious, repetitive grinding and boring trivia tests.
-Sometimes in a fight, your characters will move away from the outline of the skill, so for example, it shows a skill that hits in a straight line, and you point it to hit as many people as possible, the attack will completely go in a different direction. This is even more common with tag team attacks that you unlock with drink links.
-Three out of the four antagonists seem one-dimensional, lacking the complexity that makes characters feel human. It would be more engaging if the villains had deeper motives beyond generic desires for power and wealth.
-The only well-developed antagonist in the series appears as the final one, having compelling motives and an excellent backstory. However, a significant drawback is that much of his background is only revealed during the final boss encounter, conveyed through an eleven-minute monologue.
Positives:
-The soundtrack, cutscenes, and animations are the best in the series.
-Being able to move around in combat and the majority of skills having range to them, which incentivizes you to aim and strategize, made the combat much more engaging and fun.
-Ichiban's eventual meetup with his mother was perfect and worth the buildup.
-Being able to equip and unequip anything from both Ichiban and Kiryu's team at any time is an amazing quality of life feature. This also includes jobs.
-This is the best-written version of Kiryu, so much of his personality shines a lot more, and the entire game makes him a lot more human.
-Dragon of Dojima job is the best and most fleshed-out job in the series, especially since you don't need a weapon to use it, which also gets rid of the necessity of grinding to get a great weapon for Kiryu.
-Weapon attacks (The ones you find on the floor) are much more common and easier to use, which adds a lot more interactions in most fights.
-Kiryu's final dungeon is outstanding; it is a lot shorter but packed with so many engaging fights, great interactions and more engaging map design.
-The final two chapters are the highlight of the story, easily being some of the best in the series.
-It has more than double the amount of jobs.
-The ending is the best in the series; it is very satisfying and uplifting.
-Seeing Kiryu's interaction with some of the characters that he helped in past substories in other Yakuza games was short and sweet.
-The eventual fight between Daigo, Majima and Saejima was even better than the fight in Yakuza 7 against Majima and Saejima.
I liked the game's story and characters, but the grinding, lack of many qualities of life features, and lack of a lot of freedom to play how you want made me dislike the series a lot more.
-Once you reach level 20 the game significantly reduces how much base level and job XP you obtain, making the grinding at level 20 very tedious, even after progressing the story.
-You only get an XP or job boost of 20% per accessory, with a max of 40% if you equip both. In Yakuza 7 each one gave 50% and if you had both of either equipped you would get 2 TIMES MORE XP, meaning that you get LESS THAN HALF as much XP in Infinite Wealth compared to Yakuza 7.
-Smackdown which is the game's take on quickly killing weak enemies, is not fast enough; it still takes like 10 seconds to do it, for both the unnecessary animations and the result menu to finish.
-Navigating the long list of menus is too slow and tedious for armor, accessories, items and weapons.
-They removed the feature to quickly use skills with keybinds that was in Yakuza 7, a game that is more than 2-years-old.
-You can't change your character's job/class until chapter 5, which is almost halfway through the game.
-The "Street Surfer" which is the electric scooter, can be completely missed if you never complete a specific substory.
-Despite XP boost items helping, they still hinder how much MP you have by a lot, making fights a lot slower and painful.
-Crafting the best weapon for each job requires you to find and fight a specific boss at specific points on the map in a specific city.
-There's only like two weapons per star tier, which gets rid of the freedom of having multiple great weapons.
-There's too many different recovery items, and the amount of space you have for each one is too little. This creates the problem of constantly scrolling through the item menu to recover your team's HP and MP outside of battle, and having to waste multiple minutes going to several shops on the map to restock.
-The "Nostalgic sites" that you encounter as Kiryu later on literally just boils down to Kiryu saying "Ah I remember when that happened, those were good times..." which adds nothing to the story.
-Sujimon battles are the most bare-bones turn-based Pokémon rip-off.
-Enemies have a lot more HP, making grinding to level up a massive pain since it makes fights last too long and forces you to waste too much MP, use up too many items, and constantly upgrade everything. I understand that bosses as a whole and the enemies that appear in the story need to be strong, but outside of that, it becomes excessive.
-The amount of items you get from enemies is too little, even when equipping multiple pieces of equipment that boost drops.
-Dondoko island is a lot like a mix between Minecraft and Animal Crossing, but more tedious. I completed it, and it just boils down to spamming the attack button and choosing the buildings with the greatest satisfaction. You have little to no freedom to build what you want, since there's too little space to build and guests ask for too much.
-Each Sector in Hawaiian haunt and the Yokohama dungeon has a big difficulty spike. Despite grinding each floor for so long, each new sector made my party feel extremely weak.
-Both Hawaaian and Yokohama dungeons always place enemies in very small rooms which makes it impossible to run away from fights in most scenarios, unless you constantly useon smoke bombs to escape.
-Some rooms have obstacles in the way making it impossible to walk around enemies that are blocking your way. Other rooms have enemies continuously facing the entrance of the area they're blocking, which forces you to fight them.
-The more simplistic layouts of the dungeons from Yakuza 7 are better than the procedurally generated ones because they don't lead to so many dead ends, and they are easier to navigate.
-There are enemies inside two specific dungeons that give more XP (Transcendent Transient hobos), but instead of being easy to kill with the right skill like in Yakuza 7, this enemy ALWAYS gets their turn at the beginning of the fight and the first thing they always do is protect themselves and reduce like 80% of damage you do, just to run away on their third turn.
-The safe rooms are mostly a waste of time since one out of two safes contain a boss that only gives basic enemy loot and one safe that gives the same loot you earn by just finding the exit of each floor.
-Eventually both Kiryu and Ichiban separate into separate teams; the problem with this is having to grind both teams levels to progress the story since once they separate, they won't be getting back together for the entire game.
-Another problem with your team separating is that you have a lot less freedom to choose your party members, since you only get two to one additional party member on both parties throughout the whole game.
-Personality stats are just the game's way of locking good jobs behind tedious, repetitive grinding and boring trivia tests.
-Sometimes in a fight, your characters will move away from the outline of the skill, so for example, it shows a skill that hits in a straight line, and you point it to hit as many people as possible, the attack will completely go in a different direction. This is even more common with tag team attacks that you unlock with drink links.
-Three out of the four antagonists seem one-dimensional, lacking the complexity that makes characters feel human. It would be more engaging if the villains had deeper motives beyond generic desires for power and wealth.
-The only well-developed antagonist in the series appears as the final one, having compelling motives and an excellent backstory. However, a significant drawback is that much of his background is only revealed during the final boss encounter, conveyed through an eleven-minute monologue.
Positives:
-The soundtrack, cutscenes, and animations are the best in the series.
-Being able to move around in combat and the majority of skills having range to them, which incentivizes you to aim and strategize, made the combat much more engaging and fun.
-Ichiban's eventual meetup with his mother was perfect and worth the buildup.
-Being able to equip and unequip anything from both Ichiban and Kiryu's team at any time is an amazing quality of life feature. This also includes jobs.
-This is the best-written version of Kiryu, so much of his personality shines a lot more, and the entire game makes him a lot more human.
-Dragon of Dojima job is the best and most fleshed-out job in the series, especially since you don't need a weapon to use it, which also gets rid of the necessity of grinding to get a great weapon for Kiryu.
-Weapon attacks (The ones you find on the floor) are much more common and easier to use, which adds a lot more interactions in most fights.
-Kiryu's final dungeon is outstanding; it is a lot shorter but packed with so many engaging fights, great interactions and more engaging map design.
-The final two chapters are the highlight of the story, easily being some of the best in the series.
-It has more than double the amount of jobs.
-The ending is the best in the series; it is very satisfying and uplifting.
-Seeing Kiryu's interaction with some of the characters that he helped in past substories in other Yakuza games was short and sweet.
-The eventual fight between Daigo, Majima and Saejima was even better than the fight in Yakuza 7 against Majima and Saejima.
I liked the game's story and characters, but the grinding, lack of many qualities of life features, and lack of a lot of freedom to play how you want made me dislike the series a lot more.
2022
The game where you lose the right to speak for not having high enough numbers, and the game that has been buggy and unbalanced for more than 7 years.
The balancing is so atrocious that you have multiple characters that are mostly unplayable like Winston and you have an op character every year that completely makes the game one-sided like Orisa two year ago, Junker Queen a year ago and Mauga this year.
Brain-dead easy heroes tend to be a lot more effective than difficult to use heroes.
The community tend to have this hive mind mentality where they only believe what works is what most people believe works, if you show them a good strategy that isn't well known, most people will think you're a liar. The best example is counter picking, if someone has your counter, you HAVE to swap or else your team will blame you and be toxic.
When people say the community is toxic and acts like children, they're not exaggerating. Every three matches, you will get people acting like this.
The balancing is so atrocious that you have multiple characters that are mostly unplayable like Winston and you have an op character every year that completely makes the game one-sided like Orisa two year ago, Junker Queen a year ago and Mauga this year.
Brain-dead easy heroes tend to be a lot more effective than difficult to use heroes.
The community tend to have this hive mind mentality where they only believe what works is what most people believe works, if you show them a good strategy that isn't well known, most people will think you're a liar. The best example is counter picking, if someone has your counter, you HAVE to swap or else your team will blame you and be toxic.
When people say the community is toxic and acts like children, they're not exaggerating. Every three matches, you will get people acting like this.
2017
Even though I love this game, the grinding to get maxed gear is arduous, and the current combat is awful.
Making a villager slave farm takes so long.
The process of creating one is:
1. Finding a village.
2. Creating a nether portal from the village to the slave camp.
3. Creating a very long tunnel from the village portal to the camp portal.
3. Kidnapping a villager with a boat.
4. Taking them across the portal.
5. Create the breeding house.
6. Trapping them there.
7. Creating the post and beds.
8. Getting a villager that will give you emeralds for the item you want to or can farm.
9. Having to deal with the trade limit of each trading option, that resets every half day.
10. Resetting the villager's profession for many hours to finally get the item and deal you want.
After that, you will need to:
1. You will need a mob farm, preferably an Enderman farm, for the many XP levels you need.
2. Multiple anvils are needed.
3. If you truly want to be maxed you will need Netherite which boils down to getting the scraps by blowing the bottom of the nether many, many times and then getting the necessary gold to turn the scraps into ingots.
The combat can be summed up as a very old turn based game.
Also, it takes modders to do what Mojang can't, like making the game actually playable.
Even though it is one of my favorite games, I can't ignore the many improvements it requires.
Making a villager slave farm takes so long.
The process of creating one is:
1. Finding a village.
2. Creating a nether portal from the village to the slave camp.
3. Creating a very long tunnel from the village portal to the camp portal.
3. Kidnapping a villager with a boat.
4. Taking them across the portal.
5. Create the breeding house.
6. Trapping them there.
7. Creating the post and beds.
8. Getting a villager that will give you emeralds for the item you want to or can farm.
9. Having to deal with the trade limit of each trading option, that resets every half day.
10. Resetting the villager's profession for many hours to finally get the item and deal you want.
After that, you will need to:
1. You will need a mob farm, preferably an Enderman farm, for the many XP levels you need.
2. Multiple anvils are needed.
3. If you truly want to be maxed you will need Netherite which boils down to getting the scraps by blowing the bottom of the nether many, many times and then getting the necessary gold to turn the scraps into ingots.
The combat can be summed up as a very old turn based game.
Also, it takes modders to do what Mojang can't, like making the game actually playable.
Even though it is one of my favorite games, I can't ignore the many improvements it requires.
2020
The game literally just boils down to holding the shoot button while you walk/run away from enemies.
2022
Even though I loved the atmosphere like everyone else, I couldn't put up with how tedious the game is. Even though I played the game up to Day 20 and got almost all the upgrades, it still felt like a shore that never ends.
The games flaw:
1. Ragdolling is very annoying since you constantly get put into it whenever you are low on food and/or sleep, it gets to a point where your character falls to the ground every 5 seconds. While ragdolling, you cannot move and cannot break out of it until you stop tumbling. It's especially infuriating when you're on the ATV (The vehicle you use) and you ragdoll while on it, making you fall for like an entire minute and losing your vehicle since it keeps moving without you. You also can't run while low on either things mentioned.
2. The hunger system forces you to waste currency in order to buy different amounts of food (I literally had an entire fridge filled with the military food bags that I couldn't eat) since you have to wait until you can eat more of the same food.
3. You can't sleep if you have above 70 on your sleep bar, sometimes your character will refuse to sleep, if you're hungry you can't sleep. You need a lot of currency to buy a portable bed since the one you get at the start is very difficult to move, and it is on another room away from the computer area, making it a back and forth in order to skip time to speed up the satellite process.
4. The transformers (generators) that would deplete its power by a random number or tick, which forced me to drive there every 1-2 days. Running is too slow and depletes a lot of hunger, driving is faster, but a pain since there's an excessive amount of trees from your base all the way to the generators. The generators are also located near the borders of the map, which meant losing a lot of gasoline and time. Every trip would take like 75-80% of my vehicle's fuel.
5. The upgrade system is the worst thing about this game, it forces you to unlock multiple other upgrades in order to speed up the computers and obtain more currency. You're given little to no detail on what each upgrade does. Refunding gives you less currency back, which forces you to either stick with the upgrades you have or lose a lot of currency. Most upgrades are very expensive, I got the majority of them only of non-stop grinding up till Day 20, while the game's story has a total of 30 days.
6. The amount of currency you get is so little, I felt like I was a machine being paid minimum wage while doing multiple jobs at once. Even doing the hashes and the daily task didn't feel like enough. On day 20 I was still running out of food, boxes, drives, and fuel.
7. Driving the ATV was very buggy. Using turbo made it constantly do an entire U-turn with the slightest move to either side (There being so many trees makes it worse). Sometimes it would start up but not move. Getting out of it would make my character strafe forward while ignoring all other moving directions. Without turbo, the ATV would move way too slow. The solar panel upgrade is also too expensive.
8. Any form of convenience requires a lot of currency, like the cat that fixes servers for you cost 500, a digital map that barely does anything useful is 150, a storage box is 50-300 depending on size, buying another microwave cost 400, the portable sleeping bag is 150, the best camera cost individually 80 and gasoline cost 25. Each daily task, which is where you get the most amount of currency, only gives you 140-177 with most upgrades unlocked.
9. Buying both the robot cat and all 16 upgrade levels of “server stability” would cost a total of 740. So you would need a total of 740, to get rid of the server problems. If you can't buy that, then you will have to deal with going to each server on the top floor of the satellite that doesn't work, and you will have to fix each one. If you don't fix them, then your download speed will be a lot slower.
Basically, my biggest issue is that the game gives me very little time and currency to just do what I want.
The games flaw:
1. Ragdolling is very annoying since you constantly get put into it whenever you are low on food and/or sleep, it gets to a point where your character falls to the ground every 5 seconds. While ragdolling, you cannot move and cannot break out of it until you stop tumbling. It's especially infuriating when you're on the ATV (The vehicle you use) and you ragdoll while on it, making you fall for like an entire minute and losing your vehicle since it keeps moving without you. You also can't run while low on either things mentioned.
2. The hunger system forces you to waste currency in order to buy different amounts of food (I literally had an entire fridge filled with the military food bags that I couldn't eat) since you have to wait until you can eat more of the same food.
3. You can't sleep if you have above 70 on your sleep bar, sometimes your character will refuse to sleep, if you're hungry you can't sleep. You need a lot of currency to buy a portable bed since the one you get at the start is very difficult to move, and it is on another room away from the computer area, making it a back and forth in order to skip time to speed up the satellite process.
4. The transformers (generators) that would deplete its power by a random number or tick, which forced me to drive there every 1-2 days. Running is too slow and depletes a lot of hunger, driving is faster, but a pain since there's an excessive amount of trees from your base all the way to the generators. The generators are also located near the borders of the map, which meant losing a lot of gasoline and time. Every trip would take like 75-80% of my vehicle's fuel.
5. The upgrade system is the worst thing about this game, it forces you to unlock multiple other upgrades in order to speed up the computers and obtain more currency. You're given little to no detail on what each upgrade does. Refunding gives you less currency back, which forces you to either stick with the upgrades you have or lose a lot of currency. Most upgrades are very expensive, I got the majority of them only of non-stop grinding up till Day 20, while the game's story has a total of 30 days.
6. The amount of currency you get is so little, I felt like I was a machine being paid minimum wage while doing multiple jobs at once. Even doing the hashes and the daily task didn't feel like enough. On day 20 I was still running out of food, boxes, drives, and fuel.
7. Driving the ATV was very buggy. Using turbo made it constantly do an entire U-turn with the slightest move to either side (There being so many trees makes it worse). Sometimes it would start up but not move. Getting out of it would make my character strafe forward while ignoring all other moving directions. Without turbo, the ATV would move way too slow. The solar panel upgrade is also too expensive.
8. Any form of convenience requires a lot of currency, like the cat that fixes servers for you cost 500, a digital map that barely does anything useful is 150, a storage box is 50-300 depending on size, buying another microwave cost 400, the portable sleeping bag is 150, the best camera cost individually 80 and gasoline cost 25. Each daily task, which is where you get the most amount of currency, only gives you 140-177 with most upgrades unlocked.
9. Buying both the robot cat and all 16 upgrade levels of “server stability” would cost a total of 740. So you would need a total of 740, to get rid of the server problems. If you can't buy that, then you will have to deal with going to each server on the top floor of the satellite that doesn't work, and you will have to fix each one. If you don't fix them, then your download speed will be a lot slower.
Basically, my biggest issue is that the game gives me very little time and currency to just do what I want.
2018
Great story but awful gameplay. The mechanics like opening locked doors, sneaking and especially the tailing missions are tedious. The biggest problem with the combat is how when you hit an enemy, Yagami will flinch back most of the time, which punishes you for literally attacking. Tiger is way stronger than Crane because of Flux, and Ex boost make the game trivially easy. After beating it on Hard, I would highly recommend not playing it on that difficulty because of how annoying it is to lose a fight because of the flinching mechanic and because of the whole mortal wounds mechanic.
2023
As boring as watching paint dry. I know that it's supposed to be a simulator, but at least have some action, like somebody robbing the store or strange things happening like an alien entering the store at night. The NPC/customers don't even say anything, they literally just walk into the store, their items spawn in, and then they leave once you calculate the total price. The upgrade system is just buying more items to sell which barely increase how much you earn since most of the new items you buy are either cheaper or a few bucks more expensive. You also earn very little amount of money, like $2 on average per customer even with the upgrades, and the upgrades cost more than $40 and increase every time you unlock more. There are also a lot of bugs, like an invisible pillar behind the register that never goes away.
2019
Summary: It's great near the beginning and especially near the very end, but the middle portion of the game lacks quality and refinement. Even though I liked the game, there's more focus on quantity instead of quality. I loved the third semester, but I wished the game had this much quality throughout it, even if it meant going from an 100-hour game to 30 hours.
The Good:
1. It has the best confidants in the entire series. Most of these characters have more depth, compelling backstories and a satisfying ending.
2. The gallows is a much better way to increase your personas stats, since it requires the player to sacrifice strong personas to strengthen another persona.
3. I have to admit, the comedy in this game is top tier, even though it sucks that you get no points for choosing the funny dialogue in confidants.
4. Futaba and the story behind her palace are one of the best parts of this game, mainly her redemption, what caused the creation of her palace and her character as a whole.
5. Even though the plan to reveal who the culprit is was a little far-fetched, I honestly thought it was brilliant how they bring back a lot of the information that they teach the player in the first palace and how they used the villain's own strategy that they used on the fifth palace, against them.
6. Kasumi is in my opinion the best written character in the persona series, seeing her flaws and how she constantly fails to improve makes her a more human character. Her backstory and her interactions in the final palace improved her character even more.
7. The final antagonist was a great change of pace compared to just having an evil god as the final boss in most games. Their palace and the entire third semester had the best ending compared to the other persona games.
8. The story pace is better than any of the other persona games.
9. Best combat out of all the Persona games, and it has the most amount of personas.
10. Great dub voice acting.
11. All the endings are better compared to Persona 5.
12. The persona designs look great.
13. The balancing is a lot better compared to previous Persona games (If you ignore the DLC's). For both the enemies, bosses, and the personas you can get.
14. Maneuvering around enemies is a lot easier to do now, letting you attack the enemies you want and making it a lot easier to ambush them. Letting the player see their approximate level based on color alone is genius.
15. A lot of attention to detail was put into this game. The same thing goes with how much the game lets you interact with your environment and its characters, offering a lot of dialogue that you could easily miss.
The Bad:
1. Makoto Nijima is the embodiment of the Mary Sue archetype. Once she joins the Phantom Thieves she very quickly figures everything out, she solves most of the problems, the other members start raining compliments on how intelligent she is, and she is usually the one to push the narrative forward. Another problem with Makoto is that whenever she is not taking the spotlight away from the player, she is either correcting you whenever you say something wrong or she takes credit for whatever “smart” thing you say.
2. Leveling up social stats is very tedious since it revolves around going to one place, pressing confirm multiple times and watching the same short cutscene.
3. The dialogue options for confidants boils down to either saying something funny or apathetic and getting few to zero points, or saying something with more enthusiasm and getting points. There's very little dialogue options that actually have consequences, aside from forcing the player to waste half an in-game day getting the necessary points back. Another issue is that you get less points if you don't have a persona with you that has the same arcana as them.
4. Morgana's tantrum about feeling useless was such a waste of time. It just revolved around constantly chasing him just for Ryuji to say something dumb and morgana running away again.
5. Getting all the stamps in mementos is very tedious since you will randomly either get one or two stamps per floor, forcing the player to have to search the same floors multiple times to get all the stamps which are needed to increase how much xp, money and items you get per fight in mementos. The more paths you complete, the more you have to repeat the same floors to get all the stamps, even if you get two every floor.
6. Mementos is still very boring to traverse since most floors look almost identical. The fact that there are 66 floors makes this a hassle.
7. Using incense to increase your personas stats is so useless compared to using the gallows. They should have removed them to prevent players from wasting flowers on them.
8. Some of the best persona skills are locked behind network fusion and can only be used once per in game day. They should have designed it, so you acquire these skills from a high level persona instead.
9. The part in the story where the culprit and Shido start talking about their connections and backstory (On 11/21), relies heavily on a lot of exposition dumps, making Shido a forgettable antagonist.
10. The mementos merchant (Jose) only restocks every in game day, or after you enter a new area in mementos, which slows the progress you make for getting better gear and items.
11. The audio quality for the English voices in the PC and Switch version worsens in the third semester of the game.
12. Completing the compendium is still very tedious since you have to go to the compendium menu, buy personas, go to the fusion menu, select the persona you want to get, watch your persona level up because of confidants, change the skill it has when its skill list is full and then repeat this like 200+ times. It took me approximately 10+ hours of just fusing to get 90% of the compendium. The thing is that in advanced fusion it is 10 times faster, since the game automatically buys the personas that you need.
13. The minigames like fishing, darts, and batting have very little depth, making it boring and repetitive quick.
14. Thieve's den feels incomplete even after you buy and unlock everything. Tycoon is repetitive.
15. In Persona 4 Golden there was an option for increasing how much xp you get without changing the difficulty of the game, but for some reason they didn't add that to Persona 5 Royal. Despite Persona 4 Golden being 6 years older at the time of Persona 5 Royal's release.
16. The game forces the player to read books and waste half a day to make minigames go from unfair to easy.
17. The amount of yen you get from defeating enemies in Mementos is so random, in the final path I would get from 15k yen to 120k yen with enemies of the same level.
18. Okumura's palace was so short and forgettable.
The Good:
1. It has the best confidants in the entire series. Most of these characters have more depth, compelling backstories and a satisfying ending.
2. The gallows is a much better way to increase your personas stats, since it requires the player to sacrifice strong personas to strengthen another persona.
3. I have to admit, the comedy in this game is top tier, even though it sucks that you get no points for choosing the funny dialogue in confidants.
4. Futaba and the story behind her palace are one of the best parts of this game, mainly her redemption, what caused the creation of her palace and her character as a whole.
5. Even though the plan to reveal who the culprit is was a little far-fetched, I honestly thought it was brilliant how they bring back a lot of the information that they teach the player in the first palace and how they used the villain's own strategy that they used on the fifth palace, against them.
6. Kasumi is in my opinion the best written character in the persona series, seeing her flaws and how she constantly fails to improve makes her a more human character. Her backstory and her interactions in the final palace improved her character even more.
7. The final antagonist was a great change of pace compared to just having an evil god as the final boss in most games. Their palace and the entire third semester had the best ending compared to the other persona games.
8. The story pace is better than any of the other persona games.
9. Best combat out of all the Persona games, and it has the most amount of personas.
10. Great dub voice acting.
11. All the endings are better compared to Persona 5.
12. The persona designs look great.
13. The balancing is a lot better compared to previous Persona games (If you ignore the DLC's). For both the enemies, bosses, and the personas you can get.
14. Maneuvering around enemies is a lot easier to do now, letting you attack the enemies you want and making it a lot easier to ambush them. Letting the player see their approximate level based on color alone is genius.
15. A lot of attention to detail was put into this game. The same thing goes with how much the game lets you interact with your environment and its characters, offering a lot of dialogue that you could easily miss.
The Bad:
1. Makoto Nijima is the embodiment of the Mary Sue archetype. Once she joins the Phantom Thieves she very quickly figures everything out, she solves most of the problems, the other members start raining compliments on how intelligent she is, and she is usually the one to push the narrative forward. Another problem with Makoto is that whenever she is not taking the spotlight away from the player, she is either correcting you whenever you say something wrong or she takes credit for whatever “smart” thing you say.
2. Leveling up social stats is very tedious since it revolves around going to one place, pressing confirm multiple times and watching the same short cutscene.
3. The dialogue options for confidants boils down to either saying something funny or apathetic and getting few to zero points, or saying something with more enthusiasm and getting points. There's very little dialogue options that actually have consequences, aside from forcing the player to waste half an in-game day getting the necessary points back. Another issue is that you get less points if you don't have a persona with you that has the same arcana as them.
4. Morgana's tantrum about feeling useless was such a waste of time. It just revolved around constantly chasing him just for Ryuji to say something dumb and morgana running away again.
5. Getting all the stamps in mementos is very tedious since you will randomly either get one or two stamps per floor, forcing the player to have to search the same floors multiple times to get all the stamps which are needed to increase how much xp, money and items you get per fight in mementos. The more paths you complete, the more you have to repeat the same floors to get all the stamps, even if you get two every floor.
6. Mementos is still very boring to traverse since most floors look almost identical. The fact that there are 66 floors makes this a hassle.
7. Using incense to increase your personas stats is so useless compared to using the gallows. They should have removed them to prevent players from wasting flowers on them.
8. Some of the best persona skills are locked behind network fusion and can only be used once per in game day. They should have designed it, so you acquire these skills from a high level persona instead.
9. The part in the story where the culprit and Shido start talking about their connections and backstory (On 11/21), relies heavily on a lot of exposition dumps, making Shido a forgettable antagonist.
10. The mementos merchant (Jose) only restocks every in game day, or after you enter a new area in mementos, which slows the progress you make for getting better gear and items.
11. The audio quality for the English voices in the PC and Switch version worsens in the third semester of the game.
12. Completing the compendium is still very tedious since you have to go to the compendium menu, buy personas, go to the fusion menu, select the persona you want to get, watch your persona level up because of confidants, change the skill it has when its skill list is full and then repeat this like 200+ times. It took me approximately 10+ hours of just fusing to get 90% of the compendium. The thing is that in advanced fusion it is 10 times faster, since the game automatically buys the personas that you need.
13. The minigames like fishing, darts, and batting have very little depth, making it boring and repetitive quick.
14. Thieve's den feels incomplete even after you buy and unlock everything. Tycoon is repetitive.
15. In Persona 4 Golden there was an option for increasing how much xp you get without changing the difficulty of the game, but for some reason they didn't add that to Persona 5 Royal. Despite Persona 4 Golden being 6 years older at the time of Persona 5 Royal's release.
16. The game forces the player to read books and waste half a day to make minigames go from unfair to easy.
17. The amount of yen you get from defeating enemies in Mementos is so random, in the final path I would get from 15k yen to 120k yen with enemies of the same level.
18. Okumura's palace was so short and forgettable.
1996
The good:
-Mario feels great to control, and the game gives you a lot of freedom of movement.
-Music is great and very memorable
-The game offers a pretty good amount of power ups to make it more fun.
-Most levels offer different ways to play through it and obtain the stars, making each level more unique.
-Each level has a steady increase in difficulty.
-The amount of moves the game gives you to move around is great.
-There's a lot of content and it's all highly replayable.
-There's no timer, and you're given a lot of freedom on which stars to complete. Even though there are some stars that require you to complete others to unlock.
-The dialogue for the characters makes them more alive and charming.
The bad:
-The camera is a pain to control, especially since it constantly gets stuck on most objects.
-Some of the game's stars are very frustrating to obtain, especially the 8 red coins stars.
-Sliding off steep ground is annoying, since you lose most of your control over Mario.
-There's a big difficulty spike whenever you try to complete the last few stars for most levels.
-It's very easy to fall off the level and die, which is the main cause of most player's death.
-Most enemies are push overs.
-The water levels are tedious.
-Every time you collect a star, the game kicks you out of the level, which ruins the pacing.
-Mario feels great to control, and the game gives you a lot of freedom of movement.
-Music is great and very memorable
-The game offers a pretty good amount of power ups to make it more fun.
-Most levels offer different ways to play through it and obtain the stars, making each level more unique.
-Each level has a steady increase in difficulty.
-The amount of moves the game gives you to move around is great.
-There's a lot of content and it's all highly replayable.
-There's no timer, and you're given a lot of freedom on which stars to complete. Even though there are some stars that require you to complete others to unlock.
-The dialogue for the characters makes them more alive and charming.
The bad:
-The camera is a pain to control, especially since it constantly gets stuck on most objects.
-Some of the game's stars are very frustrating to obtain, especially the 8 red coins stars.
-Sliding off steep ground is annoying, since you lose most of your control over Mario.
-There's a big difficulty spike whenever you try to complete the last few stars for most levels.
-It's very easy to fall off the level and die, which is the main cause of most player's death.
-Most enemies are push overs.
-The water levels are tedious.
-Every time you collect a star, the game kicks you out of the level, which ruins the pacing.
The good:
-The map is huge, and it's packed with content.
-Most of the new mechanics like fusing and recall are very fun to use.
-Exploring the islands was very fun and easy to do.
-Creating your own machines is fun, and it offers thousands of possible inventions. Despite the battery being a big problem, the huge amount of freedom the developers give you to create your machines is great, and I wish most of the game gave you this much freedom.
-It has a way better final boss and story than BOTW.
-The new abilities offer a lot more uses compared to BOTW.
-Obtaining extra parts to build machines is very quick and easy.
-You can fuse several solid objects and items with your shields like bombs, springs, mine carts and a miniature flamethrower which you can also use while shield surfing to give you several new ways to travel.
The bad:
-Combat wise, Link feels very stiff and hard to control. Several boss fights boil down to flurry rush spamming.
-Traversing on land takes way too long. Most of your time is going to be spent running with a stamina bar that depletes in 3 seconds with a character that runs and walks very slowly.
-The majority of the weapons break in 10 to 25 swings.
-Unlocking anything in this game takes way too much time and effort. It also requires you to do a lot of uninteresting side quests and grinding.
-There are a lot of unskippable cutscenes.
-It's so tedious to complete quests, mainly because it revolves around a lot of back and forth location wise.
-The hitboxes on most enemies are way bigger than they look.
-If your bond meter with your horse isn't maxed out, your horse is going to occasionally steer away from where you are moving. The horses can't teleport near you, they will only run towards you if you're very close to them, and they refuse to jump off any cliff that is 5 feet tall and higher.
-Link easily ragdolls from most enemies and bosses attacks, making fights very tedious. Ragdolling becomes an even bigger annoyance whenever you're trying to fight a dragon without a bow, since most of their attacks will knock you to the ground.
-Even though creating your own machines makes exploring easier, it still requires you to grind a lot to upgrade your battery capacity and to unlock most of the machines, since the first options they give you are too slow and inconsistent for traversal.
-Shrines were too easy most of the time.
-The camera is mostly awful when fighting a singular enemy, and it's even worse when fighting multiple enemies. The targeting system doesn't help much either because of how it constantly focuses on the wrong enemy and because of how it turns the camera to the side, making it difficult to backflip to avoid attacks.
-Despite the story being better, Ganondorf is still a very bland villain, since most of his character revolves around hatred and vengeance.
-The amount of weapons, shields, and bows you're able to hold is so little that it revolves around constantly fusing whatever weapon and item you can find, making it very repetitive. Upgrading your inventory is easy at first but becomes very long and tedious the more you upgrade since each inventory upgrade is divided into weapons, shields and bows, and each upgrade further increases the price by one korok seed. You can only obtain one extra inventory slot per upgrade.
-Exploring caves is such a drag because of the insane amount of boulders that cover most of the caves. You also need to use weapons that are fused with rocks to be able to destroy it, which revolves around breaking several of your weapons and constantly fusing the new ones that drop from inside the boulders with nearby rocks.
-Outside the main story, the characters are very bland and forgettable.
Even though I wrote a lot of criticism about this game, I honestly had fun when I wasn't being forced to grind for hours and hours. I just think that the developers should've given the player a more consistent way to travel near the beginning of the game. For example: In Elden Ring they give you a horse in the beginning of the game that doesn't get tired, runs quickly, can jump in the air, can teleport to you and follows anything you tell it to do. Another problem that even Elden Ring suffers is annoying upgrade systems that slow down the pacing of the game by a lot. Finally, I just think that the fun and tedium are constantly at odds with each other until you put in like 60+ hours to unlock most things.
-The map is huge, and it's packed with content.
-Most of the new mechanics like fusing and recall are very fun to use.
-Exploring the islands was very fun and easy to do.
-Creating your own machines is fun, and it offers thousands of possible inventions. Despite the battery being a big problem, the huge amount of freedom the developers give you to create your machines is great, and I wish most of the game gave you this much freedom.
-It has a way better final boss and story than BOTW.
-The new abilities offer a lot more uses compared to BOTW.
-Obtaining extra parts to build machines is very quick and easy.
-You can fuse several solid objects and items with your shields like bombs, springs, mine carts and a miniature flamethrower which you can also use while shield surfing to give you several new ways to travel.
The bad:
-Combat wise, Link feels very stiff and hard to control. Several boss fights boil down to flurry rush spamming.
-Traversing on land takes way too long. Most of your time is going to be spent running with a stamina bar that depletes in 3 seconds with a character that runs and walks very slowly.
-The majority of the weapons break in 10 to 25 swings.
-Unlocking anything in this game takes way too much time and effort. It also requires you to do a lot of uninteresting side quests and grinding.
-There are a lot of unskippable cutscenes.
-It's so tedious to complete quests, mainly because it revolves around a lot of back and forth location wise.
-The hitboxes on most enemies are way bigger than they look.
-If your bond meter with your horse isn't maxed out, your horse is going to occasionally steer away from where you are moving. The horses can't teleport near you, they will only run towards you if you're very close to them, and they refuse to jump off any cliff that is 5 feet tall and higher.
-Link easily ragdolls from most enemies and bosses attacks, making fights very tedious. Ragdolling becomes an even bigger annoyance whenever you're trying to fight a dragon without a bow, since most of their attacks will knock you to the ground.
-Even though creating your own machines makes exploring easier, it still requires you to grind a lot to upgrade your battery capacity and to unlock most of the machines, since the first options they give you are too slow and inconsistent for traversal.
-Shrines were too easy most of the time.
-The camera is mostly awful when fighting a singular enemy, and it's even worse when fighting multiple enemies. The targeting system doesn't help much either because of how it constantly focuses on the wrong enemy and because of how it turns the camera to the side, making it difficult to backflip to avoid attacks.
-Despite the story being better, Ganondorf is still a very bland villain, since most of his character revolves around hatred and vengeance.
-The amount of weapons, shields, and bows you're able to hold is so little that it revolves around constantly fusing whatever weapon and item you can find, making it very repetitive. Upgrading your inventory is easy at first but becomes very long and tedious the more you upgrade since each inventory upgrade is divided into weapons, shields and bows, and each upgrade further increases the price by one korok seed. You can only obtain one extra inventory slot per upgrade.
-Exploring caves is such a drag because of the insane amount of boulders that cover most of the caves. You also need to use weapons that are fused with rocks to be able to destroy it, which revolves around breaking several of your weapons and constantly fusing the new ones that drop from inside the boulders with nearby rocks.
-Outside the main story, the characters are very bland and forgettable.
Even though I wrote a lot of criticism about this game, I honestly had fun when I wasn't being forced to grind for hours and hours. I just think that the developers should've given the player a more consistent way to travel near the beginning of the game. For example: In Elden Ring they give you a horse in the beginning of the game that doesn't get tired, runs quickly, can jump in the air, can teleport to you and follows anything you tell it to do. Another problem that even Elden Ring suffers is annoying upgrade systems that slow down the pacing of the game by a lot. Finally, I just think that the fun and tedium are constantly at odds with each other until you put in like 60+ hours to unlock most things.