A pretty bog-standard Survival Crafting game that crashes every 20 minutes with anime critters tacked on for the crowd who wants a "Mature Pokemon game". If you've played Ark or The Forest or Conan: Exiles or Grounded or Valheim or any of the other 5000 games out there like it you've played this. The novelty of having the Pals around the world wears off pretty quick as you spend time chopping down trees to build fires and foraging for berries to refill that hunger meter. The Pals have some cute/interesting designs sometimes but the way you use them in the world isn't comparable to a
Pokemon game. Just a lazy asset flip survival craft game like Craftopia was

Finished awhile ago but sat with it before typing stuff up.

A fun followup to Like a Dragon! Fixing all my issues with the combat to really bring the transition to a turn-based RPG. A fun continuation of Ichiban's adventures and a final closing(?) of Kiryu's. Though the games narrative struggles with problems that haven't been around since the PS3 trilogy.

From the start its a delight being able to see all my friends in Ijincho again. The decision to make the first few hours of the game be low stakes slice of life is great, we rarely get these kinds of moments in games and when we do they're relegated to side content. It's nice to see everyone hanging out and see how their lives are going since the last game ended and it works as a great setup for getting the franchise out of Japan for the first time. Down on his luck, jobless, not getting a text back from a girl, canceled by a VTuber we've all been there. Why not go to Hawaii to reunite with your long lost mother? Where, even with the looming threat of the Hawaiian underworld surrounding the cast, the general tone is nice thanks to Ichiban's unwaivering spirit and optimism. Though when the stakes start to ramp up, a bit too late for me like in Yakuza 3, the narrative starts to suffer. Splitting the lead roles between Ichiban and Kiryu because they're STILL too scared to keep Kiryu out of the spotlight, and it really makes the ending feel flat because both of them confront the antagonist they have less conflict with and neither are built up in a way that feels cathartic to finally take down. Though I appreciate the time given to Kiryu to pay tribute to his nearly 20 years of adventures we've been along with him, it really takes away from time that could've been used to flesh out Ichiban's adventure and troubles. Though more about that in a bit.

The new additions to the cast with Tomizawa and Chitose are great, Tomizawa feels very American in contrast with the rest of the cast and Chitose's rich upbringing helps her stand out coming from a completely different world as everyone else. Seonhee being added to the group is a lot of fun, finding out she's just as much as a weirdo as the rest of the cast is great. Her helping Saeko and Nanba with Kiryu's bucket list is very sweet, and the three going from Ichibans quirks to Kiryus quirks creates some real funny moments. Adachi, Zhao, and Joon-gi feel tacked on but learning more about them is still nice. Kiryu, as a supporting character, is fantastic. His cancer bringing him out of his element and making him rely on others creates really funny and heartfelt moments, and as previously mentioned leads to my biggest problem with the game. Splitting Kiryu off from this supporting role hurts the game and hurts his growth on screen. Kiryu's journey here is that he has to learn to accept help from others instead of taking everything on by himself and Ichiban is the EXACT person he'd pick that up from, and he SHOULD be learning that by seeing how Ichiban lets everyone help him at the big ending of the game! Instead it's just kind of implied and you can draw the conclusions but it's not great, but enough of this.

Gameplay is fantastic, they fixed the biggest glaring issue with the combat in 7 being that you couldn't position the characters making the attacks that hurt in a row or a cone in front of the character making combat a blast. The positioning makes it so you can do really cool team combos and knock guys against the wall making the fights feel like a rad shonen battle. The monkey's paw with this change is that the fights are way too easy now. I'm sure its nice for people who are still struggling coming from an action game to a turn-based RPG but without any difficulty settings it feels like I'm slepeing through the fights. There's maybe 4 fights that are tough and 2 of them are because of annoying mechanics and less because you have to be creative. Kiryu's turn based breaking special is a blast though, loved how they used that during the Old Man fight.

Side content might also be the best it's ever been. Substories are a lot of fun, especially the ones that really focus on contrasting America with Japan. The trilogy of substories involving movie directors is great. Miss Match might be the funniest use of FMV in the series yet, Sujimon is the best Pokemon knock off this year (take that Palworld) and fills the itch I've wanted for a Gacha game that doesn't cost me money for rolls, Dondoko Island got old quick for me but I know people like that one. Using substories to wrap up loose ends with characters from Kiryu's past was nice (though I think he could've done this while also working alongside Ichiban too). I agree with most of the choices for people to come back into his life one last time and despite some inconsistencies like I'm pretty sure Kaoru fell for a guy in America and not that she just got too busy with work, It was great to see a lot of the people again. I missed Akiyama and will continue to miss him (I also miss Shinada why did he have to be relegated to just a quick memory bring him back). Confirming that the spinoffs are canon as dreams Kiryu had are a nice touch too.

Overall a great game! Well worth playing, I just wish it had more emotional weight and development for Ichiban. Maybe months out I'll feel differently.

Also fuck you RGG for teasing out the fucking cabaret club minigame with Yuki and Koyuki asking Kiryu to be a manager one more time for old times sake. Don't do that shit to me.

Great follow up to Alan Wake 13 years later, almost everything is better and more interesting than in the first game. Almost.

Story is cool and more engaging. Love the connections to Control. Music rules. The case board is satisfying to fill out. The plot threads and light diffusion are cooler than any of the environment changes in Control. Puzzles are all fun. Combat is routinely frustrating, Reloading usually means death, enemies even if there's very few of them sometimes take more than a full clip to kill and that just feels bad, The wolves when you play as Saga are the most annoying enemy ever put in a video game, and routinely switching to a healing item or throwable glitches out and makes me stop -> switch to gun -> switch back to item -> die because of how long it takes.

I'll do The Final Draft when the other DLC comes out.

Every single plot reveal in this game feels like they're doing this without making the tower completely collapse.

Fascinating non-linear sci-fi story that you can play in whatever order you want and at no point does it fall apart because of it. A real feat of storytelling to get everything to work how it does. A game you gotta go in completely blind.

The RTS portion of the game is a lot of fun when you figure it out, I just wish that there was a way to balance it out and make it feel less Start-And-Stop than it is but it is satisfying to see the waves of bad guys explode on the screen. I thought for sure the last mission was going to make my launch PS4 melt through the floor.

cool game.

Despite being a soft-reboot, this entire game feels like you're dropping in on Season 2 of an anime that had a 5 year gap in production. The characters talk with each other like we already met them and know them.

I've wanted to play this game since it came out, at the time I did not have a PS4 and I was playing PSO2 which had a Sakura Wars collab going on despite the fact that PSO2 was only on Xbox and PC at the time. I know it was having the collab at the same time for JP players but still weird. Not sure what I expected going into this though. I think I was expecting something closer to the Saturn games than what I got here. What is here is a light visual novel with social elements crossed with a poor action platformer with musou combat. All equaling a pretty disappointing package with a lot of small things that are annoying but, all of it stems from two major issues I have with the game.

1. There's no real sense of progression. You have cool robots but you never upgrade them, save for an upgrade that's more so a narrative point than it is a gameplay thing. The cool robots never get new attacks, they never get new armor, they never get new weapons. I was able to use the same strategy the entire time and did just fine, the game doesn't even get harder making it feel even shorter than it is. The visual novel elements somehow suffer from this issue too. I never feel like I'm actually getting closer to any of the girls, or anyone else you have chat events with. In Persona and Fire Emblem you feel like you're getting to know the characters personally, separate from whatever revelations come from the narrative. Here it's very superficial casual conversations like you have with someone you work with. Even by the end of the game I didn't feel like my relationship really progressed at all with my choice from the main 5 girls.

2. The game giving most of its focus to Sakura, the most boring member of the Flower Division, made it really hard for me to care about what was going on at almost any moment. She gets so many featured moments through each chapter, even being featured in some way in the chapters where she ISN'T the focus it's distracting when it's a big cast of characters. I'm hoping that the saturn games don't have this issue, or at least that their Sakura is way more interesting. The ending feels really werid if you pick anyone else (which I ended with Azami and the PS4 trophy stats show that Sakura is the most common pick by a large margin, do gamers just have bad taste or something). The rest of the cast have stronger personalities and interesting quirks beyond being the MCs childhood friend and it would be nice if I could've replaced those moments with Sakura with them instead!

On the positive side the combat sections are pretty fun even if they're basic, hitting super attacks on a large group is satisfying. The music is great. I did find the trust sections to be funny even if they just made Seijuro seem like a predator.

Whenever I get to the English patched Saturn game I hope I like that one more.