THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

One of the very few games to have ever made me into a complete emotional mess when the credits rolled. Like A Dragon Gaiden is a thrilling emotional rollercoaster. Working within its set limitations as essentially an expansion to Yakuza: Like A Dragon to narrow the focus on Kiryu following his first finale so many years ago. It was developed in a six-month cycle, has the third of the content and scope of a regular Yakuza/Like A Dragon entry, yet it told probably the most tightly personal story these games could ever hope to achieve. It directly addresses the elephant in the room -- what’s the point behind bringing back Kiryu when we’ve had a perfectly fine sendoff for him? Why is he back? What’s he going to do now given Yakuza 7 ends with Ichiban leading the series in his place? Some remain unanswered for what I expect Infinite Wealth to tackle head-on, but what it answers reframed Like A Dragon Gaiden as a needed epilogue to provide more closure for Kiryu’s journey as a legendary yakuza.

The main antagonist is quite up there for me as far as amazing villains go in the series. The perfect final obstacle Kiryu needs to defeat for what he represents. Someone who wants nothing more than to prevent the extinction of his way of life. A twisted, savaged incarnation of the older ways of the yakuza we were first familiar with, but gradually saw fade away entry by entry. A guy who genuinely believed the days of yakuza like Nishiki, Ryuji, Mine, and even Kiryu have never ended despite us seeing how they’ve been phased out with entitled schemers who don’t uphold any ideals painted on their very backs. A man who saw the yakuza life as a chance for fulfillment and freedom needed to be preserved even in a changing era where they’re becoming hollowed out. Trading their freedom and purpose with a tight leash on their neck by higher authority who strip it all away. Making his fate one of the most morbid things that will ever haunt me.

I still need to push through the Judgment games to give a definitive end-all statement, but this is the best combat has felt in the Dragon Engine. It pulls notes from Yakuza 0 with switching between styles again and using money to level up your move set, which led to some tedious side content grinding shoehorned in to pad out the game, but I overall enjoyed it incredibly for a small enough package. There isn’t really much more to dig into here, it is the shortest Yakuza/Like A Dragon game after all, so a lot is the usual standard fare by now. It was made with one sole aim in mind, bridge the gap between Yakuza 7 and Yakuza 8, explore Kiryu through those events, offer some sentimental moments for the long time fans, and hopefully hook you on whatever the hell Infinite Wealth is cooking by pairing Ichiban and Kiryu together as dual protagonists. This affirmed my love for Kiryu and this series, and with no surprise ranks very high for me among the rest. I hope my GOAT can somehow get the happy ending he deserves.

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

I won’t lie, this was a struggle to weigh in how I feel overall. Yakuza: Like A Dragon, from the title alone, made its mission statement loud and clear. This is a mainline entry that represents the transition from seven prior games echoing Kiryu’s legacy to whatever uncharted territory lies ahead of Kasuga and his friends. Like Ichiban Kasuga himself, this game started from rock bottom and fought its way to the top with nothing but grit and beaming determination. I can’t knock down how well this did in winning Kasuga over for me as the new leading protagonist for the series. I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store for him in the future, especially when I get around to Infinite Wealth soon enough.

I’ll start this easy by saying while I don’t consider it to be its equal, the storytelling on display here is genuinely on the caliber of Yakuza 0 in terms of the clean execution of its characters, emotions, and themes. I’m gonna be honest, I was hesitant at first. I thought it spent too long on what’s the first act, ranging around 10 chapters. Which felt like stretching out a conflict that wasn’t too interesting to dwell on. Then I found out there were only 5 chapters left, which surprised me because now I didn't know how we'd finish the rest of the story. I assumed at least 10 more were left from how everything was paced, since I was already aware this was the longest Yakuza/Like A Dragon before Infinite Wealth took that crown. It… still pulled itself together in those remaining chapters, very strongly I’ll add, but not without sudden forced grinding sessions that put an awkward half to the pacing. These are the major culprits for how this gained such a bloated playtime, and I think it only drags the game back since it felt like poor padding that took away from the exciting momentum the story was locking in late-game. There were also ties to the previous entries, some as certain boss fights which made me soyjack the hell out, and made for fun fan service. Although, looking at the current state of Yakuza/Like A Dragon because of this, it may have set a dangerous precedent for RGG’s direction when balancing the old and new. The last stretch definitely pulled everything the game tackles about self-value and connections into this beautiful emotional crescendo that I consider being quintessential to the series. Especially important for understanding what makes Ichiban a character worth getting emotionally invested in. If there was any doubt Ichiban couldn't stand side by side with Kiryu, those last hours shake them all away and prove he's more than worthy to pass the torch.

Moving beyond the main story for a bit, the side content, per usual, is loaded with so many fun distractions to waste away in. They really nailed the mini-games here, especially the newly added ones I spent a significant portion of my playthrough on. I’m pleased to say that the substories are also Yakuza 0 tier, each one feeling memorable, charming, and adding character for Yokohoma to feel like a home for people who had nowhere else to go but rock bottom. Yakuza 7 (to be technical) is refreshing because after experiencing entry after entry where the stakes started escalating when the conspiracy plots only got more complex, where emotional stakes could only get higher as characters experienced more hardships, this took everything back to basics. It’s no stretch to say that Yakuza 7 is pretty much a soft remake of the first Yakuza, with how much the story beats parallel each other. The protagonist sacrifices themselves to be convicted for an extended period. They come back to the world, only to be greeted by how much has changed since they first left it. There’s a mystery they have to uncover by tracking down their fatherly patriarch figure. They’re assisted by an aged, down-on-his-luck police officer and a hostess who plays some relevance to the plot. There’s a shadowy group in town who act as information brokers that have mass surveillance on what’s going on. The main antagonist is both a power-hungry politician who’s been puppeteering everything for his grand selfish gain and the brotherly figure to the main protagonist whose absence led them astray into a path hungering for power to affirm their self-worth. Ichiban even shares the same voice actor as Nishiki, which I feel has to be intentional casting for these parallels to hit harder. None of this feels like a shallow rehash but using familiar beats and tropes to recontexulize Ichiban’s journey and how much he’s similar yet different from Kiryu.

I’ll be frank, this is a hot take I guess? I don’t see many be harsh on this surprisingly. This is not great RPG design. It’s hard for me to be uber critical because I admire RGG quite a bit to understand this was a genuine attempt at stepping out of a 20-year comfort zone into a genre they’ve never fully dabbled in. Yakuza/Like A Dragon always had RPG elements since the beginning. They had random encounters, a leveling system where you increase stats and unlock moves, items you can buy that give you certain buffs in combat, weapons and accessories you can equip, and optional side quests reminiscent of ones you’d find in a Japanese-developed RPG you’ve played before. RPGs unquestionably inspired them, but like I said what they took were just elements. Something brought in to complement a core gameplay style they’ve locked in with for so many games, going through constant refinement and revisions. I wouldn’t call RGG games wholly ‘conventional’, if that makes sense, but with Yakuza 7 it’s clear there was an attempt at making a fully-fledged traditional turn-based RPG. Where they pushed the RPG elements already present in Yakuza/Like A Dragon to the forefront and built upon what was missing by pulling from various well-regarded games in the genre. It’s drawing from Shin Megami Tensei, especially with its subseries Persona, where you have menus as long as your arm, but it all came down to spamming three useful moves that drain MP. The Social Links-- I mean, the Drink Links give that inspiration dead away. It pulls from Final Fantasy V with the job system, but it doesn’t have the experimentation that game offers you freely. I don’t understand the thought process for giving you a handful of jobs that mechanically barely feel unique from each other. Going further, I also think for a game that feels designed to address the criticisms people stigmatized RPGs for, it incorporates archaic choices that first warranted that ire. Final Fantasy V lets you switch jobs and customize from the main menu right away, yet here, you need to travel to this one specific place in a large open map to do that. You can’t introduce a system made for flexible party customization and force players to go through so much backtracking to change it. Now, there’s certainly personality to the combat, I suspect taking inspiration from Mother’s trademark zany realism except with an RGG twist that felt perfect, but there’s so little underneath the hood. There’s no strategy needed to defeat most enemies, partly because it hinges on spamming moves and also because there’s hardly much of a real challenge that pushes you. Until certain boss fights near the latter half, I found everything to be incredibly breezy. I never had to focus on doing some extra grinding, optimizing my party, planning out my attacks, or approaching enemy encounters more carefully. What I found most strange is how they incorporated environmental attacks, where if a party member moves near an object they can pick it up and bash enemies with it. It’s easily the most interesting quirk brought to the table here because RGG is flexing on the Dragon Engine’s collision physics, but you have no control over a party member’s spatial positioning in a battle. It’s an illusion of movement seeing your party members aimlessly roam around, and you have to get lucky they move closeby to an object to do an environmental attack. Because of how they walk around freely on their own, with no input by the player, I encountered so many times when a party member had to run up to an enemy to attack but the pathfinding was so rough they either got stuck running to a wall until they almost magically teleported in front of the enemy or had to awkwardly walk and step over a railing to then switch to an attack animation. I thought it was charming in a jank way, but it became annoying later on because it exposed the weaknesses of a rough design here.

Yakuza 7 became a real test for me. I have my problems with the turn-based design and how the story was paced to fill out an arbitrary requirement to make the game feel ‘big’ because it’s an RPG, I guess. Yet the positives outweighed those staggering negatives, I ended up enjoying this very well, even if it didn’t cross as being one of my favorites of the series. If it wasn’t because RGG games are densely packed with so much content from substories, minigames, and whatever wild distraction you can spend hours on to distract yourself from the main game, this would’ve done even less for me. Like, I don’t blame people for being fine with the combat, it’s fun to watch and does the job serviceably. I think that’s what anyone needs when going into an RPG, but for me, I expected much more from someone who's played the games this is explicitly riffing from and sees a pale imitation. I find this worth criticizing because turn-based is what Yakuza/Like A Dragon is going to be from now on. This is the new foundation for a new protagonist with new stories waiting to be played. I’m not at all opposed to the vision RGG wants to cook with Kasuga, so I only hope this was massively reworked with the next mainline entry to get me fully on board. We all have to start somewhere, even if it is rock bottom.

Not quite perfect, but a few adjustments away from it.

Man, 2024 really has been the year of the four star review for me. I promise that I’m not losing my epic caustic critic touch and am instead simply playing games that I expect to like. I’ve long heard mixed opinions on Observation ever since it released, but they’ve often trended towards the negative. All I really knew going in was that you controlled the HAL 9000 on a spaceship and that people who played it didn’t especially love it. That might be the ideal way to experience anything: clean slate, low expectations.

What’s fortunate for me, then, is the fact that I really enjoyed Observation. With some caveats, of course, but the broader experience was one that I had a lot of fun with. It’s nice getting to relive that Space Station 13 gameplay loop of playing as the ship’s AI and getting yelled at by the /tg/station HoS for not opening doors quickly enough. That's really not much of an exaggeration, either; the bulk of what you'll be doing is opening doors, getting subsystems back online, and helping the onboard personnel attempt to figure out what's going on. Hell, you even get the Ion Laws that'll pop up out of nowhere and rewrite parts of your code, influencing you to act in strange and novel ways. All of this is processed through a lens of cassette-futurist panels and knobs and lossy tape compression, which is an aesthetic that I don't find often hits, but really hits when it does. It's certainly given a bit more of a modern spin than something like Alien in terms of its visual flair; it's shooting for more of a "here's what the ISS would look like if it was launched in 1972". My Alien comparison isn't coming from nowhere either, because the co-founder of No Code was actually the lead UI designer for Alien: Isolation before moving on to this. Go figure. Best to stick with what you know.

I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of flicking between stationary cameras, pulling up the map to figure out where certain hubs are located, interfacing with panels and decryption tools to access locked files, and then threading them all together to break through a cipher or gain access to a new subsystem. It can be a pit pixel hunt-y sometimes in a way that I really dislike, and the parts of the game where you're forced to control the camera drone without any map access are so disorienting as to actively make me want to stop playing. I understand that the confusion when you're controlling the drone is kind of the point, but there's far too much taken away from the player that would help to compensate me blindly flying around and hoping that I accidentally stumble into progression. Maps don't work in space, and maps don't work when your core is offline; given that these individual rooms on the ship feel designed to be viewed through the angles given by the static cameras, making me fly through them in first person broadly leaves me with no fucking idea where I actually am. The yaw seems to work as expected, but applying pitch or roll feel like they add extra movement that you didn't ask for. Pitch your camera upwards and get confused as to what you're looking at until you realize that pitching upward also applied a 90-degree roll, for some reason. This came up often enough for it to be a problem, but I could never figure out how or why it kept happening. I'm mostly just attributing it to "bad controls" and moving on. That might be a dishonest read, and the actual problem lies between screen and chair, but it's my review and its real purpose is to aggrandize myself.

Of course, the gameplay is more of a vehicle by which the story progresses than it is anything else. What's here narratively isn't anything all that new; an AI onboard a spaceship in the near future goes rogue, there's an obvious doppelganger twist that thankfully reveals the conclusion almost as soon as its hinted at, there's a corrupting alien force that seems malicious but might not be. It's hardly anything you haven't seen before. Granted, it's rare for all of these elements to come together at once like this — 2001: A Space Odyssey crashing into Coherence crashing into Arrival — but it's not hard to pick at these elements like toppings off a pizza and see the base story components for what they are. It's all very steadily rolled out, often resolving one plot hook before launching the next, and the real meat is in trying to figure out what the mysterious floating black hexagon a) is, and b) is trying to make you do. "BRING HER" serve as your arc words to latch onto, and while the "HER" in question is obviously the woman who wakes you up at the beginning of the game, the purpose of "BRING"ing her is left in the air from the opening moments until the credits.

I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't really said anything kind about Observation, and that makes me wonder what it is about the game that made me like it so much. No, it's not a novel story, and it's a bit of a headache to play, but it might just be the definition of a work that's more than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of little moments that really make up the bulk of what I enjoy, and they’re peppered throughout at just enough of a regular pace to keep me locked in while also giving me just enough downtime to let them simmer. They’re such small things, too; there’s one sequence where you’re poking around the Russian arm of the ship to find some cameras, and the room you need to go into is suddenly marked with a tag that says “MOVEMENT DETECTED”. There’s basically no attention brought to this aside from a tiny text box sitting next to the room’s icon. There’s no blaring sounds, there’s no glitchy UI, it just tells you that something is moving in there when it was empty just moments before. It’s really good. It’s nice to play a game with horror elements that understands when to let the player scare themselves. The gleaming white walls eventually give way to meat-striped grunge, you’re tasked with locking all of the exits and shutting off life support to kill the captain, someone who definitely died inexplicably comes back, and it all starts to feel like reality is crumbling away. I dig it, especially as a major escalation of what started as a fairly grounded sci-fi plot. SAM sprouts tentacles from his core to kill a human and says “I have changed” in his robot voice and I popped off because it was just so goddamn cool. Observation understands creepy robots.

There’s not much to say about Observation besides the fact that it’s good at getting across big moments and small moments with equal amounts of finesse, but it struggles a bit to stick them all together. The gameplay is the glue holding it all in place, so more than a handful of segments being clunky to navigate through hurts the final experience. What’s frustrating — and encouraging, honestly — is that it’s shockingly close to a higher score. Just get rid of the probe. That’s really it. I’d forgive the occasional pixel hunt if they just excised the probe from the game. There’s nothing that the probe does that couldn’t be accomplished with the extant camera fixtures, and it might actually be better for the atmosphere; having something slink around the edge of the frame that gets away before you can move your view to see it would have been a lot better than blindly bonking the probe into every wall of the ship because I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Still, I really do like Observation, and I’m going to have to check out Stories Untold purely off of the momentum from this. This studio seems to know what they’re doing.

No Code might actually make a decent Silent Hill game.

i've been thinking about my relationship with art, and my thoughts at the moment are that what i want in a piece is to feel something. it's not only about being entertaining, it's about catharsis. it's about feeling extremely happy or deeply miserable. it's about having the teeth grinding, the foot tapping, the head scratched. it's about going insane over the details. i want to feel alive. maybe it's a sick thought. maybe i should just live my own life, but i can guarantee, i've been living my own life a lot! much more than i would like to, sometimes.

all the games i've finished this year so far (very few) were a good time, some of them were amazing, really thought-provoking like anodyne 2, but none of them hit me like a truck. until GOD HAND.

GOD HAND makes you feel extremely happy, deeply miserable, with your teeth grinding, your foot tapping, your head scratching... pretty much at the same time! it's commonly known as a very difficult game and it's not an impossible one, but it does require you full commitment. starting with learning the controls: when action games were about swords and guns, with fast-paced movement, GOD HAND was about throwing punches while moving in tank controls. it's all about positioning, a 1v1 it's already a difficult task, but a 2v1? a 4v1? does not help when your crowd control movements are slow as hell! but don't be confused: GOD HAND is not a slow game! actually, if you can't keep up, you will pretty much ended up cooked lol, you have to adapt to the rhythm of the fight. it's all about learning and once you learn, it's about going wild.

and it's not a flashy game. you throw punches. real punches. punches that hit, than you can feel when it hits. GOD HAND it's a dudes rock game but every single dude is rocking on you (in a not-homosexual-way (unfortunately)), and you got rock on them instead. GOD HAND it's a videogame that loves action games. it's a videogame that recognizes the masculine archetypes about the action genre in overall media and at the same time it honors it and it also makes fun of it. GOD HAND is very "manly"! i mean, having blackjack and poker and dogs races as a way to make money makes me think that shinji mikami and the team are either the funniest guys ever or the most heteronormative of all time! and it's very funny either way.

what really matters is that GOD HAND is a videogame that made me feel everything, and in a year that is definitely NOT being my year, with a lot of work and study and personal problems as well, making me sometimes lost my interest in my favorite hobby, it reminds me how great videogames can be and how i can always just punch a son of a bitch when it needs to. you better watch out mf!!!

Some say that the best things are those that take its time in the oven before fully baking, and let me tell ya…

Tour de Pizza fucking COOKED.


It's almost heartwarming to see this realized: I still remember those first Pizza Tower demos on Twitter and Youtube and the Noise always being in the forefront, either as a boss of major part or them or an outright playable character. As we all know, in the final game he’s World 3’s final boss, not even the main antagonist of the game, tho that didn’t stop this psychotic gremlin from being charming as hell… but nah, I really wanted the fucker to be playable, and more than a year later, he’s here, to the dismay of all Italians.

I would have still felt satisfied if Noise felt less interesting or exciting to play as than Peppino, ‘cause I mean, it’s goddam Peppinno, but no, they just HAD to go all out and make a banger move set. I still don’t really know which of the two is my favorite, but that’s just a testIment of how fucking fun Noise is and how it accomplished what it’s going for: to make you feel that you aren’t playing as an overstressed cook, but as a goddam ANIMAL.

If Pepinno was the ‘’fight or flight’’ concept personified, then Noise is just the FIGHT, he cheats the game’s puzzles how many times necessary, he super jumps whenever he wants, he doesn’t need of Gustavo and Brick to save him, he’s got himself! Literally! Like there’s another one of him just becauseWHAT THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER. And I mean, they gave him the sausage gatling, so at this point I’m pretty confident saying the game is finally whole, this is it chief, happiness has been found.

It taps once again into that sheer adrenaline burst that the first playthrough perfect, but in a completely unhinged way. Once you learn how everything about this mad lad works, everything clicks, the levels break open and the amount of tricks you’ll be performing are second nature: skate wall jumps, tornado spins into dives into jumps into more tornado spins, pizza crushers that demolish everything without much of a sweat and using it is super easy, and that’s not even mentioning how ALL extra mechanics, like the ghost transformation or the rocket, are completely changed to fit this rat brain’s way of acting, and it’s exciting to learn and glorious to master. They somehow found a way to make WAR harder yet more fun. HOW.

One would think that, since it isn’t a boss anymore, part of Noise’s completely unhinched persona would be lost in translation to playability, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some levels even change lay-outs to fit him better and be more fun, but at this point I think it was the Noise himself that changed the before entering to make his life easier. His animations, how all title cards just have different drawings of his face on top of the characters, his ‘’no thoughts’’ face each time he fights a boss and how he can DEMOLISH them with the bombs (whoever thought of that should get a raise, they are so fun to use), some new songs that I'm 99% sure are just the sounds that play inside of Noise's head, it’s INSANE, as it should and then some.

It's Pizza Tower, it obviously was gonna be insane and good, but this is next level from what I was expecting, and I’m so happy it’s here. Noise Mouse is real bois, just that justifies completely another playthrough of this game, having bomb combos and level variations is the cherry on top…

Still, huge missed opportunity to not have Noisette or any other bosses playable in the Gustavo and Brick sections, like yeah, more Noise is fun, but I just think that- Oh dear, no I didn’t mean to- OH GOD THERE ARE 100 NOISES SURROUNDING MY HOME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

Kinda garbage, but dang if I don't kinda love it. Feels like something a bunch of Japanese business men carefully concocted in a board room to maximally appeal to 13-year-olds.

Go into this expecting anything but cheap brutishness in the gameplay department, and you're gonna have a bad time. Just toss in a few virtual quarters and enjoy those first-rate cleaver-chop sound effects and the violent splatter of sewer monsters hitting the wall off your 2x4 for about 10 minutes, and then go enjoy something else.

So much to unpack, it's impossible to give this a proper breakdown. Especially with an emotionally complicated ending that's bound to stir discourse like Remake did, with the scale of this ambitious three-part project either failing or succeeding being the highest it's ever been, yet I don't think I could have it any other way. While I don't believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth proves this trilogy succeeds as a self-contained narrative for newcomers to fully enjoy alongside the old, I think this does a remarkable job of pulling interest in a way I rarely see games do anymore for me.

Now, I don't care for remakes the same way I don't normally care for many adaptations. Because ultimately, no matter how well-made they are in their own right, they are unnecessary so long as the original exists in some capacity. I recognize remakes, remasters, and revivals have, especially in recent years, become an industry of themselves. So, it's all just a matter of personal preference here, and personally I prefer having new experiences than reliving old ones that's often repackaged at current MSRP. I've also seen a lot of the arguments in favor of remakes; that they're necessary to gauge consumer interest in reviving a dormant franchise, they're a compromise for the original's lack of availability, or that it's an opportunity to take a broken concept and do it proper justice -- I don't buy into much of these. I find it more worthwhile to spend creative talent and labor on a direct sequel (or spiritual one) than waste it on retreading old ground. One-to-one remakes don't interest me whatsoever because I see missed opportunities. I understand availability being an issue, but that lands more on companies making excuses for not porting the original to modern platforms. While I believe there are games that fall into the camp of "needs a remake because this just didn't work at all based on the circumstances it was developed within" (Epic Mickey is a golden example here, but I'll save that for another time), too often I find the ones pushed for one feel like whitewashing the past for little gain. Also, I emulate and pirate when necessary because have you seen the economy we live in nowadays so remakes mean nothing to me.

Final Fantasy VII Remake changed that. I still hold the opinion that it's flawed in design, not helped at all by what Rebirth massively improved in direct comparison, but I respect the ambition Squeenix aimed at pushing the boundaries of what a remake can accomplish. This wasn't made to correct or overwrite the original Final Fantasy VII and the statement it proudly made in 1997, one that stood the test of time like a monolith. No, it was made to re-examine the impact of its characters, setting, story and ideas left on the medium. To peel back decades of cultural osmosis, which ironically speaking, clouded everyone's memories and perception about what the game is. But this was simply the promise Remake's controversial ending made for the sequel to test. To see if this three-part project, as a completed whole, can not necessarily "surpass" the original, but stand beside it as though it's the missing other half we never knew we needed.

Rebirth doesn't even come close to outclassing the original, if we'rereally going there, but it eclipses Remake in how it complements yet alternates. While Remake was reimagining the opening 5 hours of a 60-hour-long game into a 10-hour-long game that for some reason got ballooned to at least 30 hours, it was very restrictive in its design and had to work within limitations. This lends to some opportunities in fleshing out Midgar to unreal (engine) possibilities, including the crux of the plot that'll get rolling, but you can see the cracks in how difficult this was to make into its own full-fledged game. The side quests are frankly terrible and don't even do an interesting job fleshing out Midgar. The attempt at a semi-open world Midgar really doesn't work when it's limited to just a few hub areas that's laid out linearly to progress. It's a good proof of concept for things like the core gameplay and combat, but it leaves so much needed room to breathe. I was surprised how much Rebirth took my major criticisms with Remake seriously and flipped it around. Due to it covering the middle stretch of the original, where the overworld opened up, and the plot takes the characters through so many locations, this is a very side content driven game. I have no problem with this! It's a remarkable achievement in how they took a PS1 overworld map and reimagined it in high graphical fidelity that feels like it geographically makes sense! The gang defeated the manifestation of destiny itself, and now they’re free on this unknown journey that’ll take them to who knows where, other than reliving trauma, burdens, unresolved memories, and minigames galore where they can goof off. It was a no-brainer, but still a clever choice to use a Xenoblade approach when reimagining FFVII’s overworld to follow an open-world format. Almost every major location has been expanded into its own open-world map, with 8th Gen towers and side content to fill it up. I’d have a problem sticking with… less than ideal open-world tropes, but Rebirth makes it mostly work exceedingly well. Some maps, I think, are strangely reimagined to become a large pool for exploration and content grinding, but this is mainly by comparison to other maps in the game that I think are handled perfectly. The combat is fantastically done, thanks to having a larger cast to experiment with, finally proving itself to be an excellent compromise between real-time action gameplay and the strategic ATB turn-based combat from the original.

What really brings everything together as my certified GOTY, and a personal favorite, is the focus on the characters. It’s not just main story stuff, though the ones who get spotlighted throughout are elevated and faithfully to the spirit of their characterization from the original, but even small stuff like exploring environments and having party banter, or taking surprising charge in a random side quest that develops Cloud’s relationship with everyone and why they’ll stick together to the end. Final Fantasy VII isn’t really my favorite entry in the franchise, it’s still close up there as a runner-up but not number one, but Rebirth spends so much time reminding me how at one point it really still could’ve. The thing it undeniably proved to me, however, was this is still hands down the most well-rounded Final Fantasy party. Anyone who I wasn’t super strong on before has now risen in the character rankings thanks to what Rebirth achieved. I can’t really speak more on the ending other than I know for sure it’s causing discourse, but minor spoiler territory gripes aside, it made me incredibly excited about how Part 3 is going to pay off everything Kitase, Nomura, Nojima, and Hamaguchi have been cooking. It’s going to either be a beautifully reflective counterpart to the original FFVII that makes its own powerful statement to shake the medium, or it’s going to completely collapse and fail in honoring its legacy. No video game has made me this conflicted on which way it’ll go, and I adore not knowing what unknown fate is ahead here.

My parents shipped me off to a vocational school when I was 16, at their wits end with my hooliganism. I suppose they thought learning how to weld would sort me out or something. This school was a "last stop" for a lot of kids whose parents ran out of rope to give, or who were otherwise court ordered to attend short of ending up in juvie. A considerable amount of the student body had a rougher background than mine and came from homes more fractured or communities that were deeply disenfranchised.

And everyone there loved Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 (also, Gauntlet Legends, but we're not talking about that today.)

Actually, it may be more accurate to say they just loved Dragon Ball. Budokai 3 was the newest game at the time and so it got the most play, but it was just as common to find kids huddled around a CRT watching Dragon Ball GT. The guy who had that GT set was also had a copy of Big Money Rustlas and I'm sorry to report that I've been conditioned through overexposure to adore both. Many flavors of Faygo touched my lips during this era.

The thing about Dragon Ball is that it had penetrated so many social barriers by 2004 that it had attained total cultural saturation. Playing these games, Budokai 3 in particular, and simply sharing a love for the series helped me expand my social bubble and connect with others during a particularly low point in my life. I also mained Kid Buu, so everyone knew I was a motherfucker. My Dragon Ball GT loving, Juggalo, furry friend taught me to never hide who you are, and who I am is a little pink goblin that can't be touched and will send his fist through the ground to punch you in the groin.

Though I'm typically bad at fighting games, there was a period where I was so practiced at Budokai 3 that nailing precision dodges and teleport chains was purely reflexive. Sure, this is partly due to being confined to a facility where the only other things to do was play billiards or hang out at a rundown single-screen theater that mostly ran crap like The Ladykillers, but you know, some of that was pure talent! Revisiting it now for the first time since leaving that school felt like slipping into a warm bath. Familiar, cozy, and-- whoa wait shit why is Cell spamming his ultimate like that HELP!!

Budokai 3 plays a lot better than the previous two games but is still compromised in several areas. Characters control largely the same as each other with little in the way of unique playstyles, but the capsule system feels more robust and better allows you to create a build unique to you, for example. Techniques look flashy and do well to capture key moments from the show and manga, but the rush attack and accompanying button guessing minigame wears thin and becomes a pace breaker fast. There's a lot of give and take here, but you can unlock Kid Goku so I'm afraid it's just the best Budokai game there is. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules.

The story mode is limited to 11 of the roster's 32 characters, and most of its replayability comes in the form of alternate routes, hidden fights, and secrets. There's a good amount to do, but the jog through DBZ's main four arcs is severely truncated and at times plays fast and loose with its canon (Goku survives the Raditz fight in Piccolo's story, for example, but the game doesn't explore this fully.) Dialog is rife with spelling errors, kerning issues, and there's a number of portraits that are off-model. Characters who existed mostly on the periphery like Tien or Yamcha or even those who were present in the story but largely inactive during long stretches are represented here, but much of their story modes involve bouncing between disperate points on a map to get maybe two or three lines of dialog... Many of the Dragon Ball games of this era just assume you're deeply familiar with the story and don't make much of an effort, so it's not surprising that Budokai 3 offloads a considerable amount of its narrative to your imagination.

And I'm fine with that. Budokai 3 isn't perfect by any means, but like the very boring man that I am, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing its faults and enjoying it regardless. That's only possible with the maturity laying bricks for two years builds... I think, I don't know.

I had planned on replaying this much further down the road (maybe around September), but as Akira Toriyama's untimely passing affected fans all over the world, it made me reflect on my time with Budokai 3 and appreciate something I understood back in 2004: Dragon Ball suffers no barriers.

If Peppino was a journey through an anxiety-induced fever dream from a man who's been driven to the very edge of his own helpless sanity, then the Noise is a journey through a man's own vanity, going through the same struggles as Peppino not because he wants to or needs to, but just because he can. Noise is much more akin to Wario than Peppino in this matter then, effortlessly blazing through the tribulations presented to them for the sake of their own greed and ego. With such a shift of character then, playing Pizza Tower as the Noise is not a lame excuse for replayability, however it is a whole new experience within the same game.

Just like Peppino, Noise can go really fast, if not more so. Unlike Peppino though, the Noise cant climb up the walls out of sheer desperation, instead opting for his skateboard to act as more of a wall jump that gets instantaneous speed when landing on the ground. The Noise can also do a tornado spin when using his skateboard that decimates enemies. To counteract this lack of verticality though, the Noise can super jump at any time and has access to an uppercut with much more force and range to it. Bosses are also different, with the Noise deciding to gleefully throw his own bombs around the arena, instead of grabbing the bosses out of abject rage. These new movement options and every transformation having new control methods create not only just a different game feel than Peppino, but one that beautifully balances on the line between a chaotic and smooth experience.

The movement isn't just the only thing that makes playing through Pizza Tower as the Noise feel so fresh, but rather the fact that the Noise is a god damn scumbag cheater. He often just ignores several mechanics in the game, such as changing the stroke limit in golf so that he always gets the primo ‘burg, or not delivering the pizzas in Gnome Forest and instead opts to destroy the customers' homes to get the toppins. Not even the bosses are safe from the Noise's wrath, as he just flat out shoots the Vigilante in the climactic duel and even scares off Fake Peppino in the final chase phase. He doesnt even have his own title cards for each level he just slaps stickers of himself over all the faces that were present in Peppino's adventure. And that's only tipping the iceberg when it comes to all of the delightfully cheesy flourishes that the Noise adds to make for a hilariously cheap playthrough.

The Noise reinforces the chaotic and insane energy of Pizza Tower that, in my opinion, makes it one of the best 2D platformers ever made, and is a more than welcome addition to this amazing game. The Noise even gets some great new music tracks that compliment an already fantastic soundtrack.

Now all we need is a playable Gerome update to make this game a complete masterpiece. Come on Tour de Pizza I know you can do it!!!!!!

played the demo back on PS3 and had my fill of this with it at the time but at some point i think i grabbed this through the BC program on Xbox for really cheap. kinda wish i just left it be lmao.

interesting but finicky jetpack mechanics are really all the game has going for it. the intro starts you off with being able to fly around at will while tackling some combat and it's passable enough for 15 minutes (as it was in the demo) but then the rest of the game happens. enemies are way too spongy and the mid-air combat takes a turn for the worst when the other flying ships and enemies put strain on the wonky flight controls.

also wasn't into the story but that was a given at this point. didn't realize this was going to be a time travel type thing or that it was going to have Nolan North showing up to do the most blatant/annoying case of Nolan Northing that i've ever seen so it had that going for it too.

will try the metroidvania side game someday.

very satisfying in terms of a narrative end cap, of course. not the complete slam dunk iterating on the first game was ideally going to lead to otherwise.

combat gameplay sees an improvement if only because the adaptive difficulty feels less overbearing (i'm pretty sure it's still here, though) which makes getting through the thing less of a headache. unfortunately level design takes a hit with everything feeling a bit less creative (especially the nightmare sequences) overall. the game ending on reusing shooting small parts of the environment to progress the final boss was a bummer. it was bad in Max Payne and it might have been even worse here due to the external pressure of enemy fire making the already finicky hitboxes worse.

looking forward to playing Max Payne 3 someday even though i expect the story to be a shit show. the gameplay looks to be like a powerhouse among third person shooters.

Was gonna start with some sort of intro or joke as always but now that I think about it I just wanna quickly say that I adore this game’s box art. The Castlevania series has always been synonymous with banger artwork but the composition and colors in this one are something else, and it’s probably the most menacing Dracula has ever looked in one of these so far… but that shield and sword that Simon is carrying are complete false advertising, that mf isn’t gonna use anything but the whip on this one!

The Adventure is quite a curious entry; as the last game of the series before Akumajou Densetsu, it would be easy to assume that this game was actually the true return of the series of its original roots — unless you count Haunted Castle and its Zelda CD-i looking ass… oh god I’m gonna end up playing that one aren’t I—, but actually, The Adventure feels more like an adaptation of that original adventure into a more simplified platformer, with even the losing power-up system akin to that of the Mario series on top of the usual health-bar and far more simplified and bare level design… oh and also if the original game was kind of a slog.

Christopher is a Belmont, and that means it should have the usual walk full of determination and commitment-based jumps… emphasis on should. The Adventure is s l o w, and when I say slow, I mean s l o w, and it not in a way that feels deliberated. I genuinely thought I was playing as the first protagonist in a game to have arthritis: Chirstopher’s movement doesn’t feel rewarding or like it has heaviness of it, instead it just feels like he’s sliding at a snail pace and like he’s being pushed backwards everytime he jumps, and you know, that’s already pretty bad, but I’m not even taken into consideration the slowdowns ON TOP of that!

I kinda associate this series with framerate problems, it’s always a price that the series has paid in service of its striking vistas and its spectacular boss fights and levels, and I’ve always refrained from mentioning it simply because it was never a problem that really got in the way of my enjoyment of past games and I every time it happened I just thought ‘’yeah, makes sense honestly’’. Here in Game Boy Land however, this old friend has decided to he’s gonna appear more than normal! From the moment the game starts it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be a very pleasant adventure, and it never really got better, ‘cause even in those moments my jump wasn’t incredibly delayed, and enemies weren’t moving in power-point presentation mode, it didn’t matter because the base movement still sucked!

I believe that single HUMONGOUS problem caused a ripple effect in which other hiccups, some which were already present in previous and even future games of the series, were made even worse: ledge-jumping was a particularly annoying challenge in Simon’s Quest and it would return as the basis of many platforming challenges in IV, but at least in those two you felt in control of Simon, so imagine having to do the same on here but with a less responding character and the punishment being either to have to repeat an entire section or instant-death, at that point I’m sure it would be at least 10 times more fun having to clean Dracula’s own coffin for an hour straight.

The Adventure has interesting sections, mainly the eyeball bridge in Stage 2 and the entire first section of Stage 3, and other moments show snippets of a interesting and possibly fun game, but they are constantly interrupted by incredibly uninspired or frustrating challenges, inconveniences that feel like another level of tomfuckery — even for this series—, and the entirety of Stage 4, which I like to call ‘’The Gauntlet’’, and not in a loving way. If anything, this game has made me gain a much greater appreciation for Super Castlevania IV, ‘cause both games share that same problem, the difference of course being that in here they are much worse. And hey, some complain than in IV there aren’t any new secondary weapons or don’t feel as useful, but hey, in The Adventure there aren’t any to begin with and all your whip upgrades are gone if you are hit even once! JOY.

I’m not entirely sure how much this game being on the system it’s on got in the way of what the game wanted to do, and even if I can still commend the effort of translating a series into the handheld verse, I can’t justify its myriad of problems when nothing about the game itself gives a sense of unbridled creativeness or just general competency. Comparing this to even Simon’s Quest, my least preferred of the original NES trilogy, would be a disservice to the latter, because that game, even if in my opinion failed to bring to fruition most of its ideas, it tried, and in the process created a wonderful and original world and had many sections I do enjoy. In The Adventure, aside from two or three scattered parts in is three first levels, the only thing I got out of it is frustration and a profund sense of boredom.

All Castlevania games made me feel the former at times, but they always were much, much more than that. The Adventure has cool ideas, cool music, some cool visuals, and very little else. I’m sure there could be a good game in here, and maybe eventually there would be, but right now… I would prefer to not see the first boss in my entire life again, thank you very much…

(This is from the perspective of someone who has never played Bloodborne or Sekiro)

Lies Of P is a game that feels wholely tailored to what I love in stories and video games. From discussions on what it means to be human to weird-ass body horror to a twist on a rallying mechanic to a funny man in a top hat who I thought was going to die who I ended up loving very, very much.

All of the bosses were very well designed both visually and gameplay-wise. From the extravagant King Of Puppets to the scrapped Puppets Of The Future toiling away in a swamp. However, I found the designs became less interesting as the game went on substituting their once helpful now improvised murder machines for more immediately hostile-looking monsters and murderers.

The characters are all memorable and honestly, the only thing that kept me going through a story who's legs fell off by the last third. All of them range from despisable to lovable in their own ways, all of the ones that had multiple parts in their side quests had an instant place in my heart.

Lastly, there is the foundation of the gameplay. The foundation of a souls-like always boils down to a few things exploration through a gritty atmosphere and stamina-based combat. Lies Of P focuses on the second with fast-based souls combat with a focus on reading your enemies for a well-timed parry which when you do multiple of in quick succession will make you feel like a god. Also, I liked how they added to health flasks although it can be forgotten about once your max capacity starts piling up through upgrades. Although if you're good enough that means you could just ignore those upgrades entirely.

The only problem is by the last third, well I'm not going to say the developers had to rush I'm going to say they at least speed-walked to meet a deadline. You get three boss fights in a row that borrow from earlier encounters. However, flaws aside Lies Of P is a very very well-made game that blows most of its competition out of the water standing side by side with the official Souls games.

That post-credit scene had me laughing my ass off though probably still going to be peak.