460 reviews liked by Takumi
Metal Slug 4
2002
Depois do 2 é dificil dizer o que é um Metal Slug meh, todos os jogos são iguais, só alguns mais simples do que os outros, e o 4 cai exatamente nesse ponto.
É um jogo muito simples e sem graça na segunda metade, mas começa BEM DEMAIS. Única coisa de realmente marcante dele é a trilha, até o momento a melhor da franquia, uma pena que não utilizaram o motif dos 3 jogos anteriores.
Ainda assim, Metal Slug 4 é sem graça, mas um bom jogo.
É um jogo muito simples e sem graça na segunda metade, mas começa BEM DEMAIS. Única coisa de realmente marcante dele é a trilha, até o momento a melhor da franquia, uma pena que não utilizaram o motif dos 3 jogos anteriores.
Ainda assim, Metal Slug 4 é sem graça, mas um bom jogo.
FightCade
2015
A dangerous hub of online radicalization and intra-Latino violence. It's embarassing to get pinged for a match in a game whose controls you are barely figuring out. Love to be discriminated against for being on Wi-Fi. Can someone please add SCUD Race already...
NANAKO FUCKING DANCING IS THE CUTEST THING EVER
This game is about as funny as a GutterTrash review
Hey there reference to the first game did you like reference to the first game here's 10 minutes of dialogue abstracting reference to the first game.
Bored of reading in a vn? Don't worry, here's an anime AMV depressed lofi beats to study and reference to the first game.
Bored of reading in a vn? Don't worry, here's an anime AMV depressed lofi beats to study and reference to the first game.
o7 to Segata, a true hero of Marxism-Balanism who was assassinated as a key step in Naoto Oshima’s cruel rise to power
This review contains spoilers
I hated this game when I played it at launch, you know. Pure, utter vitriol. It actually made me tap out of the franchise for years until 7. For the longest time, it occupied near-permanent spot in my Bottom 25 list. I've often said that Yakuza was the refuge for MGS fans who were scorned by MGSV, and sure enough Yakuza itself scorned me with 6.
What I wanted from this game was a good Last Yakuza Game. A nice sendoff to a series I'd fallen hard and fast for over the preceding years. What I got wasn't that, it was a relatively lowkey and frankly boring mess with bad combat, droll side content and a complete disconnect from the games that it's meant to cap off. All of these criticisms still apply; the combat is slow and uncomfortable due to being a beta test for the Dragon Engine, a lot of it is just plain boring and the Yakuza Conspiracy at the heart of this game is the franchise's least interesting, the side content is snoozeworthy and god knows it has fuck all to do with the previous games.
Anyway, the thing about growing up is that change usually isn't an explosive shift towards something new, a sudden binary change or what have you. It's walking through life, day by day, not noticing any changes until you stop, rub your face and look behind only to be met with a different life - a different you.
Coming back to Y6 now that I'm much older feels strange. Difficult to articulate.
It is indeed a bad Yakuza game, but I realize now that it's not even a Yakuza game by design.
Y6 is a Kiryu Kazuma game. It's not about Yakuza, it's not about conspiracies, and it's not about clans or supporting casts or whatever:
It's about Kiryu, the guy who leads these games but only really got any meaningful depth in Yakuza 3, and has mostly been carried by side content.
It's about fatherhood, both in the literal sense (of Kiryu as Haruka's adoptive father) and more abstract ones (Kiryu's mentor role to Daigo, a man whose father was murdered by Kiryu's best friend). Mercifully, it avoids a lot of pitfalls that other sad stories fall into by not being a hyper-maschismo "fathers are the most important men in a girl's life! :D" tale nor is it a weird self-insert story by a director who recently became a father (I fucking see you, Ken Levine).
It's about an old man who is at once the worst Yakuza on earth yet also the textbook definition of their ideals. A man who disavows all that nonsense yet is ironclad in his loyalty and would take bullets for those in need. A man who respects his enemies if respected in turn, and who mourns a tragedy regardless of which 'side' it comes from.
It's about the process of blinking and realizing you're in a new world that you'd slipped into by accident; a wrong turn on the road that you can't reverse out of.
His 'daughter' is all grown up, old enough to court men and have children. She no longer just has 'children's problems', but faces many of the same woes Kiryu's compatriots ran into in older times.
The orphans he doted upon in days gone by are now young adults, ready to enter the world he'd sheltered them from. The whacky yet noble Yakuza he spent many years living alongside are now a minority. Besides Majima, Daigo and Saejima it's all unfamiliar faces and the young.
Time has eroded the difference between the Tojo Clan, the Omi Alliance, the Triads and the Jingweon mafia, for they're all staffed by young, ambitious, ruthless and amoral criminals. So deep is their decay that even an ambitious businessman with no scruples can pose as one.
When this game came out 5-6 years ago, I hated it because it wasn't what I wanted; a big glorious send-off to everything Yakuza related. The Endgame of Yakuza titles, if you want to go for the low hanging fruit. I wanted to see and fight alongside/against tons of supporting characters, I wanted characters like Majima and Daigo to have arcs running concurrent to Kiryu's, I wanted the villain to be some ghost from Kiryu's past come back for revenge. And when it didn't give me that, I hated it.
Coming back to it now, I respect it. I respect that RGG Studios opted to go against the expected finale and to create what's basically a character study, for they've always been fans of pushing the envelope and this is no different. Don't get me wrong, most of the complaints up above are still present (The Yamato 2 plot is so fucking dumb, it makes the baby lockers seem sensible), but they're easily ignorable honestly? If you focus on this as a character study you have a relatively compact story where most characters are mirrors to some aspect of Kiryu and the concepts he embodies that also manages to not overstay its welcome compared to the game immediately before it.
It's doubly easier to respect what this game did in hindsight because it set the stage for yet another Yakuza renaissance and a significant paradigm shift for the series. From this game we got two Judgment titles and the utterly mythical Yakuza 7. In an age where most publishers seem content to shit out More Games in an endless status quo, it's actually nice that Yakuza avoided that. I really do hope Y8 is the end of Kiryu.
The combat still sucks tho.
What I wanted from this game was a good Last Yakuza Game. A nice sendoff to a series I'd fallen hard and fast for over the preceding years. What I got wasn't that, it was a relatively lowkey and frankly boring mess with bad combat, droll side content and a complete disconnect from the games that it's meant to cap off. All of these criticisms still apply; the combat is slow and uncomfortable due to being a beta test for the Dragon Engine, a lot of it is just plain boring and the Yakuza Conspiracy at the heart of this game is the franchise's least interesting, the side content is snoozeworthy and god knows it has fuck all to do with the previous games.
Anyway, the thing about growing up is that change usually isn't an explosive shift towards something new, a sudden binary change or what have you. It's walking through life, day by day, not noticing any changes until you stop, rub your face and look behind only to be met with a different life - a different you.
Coming back to Y6 now that I'm much older feels strange. Difficult to articulate.
It is indeed a bad Yakuza game, but I realize now that it's not even a Yakuza game by design.
Y6 is a Kiryu Kazuma game. It's not about Yakuza, it's not about conspiracies, and it's not about clans or supporting casts or whatever:
It's about Kiryu, the guy who leads these games but only really got any meaningful depth in Yakuza 3, and has mostly been carried by side content.
It's about fatherhood, both in the literal sense (of Kiryu as Haruka's adoptive father) and more abstract ones (Kiryu's mentor role to Daigo, a man whose father was murdered by Kiryu's best friend). Mercifully, it avoids a lot of pitfalls that other sad stories fall into by not being a hyper-maschismo "fathers are the most important men in a girl's life! :D" tale nor is it a weird self-insert story by a director who recently became a father (I fucking see you, Ken Levine).
It's about an old man who is at once the worst Yakuza on earth yet also the textbook definition of their ideals. A man who disavows all that nonsense yet is ironclad in his loyalty and would take bullets for those in need. A man who respects his enemies if respected in turn, and who mourns a tragedy regardless of which 'side' it comes from.
It's about the process of blinking and realizing you're in a new world that you'd slipped into by accident; a wrong turn on the road that you can't reverse out of.
His 'daughter' is all grown up, old enough to court men and have children. She no longer just has 'children's problems', but faces many of the same woes Kiryu's compatriots ran into in older times.
The orphans he doted upon in days gone by are now young adults, ready to enter the world he'd sheltered them from. The whacky yet noble Yakuza he spent many years living alongside are now a minority. Besides Majima, Daigo and Saejima it's all unfamiliar faces and the young.
Time has eroded the difference between the Tojo Clan, the Omi Alliance, the Triads and the Jingweon mafia, for they're all staffed by young, ambitious, ruthless and amoral criminals. So deep is their decay that even an ambitious businessman with no scruples can pose as one.
When this game came out 5-6 years ago, I hated it because it wasn't what I wanted; a big glorious send-off to everything Yakuza related. The Endgame of Yakuza titles, if you want to go for the low hanging fruit. I wanted to see and fight alongside/against tons of supporting characters, I wanted characters like Majima and Daigo to have arcs running concurrent to Kiryu's, I wanted the villain to be some ghost from Kiryu's past come back for revenge. And when it didn't give me that, I hated it.
Coming back to it now, I respect it. I respect that RGG Studios opted to go against the expected finale and to create what's basically a character study, for they've always been fans of pushing the envelope and this is no different. Don't get me wrong, most of the complaints up above are still present (The Yamato 2 plot is so fucking dumb, it makes the baby lockers seem sensible), but they're easily ignorable honestly? If you focus on this as a character study you have a relatively compact story where most characters are mirrors to some aspect of Kiryu and the concepts he embodies that also manages to not overstay its welcome compared to the game immediately before it.
It's doubly easier to respect what this game did in hindsight because it set the stage for yet another Yakuza renaissance and a significant paradigm shift for the series. From this game we got two Judgment titles and the utterly mythical Yakuza 7. In an age where most publishers seem content to shit out More Games in an endless status quo, it's actually nice that Yakuza avoided that. I really do hope Y8 is the end of Kiryu.
The combat still sucks tho.
Followup from my last review.
Bumping this one up a bit because, in hindsight, I do honestly think the finale is worth it and in fact would've preferred Gaiden to consist of nothing but the first hour and last two hours.
A lot of the reactionary praise I've seen for IW talks about that game's respect for the series' legacy and... Even putting aside that it's so observably wrong that reappraisals of IW in a few months will say the same thing, I think Gaiden's Important Bits and 6 ultimately do a better job of addressing the franchise's history.
Gaiden, ignoring the faff in the middle, really stands out upon reflection (and in light of IW) because it's perhaps the first and only title in this series to admit that a lot of the past plots were ridiculous. The last hour says it upfront: The dreams of the Yakuza - arrogant, egotistical maniacs playing at modern Shogun - don't mean a damn thing.
There's no real celebration of the Yakuza here. Even compared to Judgment's dimmer view on them, everyone in Gaiden who enjoys being a Yakuza is either pathetic or insane. Yeah it's kinda cringe and on the nose that Nishitani III is a sadistic rapist and Shishido is such a pathetic little man that his final phase is easier than some trash mobs, but what do you expect? Who else would covet the power of the Yakuza? They're reduced to beating up old men and hiding away on a boat.
The final boss especially is great, there's a lot of excellent visual storytelling going on which is unusual for this franchise. Kiryu taking one last scar to keep the Yakuza away from hurting innocents, Shishido's bulk being what destroys the Omi iconography, Kiryu's Daidoji gadgets being useless against Shishido which forces him to rely on good ol' tactics, Shishido standing against the Omi logo but looking tiny... It's just so good, dude.
Don't get me wrong, I'm ignoring a lot of shit. Agent style still feels awful and gimmicky to use, the Daidoji stuff is nonsense, after IW it's so obvious this was written after that game wrapped, the endless callbacks are embarassing, and the soundtrack is wimply.
But, after IW? I'm willing to give it a pass, because at least the awfulness isn't padded out. In-out, 8 hour game. Nice and clean.
Also god First Summer Uika is inhumanely beautiful. What's up with that?
Bumping this one up a bit because, in hindsight, I do honestly think the finale is worth it and in fact would've preferred Gaiden to consist of nothing but the first hour and last two hours.
A lot of the reactionary praise I've seen for IW talks about that game's respect for the series' legacy and... Even putting aside that it's so observably wrong that reappraisals of IW in a few months will say the same thing, I think Gaiden's Important Bits and 6 ultimately do a better job of addressing the franchise's history.
Gaiden, ignoring the faff in the middle, really stands out upon reflection (and in light of IW) because it's perhaps the first and only title in this series to admit that a lot of the past plots were ridiculous. The last hour says it upfront: The dreams of the Yakuza - arrogant, egotistical maniacs playing at modern Shogun - don't mean a damn thing.
There's no real celebration of the Yakuza here. Even compared to Judgment's dimmer view on them, everyone in Gaiden who enjoys being a Yakuza is either pathetic or insane. Yeah it's kinda cringe and on the nose that Nishitani III is a sadistic rapist and Shishido is such a pathetic little man that his final phase is easier than some trash mobs, but what do you expect? Who else would covet the power of the Yakuza? They're reduced to beating up old men and hiding away on a boat.
The final boss especially is great, there's a lot of excellent visual storytelling going on which is unusual for this franchise. Kiryu taking one last scar to keep the Yakuza away from hurting innocents, Shishido's bulk being what destroys the Omi iconography, Kiryu's Daidoji gadgets being useless against Shishido which forces him to rely on good ol' tactics, Shishido standing against the Omi logo but looking tiny... It's just so good, dude.
Don't get me wrong, I'm ignoring a lot of shit. Agent style still feels awful and gimmicky to use, the Daidoji stuff is nonsense, after IW it's so obvious this was written after that game wrapped, the endless callbacks are embarassing, and the soundtrack is wimply.
But, after IW? I'm willing to give it a pass, because at least the awfulness isn't padded out. In-out, 8 hour game. Nice and clean.
Also god First Summer Uika is inhumanely beautiful. What's up with that?
Portal with RTX
2022
This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.
For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu.If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]
But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.
As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.
Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.
The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.
Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.
But.
But.
There's a worse problem.
Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.
When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...
...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.
And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.
I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.
The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.
For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu.
But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.
As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.
Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.
The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.
Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.
But.
But.
There's a worse problem.
Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.
When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...
...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.
And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.
I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.
The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.
Portal with RTX
2022
RTX? More like FarTX because this freaking stinks.
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