there's a point halfway through where you realize a lot of what you assumed was just humor because of the satirical tone of the writing was just the game saying what it meant. like, okay, let's examine the white supremacy shit: there is no route where the text is "hell yeah we love white supremacy it rocks!" and the joke is that this is a stupid text. the text itself is instead very explicit about how this is an abhorrent and violent ideology which even treating with apathy is wrong. the joke is, holy shit isn't it fucked up that we're just kinda describing the real world at you? people believe this and act like this?

so then there is no reason to believe that the rest of what this game is saying on the surface level is any less sincere and straightforward. and man it has some powerful shit to say at times, i'll be honest. some parts toward the end of my playthrough had a fairly strong emotional impact. feminist kino.

Eastward suffers from one of my biggest problems with indie developers nowdays: Make the game pretty, forget to make it fun.

But it also goes an extra mile by trying to be something that truly didnt need to: Earthbound

And also failing doing it.

Ignoring the obvious praise of the art direction of this game (seriously is real good) the game is basically a slog to play. According to the devs its 30 hours long (it took me 24 hours with like 3 being on a mini game that is more fun than the game itself) which you would mostly spend talking with NPCs, putting bombs to solve easy puzzles and talking to more NPCs for the first 10 hours of the game.

Then after it you would unlock the other mechanic of the game which would add another button to your current putting bomb button. Repeat this for another 10 hours.

While doing this you also get to read the story which, on a basic level, it has a lot of potential with an interesting setting and lore behind but that it crashes by the awful pacing and obvious lack of direction cause at the end of the day, the devs didnt know what to do with their characters.

There are, in my opinion, 6 prominent characters in this game, that you get to know during it just so at the end most of them end up doing nothing. It's a great disrepect for probably one of the 3 interesting aspects of the game.

Speaking of characters, this game could theorically have a rock or a box as the main character and i dont think it would change anything. So much shit happening in this world and in front of his eyes and he doesn't react or act to almost anything. It also doesn't help that his sprite makes him look like the most boring and uninterested person ever.

Then, after 20 hours of slog, you reach the final 2 chapters, which are filled with interesting concepts not only story wise but gameplay wise and you are wondering why wasn't the game cut 10 hours so you could just play this sections earlier.

And at the end of the day, thats the real curprit i mentioned earlier: this game is too big. Too big of a story that wasn't developed well enough. Too big of a game that was basically empty from mechanics up to the last 2 hours.

And too big of a disappointment, cause when you really think about the good parts, you can only think what this game could have been if it wasn't trying to be what it isnt.

1 week before release i played the demo, it was a 20 minutes demo that was very underwhelming, but i still thought i should give the game a chance to see if it gets better later on.

It doesn't.

So the first thing i read about this game in the embed of the steam link was "a fresh take on the jrpg genre", and its probably the biggest problem of the game. It is really the most basic, mediocre turn base combat you can find.

Turn base combat, rock paper scissor elemental types plus physical, materia base skills with few spots (i had only 4 skills activated), no gear, no party. Does that sound like a fresh take to you?

So if the gameplay is so barebones it means is at least hard right? Well no, it is basic and easy. The start is easy, in the mid part they blow up the HP of enemies so you understand you should buy new skills, and once you do it the game is easy again. Mob enemies are generally harder than bosses because you are 1vs3 most of the time, while in bosses you can just debuff it and make it slow, while you have 2 turns to spam healings and hitting. There also some questionable decisions on the minor mechanics of the combat system but i don't think they matter (see some paragraphs below)

Now here is what is really the "fresh take": the setting being cyberpunk. Everything is written with tech terminology. The mana is called data, block and delay turn is called cache, melee combat is called hack? some of the terms don't even make sense of what they actually do. Also because we obviously live in a technological society we have people called "V-sync" or "Nullpointer", expresions like "Digits!" or "Oh my grind!", you know, normal behaviour if you ask me.

The story is pretty standard for a futuristic setting, it wasn't bad but also it wasn't good, pretty normal.

The artstyle is cool, the music is generally cool, which i think its why most people would don't mind the boring gameplay and will just play for the story, which is also present in the game itself because you have options to either skip every random encounter (yeah we have those here) or to insta win every battle when you want it.

So if you want to try this game because of the "fresh take in the jrpg genre" you will be disappointed, if you have played jrpgs before there is nothing new in this game, you have already played it before.

Honestly speaking the cards were stacked against Yakuza even before I started, I don't like cutscene heavy games and I don't like Beat em Ups. So the fact that I came out of this game really liking it speaks to it's strength, the game's story building up to it's climax is incredibly engaging. Giving us reveals in a well paced manner while having some of the incredibly entertaining and well written characters in insane situations.

The combat was also fun I could button mash my way to victory a lot of the time but the heat actions and animations look and sound great and is incredibly fun to pull off.

The subquests are also great , weird and almost always hilarious. Randomly coming across them is always a treat.

I am not really a fan of the minigames though or the Cabaret or Real Estate side stories, they feel kinda tedious and time consuming to do.

The game also stumbles at the ending, with constant cutscenes and enemy encounters that were straight up tedious and unfun, the bosses somewhat made up for it but the fact that I had to go through an Hour long cutscene at the end also soured me on the ending a bit cause I also have some problems with it's story.

Overall though this game is great I put over 60 Hours in it and I had something fun to do throughout it's runtime and the story was engaging from the start.