Story, characters, and writing are a bit rough, especially compared to Yakuza 0 which had one of the best translations I've ever seen (in terms of the writing; I don't know how accurate it is). I do like the political themes though. Minor annoyances: when you exit the Sotenbori arena it tells you that you can return to the 1st floor or the checkpoint. Why not say which floor is the checkpoint? It makes me terrified to leave and lose progress. Also the menu sound effect is extremely annoying so I have to turn sound effects down quite a bit, but of course this also turns down many other sounds that are important to hear. Positioning the character to interact with things is bizarrely difficult. Another little thing: I don't like minimaps. I wish the itinerary and icons were on the world so I didn't have to keep looking down at the minimap. It gets to the point in some games where I'm hardly looking at the world at all. Are there any games that get this right?

A few more things: I wish when you auto-battle you could point to the enemy you want the characters to attack. I wish when you have an area attack it would show you the range of the area. I wish you could change jobs anywhere because having to go back to Hello Work all the time means I just don't bother most of the time. I wish pressing left or right in inventory screens would scroll a page up and down. I wish when you get a new item that there was a way to know easily what kind of item it is so I'm not scrolling endlessly through different kinds of items trying to find it. Like either a new items tab or it should just say what kind of item it is when you get it. Or both. Or how about ways to sort item in the inventory.

The job system is good and rewarding and overall the characters are probably better written than most games. But it's a bit of a let down after Yakuza 0. I actually like the grinding they introduce in chapter 12 in the arena because it is another reference to Dragon Quest games which are notoriously grindy. In this game they just make the grind explicit in the form of a battle arena which is extremely rewarding (in terms of exp and gear) and not very difficult. I wish they had stuck more to the sort of meta narrative of Kasuga hitting rock bottom and subsequently reverting to playing life like a Dragon Quest game as a homeless guy. It kind of abandons that early on and becomes a more standard crime/political story which is also disappointing.

The confection business minigame, sort of the equivalent of the cabaret club or the real estate royale in Yakuza 0, is unfortunately not as engaging as either of those. The only real task in it is to put the right employees in the right positions in your stores, which can be challenging, but once you figure it out you just zoom through the business periods with only the brief board meetings after that. And those are so simple to figure out that they are nearly a waste of time. An awkward part is that I'm always finding people out in the city who I should recruit, but I've already completed the whole thing, so all those recruits are useless. They either needed to make the whole thing way harder so those recruits are necessary to complete it, or make it so you can't just grind out the minigame all at once.

On the other hand, the city is significantly more detailed and interactive than Yakuza 0 (you can enter buildings and play in first person view), which makes it more rewarding to explore rather than just looking for the next substory. Also, the core narrative of Arakawa and Kasuga is genuinely compelling. But then you try to sell me the biggest coincidence ever in order to pull a plot twist out your butt that's supposed to resonate?

Overall this game benefits a lot from its style and charm.

I like the voices and music pretty well, despite what I've seen some people say. Well, the voices of the main characters are excellent. Other than that, they're pretty weak. And the music repeats too much. Each place should have its own music I think. On the plus side, the game is absolutely gorgeous. One weird thing is the voices paired with text boxes. As far as I can see there's no way to disable the text boxes when the characters are speaking. This has always annoyed me. And it's awkward because in between every spoken line is a slight pause. Another strange thing is the way you run. It's like a car, you hold right trigger and the guy sprints forward, then you just steer him.

At first I really liked exploring the towns. But eventually I got tired of it because there's not really much reward for it. The writing of the citizens is just passable, basically just what you would expect people to say and not much more. And you get some treasure here and there but nothing too impressive. It's all very pleasant, but not particularly interesting. I've been surprised at how few side quests there are. Dozens of hours into the game and I've only seen a handful. It's strangely sparse.

Battles are fine, but I've been playing with auto battle and the characters set to "fight wisely" and there hasn't been much reason to change. I figure the game can probably play itself better than I can. It's a problem though if the game lets you let it play itself wilthout much incentive to do otherwise. Either you should have to create AI that's more in depth for it to fight well or the AI should be so simple that it's only worth using on the easiest enemies. But it seems to fight about as well as I would do. As of about 55 hours in the game, the only time I actually had to control a battle to win was the fight with Rab against Pang. (OK, hit a wall at Gloomnivore). I'm gonna bet the game is a lot better with the draconian quest All Enemies Are Super Strong. If only I had known.

The game basically just lets you fight whenever you want to since it's no challenge to avoid enemies. It's bizarre to wander around hostile areas running circles around the enemies and never fighting, but it's entirely possible. Occasionally I do have to grind some levels. What if treasures on the map were guarded by monsters, so you have to fight in order to get the treasure? This is occasionally the way it works, but I think it should happen regularly. Or else the enemies should at least be a little difficult to dodge. I just think there should be some sense of danger or threat, otherwise there's no tension at all.

My favorite thing is when Sylvando says "Hot stuff, coming through!"

Something I thought was so strange was at the beginning when a certain disaster happens and it's suggested that some very important people to the protagonist might be harmed or dead, but there's is almost no acknowledgement of it. It's like, well the most important people ever in my life are probably dead... anyway, let's move on. Tonally it felt all wrong to me.

Good game that could have been great. I don't get all the complaints about too much dialogue. The text moves extremely quickly so I can scan it very fast and I just think it's really well-written and often funny. Different characters have their own quirks in how they speak, like one guy constantly spouting wrongly worded phrases, or a monster that inserts silly nonsense words at regular intervals. The problem I have with the game is that it absolutely insists on never letting you figure anything out on your own. Every step of the way it is going to tell you exactly what to do, or at best it will "hint" at what you should do (the hints being completely obvious). I am constantly pleading with the game to let me think about what to do, let me be a little creative, let me feel clever, etc. It often feels like it was made for children unfortunately. This simple-mindedness extends to the combat, which is essentially impossible to fail. It also extends to the huge building projects that are in the game, in which it is basically totally unnecessary for the player to participate in building. The people in the town just build it for you. I get wanting to help the player build something so huge, but there should be the option of building it alone or with as much help as the player decides. Even with these complaints, the game is mostly a joy to play. Building up towns is extremely satisfying. The game is just enormous. It feels at times like I will never run out of things to do. I vacillate here between a 3.5 and 4 stars.

Having relations with REDACTED was one of the high points of my life. Also the game was darn good. I'd give this version of Mass Effect 3.5 stars. Unfortunately Mass Effect 2 was very disappointing and I stopped playing. It was during the Mission to recruit Archangel. I got to the part where the mercs were trying to get into the room Archangel was holed up in and I found that I had no idea how to proceed. The mercs were shooting at him and he was killing them easily. After looking all over and finding no where to go, I ended up looking at a walkthrough and apparently I was simply supposed to open fire on the mercs. I found this to be such a violation of being a paragon. The game essentially forces you into betraying the squad you have just teamed up with by shooting them in the back when they aren't even hostile toward me. To my knowledge, there is no other way to proceed in the game. I even tried to find a mod to fix this problem. I thought these games were about freedom and player choice.

Beat it in 7.6 hours. Didn't feel compelled to do the extra stuff and get the different ending. Beautiful art and animation. But I generally didn't enjoy the combat. I had a hard time distinguishing yellow-green and red-green and green-blue at times, so the shields were occasionally frustrating. Often I just wanted to skip past any encounters, especially when the enemies started randomly teleporting away from me. I found that to be incredibly frustrating. On top of that, the game is built around locking you in a room and forcing you to clear all the enemies to proceed and I found myself dreading this every time. I liked the bosses more. They had some clever patterns, but even then I found them to be mostly too easy. There was some nice puzzly platforming, but probably not enough and not enough to really make me think for long. The story is extremely basic but the writing is amusing at times.