Yakuza 4 aged better than the third episode, that's for sure. Like all the previous games it's still a solid entry in the series, which I enjoyed for the most part. Personally, I liked that the story is full of betrayals and that we got bombarded with plot twist after plot twist. And the soap opera quality of the emotions that run through it made for yet another great Yakuza experience. But the last 2 hours or so felt really rushed.

Introducing several new main characters was quite ambitious back then, but still well done. Though, Akiyama was really the only new addition I grew quite fond of.

However, there is one thing I have to nitpick because it kind of soured the experience for me a bit. Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely adore the Yakuza franchise and that it's one of my favorites of all time..

...so with that out of the way, I need to talk about -that- scene. Yes, it's about Saejima and Haruka’s introduction scene. I understand what the writers were trying to do, but using Haruka for that was just wrong on so many levels. The excuse, “he hasn’t been around a woman in years”, is terrible because Haruka is a child, not a woman. It's gross and it made it very difficult to like Saejima afterward (I eventually did though). The idea that we're supposed to applaud Saejima for having the strength of will to not rape a child, like that isn't the base level of behaviour we expect out of anyone who wants to participate in human society, is laughable. There's literally nothing to applaud in that scene. It was neither deep nor well written, it was just bad in taste. Like I said, I love Yakuza but I will never excuse that scene like so many other fans did. It was unnecessary.

I finished this over a week ago and literally didn't want to write a review because I'd have to think about it again.

Legitimately the only credit I can give this game is that looting with the magnetic hand thingy is very satisfying and the setting is interesting. Oh, and I had fun in some of the linear sections when I was able to delude myself into thinking I was playing Bioshock.

Otherwise, it's a 50 car pileup of ideas and mechanics. It doesn't know what genre it wants to be, so it tries to be all of them and fails on all accounts. Don't even get me fucking started on those "open world" parts. The game even jokes several times about how frustrated the protagonist is with having to do boring shit, but as the player I don't find the humor when I actually have to do the boring shit.

Speaking of the protagonist, he is the single most annoying and unlikeable one I can think of. His decisions make no sense and his character depth goes from Sahara desert to a kiddy pool filled for 3 seconds with a garden hose. Oh, and that doesn't even happen until about the last hour, at which point the game tries to throw the entire narrative it's been trying to create in the trash with an epic twist. Why? I don't fucking know, probably just to set up for the 4 DLCs they have planned.

Christ, I thought the takes around Baldur's Gate 3 were exhausting but this is something else. It's almost impossible to find reasonable people to discuss the game with right now.

I'm about 50 hours in so I can't give this a definitive rating just yet but at current standing, I'd say it's about a 4/5 but also possibly my favorite game I've played this year. It's the throwback janky Bethesda game I've needed for 15 years. More akin to Oblivion and Fallout 3 in design philosophy than Skyrim or Fallout 4.

The UI is pretty downright awful and thankfully a mod exists to already improve on it. Space travel is of course lackluster and I can't ignore that it could have possibly felt more kinetic but overall, it doesn't actually personally bother me at all.

The quests so far are the best they have done since '08 and I love that. It's also an aesthetically pleasing experience and the various art designs are great and overall I'd say it's just a mostly 'beautiful' looking game outside of some pretty downright hilariously silly NPCs. Seriously, the bug-eyed citizens gawking at you is giving me some serious Oblivion NPC vibes and I kinda love it. There's some poor textures that can crop up and a few models that feel flat but MOST I'd say are pretty fantastic. The weapon designs rock too.

I don't think ANY of their RPGs are flawless experiences ... but I love 'em anyway. This is no exception.

Armored Core VI is a From Software game.

With visually spectacular boss fights spoiled by repetitive and restrictive gameplay. No, you will not be able to play as you want, you can try and will suffer thousands of times more. Just take the build for the boss and save your time.

It's a fun game, you will have a good time, but it was not enough to make me want to replay it 2 times to see a cutscene change, new old missions and unlock weapons that i would not use.

I think i am starting to become spoiled by mechs... let the fires of rubicon burn it all.

This is just Danganronpa but less interesting, I'm afraid. I'd love to do a large write-up on my thoughts on so many different details, but unfortunately another review on this site represents most of my thoughts extremely well: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kusoro/review/932720/.

One point I disagree with is about the ending/overarching plot, which I personally think is an upgrade from Danganronpa -- who knew creating a story that isn't a post-hoc justification for a contrived killing game might be somewhat interesting. There were some unfair dialogue tricks to cover up some twists akin to Uchikoshi, but in the end I felt as though the ending reveals were satisfying.

ALSO -
reason we are doxxing:
They said they don't like Fubuki or Halara,
they think they're overrated.
Doesn't ship yumagami.
Doesn't ship yumahiko.

I'm sure that my score will go against the grains but let me start off by saying clearly: this is not a bad game and nor is it a perfect one.

To begin with the pros, this game's style and aesthetics are (pun slightly intended) out-of-this-world. The design of the ACs, the color palette used and the music all coalesce into a profoundly great feeling world. The way the camera also pans and the particle and blur effects hit with the slowing of the game when you defeat an enemy creates some awesome looking screenshots (my finger was also hovering over my screenshot button during most cutscenes as well).

Now then, let's get to the less-good. The controls are... mostly good. I feel like the AC responds fairly well to most inputs and the majority of controls are are intuitive and easy to perform (in other words, it's a FromSoft game). My repair kits did not always go off when I thought they should (yes, I know they have a cooldown, and yes, I noticed you can't use them while attacking) and I felt like sometimes I could fire both shoulder cannons at the same time, and other times I couldn't for reasons I did not fully understand. I also usually felt like the under-dog in most combat encounters. There were a number of other frustrations with staggering or boosting that also left me feeling like the later-game bosses got to play with a different rule-set than I did. AC build viability also seemed to not be nearly as varied as other FromSoft games. A light and fast AC is probably a great choice if you're the guy beating Elden Ring on a saxophone but for someone a bit older, with not the best reflexes anymore, I cannot keep up with dodging every laser beam meaning the twin songbird and Gatling gun on a slightly heavier bipedal AC was about the only play-style I could perform.

I also just can't help but shake the fact that this feels like a B-tier game. The mission based structure where the majority of exposition is laid out in mission briefs. The missions, themselves, frequently feel like excuses to go do some video gaming instead of tell an intricate narrative. That's not to say that there is no narrative or the only exposition occurs during the briefings, but it could have been expanded upon better through gameplay. Maybe spend less time designing reasons to put in sneaking missions in my mech game and put in more stuff to help understand the factions in the world? Speaking of factions, while it's great we're introduced to some interesting personalities within them, I have no idea what the intention of Arquebus or Balam are other than "they want Coral." I don't really know anything about RaD or the PCA. Why is Balam always giving me stuff on behalf of Dafeng? Maybe this is my own fault for jumping into a game labeled "VI" without playing the previous five, but I feel like some further exposition wouldn't have hurt.

Final point regarding missions and menu decisions I'd question: While the arena is a cool concept, it really dampens the mood if I fight an enemy in the Arena, beat them there, and then you try and set them up as a big boss fight in the main game itself.

Again, this is not a bad game. In fact, it's a good palette cleanser and something very different; it's probably also the best mech game out there. However, I would not call this a masterpiece which everyone must play. Would be a great grab if you find it on sale, but as it stands, I'd only recommend for more avid fans and not a must-play for all gamers.

Baldur's Gate 3 is not a new or innovative game. What it represents is a specific kind of RPG that we use to get fairly often and games of its ilk are extremely rare these days.

In that way, it's a breath of fresh air to finally have an RPG with real depth, progression systems, decision making, and exploration.

The cast is straight up some of the best that's ever been in an RPG of this profile. While the main narrative is serviceable, it mostly serves as setting for the excellent character writing.

The immersive sim elements that made the Divinity: Original Sin games so brain teasing and addicting remain and are emboldened by legitimately good RPG combat and class design.

Having my build that I theorycrafted before even starting the game "activate" was a true moment of bliss.

The comments made about this game being polished to a sheen are likely from people who have not reached Act 3 where the game begins to crumble under its ambition. The amount of content cut from Act 3 causes many quests and NPCs who you have spent the better part of 70+ hours building on are likely to fall apart. As someone who played the game when it first released as an early access title years ago, I can tell you that Act 3 is still in an early access state.

The ending is unsatisfying and its clear that this is an unfinished game. However, I would much rather have a game that shoots for the stars but struggles to reach its ideal vision than one without a pulse altogether.

If this is supposed to be solo D&D experience, maybe it's a bit fitting that the ending hours are cobbled together and barely work, just like when your dungeon master throws together an end to a D&D campaign that people stopped showing up for.

We need more games like Baldur's Gate 3 and we needed them yesterday. Also, the definitive edition next year gonna bang frfr.

I have a lot of free time. I often think about all the big games In my backlog, how well acclaimed they are and how I really should get to them. I also think about how I am still at the moment in my life where I could feasibly play all of those. There is constantly a sense of longing to be able to get into and love games like Skyrim or Tears of the Kingdom or whatever really. But, I don't play those. Instead I spend countless hours beating games like Marvel's The Avengers, Gotham Knights and well, Exoprimal. I'm not really sure why I am this way. In fact I think all three are good games in their own right. But I am constantly forsaking "better" experiences just to play a game about exosuits and dinosaurs. There are a million cool games out this year. Pikmin and Fire Emblem and Jedi Survivor and Final Fantasy and Rain Code are just rotting in my backlog, while I spent two and a half days almost entirely on this. I don't think its something I'll be able to understand about myself but hey, Its just what I do. And as one of the few people who has decided to beat this game, what better maniac to review it.

So obviously there is a reason why I spent over 20 hours playing this. And its simple, its pretty damn fun. The idea of it is so silly that its no surprise Capcom made it, but honestly its such a good mix that people should be ashamed they didn't think of it sooner. Shooting massive hordes of prehistoric raptors is peak game concept. (Most) of the exosuits are also really fun to use. There's 4 assault types, 3 tank types and 3 support types. While only 10 does feel a little small, they all have good roles. The only suit I actually disliked was Murasame the tank samurai. Honestly all three of the melee centric ones weren't good to use. But Vigilant, the hottest and of course last one you unlock, is insane at dealing high damage with her chargeable sniper rifle. Once I unlocked her I pretty much exclusively used her, except when my team decided to be chodes and nobody wanted to switch to a support class so ofc I had to play as Skywave instead, who is basically the mommy exosuit of the group. Her staff was very fun to use to both heal teammates and lay down some fire. I did dabble in the other classes a fair bit and while not all of them are really my style they're all very distinct and just fun. The enemy variety is strange, because there's actually a good amount of enemy types but so many of them you'll rarely see in your matches which can get quite annoying.

That's really the big problem with Exoprimal, most of its really cool stuff is probably like 15% of the game. When you get to the main story levels they are absurdly hectic and fun (if a bit bullshit) but for like, 45 of your 55 required matches to beat the main story you'll be going through the same 3-4 maps with the same few different objectives. You are unlocking more as you progress but its so little and so rare that it doesn't feel like much. Story progress is a little better since basically every match inbetween the big moments you'll unlock some more lore. And the story was interesting, and I found all the characters to be likeable, but its not really interesting enough for me to sit through like 60 individual glorified audio logs. After a few matches, piecing together the mystery becomes just as slow moving (and grindy) as playing the game. I think playing through matches to work your way to new story beats and getting lore along the way is a genuinely great idea for a multiplayer campaign but the sheer lack of variety in game modes and maps hinders Exoprimal more than anything. You do unlock a new mode after beating the story but its not available yet so pretty unfortunate all around.

Just because I have to mention it, there are microtransactions and there is a battlepass but these are pretty much entirely unintrusive. You can still buy plenty of good skins with ingame currency that is not held back at all. I never had an issue buying the cosmetics available that I liked without having to spend real world money. It would probably be a hella grind to buy every cosmetic on your own but I don't know why you'd even want to do that, and as far as I saw you can't buy more currency anyways.

So because of all that, I absolutely cannot recommend you buy Exoprimal right now. 60 dollars is just not enough for how feature incomplete it is. However, if you've got gamepass (also check out the new indie game Venba thats pretty good) I'd strongly encourage you to give it a try. It just might surprise you. And honestly do it soon, this game is gonna get shut down in like 2 years and it'll be very unfortunate.

So that's my review of Exoprimal. It's been quite a while since I've put up a review lol, but there are still plenty of reviews I'd like to get to. I'm not gonna do the standard "promise I'll have more up soon" thing because that literally never works so just expect a dramatically long hiatus after this so if I do post again soon its like an early Christmas. Thank you all for reading <3

Now time to play Redfall.

-----TLDR-----
+ Extremely Fun
+ some of the exosuits are hot
- Barebones content leads to the game feeling grindy

Nancymeter - 74/100
Achievement Completion - 77% (34/39)
Time Played - Xbox says 29 hours but I don't think that is possible
Completion #2 of August
Completion #133 of 2023