For my fourth playthrough I picked the Sargon, the Knight. From all the 4 characters he's the easiest to use with a good variety of both weapons and combos, although like all characters he suffers a bit from attacking at empty spaces (but that's the game having a not so good lock-on system). This time I did the bad ending since it was one of the two achievements I was missing and have to say he's a pretty good choice to fight Dal Gurak without the sword of Ianna at full power since his combos don't have insanely slow build ups or long animations. From a design stand-point he might be the best character in the game, but that said my personal rank would be:
Zoe > Naglfar > Sargon > Tukaram.

My third run is with Tukaram, the Barbarian. He has some interesting combos (more than both Dwarf and Amazon combined) and him being the character most featured in the game's art makes me think he's the intended gameplay, yet so far my least liked character.

Basically, Tukaram is your classic "Muscle Character": Big, strong and slow. That said he might be the worst of that archetype that I have played since he has all of the shortcomings and barely any of the advantages. Every time he attacks he does some big swings that more oftent than not do an arc over the enemies' heads, making you wasted stamina while leaving you open for a stab (he's specially grating when fighting skeletons). Tukaram's aforementioned combos pack a punch but they have incredibly long build-ups and need to be executed with just the right distance because despite being the bulky character, any of his attacks gets cancelled if the enemy lands an attack, which also means timing even his regular attacks almost perfectly (from a design perspective he should've had the advantage of performing his combos despite getting attacked). Finally, he can't dodge at all, like sure he will perform a sidestep with the "dodge" button but he moves like one pixel to the side or back and it's the only character from the 4 heroes who cannot dodge-spam, so basically Tukaram is the game's unfair difficulty.

Despite the flack the Dwarf receives from being sort of an "afterthought" he's much more fun than this dude, has a wider variety of weapons, better magic weapons, can dodge-spam to safety and his combos while not flashy get the job done.
Justice for Nagfar.

Playing with Zoe, The Amazon, the game is much easier since she's a power house of jumping and dodging but ironically this made the game a bit more frustrating because the camera fucks up 20% of your attempts at attacking after dodging an enemy, to the point were sometimes you might end up doing 3 or 4 attacks at nothing while depleting your stamina bar.
Despite that, with Zoe you just breeze through the game, specially when getting her late game weapon, she's the opposite of the Dwarf, the game gets easier each level.

Blade of Darkness is an interesting game from a by-gone era where games were trying to appeal to a more mature audience by full inmersing themselves in dark and often gory narratives. Foreboding music, dimly lit scenarios and heroes sporting deadly weapons that, instead of dealing "PG-violence", left enemy corpses lying over pools of their own blood. In this aspect, "BoD" suceeds quite well, although it's bread-crumb type of storytelling fails to make it as memorable as other titles from that era like Blood Omen or American Mcgee's Alice.

Having only played through the end as the Dwarf I cannot comment much on the overall gameplay from the perspective of the other characters with max levels and late-game weapons, but I have to say this is not AT ALL a "proto-souls" like a lot of people insist. Blade of Darkness is pretty much a "Tomb Raider era" game, but with little emphasis in puzzles and exploration (though it rewards the later) and bigger emphasis on combat, and this is where it can lose a lot of people. The combat is clunky, even with the faster characters the movement has the euro-jank feel and it clashes with the way the camera is implemented. Rotating it while walking makes it jump back and forth in an attempt to center itself which it's slightly annoying on a normal situation and super frustrating in platforming sections.

Another thing regarding gameplay that I barely see commented often is it's combo system and how it can fuck you up. This game has combos that are unlocked as you level up which are a not hard to pull off, but since they require simple buttons combinations they can activate while you're trying to move away from an enemy and get you into their range of attack, not to mention what happens if say combo drains your stamina which leaves your character for almost 5 whole seconds gasping for air while the enemy can hack freely at you. It's specially agravating in the end game where you get the best weapon which has a combo that's done by simply pressing attack and then down. Can't tell you how many times I accidentally triggered "You don't have enough stamina" animation and had to sit down and watch how the Dwarf got demolished by an Ogre.

All in all, classic Euro-Jank that can be pretty fun if you can be a friend of it's clunky controls.

After the slog-fest that was Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4 goes full speed from the beginning to the point were it might have gone a bit too fast for it's own sake.

This entry introduces differenty fighting styles in the franchise: Kiryu being the all-rounder, Akiyama the super fast fighter, Saejima the wrecker with wide dodges instead of side-steps and tanking mechanics and Tanimura who I guess it's the "crowd control" character but I'm not sure that translates in the gameplay, he just does grabs and parries.

Story-wise it starts pretty strong with a mystery regarding a murder but after a few chapters (right around the middle of Tanimura's portion of the story), it starts to goof-out full force. I don't know if it is because the story was too fast-paced and they couldn't come around it or because they had already deviced the final battle set-piece and had to gear the story towards that all-out brawl, meaning the game uses of plot twist after plot twist, which by themselves are okay, but putting them all together is like in the same story one right after the other makes it seem like all the villains are cartoony and couldn't wait to seconds until getting their full victory before trying to backstab each other (you also have the guys who regret their backstabs and all that mumbo jumbo about honor and stuff).

Overall, kinda sad that the gameplay and the story don't complement each other the whole way through because they really fixed all the issues from the previous entry. With a more focused story it would be right on the same alley as Yakuza 0, but still, a solid entry for me.

After almost two whole months I have finished the main adventure and it's the most fun I had with a CRPG since "Kingmaker" (have not gone through "Wrath of The Righetous" yet). While there's a lot of good here, there are also small bits that bring down the game a little, which I'm sure will be addressed in the upcoming months (so I'm leaving it at 9/10 for now).

The first two acts are really strong and work really well in not making you notice you're being rail-roaled and have a great sense of freedom in how you approach every encounter, but the "dread" act 3 takes a dive, not as strong as other say in my opinion, but there's a lot to do in Baldur's Gate and not much relevant to the overall plot. Granted, not all sidequests in a game have to, but in the previous acts it seemed as if the side quests naturally branched from the same tree, as opposed to act 3 where you do stuff because you just "where around". And, without giving spoilers away, the end of the final act presents you with a pretty narrow set of choices that could really be summed up in "choose which body guard will jump in front of the bullet", when in previous acts you would've had the option to deviate the bullet, get the president out of the way or kill the shooter before they even get the chance to aim.

That said, this game has the stronguest set of companions of the overall series if we take into account there are no wet farts like Cernd, though some still have the short end of the stick. The trash mobs are greatly reduced and the combat even though it is turn-based it goes way faster, specially since the new system doesn't really on 5 minutes of pre-battle buffing and countles attempts at breaching the enemies magical defenses.

Still though, bring back Jan Jansen.