My name is Joe. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial masque which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Viewtiful Joe. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

Add this game on your Steam account as a non-Steam game through RPCS3 as Yakuza Dead Souls spelled exactly like that, and boot up the game and set your in-game controls to control type B
Steam stores community configs for non-Steam games that you can easily download through Steam provided your non-Steam shortcut has the right name
Then go browse the community control configs and download my lovingly crafted input config that automatically induces a mode shift causing your right analog stick to be read as a left analog stick only when you press R2, therefore enabling Right Stick Aiming without messing with your camera controls or movement, like a modern game
I might revisit this idea for another Steam community control scheme that puts aiming on L2 and shooting on R2 respectively, relocating some of the other top inputs to make room (if I do I will also upload it to Steam, so check that space if you're interested), but for now I'm using a controller with two remappable back buttons to also put R2's aim onto the left back button, and Square's shoot onto the right back button, therefore approximating modern aim/shoot controls
And for emulating it I've found the most success and least crashes with a combination of undervolting my CPU to make it run stronger and cooler, using frequent save-states to mitigate the consequence of crashes, and setting my preferred SPU threads in the emulator to 2. I'm getting a wonderfully frame-paced 30fps in combat which is where a consistent framerate matters most, and at a beautiful 4K, using my i7-9750H CPU
Enjoy! This is a better game than people give it credit for with the control mapping issues and framerate fixed
Best played immediately following Yakuza 4 imo

Where do I even begin with this game I can't play, that vanished right out from under me?
It kills me that they ported the incredibly underrated Devil's Third multiplayer from Wii U to PC as you see here in the form of the renamed RockShot, and then killed it off in THREE MONTHS, by the time I heard about it, it was already over. In the words of infamous Wanted: Dead filter boss August, is that all?

This is a cry for help shot in the dark tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it, but could somebody please reverse-engineer this game?
I'd give anything to play it and host LAN parties with it, [here I'll even give you the URL to install it on Steam] (steam://install/1368430) and yes, that trick I did with the URL there by changing out the app number from the delisted store page, works for LawBreakers, a game that did actually have its multiplayer revived recently (therefore proving that nothing is impossible), and a myriad of other F2P delisted Steam games, and only F2P games.
If it worked with all delisted Steam games it'd be too good to be true.

I found out about that install trick mentioned above because people spread it for acquiring Streets of Kamurocho and the other games from that time Sega released a bunch of freebies for Golden Week and paraded around the corpse of a modern Golden Axe vertical slice from years ago, which they then received backlash for not properly crediting the devs whose unfinished work they humiliated them over, thus ensuring Sega never does a thing like that again. But that's a story for another time, or actually this time, because I did just go off-track to explain it even if it hardly made sense.

I inadvertently expose some facet of my nature when all the multiplayer games I want are the ones that I can't have, I miss you Devil's Third, I miss you Anarchy Reigns, I never even got to play Rumbleverse, that one looked pretty good, the online melee combat multiplayer deathmatch genre, the only genre of online games it seems like I actually enjoy, or OMCMD for short (rolls off the tongue doesn't it) is an elusive species that is not fit for natural selection and would not, could not survive the winter. I love them but they never make it. ...If MMORPG could catch on surely that one should too, right?

And I love Soleil Game Studios too, they're one of my favorite extremely underrated game studios, dare I say they may be the next Platinum (or at least the next Alvion, and if you know who they are without having to look them up, you and I are friends now), formed out of the remnants of controversial Ninja Gaiden I, Black, & II director, difficulty maven, breast-man, and gooner auteur-ner Tomonobu Itagaki's Valhalla Game Studios, they are composed of the people who made Devil's Third operating under a witness protection program and now that I've effectively blown their cover they're going to need to move to the Netherlands, so I'm sorry about that guys. Depending on who you ask, Itagaki either left Tecmo because he didn't get $1.4m in unpaid bonuses for completing Dead or Alive 4, or because he me tooed and his time's up, so he's not traveling with them anymore.
They made Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, Valkyrie Elysium, but more importantly split from Itagaki and continued to refine their ideas from Devil's Third by forking off in two separate directions, one towards fleshing out their multiplayer in the ill-fated RockShot, towards which they displayed an utter lack of confidence by only giving it three months, and the other towards fleshing out its campaign in the form of Stefaniejoostenlike instant cult classic Wanted: FUCKING: Dead (which, by the way, was basically commissioned by some odd rich dude who almost paid Remedy to make it instead of Soleil), and upcoming instant cult classic Stefaniejoostenlike Vanquishlike, Vengeance is Mine

I might be overselling Wanted: Dead there with the profanity, but despite not being a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination it's a definite improvement on the admittedly not great Devil's Third campaign, and serves as evidence that despite being a game from one year ago, 7th gen nostalgia is beginning to come into vogue, as people yearn for the bygone creature comforts of turning off your multiplayer game to boot into a jank-ass singleplayer game with a title like MindJack or NeverDead or Quantum Theory or Shadows of the Damned or WET or Devil's Third or Wanted: Dead because you were tired of being called a slur by a guy sending you a God of War wallpaper

But they've yet to fully realize their original vision for Devil's Third, which by earlier trailers back when the game was being published by THQ and people were actually hyped for it once, was going to be a much more seamless campaign and multiplayer fusion. Maybe they'll realize it in their upcoming Project EDO, the latest in their OMCMD lineage, which they have nothing but concept art and breathless hype for, proclaiming loudly to the world on their front page that their ultimate goal is to make Project EDO one of the most loved and played games of all time. Big talk coming from a small team under the auspices of Tencent, who keeps repeatedly poaching creators like Yakuza's Toshihiro Nagoshi or Suda51 to then have them work tirelessly on some vaporware game that seems to be perpetually just out of reach like a desert mirage, but I guess sooner or later we'll see if it pays off for them. Eventually. For being what they perceive as a future Fortnite, their new NINJA x High-end Action Online Multiplayer title doesn't even have a Backloggd page, so I have my reservations. Hell, Soleil themselves doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet!

That was a lot of tangents for a game I haven't even been able to try...in summary, what did we even learn today, if anything?

- The only time I'll ever get to play Devil's Third MP and Ace Combat Infinity ever again will be when my brain is being flooded with time-dilating flashback DMT as I experience multiple organ failure
- You can still download delisted F2P Steam games and if like myself you like multiplayer necromancy, the art of bringing back dead games, you could go play LawBreakers through said method
- Please reverse-engineer RockShot, I'm begging you, it can't be that hard right? Surely one of you is a genius?
- Devil's Third multiplayer was cool, you could parkour off a building and throw a katana through some dude's torso
- OMCMD games are too cool and "niche" to live (honestly, I don't believe in the concept of a game being niche, either you have faith in your concept or you don't, any game can be a success with the right word-of-mouth and marketing)
- Tomonobu Itagaki is attracted to women
- Soleil Game Studios is about to hit it big and is another in the long line of things I caught onto before it was cool
- Herzog, deal with this shit
- Nicely done Cortez

Class dismissed

Egomaniac's LP is far and away the definitive Kenzan translation, with everything including all sidequests being translated and having a natural conversational flair, the full translated text superimposed onto the videos themselves, like the more well-known KHsubs LP but much better
The ASMR explanations of actual Japanese feudal history by an expert are a welcome bonus and genuinely made me feel like I learned something

https://lparchive.org/Ryuu-ga-Gotoku-Kenzan/

Playing this game with his LP on a second screen and pausing to sync up with the cutscenes is the best way to play this game and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it
What an immense amount of effort for something only a couple thousand people have appreciated after 10+ years
Reward his efforts and treat yourself to the best translation of this game that will probably ever exist

Great characters too, Sasaki Kojiro (the original Sephiroth!) will strike the fear of God into you and Marume Nagayoshi steals the screen every time he makes an appearance
Miyamoto Musashi (alias Kazumanosuke Kiryu) offers a compelling view into an alternate reality in which Kazuma Kiryu has a sex drive
The masters over at the Houzouin are more compelling than a lot of characters that were introduced in the other PS3 Yakuza games

If you're a fan of this series you're missing out if you don't play this, go to LParchive/Youtube, sync up those cutscene subtitles on a second screen when a cutscene starts and go to town

I went through this series in release order but played this after Dead Souls and before 5 because the anniversary montage in the Dead Souls credits showing beautiful cutscene cinematography from this game made me feel like I was missing out
And I was missing out, it's a great game and despite Yakuza 2 having insane production values and feeling like an excellently written movie that actual people would watch willingly, Kenzan was the breakout moment that ensured Yakuza would have more cultural staying power than Urban Reign or Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

As many have said this game will likely never get translated officially because a significant amount of the plot involves the implication that Haruka has been sold into slavery and you have to earn back her freedom, and at least once you will have to beat the shit out of someone infatuated with her
But this game was set before the turn of the first millennium and I felt like it did a tasteful job (for a Yakuza game) of empathizing with the women of the Tsuruya while not wallpapering over the historical reality that women did not have personhood in the Edo period
I don't know, I guess they could probably make it work in English if people wanted it bad enough, but that's the "Michael Jackson Sonic 3" "Beatles references in Earthbound" word on the street reasoning that people provide for the lack of a translation and who knows if that's real or if it'll ever get resolved

So don't hold out, if you're a fan of this series it's about time to boot it up, and if you play through in release order starting with the PS2 games like me, slot this one in-between Yakuza 2 and Yakuza 3 and you'll be glad you did, it has sidequests that tie into some from Yakuza 1/2 somehow, bespoke mechanics in the classic PS3 engine that would never reappear in a modern setting, and the PS3 era Yakuza games call back to this one enough to where it'll enhance your enjoyment of those later games, most notably one of Yakuza 5's locales is set in the modern-day Gion, where Kenzan was set over a millennium prior
And they do bold stuff in this game that they wouldn't be able to get away with using Kiryu because Kiryu is too on-model now, too manicured as a character
tl;dr: good game worth the trouble of playing in a kind of unnatural way, as opposed to not playing it at all, if you're hARDCORe like me it beats the hell out of not playing it

A very hard, windingly long for the genre, story-based precision platformer with lots of celebrity cameos and a singular artistic vision from its one-man team Paul Helman, former developer on PS1 PAL-exclusive game Terracon, who describes Horace as "his life's work"
Said vision comes off as that of a British Gen X Dad whose sense of humor consists of quotes from 80s movies and who will share his weed with you, his beloved child, even though you're a year or two underage because "it's better you get it here than from some stranger"
Sounds obnoxious I know but it's a lot more endearing if you have people with some or all of those attributes in your life, give some respect to Gen X they only created the entirety of the cancelled future eternal present pop cultural landscape in which you inhabit, therefore it's okay if their sense of humor is mostly composed of "do you remember That Guy from That Movie"

It's Celeste if it was about a robot trying to attain personhood and if you accept the game on its own pretenses and check your cynicism at the door it's just as likely to make you cry, worked on me at least, yeah I said it this game made me cry, it really goes to faraway places from where it starts and achieves its objective of setting out to be a grand journey encompassing the whole spectrum of human emotion, whether it's grief at the inevitability of death, comedy at the way the main character's unshakable morality and robotic bluntness clash with the world around him, and inconsolable rage at some of these level designs, this game truly has every emotion contained within its couple gigabytes
Inspired by the 1979 film Being There, if that means anything to you, it's a coming-of-age story that starts out feeling a little childish at the start because you follow Horace over his entire life with all the ups and downs that entails, as he learns the ropes of the world like an inquisitive child would, and by the end of the game you truly feel like you were right there with him through an entire lifetime of victories and traumas
Maybe Celeste is selling the game's unique approach a bit short, its edge in this genre is that of employing lots of walking on ceilings and walls and spheres with your magical grandfatherly loafer shoes, which is always something that appeals to me, joining the small-but-honorable pantheon of such famous ceiling-walker platformers as Gravity Armor MetalStorm, VVVVVV, and of course Super Mario Galaxy, especially that game's 2D side-scrolling segments
It's also somewhat of a collectathon, with a big open-ended map focused around maximizing the fun factor of the main character's quest to cleanse the world by collecting one million pieces of junk (don't worry, there's not exactly one million item pickups)
Some people might think this game too difficult, with an obvious case of "the programmer mastered the game" difficulty, but games where you're not in a life-or-death struggle all the time bore me, so I really liked this game's difficulty curve

I think what makes this game work so much on me is the way nobody can accuse it of not swinging for the fences, it earns its characters, endears them to you despite the difficulty in taking seriously its Newgrounds-ass sprite comics-ass cutscenes and the monotone text-to-speech delivery
Everyone is given ample amounts of screentime and plenty of chronological years to grow over and when someone betrays you it genuinely hurts despite being understandable from their perspective

Some people (myself?) have interpreted the "critically mixed" (according to Normal People) film Bicentennial Man as being a trans and/or autistic analogy, whether or not that was the initial intention of the writer, and I think the same can be said for Horace
The both of them are about a character who is built different, singled-out for not looking and acting the same way as others, and an uphill decades-long battle to assert personhood in a normative society that keeps telling you you're not good enough to have that, in the process being very straightforward in how the titular android endures and is alienated by brutal systemic oppression from being part of a group that is legally designated to be less human than those making the rules

It's been a couple years since I played it (ignore where it says completed again, just wanted to leave a real review this time) otherwise I'd quote the game itself or something, but if you want a memorable existential treatise on how horrifying it would be to exist as an artificial humanoid who cannot die in a world suffused by the stench of your flesh-based loved ones' deaths, AND you want to humiliate Twin Galaxies former world record holder Billy Mitchell, then have I got the game for you