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Used to be a music critic, tend to be a bartender, love to talk about movies, TV and video games (or basketball).
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Favorite Games

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy VIII
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn
MLB The Show 21
MLB The Show 21

078

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Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Final Fantasy XVI
Final Fantasy XVI

Jul 31

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Jul 15

Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Jul 10

Paradise Killer
Paradise Killer

Jun 13

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores

Apr 29

Recently Reviewed See More

Forgive me, for I am about to go off. I'll preamble with just enough text to imagine most of my review is pushed below the "read more" link because addressing this game indirectly seems at best obtuse, at worst negligent. For what it's worth, I'm not intending to address much in the way of the racial, sexual or political mud this game doltishly trudges through, both because better writers than I have already done it and their life experiences carry more weight in at least the former two categories than mine does. I had a good time with this game, all told. I think I'm at the hem of the veil now, yeah? Let's get on with it.

GAME OF THRONES

It feels appropriate to start here because, for better or worse, this was such a focal point of the marketing. And it makes sense! So much of this game's framework is wrapped in a shameless homage to that franchise, and without acknowledging that up front later narrative critiques can be more easily dismissed as "genre standard".

The first...dozen or so hours concern the player assuming the role of an outcast son of a formerly noble house. While the writers diligently attempt to dance around the rest of this, beginning with the main character being a true blood heir rather than a bastard, the following also occurs:

Said woebegone son possesses a purpose beyond understanding, his best friend prior to exile endures unthinkable mental and physical torture, his realm faces an unflinching (and iron-obsessed) threat from the far northwest and an even greater, magical (even...zombie-like) threat from the far north, his disinterest in royal machinations is only matched by the misguided territorial ambitions of those with a throne, his textual and literal guide through all this is possibly the most handsome and clued in wingman ever...yada yada, he reaches the royal capital and everyone dies thanks to a dragon.

It's not that George R.R. Martin has sole claim to any of this that I point it out, rather that this is easily the best part of the game in spite of constantly confronting the player with its influences. More importantly, as I'll get to later, it doesn't seem to understand how aggressively mediocre these hat-tips are.

THE WITCHER (PART 1)

While the franchise titling this (and two additional) paragraphs deserves plenty of retroactive critique, it always feels important to recognize how monumental its third entry was at the time. The following decade has whittled away at many of its surprises, but for now let's focus on this: The Witcher knew it was rated M for mature, knew it was inspired by an era of unquestioned (white) male superiority and owned those things.

It's easy to imagine all the ways that could have gone wrong, and would have, if not for two key decisions: firstly, the world building is astonishingly consistent in its point of view. As the player is introduced to anything, be it man, woman or beast, the game draws a clear line from each character to the culture they come from. In other words, while the world of The Witcher is starkly patriarchal and womanizing, the women of that world always bring a perspective to it.

They are people, and they scheme when they feel it suits them. And more importantly to the hornier side of the internet, they fuck when the opportunity presents itself.

GOD OF WAR

So much hay was made about the involvement of Ryota Suzuki's history designing combat for the last three Devil May Cry games (with little mention of Dragon's Dogma or Monster Hunter) that little attention was paid to the handful of times Hiroshi Takai, himself overlooked in favor or Naoki Yoshida's production credit, divulged a fondness for both the 2018 reimagining of the God of War franchise as well as the iconic trilogy that preceded it.

Even without that knowledge, the franchise is essential to understanding FFXVI. In a very direct way, this game is structured as though the 2018 game were both gospel and impossible. It consists entirely of deceptively wide open areas that funnel the player into a series of funnels, the end result of which is inevitably the biggest bad dude. The game even insists on implying the weight of Clive's journey via doors that require both a button press and a hold; bizarrely, a significant number of these interactions are separated by a matter of seconds.

But more importantly, and most significantly, despite droopily mimicking God of War 2018's structure, Final Fantasy XVI often threatens to subsume all of entertainment when its immediately iconic Eikon battles begin. It bats leadoff with an extremely incoherent and profoundly boring battle between Ifrit and Phoenix, but from there this game seems to be extremely disappointed by the God of War franchise's pivot from scale to intimacy. The most cultured people I know also point to the cult classic Asura's Wrath for comparison, and they might be right, but as somebody who has both loved the latest God of War entries while noting the relative normalcy of plenty of its major encounters, every increasingly insane encounter from Geruda through Ultima had me pondering why exactly Kratos had to fight dragons that behaved like SNES-era Contra bosses.

THE WITCHER (PART 2)

This segment's alternate title could be Final Fantasy XIV. I freely admit that I'm not an MMO player, but I did get into the PS2 beta for Final Fantasy XI and listen to enough podcasts / read enough forum banter / know enough super cool folks that I get the gist of the format. I happily accept that the format works, particularly in a social context, but probably more importantly when there's a carrot at the end of the stick.

Just as this game fumbles the way many of its secondary characters perceive the world, man or woman, it extravagantly fails to incentivize its side quests. On the delicate side of things, that damn game I'll make three headers out of is far from immune from thematic repetition, let alone tropes. By their very nature, side quests struggle to interact with the primary adventure, so it's expected that most are a means to an end. These side quests are almost always designed as if the end goal were to thrust the player's time into a black hole.

To that end, there's a character who's primary purpose is to dispense rewards for completing tasks in the game (some would accuse many of this game's side quests of spurning the player, but matter of factly it's just withholding) and to the diseased gamer brain, it feels nice to visit her whenever a yellow dot gets attached to her icon. Which only makes it more depressing when one of the last rewards of her impressively extensive offerings is some bauble that reduces the cooldown of some ability by, no joke, 0.2 seconds.

LOL.

Tell me a tale twice as long as this review about all the useless trinkets and buffs you've encountered in games - Geralt knows many of them intimately - and I doubt you'll conjure something as dumb as most of the accessories in this game.

FINAL FANTASY (PART 1)

There's a specifically exhausting conversation surrounding this game that I don't care much about. So I'll say it here: Final Fantasy isn't anything more than text on a box, no matter how much I agree that it's easier to draw a direct connection from the first to the tenth entry in the franchise to anything since. The most important utility of those two words is selling video games, and they tend to succeed.

That being said, I played a lot of Yakuza 7 alongside this game and it smeared a highlighter all over something that really sucks about this game: the party and gear mean absolutely nothing. I'm a total sucker, so it was impossible not to feel a ripple of satisfaction whenever my damage went up 2 points. Initially, it was even more exciting to find items that meant an attack I loved would hit harder. Being a game that can be played upwards of 50 hours, however, it takes a certain level of clever design to separate players from the interactions they trust.

In this respect, Final Fantasy XVI continuously drops the ball in a fascinating way. Successive skills become increasingly passive, offer benefits to the player that are consistently confusing, and worst of all struggle to obviate their correlation between the apparent power of their source. Each new skill tree Clive gains access to does significantly change the flow of combat, but they don't seem to have any remarkable impact on the flow of gameplay beyond aesthetics. In fact, because the later abilities are so abstracted by time - whether charge meters or mere patience - this becomes the rare Final Fantasy where gear upgrades inspire near zero curiosity while late game specials paradoxically behave like more of a burdensome lark than an expansion of the game's possibilities.

Likewise, you'll find yourself joined from an impressive array of sidekicks. You'll have your fellow Eikon-attuned buddies, beaten down fellow Bearers struggling to make the most of their magical attunements and even run of the mill soldiers devoted to your cause. If it sounds like that should probably matter, it's certainly disappointing that it in no way does.

Because there are no elemental weaknesses, elemental proficiencies mean nothing. Because Clive operates in this world almost entirely without equal (including most bosses) the idea of a "party" is rendered essentially invisible anyway. As his skills progress, the game becomes a cornucopia of extremely satisfying (even impressive) visual effects, but the shadow effect of his (and his enemies') attacks littering the screen with particle splendor is that companions are often invisible from cutscene to cutscene.

Perhaps weirdest of all, there's no point going into the astronomical nothing that is the gear progression other than how abjectly weird its pointlessness is. Even still, it feels important to point out that this bit of the game reaches its apex very, very late in the game. If you choose to see Blackthorne the blacksmith's story through to the end, you'll be rewarded with a one-of-a-kind sword called Ragnarok with an appropriately endgame-like description that its makers can barely believe they forged.

Within an hour, you'll have a better sword. Okay?

FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)

If I haven't said it already, I disagree that the Final Fantasy franchise is obligated to behave one way or another. Perhaps this is because I completely ignored the XIII series as well as XV, but I'm comfortable hand-waving many of the mechanical similarities providing genealogy from roughly Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy X in order to recognize each game in that sequence offered a radically different take on itself.

That being said, whatever alterations were made to the gameplay always felt divorced from the franchise's true core value: variety. Final Fantasy IV forced the player to lose party members they depended on. Final Fantasy V let players design their party however they saw fit. Final Fantasy VI centered itself around era-defining cinematics and perhaps the platonic ideal of a video game antagonist. The seventh game balanced intense conversations about mental health against gambling and tower defense.

The eighth, an incredible (and potentially, sadly destructible) card combat game against a smorgasbord of polarizing, fascinating (it's my favorite of the bunch) design decisions. Final Fantasy IX panicked in its wake and delivered an impressively weird distillation of why the franchise has proven so durable. FFX then behaved as a sort of dark room negative of that impulse, taking every opportunity it could to honor the franchise's history while shoving all of its tropes into unrecognizable disguises.

I did play and greatly enjoy Final Fantasy XI and XII in their time, of course. I don't mention the former because it has nothing to do with this discussion other than its obvious incompatibility, while I find the latter game to be something I'm quite nostalgic for but felt so dramatically let down by its most recent remaster that I honestly can't put the screws to how I feel about it anymore.

In any case, I say all that to explain how misguided I think it is to view the Final Fantasy franchise as an institution that demands traditions be upheld. Except...

THE LAST OF US (PART 1 & 2)

I love giving due to voice acting and dialogue writing. I wrote album reviews from roughly 2009 through 2015, but even more importantly I spent plenty of my early teens writing (extremely bad) original science fiction for school assignments and Resident Evil 2 fan fiction on the franchise's IGN message board. While I understand the impulse, at my core I find the idea of activating subtitles, thumbing through dialogue and especially skipping cutscenes anathema to the joy of video games. Sure, at this hobby's core gameplay is, essentially, everything, and yet I can't help but care most about all the things that bookend and explain my button presses.

From this perspective, Final Fantasy XVI fails over and over. As I said a lifetime ago, no matter how earnestly the game attempts to reframe its inspirations within the context of Valisthea the game never succeeds. I'll grant that the challenge inherent in assimilating at least three successfully subversive stories into your own new thing seems terrifying - that is, unless you just fire variations of "fuck" off with consistently comical timing and rapidly shed that complex web of inspirational guidelines for an adaptation of Dragon Ball Z's basic structure.

Line by line, performance to performance, I'd catch myself wondering why this was one of a handful of games I'd activated subtitles solely so I could pop a wheelie through nearly every NPC conversation. Eventually, I realized this was because Final Fantasy XVI barely, meekly attempts to earn its significance. This might rank among my most arguable critiques, both because it's clear plenty of people LOVE the vibe of this game and it seems like every performer is delivering exactly what was asked of them. Admitting that, I still constantly found myself wondering what many of my favorite 16-bit RPGs might've sounded like if they were voiced, but even more importantly I couldn't escape how regularly the characters punctuated sentences with some kind of sigh seemed to mirror my own curiosity regarding this game's scope, or intent, or something.

FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)

I recognize I probably promised to follow up on something earlier in this episode that I haven't made good on. I've never wanted to say more about a game, to the point I wrote this chronologically in 4 sessions over nearly two weeks. Without re-reading before this final denouement, I think if I need to make anything clear it's that I did enjoy this game. It gave me the sort of boss battles I'm surprised the modern God of Wars have mostly shied away from, the combat was constantly engaging (especially in the middle of the game) e
in its smaller moments as well and even when I was put off by the game, I couldn't help wondering why and soldiering on in pursuit of clarification.

If I didn't say it before, I expected to love this game. I'm not dogmatic about what a Final Fantasy game should be. But the further I get from actually playing this game...I just don't get why or how it wound up included in the franchise. Just about every character between Clive and Ultima get their moments, but the structure of the game makes all of them feel ephemeral. Maybe it's the rewards for engaging with them, maybe it's the one-note vocal direction, maybe it's even as simple as how intangible nearly every other character feels by the end.

But a lot of my disappoint, really, stems from the fact that this game balked at committing to its missions statement. It becomes less political as it goes, less sexual as it goes, less morally complex as it goes, less relationship bound as it goes, less driven by mechanics or inventory as it goes, even less violent as it goes, less mysterious as it goes...

Final Fantasy XVI often felt like interacting with a significant other perforated with commitment issues, or more to the point an opportunity to see myself through the lens of a video game. If I were to remove even a handful of critiques from this review, it's easy to see an ideal game at the core. Unfortunately, the more I got to know FFXVI, the more its quirks came to feel like self-defense mechanisms, afraid to let me down by the insecurity that drives it.

Despite the high score, I'm very conflicted about this game. On the one hand, part of why Disney's exploitation of Star Wars has felt so bafflingly dull is that the imagery and sound design that Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic scuffled into existence 40-odd years ago remains perhaps the most inscrutable library of pop bangers ever created. From its subtle but no less direct commentary on fascism's mighty, comedic weight to ambience as simply relatable as a radiator's hum, Star Wars looks and sounds infallible. That it has become known for - even defined by - its failures is almost as remarkable an achievement as anything from the original trilogy.

But this franchise is ultimately a story of incredible failures, and this isn't the project to shake that weight. Admirably, to an almost overwhelming degree, Respawn puts in the work to prove Star Wars' worth. There's a hub world of daunting density, boss fights that insist (at least on the Jedi Master and above difficulties) on a near chemical mastery of the game's mechanics, a story that shames most beats of the modern big screen trilogy and a generally inspired breadth of game design that ought remind any fan of Titanfall 2's campaign what it means to sacrifice one's ego to a game designer. Never more so than when you find one of their combat or platforming challenges tucked inside a glowing gem inside a cave...though the latter can often demand just a little more than this game's systems are willing to account for, to the point they feel equally heavy handed as clever.

And yet...as much as Respawn clearly GETS IT, they don't...got it. That aforementioned hub world slowly becomes a constant pest, thanks to its incredibly misleading (hi, DOOM 2016) holographic map and innumerable dead ends owing to powers unlocked via story progression. Exacerbated by only being unable to fast travel via this franchise's eternally inexplicable bonfires (or, for non Soulsians, "meditation points") the world of Koboh is often disappointing to explore. And that's before you realize most of it's secrets are just new ways to trim our hero's beard or paint his lightsaber.

But the first game primed us for that sort of thing, so as disappointing as it is to experience it again, at least this time around almost all of these little puzzles conclude with fun, unique fights beforehand. I didn't play much Apex Legends beyond the 4th season reboot, but I did play a LOT of it beforehand, and if Respawn's three flagship titles say anything about the hundreds of people on its payroll, they love designing game mechanics.

I'm adding this paragraph last, because I can't figure out where else to put it: I don't think many of the characters rise above the roles they play in either the primary narrative or the expectations of a sprawling, pseudo-role playing action game. But I get why Turgle became a sort of mini-meme. For me, he's little more than an obvious, extremely loving ode to Psychonauts' Razputin, from design to voice actor, and that's enough.

But his stories are impressively off kilter as well, in stark contrast to the Pyloon's other most interactive regulars: a stereotypical cowboy bounty huntress, some treasure hunters disbelieving they're past their prime, a couple wanderers that just want to call anywhere home and, perhaps most notably, some grim looking guy apparently, and truly shockingly, allowed by the Star Wars arbiters to slowly unravel a story of what sounds like an intergalactic cocaine deal gone wrong. It must be hard to be an executive overseeing a game of this scope but...wow, and lol.

Which leads to something I wanted to ding this game a lot harder for, but began to feel it felt personal - the final third of this game consists of several extended sequences in which, especially on Jedi Master difficulty, the scenario designers seem to believe players can stomach heaps of shit. Whether it's boss fights that evolve over four or five phases with multiple - egregiously, unskippable - minute-long cutscenes or sequences of arena battles with no save point in sight, I suppose it's not for me to say whether a Star Wars game shouldn't be so damn unforgiving, but damn can this game be unforgiving.

I don't complain about that just to do it, either. Like the first game, Jedi Survivor seems to be in its pocket when the deck is stacked. Throughout the game, Jedi Master seemed like the obvious difficulty to play the game on, requiring an extremely satisfying level of attention while still allowing for just the right amount of skin-of-your-teeth, I usually play games on Normal but let's fucking go fuckery that a lot of games miss by only tipping the scales of HP/damage one way or the other.

But this game has a trifecta of boss battles that are so nuanced in their design, so punctuated by story beats and most importantly (for, it should be said, quite valid story reasons) biased against the player succeeding that I'd be fascinated to interview the designers of these fights. These three fights ask players to have such locked in mental and technical memories that they truly feel more unforgiving than most From Soft bosses, if and even only because progressing from the first to third phase can involve as much as three minutes of unskippable cinematics. If it's meant to be a test of focus, I failed.

Thankfully, the game allows you to drop the difficulty at any time, and believe me I descended the ladder gradual. I don't take pride in things I do privately, but each time I slinked down from 30+ hours of regular campaign play on Jedi Master to a lowly Padawan during these boss fights, I couldn't help but wonder...is it me, or the game? And how many of the millions of strangers who also played this game will judge me for my cowardice?

Because I worry this review might focus a bit too much on the negative, here I want to emphasize: I enjoyed trying to study and learn these bosses. Again, I played all of the game on Jedi Master otherwise. But at each pass, a combination of said cutscenes and other wild assault combos or, even worse, one-hit kills broke me. I had to move on.

Worst part being, again, I loved the design of each of these bosses. I wish I'd kicked their ass on concrete instead of silly putty.

Especially because the combat kicks ass, and there are gonna be enough professional and user reviews out there that explain why I don't need to go much into it. I often felt like an idiot forgetting that I wasn't just a guy with a laser sword but a full on Jedi, so other than the infinitely entertaining "force push a guy into the abyss" scenario I can't speak to the bemusing skill trees as much as I'd like to. But as someone who expected to love, only to spitefully appreciate, Sekiro's parry-based sword duels I truly love this franchise's only just so slightly softer approach to the same kind of idea. Maybe the lightsaber should be deadlier - of course it should - but at least it still makes all those crisp, wavy sounds whether it's bouncing off a Stormtrooper's shield or barely damaging a droid.

I wish it were just that one big thing, which at its core might be me being a thoroughly average game player, that held this game back from greatness. In some sense, it might even be nice if technical flaws marred my experience, though for me it was mostly noticing the ways in which these relative newcomers to the third person blockbuster had to cheat at things that studios like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics or even Remedy have come to personify.

On a Playstation 5 I didn't experience the debilitating glitches, crashes and so forth that PC and XBox players did - I just saw a game that often had to cut corners to attempt some of the big screen shenanigans of its inspirations. I'm talking chase sequences where NPCs are constantly warping into position for dramatic heft, traversal that belittles Jedi mobility for the same of a puzzle, or even simply, ironically, environment design that feels convoluted for designer satisfaction rather than player legibility.

But that's fine, because some of those games are unimaginable to begin with, and some of them have gameplay flaws that Respawn could never even dream of allowing to define one of their games.

But I do have to say, perhaps much like this review...this game has a hell of a pacing problem. I believe I mentioned it early, but once you realize the traversal skills come through story progression, story progression becomes the thing...only sometimes you want more health, or force energy, or stim pack capacity, and you can never be sure which tangent those things are tucked behind. But you CAN be sure that they are behind a tangent, some kind of tiny platforming or combat adventure the game will never outright tell you to do. This leads to a constant argument between what may or may not be worth pursuing, expectations about the difficulties of the next boss fights and honestly most often of all whether your brain can trust what your eyes thing they're understanding the map to be saying. At some point, no matter how exciting a slightly bigger health bar might be, the idea that the end of any given tunnel is just a new beard trim or color wheel for your lightsaber is far more discouraging than the gamer sickness of plundering every possible nook and cranny of a map.

This will likely read like a petty way to cap this, and I really don't mean it as an insult in the slightest. Like any regular guy, I'm more than prepared to say in the same breath that the original three Star Wars films had an impossible to describe impact on my adolescence but it's a mostly shit franchise full of junk and sorrow. Jedi Survivor does NOT, and because per Disney mandate it's quite an official Star Wars tale so why not feel strongly about it, do anything more than manipulate its characters into telling a standard video game hero's arc. It hints extremely early and often at what it wants to say about the nobility of Jedi, while also force pulling some incredibly flagrant references into the mix just to remind you that for all intents and purposes there's only one story worth telling in this timeless, multiple-galaxy spanning IP.

Anyway, I was Blaster + Dual Wield. I never figured out the love for Crossguard. Too slow.

More than anything, it feels very strange to finally be, essentially, current with this franchise. I still have Lost Judgement and the Ishin remake in the hopper, but in the grand scheme of things it feels like the long journey that began with a humble Giant Bomb Quick Look of Yakuza 0 six years ago has finally reached its end.

Though, happily, it feels more like a new beginning!

For all the entertainment this franchise has provided me over half a decade, I feel I've made it pretty clear that the ecstatic highs were balanced by some nearly intolerable lows. Of course it was always going to be impossible to fully reconcile this franchise's sprawling mid-section with the considerable gameplay and presentation advances they'd made by the time Yakuza 0 came to serve as a new entry point, so I tried and mostly succeeded to take the franchise's lumps with a grain of salt.

After Yakuza 6, however, it was clear that the team at RGG Studio were essentially doing the same thing. Kiryu Kazama may be as iconic as video game archetypes come, but he was also a bizarrely limited character to spend so much time with. Obviously it allowed him to act as a sun around which the franchise's increasingly bonkers characters could orbit, but it also meant that once the conspiracy went all the way to the top way back during the events of Yakuza 2, the franchise was essentially trapped in an endless loop. If Kiryu must perpetually refuse to shape the world in his image while the Yakuza must similarly refuse to align themselves with his world view, all the character moments in the world couldn't save a franchise from turning back on itself, remixing and repurposing old, good ideas in decreasingly fresh packages.

Enter Ichiban, a man of the lowest rung on the Yakuza ladder, slowly but forcefully exiled by the only social structure he'd ever known to answer two simple, burning questions: why am I so unwanted, and why can't these people understand I'd do anything to change that?

Anyway, there's a video game here too, and while I completely understand some of its more glaring issues, this shit kicks fuckin' ass, full stop. Early on I was reminded of the DIY charm brought to the South Park RPG experiment The Stick of Truth, in which the kids reimagine their playground goofing off as life or death combat with world destroying stakes. But after nearly 80 hours with this game, the marriage of an idea as simple as way more money to the mad man assembly line they've got going at the RGG creative desk results in a game that takes full advantage of this franchise's sense of fun that makes that game look like a student project. While Yakuza's combat could be fun in fits and starts, it always threatened to become a slog, something to wade through on the way to the next side mission or TV-episode length main cutscene.

But now? I feel like I could just write two paragraphs full of enemy names, attack descriptions and a few errant side quest synopses and earn these 4.5 stars right away. This is a game where you fight worryingly oily men toting pool floaties and a penchant for club drugs three floors deep in a basement fight club. There are wild enemy puns like Dotcombatant, Druggler, Shillboard and Pornogra-Pharoah. The game isn't afraid to be uncomfortable about some of these jokes (and of 252 enemies, I'd say a good 2/3 of them are jokes) either. The Pandemicist very much plays up communicable disease, while the hosts (Biting Barker, Hostile Host, etc.) very specifically use attacks that double as rape and abduction tactics.

In other words, the game is still willing to wade in the darkness of its chosen world, which only makes its ability to coax humor out of these realities even more stunning.

As is tradition, the last three chapters of this game are a LOT. The only reason I completed the first chapter at the end of February but didn't see the final credits roll until early July is because of how discouraging a certain infamous chapter 12 boss battle forces players to do a bit of grinding to stand a chance. When I finally came back, it turned out this wasn't such a huge deal - just turn the auto battler on, queue up a podcast or two and punch your way through the battle arena - but compared to the rest of the game it's such a stark reminder of classic mid-90s RPG design that it feels as malicious as it is clearly intentional.

Likewise, the final major, actual boss definitely follows in a long tradition of demanding the player recognize its one primary gimmick, be as stocked as they can be on items (in this case, as a novelty, MP-replenishing Tauriners rather than HP replenishing Toughnesses and Staminans) and just grit their teeth. But even here, the shift from a brawler to a turn-based RPG is a balm because if the fight is getting a little exhausting, the player can simply set the controller down and chill out. This alone, even when just auto-battling through the streets, is such a balm to what can be a very monotonous franchise on the gameplay side.

Lastly, while it's heightening and cartoonish, somehow RGG have found themselves at the very foreground of the facial animation cutscene, with some of the most subtle (and outlandish) expressions you'll find in story-rooted games. Oftentimes this is all it really takes to make Ichiban feel like such a fresh shift from Kiryu, as his animations sell much of the late game drama even better than the early game comedy - the last bits of this game may be the first time this franchise elicited visceral emotion out of me, rather than the more empathic but flat ways heavy story beats tended to land in previous games.

I feel like I barely said half of what I wanted to say about this game, but I also think I've said enough for one unpaid batch of thoughts. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a real triumph, and I'm so, so excited to see what this team can do with this iteration of the franchise with all the experience of this game under their belt. Especially if it's literally a fish out of water story?!

Ichi, I already miss you.