Knuckle Sandwhich is a JRPG developed by Andrew Brophy and the game is his own attempt at a love letter for video games. It stars a silent protagonist, moving to Bright City to find a job, only to have Weird Shit constantly happen. You also commit a murder. Fun. What adventures await our Protagonist as he solves the mysteries of Bright City?

Combat was fun and was the standout part of the game for me. KS uses a take on Paper Mario’s Action Command battle system, and this one uses Wario Ware inspired microgames to determine if you’re successful or not on Attack or Defense. Usually these games last anywhere from 3-8 seconds, which gives a lot of room for battles to get to a point where they can drag, and it has for some players. But for me and my playthrough I didn’t really have that problem, even with the bosses most fights ended pretty quickly (thanks, Goblins!), and some cases TOO quickly (thanks, Gobilins!).

I’ve also seen complaints about the minigames getting to repetitive, but for the most part the "repetition" didn't really hit me. There’s a decent variety of mini games from the attacking enemies, and most of them were as enjoyable as playing a Microgame in Warioware complete with the difficulty of the Minigame going up when you succeed at one, so it kept the challenge fresh and engagement fun. There was a fatigue towards the end of the game, namely from the fact there's not a lot of variety in your own party's attacks and bosses and enemies attacks start to repeat, but luckily the game was in the final stages so it wasn't too hard for me to finish up.

On to the plot which is...fun? I’m not sure how to describe it. The game starts off running, combining a decent sense of mystery, supernatural and quirky comedy all assisted by an assortment of charismatic characters throughout, that kept me entertained and wanting to see what came next throughout the middle parts. And while it kept me entertained, the onslaught of new faces and details each chapter, while only hinting at answers started making the plot drag a bit, only for everything to be explained with a dump of information and twists in the last hour.

Though this is still saved by the fact that Bright City is just kind of a vibe. While there’s not a TON of secrets that’ll keep you busy for hours, there’s a fair bit of world here to explore and interact with that just feels comfy. I do wis there was more to do and see, more lines for the NPCs or even more secrets to find to flesh out the world, but whats here is enjoyable, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people who will get more out of it than I did.

This game is a bit of puzzling one to talk about. I think it’s a standout game, but I don’t think it’s a great game. Brophy's talent is apparent as it's sper easy to get drawn into the combat and world here I do get and even empathize with a lot of disappointment in this game, but I found the overall GBA cadence of the storytelling and gameplay to be comforting and enjoyable.

why do vanillaware titles always cause so much melties LMAOOOOOOO, notice how none of the review bombers have actually talked about the gameplay.

anyways, this shit is really good (so far - only 11hrs in), so if you're on the fence about picking up a cool srpg - i'd strongly say go for this.

also i carnally need berengaria so bad

Only at costa del sol but yeah this game is perfect

Update: finished the game yeah this game really was perfect

I fucking love ff7 dude

Perhaps I was too harsh on you.

I’ve long stood by the opinion that Half-Life 2 is a bad game. Upon revisiting it, it’s become clear to me that Half-Life 2 is not actually a bad game. Half-Life 2 isn’t a good game, and that’s an important distinction to make.

Half-Life 2 is a game defined by moments, by set pieces; the City 17 escape, piloting the airboat, driving down Highway 17, attacking the prison, rushing through the Citadel. What’s unfortunate, then, is largely how uninteresting most of these moments are. While it’s borderline impossible to downplay genuinely fun moments like sprinting along the rooftops while fleeing from the Combine or fighting off waves of zombies in Ravenholm, these moments don’t make up the bulk of the game. If you took a playthrough of Half-Life 2, exported every single frame, and averaged it out into a single screenshot, you’d wind up a photo of a dune buggy steering around runoff canals.

An inordinate amount of time is spent driving on empty roads, steering through identical-looking pipes and basins, walking along the world’s worst beach with nothing but miles of sand and an ocean you can’t swim in. It’s clear with the frequent stop-and-pop sections that interrupt these driving segments that Valve was trying — crunching, after the beta build leaked — to keep players engaged, but I don’t think they succeeded. To their credit, I suppose that this all feels more like the product of poor decision-making rather than them being forced to throw out their old work and start over from scratch, but that’s some faint fucking praise.

A few conversations with some friends of mine have revealed that, universally, we agree that the strongest thing Half-Life 2 has going for it is its aesthetic. Consider how you personally feel about Half-Life 2’s look and feel to determine whether this is a point of celebration or condemnation. Further, we all agreed that something about this particular aesthetic has been lost over the years since release; Garry’s Mod has diluted it heavily into something more funny than oppressive, whether that be through a variety of wacky game modes where Dr. Kleiner goes sledding and Barney sets up an illegal money printer, or through comedic, face-warping machinima like The Gmod Idiot Box and Half-Life: Full-Life Consequences. All of these are, in a way, Half-Life 2. And it’s no fault of Half-Life 2 that it’s difficult to take seriously in the year 2024 simply because of how its legacy has been warped by fans, but it’s borderline undeniable that these have all had an impact on lessening Half-Life 2’s, uh, impact.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair to Half-Life 2, but I’d counter that, apart from City 17 and the interior of the Citadel, the game is pretty generic. The incredibly long canal, highway, antlion cave, and prison assault sections are all as boring to look at as they are to play through, and they really don’t do a good job of delivering on the Combine-occupied hellscape that was promised when you got off of the tram.

As harsh as I’m being, though, I really don’t think all that poorly of Half-Life 2. It’s definitely a game that keeps souring on me the more time I spend away from it, giving me a chance to actually step back and reflect on the parts I didn’t mind in the moment but don’t care for at all in retrospect. I like the narrative they’ve got going on here. Dropping Gordon into the middle of City 17 without a fucking clue in the world why he’s there or what’s going on is an inspired choice, and it plays nicely into G-Man’s little tease about his employers looking for a soldier they can dump into the middle of an active warzone who’ll start blasting away without asking any questions. Similarly, the Combine that you square off against are stupid fodder who exist purely to get merked en masse, but they’re also a token occupation force comprised primarily of conscripted or traitorous humans wearing alien armor. Spinning blades and cars on winches in Ravenholm can be activated at will either to kill zombies or use the moving parts as platforms to reach other areas. There are quite a few moments where the gameplay exists in complete harmony with the world as it is established, and there are quite a few moments where Gordon Freeman has to stop what he's doing to jump up and down on a seesaw. Truly it is a land of contrasts.

What's here is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and is in a way remarkable for having such a strong legacy despite standing on such weak legs. People say that you needed to be there when this came out to truly appreciate it, but I think that if something is actually good, then it remains good. There are a lot of games out there that are both far older and far better than Half-Life 2, so I don't adhere to the "poorly aged" argument when it seems significantly more likely that people were just so awed by the tech that they didn't notice the emaciated muscles hanging off of the Source Engine skeleton.

The greatest sin Half-Life 2 commits is making a sequel to Half-Life that's boring.

A middling end to a middling franchise. While Zero 3 made a show of being one of the best 2D platforming Mega Man titles, Zero 4 slid back into the mediocrity of the first two titles. When Zero 1 failed to deliver on anything outside of music and aesthetics, and Zero 2 was just, a slightly better and improved version of that–Zero 3 was a complete departure into higher quality gameplay, level design, and a much improved customization system, of which Zero 4 sadly completely abandoned in favor of (of all things), a crafting system for its upgrades. I don’t even have the language to explain how bad of a call that was. It feels like Inti must’ve felt forced to make Zero 4 have some big mechanical difference from Zero 3, but it just ends up kicking the legs out from under what should have been a knock-out finale.

It’s a shame too, since Zero 4 features unequivocally the best plot out of any of these games–in-part helped by the English localization not sucking complete ass this time–with the compelling narrative between Neige and Craft, star crossed human/reploid lovers. Honestly, I’d rather play a game with Neige as the main character since she isn’t the charismatic space vacuum that Zero is.

On a final note, Zero sucks. He’s a bad character and always has been. Everything cool about him has been slowly drained away since X1 for the sole purpose of making him even cooler-er than he was in X1, and it’s been pathetic the whole time. I’m glad he’s dead. Rip bozo and all that.

I'm writing this review barely an hour after having Infinite Wealth. Normally I'd wait a bit and let it sit in my mind as I try to pick it apart, and I know I'll realise that the edges are rougher, I know that...but right now I want my memory of this to remain as untainted as possible. I know that sometime in the future I'll look at this review with tainted eyes, cringing at my self but I want to write this right now so I can look back and see that I genuinely loved this game deeply.

It took nine whole games to get here, and I'm at the end of it with my emotions being a complete mess. It takes so much hard work to sell a character, much less the same one around eight times over, and each time I've fallen in love deeply with Kiryu Kazuma all over again.

"They all treat you as if you're some hero. If we ended up just like you...the illusions of the yakuza life would be stronger than ever."

Piece by piece for eight whole games, we've been building up the legend of the Dragon of Dojima alongside him. Every admiration thrown towards Kiryu doesn't feel like just cheap talk, it feels earned because you yourself earned it.

Infinite Wealth isn't an erasure of every misstep this franchise has taken, it doesn't hide it but instead puts it on full display, it shows just how much you have impacted the world around you for so long to the point where at the end of Kiryu's life, the only question that remains was "Was it worth it? Was it a life worth living?"

It's hard having the courage to do something. It's even harder to be the one to give that courage to others but this common trait, this link that runs deeper than the dragons on their backs, is exactly why Infinite Wealth isn't just talk. You've seen that exact event take place time and time again, and now all that remains is the end of Yakuza as you know it. It asks you to be brave and head towards an unfamiliar future, and let the burdens of the past be a weight on your shoulders no more.

I wish I had something more meaningful to say, and in the future I probably will, but I want a record of my feelings as they are now. A public if not embarrassing declaration of my utmost love for this entry in the series, guess I'm taking a page out of Ichiban's book in doing this. Not that it matters, I think we can all benefit by being a bit more like Ichiban Kasuga.