Playing through the Yakuza series these past few months has been a treat because despite the main stories for each game all being essentially crime drama movies you'll never know what you might get. Whether its an inter-clan battle over the position of one of the family captains while tying into a much bigger conspiracy, or its a story of trying to find a missing friend while you protect her daughter, deal with your former clan, and try to get through to your brother who has fallen from grace you can generally expect a pretty interesting story front and center while the rest of the game is filled with wacky and interesting side stories and minigames. Yakuza Kiwami 2 mostly continues this trend. This review is going to heavily go into spoilers for the main story of Yakuza Kiwami 2, just as a heads up. Before we talk about those aspects of the game though I do want to touch on the general gameplay of the game first.

Due to engine changes Kiwami 2 has a different combat style from Yakuza Zero and Kiwami 1, and honestly while it took me a bit to adjust to not having styles I did grow to like it by the end. The actual acts of attacking, dodging, blocking, and using heat actions all remain relatively the same but the way the game's new engine makes them feel more fluid on top of how all of them have been reworked slightly just make them all feel better and more impactful than the combat in Zero or Kiwami 1 did. Kiwami 2 also removes the worst mechanic from Kiwami 1, the essence of Kiwami actions that you have to use when a boss charges up otherwise they regain a ton of health, and replaces it with a much better system of finishing heat actions that you can activate towards the end of boss battles for a big cinematic finish to the fight. These changes come together to make a fun and fluid combat system that I think is probably the best in the series for me as of me writing this.

Building on top of the base combat system weapons and picking up items off the street has also been revamped, and I both like and dislike these changes personally. The way they have items bound to the dpad instead of styles made me want to use weapons more since I could have multiple equipt to switch through at a time, and generally most of the weapons and their heat actions were really fun to use, but I do feel like they gutted pick up weapon objects in doing this. For those that don't know in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami there was a combat form for Kiryu, Beast style, that allowed you to pick up items from the area of the overworld map you were in such as signs or bikes and just start swinging them around like crazy to do massive damage to groups. This is still in kiwami 2 too a degree but it's severely cut back in terms of how many uses of the picked up objects you have, how many objects can be picked up, and if they have unique heat actions like in Kiwami 1 and Zero. I do get why this system was cut back, since it's not needed and it allowed them to refine Kiryu's hand to hand combat a lot more so this isn't the biggest of complaints, but it is a part of the two games before this that I particularly enjoyed that got cut down so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

While we're on the topic of the overworld I do want to say that I really love how Kiwami 2 expands and adds more functionality to the two cities, Kamurocho and Sotenbori, that we go back and forth between. You can just walk into buildings now instead of needing to load into every small building you may want to visit for a side activity and while this is again a minor thing it's a really cool change that I greatly appreciated coming off of Zero and Kiwami. This functionality of including small buildings and shops on the main world map mixed with the increased graphical quality and crowd sizes of Kiwami 2 makes the world feel a lot more lively and bustling than in previous games. It's cool how small touches like this can make a game feel a lot more alive and I think it's a very notable thing about Kiwami 2 that could easily get looked over.

I think an aspect of why the dev team decided that it was important to make the restaurants and stores part of the overworld is that it also is more important to visit some of these places this time around, mainly in regard to restaurants. Instead of just healing you when you eat like in Zero and Kiwami when you eat in Kiwami 2 you get various amounts of the five different kinds of exp points that are available in the game. Each different kind of point corresponds to a different stat and is used to upgrade different aspects of Kiryu and unlock moves. Restaurants are where you'll be visiting most often to get these points since eating will supply you with way more points than combat usually will. I'm not the biggest fan of this style of leveling up because it feels a tad frustrating to try and manage all five different kinds in order to consistently upgrade your stats on top of also unlocking new abilities since some stat upgrades and most abilities require upgrade points from multiple different exp pools. It's easy enough to get points if you eat consistently throughout the game, but it still feels like a step down from Kiwami 1's level system to me personally.

I'm not a completionist so while I didn't do all the side stories in the game, the ones I did do were really enjoyable and pretty par for the course for the franchise. Whether it's being a VA for a Gay dating sim, being a shirtless model, stopping a dude from killing his girlfriend with a knife on a rooftop, finding a puppy for an orphanage, or beating a millionare at Virtua Fighter 2, there's plenty of fun and unique side stories that can be found throughout this game's world. Something I noticed about this game's handling of substories is that instead of just instantly forcing you to chose if you want to do them right as you run into them like in Zero and Kiwami they sort of structured them as to where you would get introduced to the story character, and then be free to approach it whenever you want later now that you know of its existence. Like a few other things I've mentioned it's not the biggest design change, but it was noticeably different in how the NPC's giving the sub stories interacted with you; which in turn made the world feel a bit more alive during my playthrough.

Finally getting into talking about the story for this game, it's mostly alright with the ending completely destroying any good will I had for it. The main plot of the game follows Kiryu getting dragged back into the Tojo Clan's shenanigans when the person he left in charge of the clan at the last game, Terada, is killed and in his dying breath he begs Kiryu to bring an alliance between the two big Yakuza clans on their side of Japan, the Tojo and the Omi. This alliance is stopped and delayed due to interference from the son of the the Omi alliance chairman, Ryuji Goda, who wants to completely wipe out the Tojo and take out over their territory. This battle against Ryuji and the Omi is intertwined with a revenge plot from the few members of the Korean Jingweon mafia that Kiryu's father figure Kazama spared when he and other Tojo clan members were ordered to eliminate them all Twenty-six years ago. Kiryu is joined on this quest by his new love interest, the Yakuza Huntress Sayama, as the two of them try to unravel the plots and mysteries of these two plot lines. Honestly I do think the game handles both of these plot lines well enough and they kept me engaged and trying to figure out where they were going with them, right up until the ending of the game where it completely managed to unravel the entire story and make everything feel stupid in a fifteen minute timespan.

Remember Kiryu's pal Terada who died within the first twenty minutes of the game? Surprise, he's alive. He also is the one who has been planning the events of this game for the past twenty-six years because he was apparently also a member of the Jingweon mafia that was spared by Kazama, who then decided to get revenge on the Tojo clan by moving up the ranks of the Omi Alliance, defecting to the Tojo clan after Kazama dies and has his son make him the new chairman of the Tojo clan, only to fake his death to cause a war with the Omi Alliance and have both of them take each other out. This part of the ending just doesn't work and feels really out of nowhere. There was no foreshadowing or build up to this reveal, and then they show us that they just left off part of the flashback to the original raid on the Jingweon, that they showed six times before this without any indication of this being a thing that happened that night, in order to throw it in here and make this make sense at the last second. However it doesn't make sense and just feels horribly convoluted. I wish I could say that's as bad as it got, but unfortunately that's not the case.

Immediately after this Terada is betrayed by his benefactor and biggest supporter in the Omi, a family captain named Takashima, and killed. But not before he activates the giant bomb that he brought to the roof, giving everyone 10 minutes to escape. Takashima is then killed by Ryuji, who despite everything you put him through in the boss fight right before this plus being shot multiple times is still able to get up and kill a man. Then instead of trying to escape the bomb Kiryu and Ryuji decide they need to have a final fight right then and there, despite both of them resolving their fight earlier and probably not needing to do this right next to a bomb. Kiryu wins again, Ryuji dies, Sayama comes back up the tower after being sent down to escape the bomb, and instead of trying to escape both of them accept death and start making out as the bomb ticks down to zero… but then doesn't go off in the post credits because Terada had disarmed the bomb before setting it to blow. For some unknown reason.

This ending is bizarre and really dumb in my opinion, and not dumb in the "oh my god this is hilariously weird I love it" kind of dumb like earlier in the game when a golden castle was hidden under Osaka Castle or when Kiryu fought tigers, it just felt needlessly convoluted and poorly written. I feel like if you just removed the Terada reveal and the bomb and instead had Takashima show up at the last second after you fight Ryuji, have that conflict play out, and then fight Ryuji again with him still dying at the top of the tower it would have felt infinitely better narratively and writing wise. I'm not kidding when I say this whole ending sequence significantly lowered my opinion of the game overall, which is unfortunate because I did enjoy the narrative up to this point despite its weird pacing at times.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a prime example of a game that has a good run throughout but doesn't manage to stick the landing at all and ends up stumbling and falling on its face right at the end. That being said it was a good run up to the ending in my opinion, a bit poorly paced at times as I mentioned but still having some really solid moments and decent-good writing. It has the best combat you'll find of the Kiwamis + Zero, some really solid sub stories, and looks absolutely stunning while opening up the world a bit more. It's really unfortunate that the ending played out the way that it did, because if it wasn't for that I probably would have liked this almost as much as I like Zero. But, unfortunately while it is a great game I can't really say I prefer it to the other two games in the franchise that I've played at this point. Still definitely a game worth checking out in my opinion, but keep your expectations in check going into the finale.

8/10

Back at E3 2019 12 Minutes was one of the first games that really caught my eye during the Xbox press conference. A Telltale style story game around a timeloop murder that you have to prevent in only 12 minutes that starred some high profile actors like William Defore, Daisy Ridley, and James McAvoy? It initially sounded like something I'd really enjoy back when it was revealed two years ago. Then I actually played it and I was pretty disappointed if I'm being entirely honest. This entire review is basically one giant spoiler because there's really no way to talk about this game without going heavily into spoilers for it's story due to the fact that it's effectively a modern point and click adventure game.

Speaking of being a point and click adventure game, I feel like that kind of game was not the best idea for this sort of plot. I have nothing against point and click games but in a game where you're going to be repeating things I feel like it might need a bit more to it terms of how you actually play in order to keep the player engaged. I say this because in 12 minutes you'll be repeating a lot of dialogue and conversation options over and over again in order to reach the new content that you can now access after the last loop that you went through assuming you made progress. Eventually you get to a point where you repeat the same conversation trees so many times that you just want it to be over. While this would most likely be an issue with almost any kind of time loop game, it feels especially frustrating here just due to how the core element of the game is the conversations between characters and there is no other kind of gameplay to keep you entertained with. Ultimately I feel like the format works against the story of this game and makes it more repetitive than it would be if there were more fleshed out gameplay elements to it.

Now actually tackling the story itself, there is a lot to unpack here. The basic synopsis of the plot is that your character, named "the husband", comes home from work and are surprised by your wife, "the wife", and are told that she is pregnant. The celebrations are cut short though when a police officer, "the officer", makes you let him in and then he kills your wife over a pocket watch her father used to own. Over the course of the loops you eventually learn that the officer believes the wife killed her father, and over each loop you have to try and find a way to prove that she didn't do it to the officer in order to break the loop and stop him from killing her and potentially you. This is a very interesting premise for a plot and I'm all for it, the problem comes in its execution which I already touched on earlier as well as in it's two major twists.

You do manage to prove that your wife is not who murdered her father, but rather it was her brother from the affair her father had based on information the officer had and the timings of the death and where your wife was. You then end up finding out that the husband was actually that brother. This unleashes a whole slew of problems both narratively and in what it makes the player feel. Going to save the narrative aspect of this for after we talk about the second twist in the game, but in regards to how this makes a player feel I'm not exactly sure what they were trying to go for here. The game does eventually paint the husband and wife being related as a bad thing in the true ending, the problem being that the keyword there is eventually.

Before you get to the true endings that has the main character either abandoning his sister wife or being hypnotized by their dead father to forget about his feelings for his sister (we'll get to that) you have to go through multiple loops where the husband either tries to justify their incestuous relationship or just refuses to acknowledge it and keeps trying to solve the loop as if they were still just two random people who loved each other. It all feels very weird and unnecessary while playing and I'm not sure what the intent of the writers was with this? The incest is treated as a bad thing by the other character that knows, but the main character who you're supposed to agree with actively fights against this idea until he's basically forced to give up by another character. It's treated as a sad thing that the two of them have to separate over this when like, I feel like this shouldn't have been something that even happened in the first place given some aspects related to the other major twist of the game.

So the second twist of the game is that the officer who breaks in and murders you and your wife is the father of both of you. This is never explicitly said but both the officer and the father are voiced by William Defoe with the exact same inflection and tone in their speaking so I'm pretty sure they have to be the same character based on this. Unless they were just lazy and decided not to get a fourth voice actor for the character who has about 4 scenes. Regardless going under the the assumption that Defoe's characters are one in the same, this along with the brother twist create a pretty big problem. That problem being "how did no one recognize the others?" If the husband is Defoe's son and his wife's brother, and Defoe is the dad of both of them, wouldn't one of them have recognize the other or at least the voice of them? This kind of breaks the whole narrative for me because as far as I remember it's never explained why the brother doesn't remember his sister or killing his father, he just kind of doesn't. So because of that it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere with nothing other than the mention of a brother character existing at all acting as foreshadowing for this fact.

Even then, the wife should have recognized her father's voice or her younger brother since she doesn't have any kind of memory lose in the narrative since a big part of the loops is getting her to open up and tell us what happened several years ago. To top this off we actively see the father die in one of the flashback loops where he confronts the brother over wanting to have a relationship with his sister. You watch him die yet he's still present in the main game as an antagonistic force that no one remembers somehow. I don't like being too negative about things but these plot twists feel like they were made specifically for the shock factor of the player and not to tell a coherent story because they create so many inconsistencies that feel impossible to look past for me.

I really wanted to like this game because of how excited I was going into it, but ultimately I just did not enjoy this game. It has a great set up as well as an all star cast, but the writing and gameplay loop just don't come together in a satisfying way while also just ultimately being uncomfortable and frustrating.

2/10

Going into No More Heroes 3 I wasn't expecting it to be the final game in the series. With Travis Strikes again existing as a way to bring people back into the series and them seemingly going all out for 3, I figured the franchise was going to go into an upswing of sorts. So When I saw the tweet from The official No More Heroes twitter where Suda 51, the director and creator of the franchise, said that the game is Travis's final battle it caught my by surprise. That being said, after actually playing No More Heroes 3 it makes a lot of sense. I will be saving that part of this review for last though as I would like to talk about every other aspect of the game that I found notable first, but the sense of finality that exists in regards to Travis and his journey was a major part of the game that I found extremely engaging. Fair warning this is gonna be filled with a lot of spoilers for the game.

To kick things off I wanted to talk about how incredible the combat feels this time around. I played the switch ports of 1 and 2 originally and while I liked their combat design well enough the gameplay did feel very of its time in terms of not having some now standard mechanics of the genre such as dodging being easy to pull off. NMH3 meanwhile has some of the best action combat I’ve seen in awhile. Giving Light attack and heavy attack their own buttons instead of having two different ways to do them from one input feels really nice and makes it feel a lot more fluid than the prior games. Adding in dodging and jumping also helps the overall feel of the combat to feel a lot smoother and bring it up to modern action game standards. These more modern controls mixed with all of the new enemy types you have to face as well as just the general weight and feel of attacks makes for some incredibly solid combat that I wanted to do as much as possible throughout the game. However, I’d argue the biggest addition to the gameplay this time around are the death skills.

Death skills are an addition from Travis Strikes Again that I am really glad made it into 3. They essentially function as special moves that can help you dish out massive damage in some capacity before needing to recharge before the next use. These skills felt like they slotted in really well with the rest of Travis’s combat abilities personally. The four skills you receive are Death kick, a strong drop kick that sends enemies flying, death force, a force push type attack that sends enemies flying as well, death rain which has small projectiles rain from above over a set area, and death slow which slows everyone in a certain area. All of the abilities will work well in a pinch and can make battles a breeze if you use them well, but my personal favorites were slow and rain. Being able to damage enemies and keep them off of me while I fought one enemy, or if I was getting overwhelmed being able to slow down everything near me and give myself a second to breath helped to control the flow of combat and make me feel like I'm in charge of the battle and I love that feeling. The combat is easily the best part of the game and it runs incredibly, which I unfortunately can't say about most of the rest of the game.

The game runs at about 60fps in combat, and that's pretty much the only time outside of cutscenes where it does. I'm not very good at noticing framerates so it usually doesn't bug me when a game has framerate problems, but going from the extremely fluid fights to the open world which I think hovers around 30 fps (or possibly lower during certain parts of the game such as using the boost on the motorcycle) it is very apparent and shows that this game probably could have been optimized a bit more. Even with how it's running the open world isn't much to write home about. It's very barren and while it does have points of interest they're few and far between compared to most modern open world games. That being said, I'm okay with this for one reason.

That reason being that while the open world doesn't run the best and is pretty empty, it adds to the charm of the game in my opinion. Santa Destroy is a shitty, rundown place that even after years of change and having a big tech mogul like Damon, one of the game's main antagonists, move into the area and bring money isn't enough to make Santa Destroy any better of a place. It's still just some backwater, rundown town. The lower quality framerate and resolution in these areas help add to that for me in a bizarre way that I feel like I shouldn't like as much as I do. In the same vein, I would ultimately rather have these aspects of the game than not.

The overworld and everything that comes with it, such as the money earning for rank up fights and the minigames in order to earn that money, are a returning feature from No More Heroes 1 that all were not in No More Heroes 2. NMH2 cut a lot of these features in order to streamline the game and get people to the fights quicker, and while I get that approach from a certain perspective personally I find that it made NMH2 lose some of the charm that NMH1 had. There was something special about watching Travis have to run or drive around town to various odd jobs like picking up trash or mowing lawns, it was wacky and silly between all the high octane fights that each level brought and it made them memorable. It also made Santa Destroy memorable in it's own right because you got to see the town as you went looking for jobs to do after being sent out from the job agency. It wasn't exactly the most fun thing possible but it added its own quirky touch to the game. No More Heroes 2 however cut all this. You don't have to get money for rank up fights, you can't explore the map at all, and while you can go do side activities they generally were for leveling up and weren't as memorable to me as the No More Heroes 1 minigames.

No More Heroes 3 having these elements from NMH1 return made the game feel charming in a way NMH2 couldn't really manage. So even if the overworld parts of the game didn't run the best compared to how well the combat runs I can look past it because it makes the game feel more unique and just adds a layer of charm to it. Sure it's janky and feels off compared to the cutscenes and combat, but that's okay. Santa Destroy is an off putting place and seeing it explored in a less than ideal way adds to that feeling for me.

The story for NMH3 is one that I really enjoyed personally. It's unconventional, weird, over the top, but most of all it just has fun with itself. The game starts with an alien invasion lead by Prince Fu, an intergalactic criminal who has come back to Earth after being stranded there years before in order to take it over with his buddies from space prison. Travis gets involved when they blow up a huge chunk of Santa Destroy and wake Travis up from where he's passed out in front of the TV. From there Travis kills the weakest one of the aliens, getting himself put onto their galactic leaderboards, which then leads to Fu attacking Travis's friends and bringing him fully into taking out all of the invading alien superheroes. From there it's a fun romp through multiple boss fights, some against the aliens from the rankings and some against other characters from previous games who killed the boss before you could in classic NMH fashion.

This type of story feels fitting for the final game in the series in my opinion. Travis has peaked as the strongest on Earth so the only people who can keep giving him reasonable challenges are his friends and his brother or aliens who aren't bound by the restraints of being human. The grandiose scale of the story feels fitting for both the series and the supposed final game of it. Overall I loved the story for this crazy game; but at the same time I think the part that I found the most impactful and important about the story was how it functions as a character study of Travis Touchdown after doing this for the past 12 years.

I mentioned earlier that the game has a sense of finality to it, and that is best reflected in Travis himself. It's been 12 years since the first game and the years have taken their toll on him. He still loves the thrill of the fight and will fight to protect his home town of Santa Destroy, but it's no longer his choice in a way. In No More Heroes 1 he actively sought out the fight. Throwing himself into the assassin ranking fights for money, a chance at sex, and the general thrill for battle. But as of TSA and No More Heroes 3, the fight is actively chasing after him. Travis just wants a quiet life now, sitting at home watching Miike movies, anime, and wrestling with his friends. Sure he'll fight and kill other assassins when needed, but it's no longer what he's after. The fight continually is coming to him and he's trapped in this cycle of the battle never truly ending because of his actions in the first two games. This is effectively Travis's final battle, not against Fu or Damon, but against the life he's built for himself.

I think this is exemplified by the after credits scene of the game where Travis and everyone are getting ready to go home after the events of the game and yet another new threat appears. That threat is then dealt with by outside forces, namely Travis's kids from the future, who have come to find Travis so he can help them fight another threat. This is Travis's life now, and despite being annoyed Travis does accept going with them in the end to continue the fight. Travis is still fighting on and on because that's all his life has been for the past 12 years, just continous death and bloodshed with moments of peace with those that he cares about in between. His final battle is effectively deciding whether he wants to put up with the never ending battle for the moments of peace; and the game answers that question in a scene earlier on in the story where Travis dies.

Travis's death towards the end of the game is effectively the deciding point in this psychological last battle. After being killed by his brother Henry, Travis’s soul is then sent to what is essentially a 80’s arcade game. In this game Travis has a conversation with the main character that while brief is ultimately what helps him come to a decision. He chooses to go back and keep fighting instead of finally being able to rest. Travis decides the outcome of his final battle here by accepting that if he wants the parts of his life that he enjoys he also has to accept that the fighting won’t ever truly end for him. There’ll always be another ranking leaderboard, there’ll always be another huge threat to his loved ones, and there'll always be another battle to fight. But that’s okay because Travis is determined to keep fighting as long as he gets the peaceful moments with the people he loves.

No More Heroes 3 is a bizarre but beautiful game. It has the perfect mix of fluid and janky when it comes to the different aspects of gameplay, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Meanwhile when it comes to story it revels in being juvenile while having some really serious stuff going on under the hood, and honestly I think this dichotomy that it creates with this elevates the story and makes it extremely memorable and impactful. NMH3 is a special kind of game that doesn't come around very often and I'm glad I got to experience it.

So thank you Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, for one final trip to the garden of madness.

10/10

As a big fan of horror media I've been trying to branch out and try more horror games since outside of Resident Evil and (arguably) Dead Rising I haven't played a lot of horror or horror adjacent games. Which lead to me trying out the Metro series, games that aren't entirely horror but have enough of it in their DNA for me to count them as such. While I did like the first game in the series, Metro 2033, it had its fair share of problems that brought the experience down for me a bit. I can safely say that for the most part those problems were fixed for Last Light. There are so many systems and general gameplay elements that were tweaked for this sequel that just makes the game as a whole feel so much better to play and made it a much more enjoyable experience overall.

One system in particular that I would like to touch on first is the filter system the series has. A big part of the game's lore is that humanity cannot survive in the open air thanks to how toxic the air has become due to radiation poisoning, which leads to needing air filters whenever you venture onto the surface world. These filters run on a timer that limit how long you can survive on the surface or within pockets of toxic air within the metro. I don't have a problem with the mechanic itself and found it added to the tension a lot in certain areas. For example there was a boss fight on the surface that I had to figure out how to defeat in less than a minute since when I reached the checkpoint before the boss I only had about a minute of filter time left. It made the boss a lot more difficult and forced me to strategize and really figure out how the boss's mechanics worked in order to beat it on time, and even then I barely made it to the next level without passing out in game. Experiences like these really elevate the feeling of tension the game tries to create and made it a really memorable part of the game for me. The system itself is great on paper and when it works, it really works. There is a problem with this system though, which is the number of filters in the game.

In my opinion to get a system like this right you need to balance it well around having enough filters but not too many to make the system feel pointless. Last Light doesn't really accomplish this and ends up going to both ends of the extremes on this issue. The start of the game is pretty light on filters and you're constantly struggling through a lot of these areas just trying to find the next filter to the point of being more frustrating then fun. This is exacerbated by the fact that unlike the first game you can no longer buy filters in the early game and have to make due with only what you find in the tunnels. This then switches over about halfway into the game into having too many filters. You still can't buy them but suddenly you have 25 minutes worth of filter time from random large groups of them you find during a certain section and as long as you're not just ignoring every pick up, you maintain that amount of filter time for the rest of the game. While throwing more filters in late game as they expect you to spend more time outside makes sense and I think it's a logical course of progression, it does feel like it was less of a progression and more just going from having no filters to never having to worry about filters. I would have personally liked it if it was a bit better balanced, and I hope Exodus improves on that aspect, but it's still a cool system that I enjoy during the points where it's balanced well.

Speaking of balance I would like to say that they really fixed the balance on human vs human combat this time around. My biggest issue with 2033 was how much of a slog the combat against other human opponents was because of the arenas you fought them in, and I am glad to say that Last Light definitely fixes that. It actually feels fun to fight human enemies this time due to the changes to the general level design for combat encounters.

The rooms for human enemy encounters feel like they were designed in a way that makes both combat and stealth feel really good this time around. In 2033 the level designs for most human encounters felt like they designed the levels without human enemies in mind, and because of that a lot of the stealth or just outright combat that was intended for those moments felt more frustrating than fun because any attempts at stealth were ruined by the level design not really giving you places to hide but then also not giving you a ton of places that provide true cover at the same time for full on combat. Thankfully Last Light takes care of both of these problems and manages to craft a lot of levels against humans that allows either approach to work well in most cases. Most of my time I would go for a stealth approach until I deemed that the herd was thinned enough to take them out in a fire fight and then went from there. Both approaches worked well and felt like you could tackle the entire game with either gameplay style if you desired.

On the topic of level design, while I do love the general aesthetic of the game and feel like it fits very well within the tones and themes the games try to set up, it can be a bit too similar at times. I may just be bad at videogames and the whole "seeing" thing in general but a lot of times the environments, especially in the tunnels, all blended together and it became a tad difficult to figure out where I needed to go exactly when things would divert from a linear path. I would generally find it after fumbling around a bit but the earlier parts of the game were rough due to most of them looking incredibly similar. Thankfully the later parts of the game address this issue by giving you a lot of unique outside areas that really showcase the game's aesthetic while also having subtle level design that shows you were to go without telling you where to go. The final trek through the garden and the surrounding area to get back to the city you started in is honestly beautiful and really shows off the art direction to its fullest in my opinion. This area also just happens to be one of the best parts of the game in terms of story.
So the story of Metro Last Light is that after the bad end of the first game where you accidentally nuked and obliterated a race of people known as the dark ones after thinking they were hostile the whole game, only to find out that they were trying to make contact with humanity instead of kill them, you are alerted to the existence of a child sized dark one that has been spotted living around what remains of their nest. Your mission from there is to then retrieve the baby dark one; which unfortunately doesn't go as planned when the nazis show up. You then spend the rest of the game trying to get back home after escaping from the nazis, combating the reds, and then reuniting with the baby dark one in order to stop the reds from wiping out your friends. The story is alright for the most part but the last third of the game is where it really shines in my opinion.

After you reunite with the young dark one he essentially acts as someone to question your morality and make you think about the choices you've made, both as just the character Artyom but also as the player. I found this angle of having a child character essentially questioning why you did things a certain way and reminding you of how you had a hand in genociding his people (though the player did have no say in letting that happen in the first game) really compelling, because it makes you think of the actions that have lead to this and think about the actions you can do now. They remind me of Clementine from the first season of the walking dead game in a way with how they act as someone who makes you explain yourself for things you've done and makes it more apparent when you realize you've done something wrong because now you have someone reacting to all of your choices and actions. It's a dynamic I love because of how it makes the player think about what they're doing and what they're allowing to happen within the game's world and I think it is done really well here for the brief time that the young dark one is with you. That all being said, the game introduced this far too late into the game.

I really like this dynamic but I feel like the fact that the small dark one just isn't relevant for over half of the game does lead to feeling like we didn't get enough time with them. While it would have been a bit difficult I could see a way for them to incorporate this character throughout more of the story and keep them as something that accomplishes what I mentioned earlier but on a much wider/larger scale. I still love how they're used in the game and how they play into the plot as a whole, I just think it was a bit of a wasted opportunity to restrict how much this dynamic can be explored in this way. I understand needing to not have the dark one in the story for certain sections to make some reveals land, but I feel that there may have been a way to keep the dark one out of those moments without writing them out of the story entirely like they were in the final product.
Regardless of this Metro Last Light manages to improve in almost every way on its predecessor and I am extremely impressed with how much they managed to improve between games. Still a few things that need to be worked out to make it a incredible experience to me but this game overall was one I had a great time with.

8.5/10

I went into this game not expecting to like it as much as the original trilogy based on how often I see it cited as the where the series went downhill, and while I do have friends that liked this game a lot I still wanted to keep my expectations in check in case this game actually was worse than the the first three Ace Attorney games.

That being said, Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice is just as good as the original trilogy, if not better in some instances, in my opinion.


This game is just absolutely oozing with charm and has so much to love about it. Everything just comes together in such a fun way that really feels well crafted to me. The characters, story, art direction, and music all build off each other to make this game another incredible entry in the Ace Attorney series. I do want to start off by properly talking about the characters though, since in my opinion they're what really elevate this game and are the core part of it.

I will warn that this entire review will be filled with spoilers, since due to the nature of this game it's impossible to talk about without talking about extremely spoilery content so while I will try to avoid spoiling the main plot as much as possible, a good chunk of information about the story and characters will come through here.

Going into this game I was a bit worried about the cast, I've spent the past three games getting used to a certain cast of characters (minus the revolving door of prosecutors) so to suddenly have them uprooted and replaced with a new generation of characters did leave me a little uneasy. I'm glad to say that that worry was unfounded, because man is the cast of this game great.

The replacement for Phoenix in this game, and the game's namesake, Apollo Justice is an absolute gem. He feels distinctly more serious than Phoenix did in his games and I personally felt like it was a good direction to take the character. While Phoenix seemed to just embrace the wacky antics of the Ace Attorney universe's courtrooms right off the bat Apollo seemed to just be blindsided by the kind of shenanigans that happen in the court of law and it's a great thing to see as a contrast to how weird the cases in the universe get. Apollo's surprise at the weirdness of the Attorney world feels like a nice way to relate to new players who might be starting with this entry; but at the same time as someone who's played the games before this one I thought it was a nice (and pretty funny) change of pace to see someone go into what he thinks is a normal trial and then spend the next four trials just going through progressively more bizarre and intricate cases.

Otherwise I do love how Apollo comes into his own as attorney over the course of this game. Seeing him start as a scared first timer who has to have his boss arrested with the help of a disgraced pro and then growing into a confident person in his own right who solves a seven year old case centered around the people from the first case of the game is great and really feels like a great character arc for him; that while not directly about him does feel right to have him at the center of in these instances. Though Apollo is great on his own, he is made infinitely better by his dynamic with Trucy Wright, his co-counsel.

Trucy was a character that I was especially unsure about going into this game. Trucy is the adopted daughter of Phoenix and the head of the "Wright Anything Agency", which is where you work for most of the game. I was a big fan of Maya and Pearl as our co-counsel in the original trilogy so going into this I was worried that I wouldn't like Trucy as much since she didn't seem as interesting from what little I knew about her at the start; but I have to say that Trucy is probably one of the best parts of the game for me. The way she interacts with Apollo and messes with him gives me brother and sister vibes reminiscent of Phoenix and Maya, while also putting their own spin on it and making the dynamic feel like it's own thing even with the similarities to how Phoenix and Maya were.

Outside of her banter with Apollo though she's great on her own. Her way of seeing the world feels deceptively innocent when you first meet her but it becomes very clear as the game goes on that she's wise beyond her years. You're given hints about how Trucy came to be Wright's daughter and other small tidbits about her life through cases 1-3 but once you hit case 4 and get the full picture it really puts into perspective how strong Trucy is as a character and how intense her determination to make others happy is after she's endured so much; yet she basically pushed all that down in order to ensure that she can help Phoenix after his life was ruined. Trucy is a really well written tragic character and I cannot wait to see how they follow up on her story in future games. Speaking of future games, lets talk about a character that we probably won't see much of going forward: This game's prosecutor, Klavier Gavin.

As I mentioned earlier the prosecutors in this series tends to change to a new main one every game, and considering I liked all three before this I was expecting to enjoy whoever the new one was well enough. Enter Klavier Gavin, the best prosecutor this series has seen so far. Everything about this man just hits the right notes for me and it actually kinda surprises me how much I enjoyed him in this game. From the moment you first meet him he just has this aura of "I'm better than you, but like in a respectful way." and it's super interesting to me because of how generally the prosecutors up to this point have been a lot more meanspirited and aggressive at first. Gavin on the other hand, is friendly from the start and makes for a really fun dynamic between him and Apollo.

Despite his friendliness with Apollo, Klavier still acts as a formidable rival in the courtroom. Calm, collected, yet fierce he challenges you at every turn throughout the three cases he's in. He manages to capture the energy of a friend who wants to push you to be the best that you can be, and the way he starts working with Apollo throughout the trials once the truth starts to become clear is always so much fun. This is due mainly to the fact that much like how being the best and revenge drove the other prosecutors, the main drive that Gavin had was finding the truth. I find this aspect of him really interesting because it's a fresh take on how the prosecutors usually are in this series when you first meet them. He's just a guy who wants the true culprit to be caught, and even if he loses the cases he's just glad that the real criminal got put away. We also actually get to see where Klavier Gavin's quest for truth started in game which is cool; ir also just so happens to coincide with Phoenix Wright's fall from grace.


Full disclosure I knew about old man Phoenix coming into this game, I've seen the design around a lot but I had no idea what the context of it was. Seeing him as the defendant of the first case though, and from there seeing how much he's changed in the seven years since the end of AA3 really caught me off guard and got me extremely invested in the main plot of the game. Slowly being given details about what happened to Phoenix through the first three cases and then having it all be revealed to you in a section where you get to play as him again in case 4 for a flashback was great and I think they did a great job of revealing all the information around what caused him to become this person.

An older, more cynical Phoenix that's been warn down by being framed and kicked out of the job he's dedicated his life too felt like a compelling place to take his character in this game and helped to provide a continuous hook throughout the game of wanting to find out how he became this tired, kinda sad guy after being a lively fun person in the original trilogy. I think what this game absolutely nails about him though is it showcases just how smart Phoenix is. His entire plan to not only clear his name, but finally get closure and justice for the case that ruined him seven years ago was brilliant and showed that while the years had dulled his spirit, they hadn't dulled his mind. Phoenix isn't the only returning character though, he returns with forensic expert Ema Skye who functions as the new detective to help (or hinder you sometimes) you during investigations.

While I did like Ema Skye, I do think she's the one character that didn't reach the same standard of the other new generation characters from me. I still think she was great but the character she was replacing, Detective Dick Gumshoe, was just too good in the original trilogy. Her personality is distinct and different from his enough to make them two very different characters who ultimately function differently and are enjoyable on their own; but it does still feel like she's missing something when compared to who she's replacing.

I will note that while I would like to focus on how all of these characters stand on their own, it is a tad difficult to do so when they are all effectively replacing other characters. It's the unfortunate risk writers run when they try to introduce a new cast to an ongoing series, it can be hard to get out of the shadow of what you've done previously. Ultimately I do think the game for the most part does manage to live up to the expectations of having the same great core cast the trilogy did and I love how all of them are throughout this game's story.

Regarding the story, I really liked how they managed to pull off the style of overarching plot that AA3 did again. I feel like as Shu Takumi worked on the series he became a better and better writer and that is exemplified here. So many small things throughout each case that felt like they would be irrelevant to the main plot of the case all end up factoring in and as I started to realize this it was fun trying to figure out which minute details would become important to the endgame of the case. This game has its fair share of sudden twists and turns throughout the cases like all the other games, and I do love how it all comes together in the end with case 4, which is tied for my second favorite case of the series.

The overarching plot of the game focuses on the mystery of Phoenix's final trial seven years ago and what really happened that day that got him disbarred. I've mentioned it a few times in this review already but the way they managed to weave breadcrumbs throughout every case felt organic and like it was never detracting from the current focus, but still reminding you that plot was still going on in the background. The way everything came to a head in case four was so damn cool and I just absolutely loved how they wrote that entire case. The whole idea of trying to use a jurist system for this case instead of the evidence only approach was a fun idea that I hope continues to show up in future games as it felt fresh and unique in how the case was presented due to it not needing to be won in the same way as every other case so far. Apollo Justice's story is great and definitely a fun time if you decide to playthrough it.

While the story is great, I do think part of what makes this game so great is the presentation.

Playing this game you could really tell Capcom were taking full advantage of the ds's visual abilities. The bounciness and general movement of the sprites, as well as just how clean they look visually, was super neat to me and really made all the fun new character designs pop much more than they would have if they had the more static look of the gba games I feel. The designs are also just all really fun in general as well. I think it says a lot that when trying to think of my favorite design pretty much all of the main cast come to mind. The animations and art are definitely made even greater by the music though, which may be my favorite soundtrack of the series so far.


Like I said with the FFX review I'm not the best at talking about why I like music, I just know when I like something I like something. That being said, I just wanted to say that Apollo Justice's soundtrack is phenomenal. Tracks like their renditions of the cross examination and the cornered themes in this game are some of the best I've heard so far, and new themes such as Klavier Gavin's theme are just incredible. Even if you don't play the game give some songs a listen, they're great.

Though I've spent most of this review talking about aspects of the games that I love, there were a few things about the game that did rub me the wrong way.

I think one of the two places this game is lacking though, are the investigation minigames. This time around during the investigation portion of cases you will often enlist the help of Ema Skye in order to gather evidence left behind at the crime scenes that you couldn't get through normal means. Cases two and four have one or two new minigames that cover gathering evidence in different ways. For example you make casts of footprints in case two, using an X-ray machine to read a letter through an envelope in case four, etc. case three meanwhile has a soundboard that you have to adjust and listen too carefully in order to hear sounds that help build your case in that specific trial. While most of these are fine and not that big of a deal they felt not super fun to play at best and just tedious at worst like with the aforementioned X-ray minigame. While I'm bringing up tediousness, that brings me to my other big problem with the game: repetition.

While this may seem like a petty complaint, I was extremely not a fan of just how often the middle cases would use flashbacks and make us reread parts of the game that we've already read. Or in the case of case three specifically, replay the same clip of video on repeat every two minutes or so during a section that was reliant on talking about this piece of video. I do understand to some degree that it was necessary for people to see the different clues and stuff that they may have missed when they weren't specifically looking for them, but I do think it still went overboard to some degree.

All in all though, Apollo Justice is a lot better of a game than I think its given credit for online. Fun characters, incredible writing, great music and visuals, all ingredients in the recipe for a good Ace Attorney game. Give this game a shot if you're on the fence after the trilogy, it's a great time.

9.5/10

Before I begin gushing about this game I just want to say that the version I played was the remastered version so my experience might differ from the original slightly.

Final Fantasy X is up there as one of the greatest JRPG's I've ever played. The gameplay, the story, the music, and the world design are all incredible and work together to make a truly special experience.

Focusing on the gameplay specifically, I was a little surprised coming into this game that it did not have the ATB bar like the other Final Fantasy games I have played at this point, but I quickly adjusted to the new style. The game uses more traditional static turn based combat but it adds a turn meter that determines when each character gets an action instead of just having every character on both sides of the confrontation get an action per turn. The turn meter is really a solid gameplay choice in my opinion and really allows for you to control the flow of combat once you get spells like slow and haste, which change up the turn order. Being able to get a combo of both spells going and then being able to just blast the enemy for multiple cycles and get a large amount of damage feels super satisfying. Inversely it can also up the tension exponentially when you can see that the enemy is about to get several turns in a row and you need to hope that they don't manage to wipe your party.

The turn order also ties into another mechanic I'm a really big fan of, party switching. The game lets you swap out who's in your party at any moment during combat (assuming the character isn't at 0 hp or any other state where you can't control them) and it allows you to try interesting new strategies with the entire party instead of just eventually having you stick to just a set party for the rest of the game. It also really helps with trying to level everyone up by letting you switch in a weaker member, let them get a hit, and then switch them back out for someone stronger to deal more damage.

Speaking of leveling this game handles leveling in a different way than most final fantasy's, that being that there technically aren't levels. Instead of levels you get the sphere grid, which is an incredible way of handling RPG stats. Everytime you level up in game you get a sphere level, which you use on the grid to move to different spots and then use spheres gained from battle to unlock new abilities and stats for your party. I really like this approach because it let you fully control how your character evolves and grows over the course of the game and encourages experimenting to try and see what kind of build could work for your character. The grid never feels like you're struggling to make it move forward as long as you're actively fighting monsters on your way through the game either, which also gives a feeling of constant progression which I love personally.


The game also has its own limit break style system known as Overdrives, which I personally think are a really good evolution on the concept. You start off with only being able to charge overdrives through taking damage but as you go through the game and fight more battles you begin to unlock more and more ways to charge them, such as through doing damage to enemies, seeing your party members get damaged, or through healing. This lets you customize your characters further and really set how you think they should function and create your owns kinds of builds and strategies between sphere grid customization and overdrive selection.

Another gameplay system that I think is worth noting before I get to the story is the summons system. You have a character who can summon this game's version of summon monsters, known as Aeons, and then the summons on the field actively fight as if they were their own party member with their own spell lists, overdrives, and health instead of just showing up for one attack and disappearing like in the other Final Fantasy's I've played. This system allows for some really fun strategies and timings of when to pull out a summon to save yourself from a high damage attack or to deal some really big damage yourself over a few turns. Summoning as a mechanic also ties deeply into the story of this game which elevates this mechanic a bit for me; as I tend to like it when game mechanics are important plot wise.

Getting into the story it revolves around Tidus and Yuna, a sports star taken out of his own time and sent a thousand years into the future and a summoner who is training to defeat the ancient evil Sin respectively. They're accompanied by Yuna's guardians, Auron, Wakka, Lulu, Rikku, and kimahri as they all travel across the country of Spira in order to find a way for them to defeat Sin once and for all; as well as a way for Tidus to get home. I'm going to not get too deep into spoilers or specifics for this game because I feel like the story is something that should be experienced firsthand, but I do want to talk about a few spoiler filled points; namely Tidus's relationship with his father Jecht, Yuna's journey, and the reoccuring antagonist of the game Seymour.

Tidus and Jecht's relationship is a big plot point throughout the game, with Tidus slowly discovering more and more about the kind of person his father was as he follows his footsteps throughout Spira and has to struggle to mesh this with his preexisting feelings on his father. What I find really interesting about this is how the game explores the dynamic between the two of them without the two of them meeting in present time until the very end of the game. The game really manages to portray how Jecht and Tidus's relationship was before while also showing how Tidus grows to understand his father and who he was, but still having him be able to acknowledge that even with what Tidus knows now he still can't see his father as a good person. It's a really interesting dynamic that adds a lot of emotional impact to the climax of the game. Tidus's journey of understanding with his father is also interwoven throughout the plot with Yuna's journey to try and stop Sin.

This journey is particularly interesting to me because of context we learn later in the story, that being that Yuna will have to die in order to defeat Sin in the traditional way. Yuna's determination to defeat Sin and do whatever it took, and then Tidus and the group's determination to steer her away from this path and find another way created a really compelling narrative for me and I loved the dynamics that come into Yuna's character and relationships with other characters that stem from this. My favorite scene around this is one on the trek to the final temple where Tidus finds a message sphere that Yuna had dropped that functions as her goodbye to everyone else. It's such a bittersweet moment hearing her talk about her life and her friends like this as a goodbye knowing that by the time anyone sees it she'll already be gone, and it really impacted me emotionally. This journey and how she feels about what is necessary in order to make people happy directly coincides with the main villain of the game, who holds the exact opposite ideology and resolve that Yuna has.

Seymour is this game's Kefka/Sephiroth equivalent (despite not staying around the main plot as long as them), and I think he may stand up there beside them as one of my favorite villains in gaming. Seymour is a troubled high ranking religious leader of the group that regularly sends out summoners to try and defeat sin. Within FFX's story he tries to get Yuna to become his wife so that he can use her to defeat sin and then become the new sin himself to wipe out Spira all together. While this does sound like a pretty basic villain plot, I do think the reasons he does what he does is the most interesting part of him. Seymour parallels Yuna in how their upbringings were and it creates a really interesting dynamic between the two. Both were missing or separated from their parents due to sin, both got dragged into the battle against Sin because of their parents, and both of them ultimately have the goal of freeing Spira from the sorrow that Sin brings; just with different methods of reaching this goal.

The two of them function as different sides of the same coin in their background and their surface level goals, but one key difference lead them down two different paths: Isolation. Yuna grew up and had friends in the form of Lulu, kimahri, and Wakka to keep her happy and to make her want to try and defeat sin to preserve everyone's happiness. Meanwhile Seymour ended up completely alone, and slowly grew to think that the only way to end the sorrow of those in Spira was to end Spira itself; due to noting how those that perished around him stopped suffering when they were no longer living due to the no longer being of this world. Seymour not having anyone to steer him away from that line of thinking and to be there for him is ultimately what turned him into the monster he becomes throughout the story. He and Yuna form an interesting commentary on how one's environment growing up can influence and change the person they will become, and to me it is was handled really well throughout the story and really adds to it overall for me.

One final note on the story stuff that I wanted to touch on was the voice acting. This game's VA tends to get a bad rep for a certain scene (which actually is a good scene in context, people just like to use it out of context because it sounds funny and is easy to dunk on) but I think the VA work for a large portion of the game is really solid. There are a lot of moments where it's clear that the VA's weren't given the proper context for scenes in order to have them properly voice with the correct cadence and tone, but a lot of the really emotional and important scenes still manage to land with great tone and diction. The scene where Tidus finally sees Jecht again hits me really hard due to how Tidus's VA delivers certain lines, which I won't spoil here because again its something that I think needs to be seen to fully understand why its so good in my opinion.

Speaking of sound, the soundtrack to this game is phenomenal. I can't name a single bad track in this game in my opinion, even the sonic adventure esque song during the first two phases of the final boss is kick ass and fun in its own way. I do think this game has probably my favorite rendition of a final fantasy main battle theme as well, but I may be biased in that due to my affinity for trumpets from playing Pokemon Emerald for hundreds of hours growing up.

Finally, the art direction and locations of Spira are just really aesthetically pleasing and I constantly found myself going "man this place is pretty" or "Wow this would be fun to explore if it didn't have giant monsters everywhere". Spira is just such a charming world to me and I loved getting to explore it and see everything it had to offer and seeing all the weird and wonderful things within it. Except for blitzball. Playing that once was enough.

Overall, Final Fantasy X is a game that I cannot recommend enough. There's definitely a reason this game has withstood the test of time and to this day is seen as one of the best games in the franchise, and I think everyone with even a passing interest in JRPG's should give it a shot because it does everything on such a fantastic level. To me, Final Fantasy X is a truly unforgettable experience.

9.5/10