123 reviews liked by Nodima
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
im sure this game is good but they really named that mf clive. taxpayer ass name
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
– Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).
One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.
The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy
Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.
It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.
To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.
A case for centrism and laissez-faire
This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.
Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.
Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.
A hollow and meaningless experience
Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.
The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.
Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.
Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity
While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.
In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.
The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.
It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.
__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.
– Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).
One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.
The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy
Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.
It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.
To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.
A case for centrism and laissez-faire
This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.
Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.
Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.
A hollow and meaningless experience
Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.
The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.
Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.
Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity
While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.
In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.
The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.
It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.
__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
Finally, a game that's willing to make the brave statement that slavery is fine if your dad did it.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
Just a blindingly infuriating game. Feel like there was so much wasted potential here buried under horrible pacing, some of the worst side quests I've experienced in a AAA game and combat system that once you get past the flashy colours, is extremely hollow. The story is what pushed me through and the high points are incredible, filled with amazing spectacle I haven't experienced in a game before. But those high points make the middling and low parts of the game even more frustrating. When I finished my playthrough, all that I could reflect on was that this was a super yacht that is riddled with holes, progressively sinking the longer it went.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
a pretty bad final fantasy game built on some pretty solid bones for a character action game, when it wants to be a proper mix of DMC/Asura's Wrath it's usually pretty decent but most of the time i'm sitting through an atrocious and extremely questionable story with the most boring world and characters in any final fantasy game that i've played.
Wasteland 3
2020
Wasteland 3 makes a few improvements to the gameplay of the previous title. There is better skill and weapon balance, attributes are now balanced so any character without a high intelligence score is no longer worthless, and the traits that you can choose at character creation are no longer as overpowered or useless as they were in the directors cut version of Wasteland 2. They removed some of the more Tabletop style RPG features like percentage failures for doing things like lockpicking or different attribute ratings coming together to effect stats but it wasn't really handled in an interesting way in the previous game and just simplifying it was for the best. There are combat abilities that characters can learn that can chain together well, some skills might do bonus damage to bleeding, stunned, or otherwise status effect characters.
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491
While a dramatic departure from the rest of the Yakuza series in terms of gameplay, almost everything else about Yakuza 7 is the franchise at its absolute peak. It’s not only one of, if not the best entries in the franchise, but it’s also one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s tremendously addicting in just about every regard, once I started playing it, I had such a difficult time putting it down.
The story is very well told, and I think it’s up there with some of RGG Studios’ best work. The new protagonist, Ichiban, is not only my new favorite Yakuza protagonist, but one of my favorite video game characters of all time. It is impossible to not get swept up into the flames of his kindness, passion and charisma. While I absolutely adore and idolize Kiryu, and he was my favorite character in the series until this point, I was absolutely won over by Ichiban and his grueling journey of losing everything and then crawling his way to the top. I enjoyed the rest of the cast quite a bit as well, but I did find that they all take a backseat to Ichi as far as their involvement in the story goes. This isn’t really a bad thing, just noticeable. Thanks to the Bond system, you do get a chance to learn more about them and get involved with their personal stories on the side. I just prefer it when the party members of a JRPG are more involved with the overall story.
Whether or not you’ll enjoy the combat will hinge entirely on how you feel about JRPGs. If you actively despise turn-based combat, there’s admittedly not much here that will get you to reconsider your feelings for it as it’s mostly pretty standard. Skill attacks require you to either mash a button or press a button at a specific time similar to the Heat actions of old but otherwise it plays like a traditional turn-based JRPG. My only complaint when it comes to the combat is that if the protagonist, Ichiban dies then your game is immediately over, and I absolutely despise it when JRPGs do that. It just makes no sense when you have party members or items that can bring other party members back to life. Normally it's not a huge issue, I rarely found it happening to me, but later in the game there are bosses and certain enemies who have either instant kill attacks, or attacks that can kill a party member if they weren’t at full health already and it's when Ichiban dies during moments like this that make this design choice absolutely infuriating.
My only other complaint about the game is how the game handles enemy encounters. Enemies in the overworld have a wide and far range of vision, especially compared to previous Yakuza games. This makes it easy for them to spot you and difficult as well as annoying to avoid them. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve defeated a squad of enemies on my way to a destination, only to watch another 5 or 6 dudes literally materialize right in front of me and I’m forced to fight them as well. At the very least, they completely vanish from the map if you successfully run away, but this was still annoying to deal with, especially in Sotenbori, where the streets are so narrow that it's almost impossible to avoid enemy encounters altogether.
Everything else about the game is absolutely top notch. The game has an abundance of different mechanics and systems that all feed back into one another and make for a title that feels like it's constantly rewarding you. This is primarily what makes the game so addicting. I couldn’t put this game down when I started it. I was thoroughly engaged and entertained from beginning to end. Fantastic game.
The story is very well told, and I think it’s up there with some of RGG Studios’ best work. The new protagonist, Ichiban, is not only my new favorite Yakuza protagonist, but one of my favorite video game characters of all time. It is impossible to not get swept up into the flames of his kindness, passion and charisma. While I absolutely adore and idolize Kiryu, and he was my favorite character in the series until this point, I was absolutely won over by Ichiban and his grueling journey of losing everything and then crawling his way to the top. I enjoyed the rest of the cast quite a bit as well, but I did find that they all take a backseat to Ichi as far as their involvement in the story goes. This isn’t really a bad thing, just noticeable. Thanks to the Bond system, you do get a chance to learn more about them and get involved with their personal stories on the side. I just prefer it when the party members of a JRPG are more involved with the overall story.
Whether or not you’ll enjoy the combat will hinge entirely on how you feel about JRPGs. If you actively despise turn-based combat, there’s admittedly not much here that will get you to reconsider your feelings for it as it’s mostly pretty standard. Skill attacks require you to either mash a button or press a button at a specific time similar to the Heat actions of old but otherwise it plays like a traditional turn-based JRPG. My only complaint when it comes to the combat is that if the protagonist, Ichiban dies then your game is immediately over, and I absolutely despise it when JRPGs do that. It just makes no sense when you have party members or items that can bring other party members back to life. Normally it's not a huge issue, I rarely found it happening to me, but later in the game there are bosses and certain enemies who have either instant kill attacks, or attacks that can kill a party member if they weren’t at full health already and it's when Ichiban dies during moments like this that make this design choice absolutely infuriating.
My only other complaint about the game is how the game handles enemy encounters. Enemies in the overworld have a wide and far range of vision, especially compared to previous Yakuza games. This makes it easy for them to spot you and difficult as well as annoying to avoid them. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve defeated a squad of enemies on my way to a destination, only to watch another 5 or 6 dudes literally materialize right in front of me and I’m forced to fight them as well. At the very least, they completely vanish from the map if you successfully run away, but this was still annoying to deal with, especially in Sotenbori, where the streets are so narrow that it's almost impossible to avoid enemy encounters altogether.
Everything else about the game is absolutely top notch. The game has an abundance of different mechanics and systems that all feed back into one another and make for a title that feels like it's constantly rewarding you. This is primarily what makes the game so addicting. I couldn’t put this game down when I started it. I was thoroughly engaged and entertained from beginning to end. Fantastic game.
I'm not a Yakuza expert or whatever, but I feel this game did an amazing job transforming the series' usual formula and vibe into an even crazier, and slightly more lighthearted RPG adventure. I'd wish for it to be more whacky, honestly, because at times LaD feels way too much like Yakuza and not enough like whacky urban Dragon Quest, and the story ultimately doesn't quite manage to bring these two influences together. The ending was especially rough for it, with two consecutive boss-fights that were pretty boring both narratively and gameplay-wise, in large part because the Fantasy Adventure-stuff was weighed down by the Crime and Conspiracy stuff, which wasn't that cohesive or well-developed.
In terms of gameplay this was a blast. Perhaps a bit more complexity and strategy could've been injected, but stuff like your entire supporting cast technically traveling with you, thus allowing you to shuffle your party on the fly, was a nice touch that also fixed the ever-present issue with optional party members in JRPGs, where some of your characters would sit in the hub, not participating in the story. And overall, the bombastic presentation of Yakuza combat was pushed to the limit here, and I can't wait to see what crazy shit they're going to do with Joryu in the sequel.
P.S.
I honestly don't like the fact that Kiryu is returning in the sequel, it felt like we're turning a new leaf here, with this ever-growing cast of supporting characters and an idealistic shonen protag to bond with them. But now we're just back to Kiryu? And any party member after Nanba wouldn't be returning? Kinda sucks man.
In terms of gameplay this was a blast. Perhaps a bit more complexity and strategy could've been injected, but stuff like your entire supporting cast technically traveling with you, thus allowing you to shuffle your party on the fly, was a nice touch that also fixed the ever-present issue with optional party members in JRPGs, where some of your characters would sit in the hub, not participating in the story. And overall, the bombastic presentation of Yakuza combat was pushed to the limit here, and I can't wait to see what crazy shit they're going to do with Joryu in the sequel.
P.S.
I honestly don't like the fact that Kiryu is returning in the sequel, it felt like we're turning a new leaf here, with this ever-growing cast of supporting characters and an idealistic shonen protag to bond with them. But now we're just back to Kiryu? And any party member after Nanba wouldn't be returning? Kinda sucks man.
The word "deconstruction" gets thrown around a lot these days. Formally defined as "questioning traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality", it's often used to describe works that seek to criticize a specific genre. I disagree with this use of the word, but less because of the "what" and more because of the "why". I believe deconstruction should be used not only to criticise media, but to use that media's pieces to build something new.
An excellent example of this is one of my favorite films: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's 2007 action-comedy masterpiece Hot Fuzz. It deconstructs both the contemporary American cop flick and the traditional detective story by flipping classic tropes on their heads. However, all of this is done not out of criticism, but as a way to both pay tribute to those genres and highlight their potential.
In that sense, yes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a deconstruction of the JRPG. Rather than a teenager killing God, you're a 40-year-old man trying to find a job. But the game is still very much a JRPG: It has all the classic mechanical trappings, numerous references to other games, including multiple explicit mentions of Dragon Quest (and people still compare it to Persona), and yes, it relies on the tried-and-true trope of the power of friendship.
That last one is a major criticism of JRPG's I've seen from certain online sources, and I feel Like a Dragon does everything in its power to embrace it. Everything from the combat to the substories to the summons to the incredibly complex management minigame revolves around helping others. There's a major mechanic that involves spending time with your friends and helping them work out their personal issues (alright, it's a little like Persona). A lot of the strongest attacks in the game involve working with your other party members.
But more than anything else, Yakuza: Like a Dragon embraces the theme of friendship through its story, especially through its protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga. He's someone who spent most of his life at "rock bottom", and gets dragged through the mud on a regular basis, often by powers much greater than him. But he gets out through a power even greater than that: the people he can count on. Everyone who supports him, from his party members to the most insignificant NPC, makes his journey just a little bit easier. Even in his darkest times, Ichiban can still bounce back to his infectious optimism thanks in no small part to the support he gives to and recieves from the people around him.
Of course, the game still isn't perfect. While it's an amazing first attempt at a JRPG, you can also tell it's a first attempt. Dungeons are a slog and sometimes combat is too (you didn't have to borrow everything from Dragon Quest, guys). Job systems are fun, but the lack of ability mixing combined with not being able to switch on the fly means there's very little reason to experiment. Also, there are some pretty nasty difficulty spikes near the very end. I get why they're there, but I would've appreciated a little warning.
Despite all my criticisms, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is still an excellent game with a wonderful story and the best deconstruction ever made of the JRPG. Suck it, Undertale.
An excellent example of this is one of my favorite films: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's 2007 action-comedy masterpiece Hot Fuzz. It deconstructs both the contemporary American cop flick and the traditional detective story by flipping classic tropes on their heads. However, all of this is done not out of criticism, but as a way to both pay tribute to those genres and highlight their potential.
In that sense, yes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a deconstruction of the JRPG. Rather than a teenager killing God, you're a 40-year-old man trying to find a job. But the game is still very much a JRPG: It has all the classic mechanical trappings, numerous references to other games, including multiple explicit mentions of Dragon Quest (and people still compare it to Persona), and yes, it relies on the tried-and-true trope of the power of friendship.
That last one is a major criticism of JRPG's I've seen from certain online sources, and I feel Like a Dragon does everything in its power to embrace it. Everything from the combat to the substories to the summons to the incredibly complex management minigame revolves around helping others. There's a major mechanic that involves spending time with your friends and helping them work out their personal issues (alright, it's a little like Persona). A lot of the strongest attacks in the game involve working with your other party members.
But more than anything else, Yakuza: Like a Dragon embraces the theme of friendship through its story, especially through its protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga. He's someone who spent most of his life at "rock bottom", and gets dragged through the mud on a regular basis, often by powers much greater than him. But he gets out through a power even greater than that: the people he can count on. Everyone who supports him, from his party members to the most insignificant NPC, makes his journey just a little bit easier. Even in his darkest times, Ichiban can still bounce back to his infectious optimism thanks in no small part to the support he gives to and recieves from the people around him.
Of course, the game still isn't perfect. While it's an amazing first attempt at a JRPG, you can also tell it's a first attempt. Dungeons are a slog and sometimes combat is too (you didn't have to borrow everything from Dragon Quest, guys). Job systems are fun, but the lack of ability mixing combined with not being able to switch on the fly means there's very little reason to experiment. Also, there are some pretty nasty difficulty spikes near the very end. I get why they're there, but I would've appreciated a little warning.
Despite all my criticisms, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is still an excellent game with a wonderful story and the best deconstruction ever made of the JRPG. Suck it, Undertale.
When the new protagonist of the Yakuza series was revealed a few years ago, I was partly worried about his often humorous appearance and expressions signifying that the series was going to lose a lot of the more emotional elements and problems heavily grounded in reality to fully embrace the absurd. That was not the case. Ichiban is a fun and likable protagonist with a backstory that fits the series norm of having a protagonist that never had the culturally accepted family lifestyle which also causes him to fit in well with his new friends and companions. Even his Yakuza back tattoo of a dragonfish highlights the way his past is viewed, being seen as someone lower in society while also representing trying to take the reigns as series protagonist from Kiryu. He even comments when asked about his tattoo by saying he wanted a dragon but that represents the top of the food chain, and that one day it will shine brighter than a dragon. His look and usual antics make him seems like more of a doofus but he can often be smart and frequently uses his knowledge of criminal and Yakuza lifestyle and hierarchy to trick or intimidate the games antagonists. There is also a focus on bonding with your party and friends that often feels like an extension of the bar friends and conversations from Yakuza 6 with conversations at your favorite bar hangout spot, conversations when you go to certain parts of the city, and conversations that happen when you eat certain meals with your friends that all allow for a deeper understanding of each character. The usual high quality voice work, character expressions, and clothing detail the series is known for continues in this entry.
The change to an RPG battle system is both fun and fits well with the main character's desire to be a hero like in the old Dragon Quest games that he played, and that ends up supporting a plot often dealing with Ichiban becoming a source of support towards the abused and forgotten of society (homeless, sex workers, orphans, elderly, immigrants, poor, whistle blowers). With the main plotline also having the usual well written Yakuza fare of the dealings and backstabbing of Yakuza and police, rising politicians, a family at odds, surprising reveals, and a group of foreign gangs that put your party in the middle of a decades old counterfeiting operation that has been keeping the peace between three rival factions.
A well made assortment of side quests are here, featuring both the touching and funny situations that the series is known for. There is also a variety of activities to participate in throughout the cities such as karaoke (with all but one of your party members having their own song to sing), go kart racing, shogi, mahjong, cabaret clubs, Sega arcade cabinets, gambling, baseball, darts, golf, pachinko, movie watching, a bicycle riding can collection game, and a property management and shareholder meeting side quest. Three different areas are featured with the main one being Isezaki Ijincho and with both Kamurocho and Sotenbori being available to travel to at a later point in the story. The new area is well detailed and as enjoyable to explore as Kamurocho.
The new battle system is fun and often works well but the biggest issue is one that I didn't expect the game to have. A shift to an RPG like commands seemed like a change that would just get us even more of the great visceral/hilarious/bone crunching heat attacks of the main games (even more so with a lot of the more out there combat elements just being what Ichiban sees in his head), instead many of moves are just dull to look at until you start getting into a lot of the late game unlocks or co-op attacks. You also miss out on a lot of the environment based combat that has been around since Yakuza 6, apart from hitting enemies into cars that are still moving in the background, you won't be seeing friends help you out with special heat moves, knocking enemies into stores, throwing them over railings on trains, throwing them into microwaves, etc. Other problems involve awkward battle positioning when it comes to hitting multiple enemies, people getting stuck on things (though the game will eventually just teleport them to the correct position if it the environment is causing characters to get completely stuck), and using objects in the environment to attack doesn't always seem to work to the extent that half the time it doesn't even seem functional. The camera can also make it difficult to block attacks well (by hitting O/B before an attack lands) and can sometimes be so slow to react that you can be hit before you even seeing the attack coming.
Grinding job XP if you want to try out new things, the sudden loss of 4th party member unless you have done the business management side quest to replace him, quests to find and beat certain enemy types that the game sometimes just never seems to want to spawn, at times almost immediate enemy respawns, and enemies that have no chance of killing you but have ridiculous amounts of health can all make the game feel like an old JRPG in a bad way. The women in your party job role's and some of their character skills are much more sexualized and flirty than anything the men get and some of the enemy types you run into can be questionable (like how most any black guy you run into is giant muscleman, wearing giant chains, or someone who draws a gun on you and starts shooting it sideways). Plot wise the game ends with some of the most expressive and emotional acting in the series, rivaling Yakuza 0's best moments, though also hurt quite a bit by having your only real attachment to the moments being what Ichiban is personally feeling. This is due to one of the main antagonists that you watch him pour his heart out to being easily one of the most repugnant people in the entire series, to the point that I can easily see people (especially people from the kind of backgrounds that you have been supporting through the game) liking Ichiban less for his actions at the end of the game.
There is a decent number of classes with every character tending to fit two or three of them well, but all job skills and animations are the same for each character. While you can learn and keep two skills in every class that can then be used in a different job those two carry over skills are the same for every character, taking a bit of characterization out of it (though each character does have different color costume options). Each party member does have their own unique class (Ichiban has two) to give them a few unique options, though three of them basically start as their most useful one. It is also unfortunate that two of the classes are locked behind paid DLC.
Like A Dragon succeeds at not just being one of the best Yakuza games but at creating a new protagonist that isn't just a great character but who is every bit as strong as Kiryu and reworks the series into a completely different combat and party focused style that, for the most part, works well while being fun to play but also further surrounds you with the friends, allies, and social issues that have always been at the heart of the series. It sounds like Ichiban is planned to head future games and that is a great choice. If the series continues with the RPG like battle system I think a lot of the issues would be fairly easy to fix and what we have here was a good start to a new gameplay style.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1343379463740878848
The change to an RPG battle system is both fun and fits well with the main character's desire to be a hero like in the old Dragon Quest games that he played, and that ends up supporting a plot often dealing with Ichiban becoming a source of support towards the abused and forgotten of society (homeless, sex workers, orphans, elderly, immigrants, poor, whistle blowers). With the main plotline also having the usual well written Yakuza fare of the dealings and backstabbing of Yakuza and police, rising politicians, a family at odds, surprising reveals, and a group of foreign gangs that put your party in the middle of a decades old counterfeiting operation that has been keeping the peace between three rival factions.
A well made assortment of side quests are here, featuring both the touching and funny situations that the series is known for. There is also a variety of activities to participate in throughout the cities such as karaoke (with all but one of your party members having their own song to sing), go kart racing, shogi, mahjong, cabaret clubs, Sega arcade cabinets, gambling, baseball, darts, golf, pachinko, movie watching, a bicycle riding can collection game, and a property management and shareholder meeting side quest. Three different areas are featured with the main one being Isezaki Ijincho and with both Kamurocho and Sotenbori being available to travel to at a later point in the story. The new area is well detailed and as enjoyable to explore as Kamurocho.
The new battle system is fun and often works well but the biggest issue is one that I didn't expect the game to have. A shift to an RPG like commands seemed like a change that would just get us even more of the great visceral/hilarious/bone crunching heat attacks of the main games (even more so with a lot of the more out there combat elements just being what Ichiban sees in his head), instead many of moves are just dull to look at until you start getting into a lot of the late game unlocks or co-op attacks. You also miss out on a lot of the environment based combat that has been around since Yakuza 6, apart from hitting enemies into cars that are still moving in the background, you won't be seeing friends help you out with special heat moves, knocking enemies into stores, throwing them over railings on trains, throwing them into microwaves, etc. Other problems involve awkward battle positioning when it comes to hitting multiple enemies, people getting stuck on things (though the game will eventually just teleport them to the correct position if it the environment is causing characters to get completely stuck), and using objects in the environment to attack doesn't always seem to work to the extent that half the time it doesn't even seem functional. The camera can also make it difficult to block attacks well (by hitting O/B before an attack lands) and can sometimes be so slow to react that you can be hit before you even seeing the attack coming.
Grinding job XP if you want to try out new things, the sudden loss of 4th party member unless you have done the business management side quest to replace him, quests to find and beat certain enemy types that the game sometimes just never seems to want to spawn, at times almost immediate enemy respawns, and enemies that have no chance of killing you but have ridiculous amounts of health can all make the game feel like an old JRPG in a bad way. The women in your party job role's and some of their character skills are much more sexualized and flirty than anything the men get and some of the enemy types you run into can be questionable (like how most any black guy you run into is giant muscleman, wearing giant chains, or someone who draws a gun on you and starts shooting it sideways). Plot wise the game ends with some of the most expressive and emotional acting in the series, rivaling Yakuza 0's best moments, though also hurt quite a bit by having your only real attachment to the moments being what Ichiban is personally feeling. This is due to one of the main antagonists that you watch him pour his heart out to being easily one of the most repugnant people in the entire series, to the point that I can easily see people (especially people from the kind of backgrounds that you have been supporting through the game) liking Ichiban less for his actions at the end of the game.
There is a decent number of classes with every character tending to fit two or three of them well, but all job skills and animations are the same for each character. While you can learn and keep two skills in every class that can then be used in a different job those two carry over skills are the same for every character, taking a bit of characterization out of it (though each character does have different color costume options). Each party member does have their own unique class (Ichiban has two) to give them a few unique options, though three of them basically start as their most useful one. It is also unfortunate that two of the classes are locked behind paid DLC.
Like A Dragon succeeds at not just being one of the best Yakuza games but at creating a new protagonist that isn't just a great character but who is every bit as strong as Kiryu and reworks the series into a completely different combat and party focused style that, for the most part, works well while being fun to play but also further surrounds you with the friends, allies, and social issues that have always been at the heart of the series. It sounds like Ichiban is planned to head future games and that is a great choice. If the series continues with the RPG like battle system I think a lot of the issues would be fairly easy to fix and what we have here was a good start to a new gameplay style.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1343379463740878848