If Pikmin 1-3 is exploring the unknown, in a planet filled with new creatures and locals. Than Pikmin 4 is exploring a nature park. Still unknown and mysterious, sure. But also familiar, welcome, and shockingly bustling with people and sources of the known. Thats my biggest takeaway here, I kept getting hung up on how little this world felt "alien". PNF-404 is not an unknown planet here, its a tourist attraction through and through, and it really made it lose a lot of the impact, melancholy, and beauty the original three games had. And when you did reach a level of tranquility in the game, you can be sure your crew is chatting up a storm, making sure to break that atmosphere. At least in mine opinion.

Gameplay wise its good! I think? If Pikmin 1-3 is commanding a small army of little guys. Pikmin 4 is commanding a commander of an army. To be honest I knew from the jump that Oatchi, (the lovable little dog guy) was the most brain-dead broken thing in the world and only upgraded his mobility. Even then not to max, and it still was far to overcentralizing! Hes just to strong, too important. I cannot imagine how this game plays with the dog at max power. His charge basically sure-fire killed anything that wasn't a boss. The autolock on normally was not an issue, but when it was? Wow was it.

I feel like two paragraphs of issues sounds like I hate it, but I really do not. Its a very fun, solid entry in this little series, that seems to have done its job in skyrocketing pikmin's profile in the popular culture. And I did like it! It was fun! But it losses at lot of what I enjoyed about the artistry of the first few games.

This game is quite a departure from the earlier games. It has a lot of new stuff that didn't really need to be there. That isolating feeling the first two games had is all but gone here. The crewmates will chime in constantly, never letting you go without stating the obvious (Pikmin 3 had this problem, but it's even worse here). There's way more dialogue than the first 3 games, so much so that I started skipping it because I didn't care for the story. Just let me play the game damn it! Thank god for the plus button.

The game also feels quite easy (I've lost even less pikmin than I did in 3). Oatchi's rush ability and ice pikmin spam make most fights a cakewalk.

That said, this is no doubt a great place to start for newcomers. It's easily the most accessible pikmin game with plenty of quality-of-life features absent from the older entries. There's a lot to love for new fans.

Nintendo took the route of mass appeal. It's no doubt going to be the best selling pikmin game by far, but at the cost of alienating some longtime fans.

Overall I don't really like the direction it took, but it's undeniably polished.

My first impressions of Pizza Tower were that it embodies the concept of a fangame, not just due to its obvious homages to an existing franchise, but due to how its definition of coolness is so video game-y.
EVERY LEVEL A NEW IDEA
KEEP UP THE MOMENTUM
PARRY EVERY BULLET
GET THOSE HIGH RANKINGS LIKE ITS LIFE OR DEATH
GRAPPLE TIL’ THAT COMBO COUNT’S IN THE HUNDREDS
GET EVERY ONE OF THOSE ENDINGS EVEN IF IT TAKES A THOUSAND HOURS
THEN SPEEDRUN FOR A MILLION YEARS
And through an incredibly tight set of influences, and some honest to god brute forcing, it all works out! What impresses me the most is how the “get to know it, then blow through it” design ethos of Wario Land 4 so perfectly overlays onto the mesh of a Sonic Rush-ish speedrun game to create something so immediately rewarding.

Peppino really steals the show here; controlling this bumbling chef feels like manning a well-oiled machine. Where I was most impressed with the game’s tactile nature is how you control his speed; to go fast, you gotta throw out a lot. While dashing, your jumps become stone cold arcs reminiscent of classic Castlevania, and your only actions out of it either push back against your momentum, or have their own foresight-necessitating fixed arcs as well. Gotta love stuff like how turning while dashing has a massive lag to it, and you’ll just freeze up and fall to your death if you drift off an edge. That’s that good Super Metroid type clunky!!
But when you shine a light over a game; interrogating it as a precision platformer–a practice the game itself encourages through its ranking system and playthrough judgements–things get a bit messier. Having done a few P rankeds and watched some speedrun gameplay, I can’t help but think the game evolves into a less interesting version of itself at high level play. The game’s stick shift-y movement can be easily teched around through the instant boosts of speed through canceling a grab into a crouch, getting you full speed dashes almost instantaneously. The dash’s true invincibility then ripples out into downplaying other core mechanics, such as the necessity of your grab and parry, and makes slowing down much less of an awareness-requiring commitment. So once the game has been broken down into a simpler run-and-jump formula, it becomes noticeable how little there is to learning its flow; you'll never see something like a Sonic game’s multi-path routing, for example. While it’s too early to tell what this game will look like at maximum capacity, I already feel a bit disappointed with the cool factor of my perfect runs; on paper, this is one of the most frenetic speedy action games I’ve ever played, but in reality, it’s a bit coarse. This is especially frustrating due to the game’s lack of playgrounds to challenge yourself - you're really just picking between its entirely precision-based P ranks, or its death-less, punishment-less go-for-literally-any-other-ranks. Pizza Tower is an incredible first run game - defined by its constant bombast of new ideas to the face, and the sheer kinesthetic joy of suplexing wads of cheese into the ground, but as of right now, but I can't say I fuck with the game's replay value despite its breezy runtime. Wow, this really is a Nintendo inspired game!

And while it’d be pretty shallow of me to compare this game too intensely to Wario Land 4–they are literally not that similar in motion–I was a bit disappointed in the places where this game was less transgressive than its forefathers. Just look at how loosely those boss fights are integrated into the game's rules compared to Wario Land 4’s time limit fights! In general, I thought the bosses were a bit overbearing; testing me on the same things repetitively, in a way that always fell behind my skill growth and memorization. Generally, I’d lose some attempts, unable to keep up with the stamina required for their length, then I’d beat them completely one-sidedly later on - which I would usually see as a sign its mechanics were taught well, but it felt a bit extreme here.

Despite all those negative ramblings I have for the game, though, its energy is absolutely contagious in a way that makes it near-impossible to hate. Easily one of the greatest games ever made to not play and watch a friend play instead–and I mean that as un-back-handedly as possible–I deliriously spectated one of my close friends playing this before I got my hands on it myself, and every time I turned to my screen, I saw Peppino getting up to something I had never seen before. Genuine every-frame-a-painting shit. And their enthusiasm for it was just as contagious too, I think I literally liked this game more before I had played it. This friend came out of the closet a few days ago, so I am being very nice to them by telling them I love this game instead of “yeah its great but the postgame experience just made me want to play sonic 3 instead”. What I’m saying is, I love my friends, and I don’t love Pizza Tower, but Peppino won me over, so he gets to be one of my friends too. Therefore, I appreciate Pizza Tower in the same way I appreciate a first meeting locale, or a hang-out spot, or
a fuckin pizza
Pizzas come split down the middle so they can be perfectly leisurely shared amongst a group
Pizza really is the food of friendship…😳

[3/25] silent edit notation: nvm games antisemitic i don't even like it a bit anymore i'm gonna be real. just like a complete mood souring. i don't even edit my reviews usually, i like preserving the exact authentic amount of grammatical errors and dumb shit i've written over the years for reasons that are too vague for me to explain, but i kept wincing thinking about how i wrote "near-impossible to hate" and found out that there's an enemy named "tribe cheese" that does tomahawk throws, war cries, and rain dances like 2 days later. buddy, that's at least 2 too many details to even be worth being remotely charitable!

Welcome to Bayonetta 3 / Hideki Kamiya’s Super Mario Odyssey / Yuji Shimomura’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. We hope you enjoy your stay!

At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.

This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…

Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.

What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao

Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?

Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.

I don’t think any series has come and gone throughout my whole life quite like Pokémon has. Thinking back to 2019: I played through Pokémon Crystal with a band of friends, and it brought back a lot of my dormant love for it. We planned our teams together, helped come up with nicknames, and tried to each catch a shiny of choice before the end of the game. By the end of the game, not only did it have that usual special Pokémon feel like you really went on a journey with your lovingly raised lil guys, my other friend’s Pokémon had also floated vaguely through my mind. Pokémon’s natural strengths of telling little wordless stories through your playthroughs all seem to shine when you do it side by side with others. Recently I’ve been playing Dragon Quest 3 - I named my party after my friends, and was really endeared by how their classes naturally make them interact with each other. 2 of my other friends, who are besties, are a mage and a priestess, and the mage is frail so the priestess has to heal them a bunch. Gotta love how classic RPGs remind me of people, but I gotta love how Pokémon brings my friends together at least just as much.

And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.

Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.

One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.

So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.

When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?

And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.

The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.

it's been even longer since i had initially played this game's story mode (7 years ago!! holy shit!!!) and when i last did; alot of the allure of it came from this being a new, fresh thing from nintendo's library, so i went into this replay fresh off the hook of splatoon 3's singleplayer offering, wondering just how well this small singleplayer mode still held up. the answer?

well uh, not particularly well. let's get the positives out of the way first, splatoon 1's game feel is still amazing to handle, and as someone who had just played splatoon 3; seeing splatoon 1 not lose anything in the game feel department does make me very happy! splatoon 1's aesthetic, although not very strong or coherent is very striking compared to alot of contemporary nintendo games, loud and bold colors are abound everywhere, and this is all propped up by a similarly very strange soundtrack! the final boss, while not as difficult as i remember it being is a good test to just how much they could do with this kind of formula.


however, that's about where my positives end and i start to become more critical; let's start with the aesthetic again, while i DID just praise it for being striking to its contemporaries, the lack of coherency means it can't really build a tone or world meaningfully outside of lorebooks; octo valley is literally a bunch of gray skatepark tiles placed all over, and this doesn't give me much an impression of the world of this new ip, more that it does just make it look like a smaller offering; the soundtrack on a similar note, while being strange and quite abnormal for something like this... is also not very good (wow, what a shocker! splatoon music not being good? they could never) as an aside, while i do think splatoon music isn’t as bad as the internet makes it out to be (octo expansion and splatoon 3 often have good music to accomplish the kind of tone they want to give for their levels!) splatoon 1’s octo valley stage music lack the kind of aesthetic coherence that octo expansion or splatoon 3’s campaign have in building a tone for a level and often show a lack of vision and inexperience in this kind of field.

last but certainly not least, we have the level design, and this one is a bit of a doozy. the stages in this hero mode feel very bland in terms of design, while they do get the job done at giving someone a decent understanding of the mechanics to get them ready for the real meat of the game, it has a distinct lack of creativity in pushing these mechanics to their very brink, often just showing you how something works in the game and sending you via a launchpad to the next landmark, and each of these landmarks are just spacious areas with 1 or 2 enemies littered about, this sadly gives levels a lack of real identity outside of the occasional gimmick level that focuses on the setpiece rather than the set formula they continue to go with.

i came out of this game more mixed than my 10 year old brain could've possibly fathomed. however, that's not to say that it's all bad; splatoon has come a long way since this, and the newest campaign shows that they've mastered the kind of design these levels have in teaching you this quirky shooter's mechanics!

(also, oh my god; the game uses cephaloparade like 10 times and made me want to shoot myself everytime it did)

Yakuza 6: The Song of Life weirds me out.

Yakuza 0 was a worldwide success. Establishing the beginnings of fan-favorite characters, in a very well-designed game to boot, turned out to be a damn good strategy to get people into a franchise that was already five games big.

So, following that with the very last game of the Kiryu Saga is certainly an… interesting move. Granted, the first Kiwami title released before it, but the second one and the remasters for 3, 4, and 5 came after Y6. Very bizarre release order, honestly.

Anyways, the main thing this game debuts is the Dragon Engine, which most RGG Studios games use now, and… it’s a brand new engine debut, alright. The excellent visuals provided in K2 are here, but it’s missing the fluidity in combat introduced in that game and expanded in the Judgment titles, but I’ll talk about combat later.

The story is… I’d say aggressively mediocre. My main issue with it is the main antagonist - he’s just boring. He doesn’t have many interesting traits or anything, and after how much I enjoyed the main villains from Yakuza 0, the Kiwami games, Yakuza 3 and Yakuza 5, this feels like a kick in the nuts.

The game also completely lacks subtletly in regards to him; after a while, the game pretty much shouts at the top of its lungs that he’s the final boss and main antagonist. I can only assume this was a kneejerk reaction to Yakuza 5’s final boss being received weirdly, thanks to his sudden presence.

The other new characters are great. The Hirose Family in particular made me smile a lot, and they make for a damn good supporting cast. Although, it came at the cost of other major characters - Majima, Daigo and Saejima are barely present, albeit Akiyama is still a major character at least.

Kiryu is a grandfather now, and that’s something I was really looking forward to! Seeing how Kiryu would have to cope with his dangerous past potentially involving a baby he has to take care of is an amazing premise for a Yakuza game, and to its credit, the game does it really well. You carry the baby at some points and even have to keep him happy, which is a good gameplay addition.

My main issue with Yakuza 6’s story? The fact it’s the final Kiryu Saga game. A boring antagonist and not many of the series’ major characters showing up results in a final game that weirdly doesn’t feel like it. Komaki and The Florist aren’t even involved at all! Yakuza 6’s storyline just doesn’t feel like a celebration of the Kiryu games, which it should’ve been.

Anyways, moving on from that. Yakuza 6 introduces the lovely seaside city of Onomichi, which is actually probably one of my favorite cities. It’s small, but very bright and clear - a far cry from the bright lights of Kamurocho. It’s calming.

Kamurocho is also present, as always, but with some caveats. The Champion District isn’t accessible (it’s under renovations, apparently), but with a new take on the area of Little Asia. It’s pretty nice, and looks beautiful with how powerful the engine is.

Moving on to gameplay. Kiryu has a new fighting style compared to the previous games’ takes on the Dragon Style. It’s pretty solid and covers a lot of ground - you have attacks that stun, some charge attacks, a sweep, uppercuts, the works.

Plus, the debut of Extreme Heat - fill up the Heat Orbs (yeah, not bar, orbs) and exchange that for the ability to melt enemies with stronger attacks where you can mash a face button or do a QTE to do more damage.

Combat is a bit clunky and slow, especially coming from previous games, but it’s not bad. The game’s designed around it, and I rarely felt frustrated. On the positive side, this game has some damn good boss fights; I don’t think any of the movesets are from previous games.

The music kicks ass as always. This is when the series really transitioned into a more electronic sound - rock is still here, but it’s complemented by some orchestral and electronic beats. I dig the soundtrack a lot, and it’s probably one of my favorites.

So, in conclusion: I think Yakuza 6 is a mixed bag. It looks beautifully, and plays well, if a bit clunky and slow, but a mediocre antagonist that doesn’t really feel like a celebration of the Kiryu Saga results in an experience I think is good, but not much more than that. I’ll admit I didn’t engage much with side content, as I had already bought Judgment and wanted to get on that, but I doubt it’d have changed my overall opinion on this game.