Paradise Killer equally values exploration and style with a liberal dose of visual novel seasoning, and while I must acknowledge the Playstation Plus fog lingering over my takeaway that does little to devalue how I powered through this game in two pretty visceral, almost astonishing pair of seven hour sessions.

I'll grant that as I got into the back third of the game that the city's labyrinthian construction became extremely annoying, and the mystery isn't actually all that mysterious. After my first marathon, I felt confident enough to approach the judge with my accusations only to realize I had very little evidence to present.

That could've felt discouraging, but instead it was exactly the push I needed to keep digging into Paradise 24's secrets. And I was truly surprised by many of the later revelations Lady Love Dies' detective work offered, and even if I was only confirming my early suspicions I really enjoyed the process of finding out exactly why some character made a choice, let alone their role in the broader mystery.

Better yet, the trial made me aware that I'd forced the hands of some characters to solidify my hypotheses, that there were several more clues to find and mysteries to solve, and that while I may have satisfied the demands of the court I may not have fully solved the mystery of Paradise 24.

As I began uncovering lie after lie, it was undeniable that not only did the Blood Crystal economy feel mightily restrictive (though I'm sure more than enough of them exist for the obsessive collectors) but the city itself was quite a burden to navigate even with all the movement upgrades. It got less and less fun making my way towards the character I wanted to talk to the closer I got to the end...but the thinker in me also began to interpret that impatience as an extension of the gameplay. In those moments, I started finding the time it took to get from one suspect to another a representation of both my and Lady Love Dies' frustration with the increasingly desperate lies of her former friends who'd become my new adversaries.

I'd like to think I nailed the trial. It sure seemed to feel like it. But I also know that there are mysteries I didn't solve, environmental puzzles and narrative links left dangling. Perhaps I was allowed to accuse one person of too many crimes, and finishing one or two of those Resident Evil-esque puzzles may have been the key.

I suppose for now I'll just have to feel okay with what I chose. But I wouldn't surprise myself if I came back to this when I'm looking for something to play and tried to uncover the mysteries I presented to the Judge as tangential.

At the very least, it'd be nice to wander around this place listening to its dope ass, mysteriously joyful soundtrack in search of the various Sinji interactions I missed. Because at the very least, the truly curious player just has to know if the reward for finding all of his instances is the removal of the hilarious emoji obscuring his banger.

After spending much of the past two years wandering through the endless sprawl of the Yakuza Remastered Origins bundle, let me just start by saying it was a real thrill to finally return to the Kamurocho of Yakuza Kiwami 2, awash in neon lights, overwhelmingly high resolution advertisements that hint at a Metaversian confluence of real and fake, full of dense infrastructure and a far too common propensity for truly epic brawls. I'll come back around to that latter bit, because much to my surprise I wound up enjoying the combat far more than any previous Yakuza game. In a game that spotlights combat as often as Judgement does (the street fight slider feels as much as 50% more aggressive than those PS3 titles) that's no small thing.

In my roughly 30 hours with the game, however, I found that Ryu ga Gatoku Studio had either lost some of what made Yakuza's unique blend of melodrama and slapstick cohere or, even worse, found a clever excuse for a dumping ground to wrap various mini-games cut from the Yakuza series over the years and have a little fun with it. About half way through the game I'd realized that the latter might actually be a more charitable take than the former. If that's confusing, think of it this way: through one lens, Judgement is a fun brawler you mostly ignore in favor of side stories and awful mini-games. Through another, it's like listening to a b-sides collection in an anthology, and that's not so bad, right? Who'd listen to the b-sides if they didn't already like the band to begin with?

Judgement really doesn't do itself a ton of favors off the bat, though. For one thing, Yagami is a total mess of a character. At his most abstract, he's essentially a blend of two classic Yakuza protagonists packaged in a mashup of a couple previous side characters. The honor of Kiryu married to the aloofness of Akiyama while slipping in and out of the cop world like Tanimura via the underworld lens of Shinada. There's a version of this on paper that works, but in practice he's a nearly impossible character to get a read on. I was always pretty taken aback by the Yakuza franchise's ability to keep introducing new characters that were neither caricatures nor hard to find the motivation for, but Yagami is kind of a generic superhero archetype. His motley crue of buddies feel similarly market tested, particularly the mysterious masked teen that's been ubiquitous for half a decade at least. Contradicting what I'll argue later, at least the yakuza dudes continue to contain layers that feel as personal as they do burdened by plot or screenwriting.

Some could argue, probably rightly, that Kiryu has the same problem as Yagami generally. But if Kiryu at his core is always wound tight and prepared to spring back to a stoic scold at any moment, Yagami seems too prepared to adjust to the moment. Sometimes he's a hard drinking party guy, sometimes he's practically a clergyman, and his role in the story stumbles around in much the same way. If you're the sort of person that every so often while playing a Yakuza proper found themselves wondering, "why is this character being allowed to live right now?" - keep in mind that the yakuza of Yakuza spend about as much time discussing the operational restrictions of suboordinates as they do actually killing people - Judgement can only amplify that effect.

This is where I spend a little time talking about all the ways that even such a subtle shift as yakuza protagonist to civilian protagonist upsets the balance of the franchise a bit. Whatever the reason may be, Judgement is by far the horniest game in the series. The side missions are full of stalkers, perverts and outright predators (remember, in Kamurocho stalking is a kind of clumsy, nerdy behavior but not actually that worrying) while a key plot point of its middle third involves a She's All That sequence surprisingly had the potential to be more than a "wow, she took her glasses off" trope but air balls the hell out of the shot. All too often are conversations about sexual abuse and coercive sexual conduct met with a comedy soundtrack, or a camera panning up and down the female body, or just otherwise inundating the game.

The Yakuza series has always had a problem with that stuff, but it was a problem that it seemed to be commenting on within Japanese subcultures as a whole. While never outright excusable, these moments were sparing in the grand scheme of each game and the joke was always on the perp. Somehow, in 2019, that no longer always feels like the case, which is what makes it so shocking when you spend a brief mid-game sequence playing dress up with a friendly, helpful, named cast woman like a child's doll only to then inhabit her as she walks down the street, gawked at and cat-called on the way to the next waypoint.

It's simple, and the second time the player is put in this character's shoes neither the effect nor the scenario is nearly as surprising, but as I'll keep exploring this is a game that could've really been onto something if it had just focused more on its core competencies: small claims cases and sexual lunatics.

While it makes sense that a private eye would come across, or be asked to uncover, plenty of lewd moments in the Kamurocho underbelly, there's something about the frequency of it here, let alone the sloppy way most of it is played for laughs rather than any real cause for concern, that exposes Judgement's main flaw: the involvement of the Yakuza at all. As it turns out, when you aren't approaching the streets of Kamurocho from the perspective of a shot-calling wiseguy a lot of these smaller tales from the common people being thrust into the spotlight makes it all feel weird in a bad way rather than a little lark.

Similarly, while the yakuza characters allow for the game to track similar plot details as, well, every Yakuza game in the series excluding Zero and Kiwami and go all the way to the top of the political food chain...it doesn't allow for the player to really get intimate with another side of Kamurocho life in the way this game often suggests. From its "previously on..." stylized recaps to the shockingly dense business and hospitality districts, heavy emphasis on getting to know your local service workers and of course Yagami's position of P.I., Judgement teases a ridiculously enticing pivot for the franchise and it's a real shame RGG either didn't see it the same way or couldn't bring themselves to take such a risk.

And look, I get it. For all its groundings in the real world, the Yakuza franchise is all this studio knows and in many ways the comic book characters that help them get away with the luxurious bullshit they're known for. But from the chapter structure to the severe reduction in the dramatic needs of the protagonist, I had this strange feeling of being let down the more interesting the story became. Initially I figured this was because the story itself was, however relatively ambitious for a video game, quite stock for a noir-adjacent corruption story - though the Resident Evil reference was appreciated when it barged in. Near the end of the game I'd realized that what I was actually bemoaning was that Judgement hadn't fully invested in that zoomed in vision of Kamurocho nor the gimmickry of its nods at procedural television. Who wouldn't want a series of Murders of the Week from RGG Studio, their sort of take on LA Noire's desk-based progression?

Let me step back from that train of thought a bit, because this was ultimately a game I quite enjoyed. In the most basic ways, Judgement knows its way around making a combat encounter shine in their next-gen Dragon Engine. Whether its offices full of desks, chairs and other ephemera, street fights surrounding by glass for the breaking or backyard brawls with water features to duel in, creating moments on par with some of the cutscenes' more clever set pieces has never been easier. Of particular note is a fight at the batting cages in which characters can spill out into the parking lot or a few areas with fish ponds. It's never quite as polished as what you'd see in a Rockstar game from an experiential standpoint, but then Arthur Morgan never leapfrog threw a street thug through a plate glass window like a ragdoll Shane MacMahon, either.

As I got into the later stages of the game I definitely was grateful to have purchased some kind of special edition during a PSN sale, as I had a trio of flaming fists, explosive ground pound and perpetual healing extracts that never left my side from the very beginning. I suppose this means I never fully explored the fighting system, but that's always been my M.O. in these games. My experience with the weapons manufacturers, for example, basically begins and ends with the side quests that unlock them. That was again the case here with the medicine man, but I can see some potential in that whole system being fun in a more concrete, less excessive aspect than the arms of previous games. It's the most Game Ass Game concession the Yakuza franchise has ever made to players who might find its core brawler both too simple and too cheap. Especially if you're in my position and are granted a number of infinite stones that may as well by cheat codes. Anyway, back to the complaining - Kamurocho is showing its damn age.

For what it's worth, Judgement doesn't always look at its play space the same as a Yakuza game would. Several of its missions amount to little more than going to work, heading to the bar for a little R&R then heading home for bed.
Similarly, the side missions are often far lower stakes than those presented in the Yakuza series, to the point that many of them simply revolve around frequenting coffee shops or setting characters up on dates (in a strange twist, you usually don't even accompany the clumsy teens to offer your virginal advice about flirting). Unfortunately, for me this exposed that I've spent the better part of five years indulging in this game world and yet I could turn off the GPS and get you from Armadillo to Valentine in Red Dead Redemption faster than I could Shellac to Ebisu Pawn. A slight exaggeration, but adding all these interiors and businesses into the same square mileage more often just makes this confusing rather than feel more lived in. Yakuza characters may wield fascinating turns of phrase, often strange day jobs and at the top level some of the best variety of face scans in all of gaming, but even in 2019 nobody could excuse them of being all that emotive and the city itself flows from that core robotic state.

Which is to say that by nodding to the bigger ambitions of the modern world's open world game designs, whether that's a sprawling map, a quest log that never quits updating, zoomed in and slow paced interior infiltration types of missions or just hanging out on a date, playing a Yakuza release that's practically contemporary for the first time one can't help but notice how slapdash its approaches to these open world staples is. Likewise, Judgement's base charms can't really distract from the fact that RGG have never so much as teased they could crack the code of narrative pacing in a world where the player could just as easily fuck off and play Fantasy Zone for five hours. Especially in the last three acts of the game, there are all kinds of urgency stacked onto the player from death sentences to members of the party's own desire to see things end quickly. The cumulative effect is a game that feels like its trying to do a little too much both in the stereotypical way all modern video games do but also simply a project of this scope and story of this ambition.

The thing that really, really hurt my time with this game however and had me worrying this might be the absolute worst RGG product I've played was Judgement's pacing. While this is clearly a procedural at its core - again, see the "previously on..." segments and first ten or so hours of the game - the bulk of its storytelling is quite serialized. Unfortunately, this means roughly 65% of the conversations you'll be watching in this game are little more than recaps of the information you'd acquired before. Accompanied by a ripping, endless heavy rock guitar line, most of Judgement's most fraught scenes are little more than Yagami and a character he went on an adventure with explaining what they did and learned to the other characters who weren't there, spiraling their way towards an idea for what to do next. Not only that, the player character often interjects with a blue-coded inner-thought that both accidentally implies the player is an idiot who can't follow along AND stops the flow of conversation until you press X alongside an annoying chime noise.

Quick tangent: musical cues are an entire other gripe with this game, whatever positives the soundtrack might have to offer is far outweighed by the looney tunes way its spare number of themes are employed throughout the game. It's so rarely comedic, or dramatic, that the times they do feel sympatico with the cinematography it feels accidental. This chime, likewise, highlights a pointless aspect of the game that in attempting to be "detective-y" just slows things down. I won't even get started on the whack-a-mole interrogation or crime scene investigation scenes, let alone the dreadful tailing (scored by the game's standout track no less, a beautiful little acid jazz cut reminiscent of Final Fantasy VIII's Deling City theme among others) sequences that do little more than insult everyone's intelligence and suspension of disbelief.

If this seems like a lot of complaining, it's only because Judgement has made a bunch of problems for itself at the exact same time that it solves the franchise's longest running flaw. The combat is still mindless, of course, but it seems ready to accept that and stop throwing enemies with specific attack patterns, cheap weapons, aggravating special tactics or any other cheap bullshit at you. We're a long way from the Blockuza meme of Yakuza 3 and while I'm quite sure there are those who wish Judgement weren't so easy to mash your way through I'm personally ecstatic. Y'all mad men and women can have your Amon pit fights; I just wanna mash my way to the same basic EX move cutscenes for dozens of hours and watch a soap opera on the side.

Finally, generic as a quality doesn't necessarily condemn a story, and Judgement comes out the other side just fine on that front. When suspicious characters aren't telling you the full story of a photo you and your friends already sussed the details of 10 minutes prior, it doesn't necessarily matter that Judgement is using the same story agriculture as previous Yakuza games. There's just enough of a sense of audacity in the fire at the center of it all that, for whatever reason, the incessant pauses to explain why a bad dude isn't all that bad, really, other than how bad he is of course that the core charm of the franchise can still shine through. I liken it to boys playing with new action figures - sometimes there is a bit of Marvel-esque creep into these characters, especially Sugiura and Kaito, that feels threatening - in the same corners of the room they always have.

Clearly I found much - MUCH - to dislike about this game, but I also found its 30 hours to be pretty breezy and cordial, completed in about three weeks despite everything weighed against it. Sometimes, I couldn't help but wonder if I hadn't been making my way through this series in as short a time as I have if some more of that RGG charm could've made up for the complaints.

As it stands, it was nice to spend some time in this world that wasn't quite as intensely splayed out as Yakuza 4 or 5 and also take a break from some of the more byzantine paths Kiryu and Co.'s lives have gone down. And I can't stress enough that however annoying the frequency of the combat can be in this game, the fact that the GAME bit of a Yakuza game is the most successful aspect is a minor shock and went a good way towards Judgement not joining Yakuza 3, or in some ways 4, as a bad game propped up by compelling characters and bonkers translations. Judgement is sparingly good, often bad, and far more mediocre in the middle than you'd like...but this is still a world in which you'll have an actual belly laugh every hour or so. That's not nothin'.

And for what it's worth, I'm not even necessarily opposed to a beelining of the NG+ save with the English voice acting at some point, just to see how that feels in a Yakuza setting.

But it'll probably be quite a while before I look into whether Lost Judgement sorted all of this out. I heard something about a high school...

Just needed to log that I love the idea of a huge Japanese man yelling "Hey, where's my spaghetti?!" too much to research whether that's a localizer's creative license or not.

About a week later...now that I've finished the game, the months-in-the-making follow up to my Yakuza 2, 3 and 4 reviews!

I entered Yakuza 5 with a strange feeling. I'd enjoyed my time with Kiwami, Zero and Kiwami 2 so much that I screamed through Yakuza 3 and 4, the latter of which was clearly intended to devour my free time. Thanks to some very compelling narrative choices, some unfortunately obscured side stories and the inevitable awkwardness of moving forward with a world that was jumping backwards in time mechanics wise, Yakuza 3 and 4 had not been the most enjoyable experiences. If Zero can rightly be pointed to as the catalyst for renewed Western zeal for the franchise and the Kiwami entries essential if modest modernizations of desperately old action games, Yakuza 3 and 4 function primarily as stark reminders of how exactly such a charming, idiosyncratic world of sexual deviants and back-tattooed soap opera stars could struggle for so long to find footing outside its home territories.

Yakuza 5, then, is a much needed balm for the marathoning first-timer. It combines many of the aspects that make those middle chapters as thrilling as they are infuriating with many, many hints of the strides the team at RGG Studio would make five years later with Zero. The result is a game that might have the least impactful story implications of the entire franchise, functioning mostly as a greatest hits mashup of Kiwami 2's baffling convolution, 3's dedication to the bit and 4's 50-piece puzzle brand of "so simple you'll never guess it" interweaving tales.

That might not sound appealing on its face, except that Yakuza 5 is such an effective time waster in part because each character is gifted with side stories equal parts absurd and heartwarming and an absolute litany of mini-games to play, all of which would be embarrassingly simple if not for the plucky charm inherent to this world. This was the first time in nearly two years plugging away at this franchise that I felt back in that old familiar groove of becoming so invested in Kiryu's street racing and taxi cab adventures, or Haruka's quest to refine her femininity for the stage, or Shinada's volcanic commitment to the bit during a multi-hour subplot involving nothing more than the batting cages that far more than half my time with Yakuza 5 was spent blissfully unaware of the entertainment industry chaos unfolding over in the shadows.

The cast is also far better realized than the last go around, even if the core story is practically more of a superfluous metaphor about the power of love, inspiration and ambition (or, y'know, "dreams") than an actual story. Kiryu's isolation feels both more earned and more sad than his time on the orphanage, Saejima once again goes to jail before once again mostly being sidelined by his own, strange place in this world but almost anything is better than convoluted rooftop and sewer navigation, Haruka lets the player explore this world free of conflict for once, Akiyama remains this period of Yakuza's secret, throbbing pulse while Shinada is maybe my favorite character yet in the franchise.

Scorching hot take, I'm sure, but there's something about the approach to his character that's oddly refreshing. He's not honor obsessed the way Kiryu or Saejima are, nor is he a swaggering rags to riches type like Akiyama. Instead he mostly plays as the embodiment of Akiyama's fantasy of himself, ceaselessly funny, charming and self-deprecating without the infinite piggy bank to get himself out of any jam. Thus he actually is a man of the people, and lets the player sink into Yakuza's universe as just another player in the game, rather than some legendary Dragon or other God-like figure taken human form.

All in all, while Yakuza 5 at times can certainly feel debilitatingly pointless - I started this game on Christmas Day, 2021 and beat it nearly a year later in no small part because I just couldn't bring myself to care about Saejima's adventures in bear country (I finished Part 2 on August 26th, 2022 and the rest of the game less than a month later by comparison) - as a total package it's a vital return to form for a franchise most Western players are likely experiencing in this backwards fashion wherein the game is actually signaling that the best is yet to come for this charmingly singular franchise.

But I suppose even that is fitting - what franchise other than Yakuza could find players in a position to celebrate signs of better and better things to come, only to remember those better things happened as many as five long years ago and you've already experienced them. Oh well! Now to decide whether I go play the child rearing simulator I apparently have to look forward or detour into the police procedural offshoot, Judgement, I suppose.

I am an incredibly disorganized person. As a result, playing the game normally makes me irrationally irritated at this fictional girl's preferred placement for her things - I looked up a solution image for the first room after a miserable 45 minutes and nearly threw my iMac out the window - but turning off those requirements just made Unpacking, well, interactive unpacking. Using a mouse with a DualSense. It's unpacking but worse. That's really all that needs to be said about why I hated my time with this game.

But because I'm normally so long-winded, a few more notes for the time-rich among you:

• The music is totally good That Kind of Stuff. And that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff I like. Unfortunately, by some stroke of madness it isn't programmed to loop indefinitely, leading to at least a full minute's worth of silence before a given level's soundtrack kicks back in. I can't speak for everyone but, personally, this constantly made me feel like I was taking too long, like the game was staring at me with the plain face emoji flashing incessantly.

• I like the aesthetic, but I also found myself wanting to recognize more clearly what many of these objects are. Sure, smarter folks than I could pick out more references than "ooh, a Gamecube!" but I could only stare at the same vague set of novels for so long.

• I think the logic of the closets, desks and cupboards is absolutely insane.

• Even more insane, who packs their stuff and doesn't label ANY OF IT?! I may be a messy son of a bitch with the organizational skills of a nine year old, but whenever I move I'm AT LEAST gracious to myself enough to label the box with the knives in it. I get haphazardly dumping the living room stuff in the bathroom just to get it the fuck out of your grasp as quickly as possible, but each box felt more like a random item generator than another piece of this girl's puzzle.

• Lastly, and this is just a nitpick compared to all the rest, but without knowing much about this game other than how many podcasters I love and Giant Bomb guest Game of the Year lists (R.I.P., apparently?) it wound up on, I'd forgotten Unpacking was about a very specific girl-to-woman arc. Sometimes I wondered if my maleness, or having named my character "David" after myself, contributed to how little I seemed to understand where certain items go. We should have just all had to be "Rebecca" or whatever.

The key to Death Stranding's success is it's sound design. Everything from the sound of Sam's footsteps on wet grass to huge variety of confirmation pings during a delivery resolution feels highly specific, and in the case of those menu pips absolutely tuned to wring as much dopamine response out of the player as possible.

As you progress through the game and begin unlocking Reverse Trikes, big trucks (I love me a big truck, loaded with six or seven deliveries for a long haul) and stronger courier frames a lot of the nuisance of the early game begins to fall by the wayside and what you're left with is a mostly very pleasant, relaxing game about bringing people new underwear, lightbulbs, pizza and toys to keep them healthy and occupied as they live out their days in underground bunkers cowering under a disease-ridden Earth's surface.

While that side of the experience would have been worthy of Game of the Year nods, the other side of the Kojima coin really drops the ball. While there is some fun to wring out of his absurdly allusory tale of a fractured country and isolation as a connection to (or facsimile of) the afterlife, so much of the dialogue is laughable in a tragic way that'll leave long-time Kojima fans longing for the animé trappings of the Metal Gear series.

Likewise, where his need for the lore to have a tangible effect on gameplay usually leads to wildly inventive gameplay scenarios, everything involving the BT fields and resulting mini-bosses if caught (which, if you mostly drive trucks around like me, means a lot of getting caught) is nothing more than a timesink. Escape the field of oil that bubbles up from the ground and represents a battlefield just once and you'll realize it's far easier to just make that mad dash, watch the boss evaporate on its own then return to your items than actually engage in the ponderous combat system - which, again, is far more clever in concept than execution.

In other words, Death Stranding is a perfect delivery game with some truly gorgeous vistas and an incredible core feedback loop mired by nigh incomprehensible storytelling techniques and all manner of minor gameplay baubles that distract the player from what it does so well. Death Stranding was certainly the most 2020 game, and it's been nice to see some critiques circle back to it during quarantine and discover a newfound appreciation for its comforting qualities but it does have some serious flaws that are about as bad as the good is great.

Video games have, on the whole, more examples of "it's about the journey, not the destination" than any other medium I'd wager, even books. Even going beyond the actual content of most video games, just look at how most people play them! Just HALF of players who booted Spider-Man and God of War, two of the most acclaimed Playstation exclusives ever released, saw their campaigns to their respective conclusions. And that's a very impressive clear rate, reserved for only the most narrative-driven, linear, prestigious titles - widen the scope and players are likely to get lost forever, as evidenced by the 30% clear rate for The Witcher 3 or Horizon: Zero Dawn.

And 13 Sentinels just may be the "it's the journey, not the destination"-iest of them all! While it resides in a genre frequented by more fervent players than some other genres and thus can boast a nearly 60% completion rate on PS4, it's not rare to hear from many of those who finished the game that the ending doesn't "live up" to the game that preceded it. To which I say: the entire story was KIND OF bullshit, yeah, so who cares?

On the way to that smoldered conclusion, players get bombarded with just about every major work of science fiction in the last 50 years as interpreted by a choose your own adventure book rooted in the zaniness of Japanese kaiju and waifu culture. Seen another way, it's watching the East mollify the West's future-fearing paranoia in real-time and applying a cheery, aw shucks attitude to some of the scariest stories and concepts ever committed to paper and film.

If this sounds like it shouldn't work, try fracturing it across 13 different characters who all satisfy various archetypes, further fracture the story by separating it across five timelines in five separate decades (some of which are actually CENTURIES apart) and then design the progression of this structure so that certain characters are locked out of progression for seemingly vague reasons, and not always the same ones - sometimes another character or two need to reach a certain point in their story, or sometimes you have to...oh yeah, sometimes you have to go into an Ender's Game like real-ish-time-strategy layer and fight these kaiju in mechs on an AR chess board animated by voxels that pop every which direction like confetti when the action kicks off.

13 Sentinels is an almost unfathomably bad idea on paper, and yet, one of the most satisfying and propulsive video games, despite mostly being a visual novel, there's ever been. It satisfies the "just one more turn" impulsiveness of Civilization, the "what the hell's gonna happen next" of blockbusters like the aforementioned God of War and the "hmmm, this is just a pleasant mess" of the most classic downtime moments in old Squaresoft RPGs all in one violently comprehensive masterstroke.

I don't think I know anyone in real life that would be interested in this game if I just tried to describe it to them, or show them a Quick Look or something. But I'd surely be angry with them for judging a book by its (admittedly awkward, skeevy) cover.

I have such deeply held nostalgia for this game that, despite all the negative reviews and photographic evidence they were entirely justified in their disappointed tone, the game went on sale and I gave these shucksters some of my cash. I think some of the graphical complaints might be a little overblown, but my mistake was made obvious stupidly quick for something that should've been even more obvious to me as I hovered over the purchase button: this game plays like trash on a controller.

Having played Civilization IV and V for hours and hours (and hours) on my 2011 MacBook and my 2008 iMac before shifting to hours and hours (and hours) of Civilization VI on PS4/5, and also having not owned a proper gaming computer since an ill-fated 5-year sabbatical from Mac Life in my early teens (Windows XP, get wrecked!), I'm not as easily reminded of how poorly suited to controllers some PC games are...even though I probably should be. Hello, Tropico 5, Crusader Kings III, Planet Coaster and more! Mayhaps I'm just a fool...

That being said! The voice acting is the same as it always was and that's still absolutely fantastic, as is the writing. It could come off a little stilted compared to modern games but overall, even beyond the voices, this game sounded and sounds awesome. It's the one thing about the Blade Runner aesthetic that just can't be diminished by shoddy ports or endlessly debatable alternate edits or decades later sequels.

But I have to actually give this a super poor rating despite barely making it back to Ray McCoy's apartment. While I didn't find it as ugly as advertised, it IS ugly as sin on a big 4K screen as compared to a late-90s/early-2000s PC monitor, the controls ARE that bad without a mouse and all the charm of the real-time storytelling, as someone who played this game over and over and over as a kid, absolutely has to be ruined by how clunky this all is. So much of that mechanic involves being in the right place at the right time or doing the right thing at the right moment and that must be impossible here.

Lastly, this game does have two infamously bad bits involving a time bomb at one point and McCoy's pistol in another. These are the most precision (and luck, honestly) dependent bits of all and I'd bet the timebomb escape alone is an absolute padlock on progressing through the rest of the game when using a DualSense.

This was a really strange experience for me. While I might agree that Ghost of Tsushima is a much bigger game than it had any need to be, I was also one of those people that was really grateful to have so many excuses to keep putzing around in its world. Like fellow Sony exclusives Horizon: Zero Dawn and Spider-Man before it, Ghost of Tsushima was the rare game I clicked so deeply with on a mechanical level that I found myself pushing into Hard and eventually Lethal difficulty just to get a rush.

And yet here I was, back in this game I loved pushing through Act I on a New Game + save to get to the DLC section and I was strug-a-ling on Lethal+. I knocked it back down to Medium+ and continued to struggle though at least I wasn't dying anymore. And then the DLC arrived.

One thing I've never loved in modern video games is designers' obsessions with trying to portray psychedelic experiences or supernatural phenomena. It wasn't all that novel to me even when it was novel to the industry when Rockstar got weird in Grand Theft Auto V, but in a post-Baba Yaga in Tomb Raider world it feels like it's a 50/50 shot whether an open world adventure game will turn its DLC into an internal struggle with tribal medicine designed to interrogate what it all means for the player character.

I suppose it doesn't help that, for as much as I enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima back in 2020, I never did care much for Jin. I found him flat in English and merely stout in Japanese, a strange attempt at making a sympathetic nobleman at a time when working class scrubs like me really were not in any way looking for heroes in rich boys with daddy issues. So I can't say I'm interested in this attempt to give him more depth and sympathetic layers - I'm still on the side of all the NPCs with no better name or designation than "peasant" here.

There are also few enemy types I find less interesting than the magical buffer dude that hangs out in the back and re-arranges pretty much every encounter he's involved in so that he's suddenly the most important guy in the room until he's been taken care of. This isn't just Iki Island's primary addition to the Tsushima formula, it's a part of every.single.fight in this expansion. This bummer is made more stark by their other, less "clever" but far more grounded introduction of enemy types with multiple weapons. It's stunningly obvious, but it never got old watching an enemy switch from sword and shield to spear or big sword to small blades or whatever - I wish they'd have spent more time on the significance of THAT than the shamans.

I also found the design of some of these missions just baffling. It really, really sucked trying to get that super cool horse armor (though I'm open to this being a meta commentary on the most infamous horse armor ever conceived) and during several other missions I found myself straight up confused where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to want to kill. I can't remember how often I felt this way during the game proper, though my time with Act I this year didn't serve up any of those same feelings.

So...I'm walking away from this DLC with really weird feelings. The weirdest of which being something that I'm actually gonna worry about for at least several months onward: are the L1 and R1 buttons on the DualSense actually a little too sturdy for games designed around precise parrying? This is the first game of this sort I've attempted on this controller, and like I said I felt pretty useless on Lethal+ (despite most of my 12 hours with this game on PS5 that I'd Platinum'd over 75 hours on PS4 being spent on that difficulty) and over time I couldn't stop wondering if it was myself or the throw on the L1 that was the problem. I hate that that's going to sit with me for some time now.

So why 3.5 given all this complaining? Well, because on a pure aesthetic and gameplay level, the original game was my second favorite game of 2020. I love the animations, I love flipping between regular and Kurosawa modes (despite the game part of the game clearly not being designed with the lack of color in mind at all) and checking little meaningless tasks off my to-do list and I love, love, love sticking a sharp blade into fools (virtually, of course). The Iki Island expansion doesn't let go of any of that stuff, but it does expand on them in ways that aren't super appreciated, and that's on every front from narrative to core mechanics. It's just that the base game set such a high bar for pure fun that, despite one disappointment after another, I'm left admitting I had a real good time with this thing.

Fingers crossed the L1/R1 issue is all in my head.

There is no game I've wanted to give 5-stars to more than The New Colossus. From its incredible (and incredibly timely) story to the ferocious creativity in its world building, level design (okay, Manhattan is a bit ponderous) and characterization, The New Colossus was a titanic achievement of feel and style.

I mean, I played 18 hours of this, the campaign portion practically straight through. I earned my first trophy just after Noon on November 5th, my last trophy (of the campaign) just after 2PM on November 6th, then dabbled in toe Übercommader stuff for about a week and walked away. That's fucking DEVOURING a video game!

Unfortunately, it doesn't always feel great to play. The previous game had a heavier dose of stealth than this does, but those roots are still lain and thus at times this game incentivizes anything other than laying waste to Nazi scum at the most brusk pace possible. I get it, the Nazis won and are very dangerous - I still would rather feel like a lawn mower than a field mouse! Speaking of danger, the A.I. itself isn't particularly robust, but this game has a hard time communicating damage as well as its source, leading to many frustrating deaths wherein you can't be entirely sure you were actually playing the game poorly.

There's a side of me that says, ah whatever, this has syphilitic Hitler, pregnant women double wielding uzis, weird secret Jewish space tech, character deaths* just as shocking as anything on Game of Thrones and one of the single most empowering, feel good endings to a video game there's ever been.

If anyone's ever told you that The New Colossus can be a frustrating experience, believe them! After two of these I'm actually not entirely convinced MachineGames are excellent video game designers. But they are certainly some sort of visionaries, daredevils beyond measure, and I really hope we get to hear from them again soon.

This game might actually be impossible to assign a score. Compared to Yakuza 3 Remastered it is a huge, huge step up in terms of storytelling and gameplay variety, but in some ways that just makes the game's shortcomings more frustrating.

For example, by virtue of being the first new character players are introduced to as well as being threaded through the other characters' stories as well, Akiyama winds up feeling like the main character of a game the player rarely actually embodies. In some ways that's a neat trick, and RGG definitely weaponizes his charm to lift the spirits of the other characters' fairly dour storylines whenever it feels right, but every time Akiyama appears it's also a reminder that not only is his dialogue the most fun but his combat the most unique. This is especially true if you're marathoning through the games in chronological order, where his kick-heavy combat style truly plays like nothing else in the franchise to this point.

While charming additions to the gallery of misfit gangsters, Saejima and Tanimura are often saddled with gimmicks that make the game more cumbersome than interesting. Saejima, for example, is mostly forced to navigate the city via rooftops and sewage systems due to a high value warrant out for his arrest, which is not only a confusing and convoluted way to get around Kamurocho (albeit a slightly clever way to alter an otherwise constant map) but also highly discourages the pursuit of side quests. Tanimura, by contrast, has free reign of the city in a way no other character does, and yet nearly all of his missions involve him engaging in some kind of one-off mini-game or unavoidable gimmick that often restricts his already all-too-similar to Kiryu move set. Yakuza 4 is full of variety, but sometimes that variety can feel as convoluted as Yakuza's various criminal organizations.

Though if I'm being fair to Yakuza 4, it's main story is so propulsive that there's little wiggle room for dating, MMA training, combat arenas or the SEGA Arcade. Much like Yakuza 3, this game is awful about surfacing its side quests or guiding the player along the way Zero and the Kiwamis do, so I actually came to appreciate this. While Yakuza does an awful job pointing players in the direction of its side activities, its narrative does an excellent job of enticing the player to keep the accelerator revving. For what it's worth, the narrative does offer a very explicit opportunity to swap freely between characters and wrap up whatever loose ends you might want before completing the narrative.

While a classic JRPG trope, that does open the question: what business does a game, or player, have approaching the finale of their tale only to stretch the game from 17 hours to, potentially, over 100? It's a compromise made slightly tempting by the diverse playstyles and personalities of the characters as well as the hitting-its-stride silly writing of whatever substories you've likely seen at that point, but still...

I ultimately decided it wasn't really worth it, in part because the final proper act of this game may not feature the block happy anger management class bosses of Yakuza 3 but it certainly features some of the most poorly designed combat encounters I've yet experienced in this franchise. Far too often enemies can juggle the player character in a never ending series of stuns and knockdowns, in a Game of Death-like marathon fight in which your greatest enemy might actually be your limited inventory slots. The combat in Yakuza 4 is rarely hard but it is frequently cheap and somehow even more infuriating than 3 due to the more aggressive enemy A.I.

It's also hard to ignore that much of the final story beats lay the animé bullshit on thiiiiiiiiick while also matching the ending to Yakuza 2 practically beat for beat. Yakuza 4 spends so much of its time being a small (if absurd) story about how four strangers are all emotionally tied to the same state-wide conspiracy that a lot of its final hours can feel as desperate as they are repetitive.

In other words, I spent much of this game waffling between a 3.5 and a 4, but I think I ultimately have to settle even lower, a strong, bold-faced 3. For all the ways this game improves on that meandering installment and all the fun little hooks and twists there are in the story's mid-section, an eventual abundance of purely frustrating combat encounters and some true lack of imagination in the more Machiavellian aspects of the game's story make for something I definitely couldn't recommend as a cold turkey entry point to the Yakuza series, but would also advise those looking to binge the series as I have been that the game is quite enjoyable - with some very significant caveats.

I definitely get why people are in love with this game. It's got a really cool world, feels like you can do just about anything you want, the powers are really cool and mobility is pretty choice.

Unfortunately, as will come to be a theme as I get more of my thoughts on games out there, I'm just not that good at making my own fun for myself. I want to follow the markers, complete the objective and get out of the level. Even worse, half of this game is action and half is stealth, but all of it is in first-person and first-person stealth is about as appealing to me as self-mutilation. Absolutely too stressful in almost all cases without the situation awareness of a third-person camera.

ALL THAT BEING SAID, the blink mechanic makes the use of stealth to rain death upon A.I. from parts unknown is quite a good feeling, and while the objectives often lay down clues for clever bonus objectives you can do they're never explicit or handholdy, so I do get to feel some kind of smart without having to put everything together on my own.

I bought this in a huge bundle of every Arkane Definitive Edition release prior to Deathloop because it was like $25, and I do hope to really give Arkane a fair shot at some point. Unfortunately, after nearly six hours I realized that I really wasn't paying attention to any of the systems this game had to offer, I was just blinking around killing dudes until I made it to my target where I'd get clever and figure out the secondary way to complete the mission. Stealth runs? Retrying missions to experiment with the A.I.? Clever possession tactics, catching bullets with enemy bodies, being mindful of the corruption or whatever that mechanic is?

No, I'm just a simple murder boy, and I hated that I couldn't meet Dishonored on its own terms. I knew I put this studio's games off for so long for a reason.

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.

I don't think this game is worth expounding on too much, and I'll not bury the lede there. That said, I also think it's a perfectly perfect showcase for what the Playstation brand can bring to a Gamepass competitor. Who's to say if they'd entered this sort of market earlier that a game like As Dusk Falls, about as Sony Game a Sony Game that's ever Sony Game'd, would have wound up an XBox exclusive?

Stray fronts a lot of prestige tropes. It's got a Radiohead-esque soundtrack (and lowkey, this is by far its most impressive feature) paired with a telescopic portrayal of Final Fantasy VII's post-cyberpunk aesthetic and an exploration of very NieR: Automata-like ponderings about the nature of humanity and what role robots, let alone nature and the habitats people build to shelter themselves from said nature, have to play in a world without said people.

Stray gets a lot of mileage prior to playing the game out of being a game in which one embodies a cat; if the player owns a cat and just as importantly is predisposed to filming everything on a smartphone rather than simply chuckling at it in their own reality, it seems those players and even more importantly those cats really enjoy hanging out with Stray's unnamed cat.

I'm not a cat pervert, unfortunately. I didn't find it cute that there were nearly a dozen places to take a nap in this game, seemingly half as many places to scratch aimlessly as there were bosses in Elden Ring (spoiler for Elden Ring, or Stray, or both: half the bosses in Elden RIng is still a LOT of scratching stations), some truly pointless (other than a trophy!) interactions with balls of yarn and basketballs (basketballs?) and then the semi-Army Men/Toy Story gimmick of exploring spaces designed for 6-foot adult men as a tiny cat.

And when the cat bit comes last, it's a lot easier to laser focus on how simple the actual game design is. I like to jokingly refer to licensed character action games of the PS1 era that are truly terrible like Garfield's Lasagna World Tour when I get to the nuts and bolts of this game (that game in particular because, y'know, cat memes) but I'm also fairly serious: aside from an appreciably dense if not remarkably challenging Slums area, lose a few hundred thousand polygons here and a number of clever signposting techniques in level design there, Stray is a PS1 game in a 2019 game's clothing, released in 2022.

That sounds insanely harsh to me so I'm sure it'll read practically absurd to others, but I only fixate on that so I don't dwell too much on the fact that - brace yourselves - this is NOT a cat game. It's a game about a tiny floating robot companion with a complicated understanding of its own past and the context within which it can translate any language, open any door and manipulate any form of cybersecurity. I guess I won't spoil exactly why that is, though I admit that's in part because the game doesn't actually think about it too much either.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't pontificate much yet here I am, so: you control a cat in this game, but the cat could just as well be an extremely agile possum and nothing would change other than how cute it is. It vaguely points at some post-apocalyptic themes without any curiosity about what that means for the cat. It's a game all about the little robot friend, peppered with mostly fetch quests and the occasional stealth or chase sequence that in either case mostly imagine what it'd be like to play a vertical Crash Bandicoot level from behind the protagonist. The actual novelty of the cat perspective begins and ends with "this avatar looks like a cat."

Which is to say, again, it's a perfectly good pilot program for what Playstation can offer players as an incentive for their upgraded tiers of Playstation Plus. The puzzles are simple enough that you feel clever completing them on first go, while the art direction, music (the music!) and rudimentary inventory system keep the video game player's lizard brain demanding their fingers push them forward to seeing and hearing more of what Stray has to offer. Other than a really rough start (I wholeheartedly rejected the discovery of the little robot friend) in the first hour, I did the other four in a single sitting. That was nice, having the achievements pop as consistently as they did and the game progress as quickly as I could manage.

That bit was refreshing, I suppose. I liked feeling nostalgic for the sort of gameplay that was undeniably mindblowing when 3D environments were brand new. But the cat perverts really need to chill out - as I said at the top, this is not a cat game. Don't get played.

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.