112 reviews liked by alagoa


Simplesmente sensacional.
Castlevania em sua forma mais pura, justa, divertida e incrível.
O jogo que precede Symphony definitivamente não decepciona em absolutamente nada, com músicas incríveis, visuais lindos, personagens carismáticos e uma dificuldade balanceada. O mais próximo de perfeito que um Classicvania poderia chegar.

This game was the first in a planned trilogy of games with a story that was meant to parallel the Christian Gospel. The game ends with the protagonist defeated, chained to a wall and left to die in a cliffhanger that was never resolved. Incredible.

I would love to play an online multiplayer version of this game.

Cool concept and execution.

An exceptional horizontal cute-em-up, exclusively for PSX.

I was waffling between 3.5 and 4, as the scoring in this game is both super compelling on its surface and--at times--very annoying to actually execute. It revolves, primarily, around damaging large enemies just enough to almost kill them, and then bombing when a ton of smaller enemies are onscreen to finish them off and cash in on a huge multiplier (which increases for every enemy killed with a single "projectile").

Figuring out just how much damage to do to these larger enemies takes some trial and error, and you'll often overshoot it and frustratingly miss out on a jackpot. Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities, and you get an extra life every 500,000 points, which is extremely generous; so, after some practice, the system becomes a bit more lenient, because with more score comes more bombs, and more bombs equals more attempts at massive cash-outs. (On my clearing run I scored around 6 million points, which is 12 lives on top of those I started with!)

In addition to the addictive gameplay--in which you cycle between four different shots that have four unique bomb types--the sprites, backgrounds, and music in this game are Konami-esque in quality. Beautiful animations, a huge and gorgeous palette of bright colors, massive bosses, silly gags--it's all just as delightful as it tries to be.

There's an English patch out there, and the game actually does have a story, ridiculous though it may be; so check that out if you don't speak Japanese and want to give this a shot.


To live is to not run away

The original Yakuza, the game that transitioned Sega out of the in-house console era onto the PS2, opens with this line. It embodies the spirit of the entire franchise that would come to be. Yakuza’s spirit was that of the romanticized Bushido code mixed with the rich atmosphere and contemporary setting of Yakuza crime movies. What distinguished Kiryu from the real-life yakuza was his way of life: his tenacity and insistence on walking the path laid out for him.

Yakuza 0, as a tenth anniversary celebration, looks to explore that tenacity, that insistence on looking past the inflating yen of the late 80s, and direct Kiryu and another man with a common conviction—Goro Majima—toward their personal truths.

> Through this whole ordeal, I saw a lot of people try to set things right. It blew me away, man. Not just yakuza. Civilians too. It really drove home just how green I still am.

The streets of Kamurocho in ‘88 were dirty and grimy. There’s a bed of trash coating the sidewalk, and gaudy lights and excess are laid out everywhere. It’s the kind of environment that breeds monsters willing to tear each other apart, tooth and nail, for a spot of land about the size of a doghouse. Perfect space for a 20-year-old Kiryu, aimlessly following the whims of others and vaguely following his adoptive father’s footsteps.

Kiryu’s philosophy and way of life is slowly being brought to the surface. Every surprise attack he gets from Kuze, every slimy wishy-washy opinion from Awano, and every piece of shit thing a yakuza takes the liberty of doing to those he cares about pushes him over the edge. There’s a level of reverence 0’s Kiryu plot has towards the character’s legacy as a whole – filling in some of the missing pieces of characterization that understandably couldn’t be explored in the original ‘05 game.
Kuze specifically is masterfully crafted as a benchmark for how Kiryu is doing, and his level of resolve. He’s a stubborn old man that tries to constantly beat Kiryu down through raw strength reminiscent of his boxer days. He’s the crown jewel of Kiryu’s antagonists in his simplicity and brutality. Tachibana was able to confide in a young Kiryu, but it took his death for a switch to flip in the kid’s head – he’s going to stop the lieutenants with his own two fists even if it costs him his life. Walking away, the old man’s able to acknowledge Kiryu as fit for the job.

Shibusawa isn’t nearly as competently written as Kuze, but his ability to challenge Kiryu’s beliefs and sense of direction by highlighting the futility of honorable yakuza and Shintaro Kazama’s disregard for the idea forces Kiryu to make a personal change – he’s no longer his oyabun’s puppet but wants nothing more than to carve out his own fate.
As he gets his last drink in at Serena, Kiryu throws on a gray suit: it’s not a pure white, but black isn’t particularly fitting either. It’s grounded by a passionate, burning red collared shirt underneath.


> Watchin’ you, I figured out just how important hangin’ on really is.


Soutenbori is similarly drowning in excess, but a level of sophistication comes from the sprawling cabaret scene and laid-back food-focused economy of Osaka. The indulgence of the settings hides the truth: it’s a jail for a Majima in his mid-20s, treated like a toy, and referred to as “Shimano’s project."

Yakuza 4 sets the groundwork for Majima as more than comic relief but establishes him as a broken man using the facade of the Mad Dog to get through to the next day. There’s a certain level of reverence both Majima and the story itself share in regards to the alleged “slayer of 18," Taiga Saejima.

Majima’s arc has a lot of highlights, one of the most prominent being the parallels drawn between a young, recently traumatized Goro and a young girl limited by her psychosomatically triggered blindness. Makoto grounds Majima’s story and forces him to punch above his weight and be shaped into more than just a hitman. The implication in Yakuza 4’s cutscene where he and Saejima prepare to gun down the Ueno Seiwa clan is that this isn’t their first time doing something like this. Saejima himself has done some dirty shit and no way his sworn brother hasn’t tagged along.
Unfortunately, Makoto is frustratingly passive throughout most of the story. She is entirely aware of this, but this self-awareness doesn’t really sway me over to loving her character. It doesn’t help that her big statement of independence is where she foolishly puts her life at risk in front of a cabal of hardened yakuza.

Sagawa is excellent and stands as a checkpoint for Majima to look at as he grows and experiences the storyline. He’s always right around the corner, taunting Majima and being a stick up the guy’s ass. It’s unfortunate that no one else really has the staying power he does consistently throughout the narrative. Lao Gui feels like a last-minute addition that is hamfistedly Majima’s final boss.

Goro Majima’s story is one that pushes the guy into his own twisted way of life – even if he pushes everyone away from him and destroys his ability to be engaged with seriously. As a mad dog, nobody can throw him into a bullshit scheme. No one can trick and deceive him, nobody can pull out weird underhanded tactics, and no one can ever toss him into an alley and gouge out his eye.

Majima is not Kiryu. I wish this could have been further reinforced throughout Zero. This might be a bit of a hot take, but I genuinely wished Majima had taken out Lao Gui with his own two hands. Sera bullshits him with weird excuses like “Makoto wouldn’t want to carry that weight”, knowing full well the girl still resents the Dojima Family deeply and openly expresses a desire for their destruction. Majima’s big poignant moment could have been giving Lao Gui a quick gash to the head with a knife, refusing to take orders from anyone he doesn’t feel like. Majima didn’t have a Nishiki-type figure to stop him at the moment – Saejima is in jail. I was really hungry for the more unstable, vicious Majima we see in Yakuza 1, and the lack of these moments in the main story make it hard to believe the guy organically transitioned into that older iteration.

While Zero continues this exploration beautifully, its characterization of Majima doesn’t quite strike the balance of moral grayness in his earlier iterations with the more archetypal heroism of past RGG protagonists—he's forced to be a Kiryu-type in substories, side content, and at points in the main story.

The grind of the bubble

Zero is in love with the legacy of the franchise, and as a last-ditch effort to encourage newcomers, it pushes the player into engaging with its side attractions. As this isn’t my first time experiencing the game, it really got on my nerves.

Majima’s Cabaret Club Czar starts off as a fun minigame that espouses traditional Yakuza protagonist beliefs of fair play and fair treatment of women. It takes the awful cabaret hostess minigame from Yakuza 3 and 4 and flips it on its head, making it an enjoyable bite-sized experience you can knock out in 3-minute intervals.

The different women you interact with are really likable and fun to be around. Their presence is made clear through the cabaret “practice” dialogue you go through with them, and the outings like pool, disco, and karaoke feel very emblematic of the era. I think my favorite hostess was Ai.

It follows a very predictable pattern that side content tends to follow in these games in the same vein as Yakuza 5’s racing. You’ve got five big bads that each answer to an even bigger bad, and after beating the shit out of each of them, they join your side. While you can see the progression from a mile, you’d have to be a real cynical person to not get even a grin out of the interactions.

The problem is, like most of 0’s side content, you’re pushed into doing an entire session of the mechanic starting the game out, and if you want to meaningfully level up your skill tree and remove its blockages, you really have to thoroughly and consistently engage with it. CCC is grindy, and if you’re not doing it on the side, you’ll have to just dedicate days of your life to catching up if you want to really level up the game’s styles.

You end it with the Mad Dog awakening, which is less a thematic parallel and more a gesture of fan service.

Looking at Kiryu’s Real Estate Royale, things are a lot worse. While CCC was a minigame that demanded your active attention, Real Estate Royale is entirely passive and expects you to dedicate real life time to it. The subplot with your two coworkers and the Five Kings is a less engaging version of Majima’s. Real estate is far more inflexible to different players’ preferences on how they engage with side content. The expectation is that the user would be tending to real estate on the side between the plots, but not only does this fundamentally break the airtight pacing of the main story, but it’s far too common for players to be too engaged to care for the extraneous bits of a completely disconnected narrative. There’s also an irony in the core mechanic being real estate and accumulating absolute mountains of money that eclipse anything the main story is fighting over.

RER also expects you to accumulate a lot of money through purchases of various properties in the seedy Kamurocho underbelly. If you haven’t figured out the common fan strategy of cheesing Mr. Shakedown and getting multipliers off your collection of money, you’ll have to manage by grinding the real estate mechanic itself, gambling on janken half-naked wrestling games, and hopefully running into a couple Nouveau Riche enemies.

At the end, you’re greeted with the legendary Dragon of Dojima style, but about one-third of its usual speed thanks to Yakuza 0’s heat meter system.

That brings me to combat.

Zero’s combat in some ways tries to clean up the extravagant and incredibly long heat moves and over the top nature of Yakuza 5, the last mainline game with the traditional fist-to-fist brawler combat. The multiple style approach from the samurai spin offs Kenzan and Ishin was implemented here and in theory it’s a great idea. You have different approaches to handling combat scenarios and different flavors of enemy. However, the experience is held back entirely by an asinine decision – tying the heat meter’s increases to an increase in speed. This means if you have an empty heat meter, you’re incredibly slow. This happens quite a bit entering fights after having drained your heat on a previous encounter or boss fight, and it makes it increasingly more difficult to even land a hit in.

The point of Heat is to reward the player for staying on top of combat fundamentals by granting them the ability to pull off high-damage spectacle. It was nailed as early as the first game, but somehow they managed to take a step back in Zero? Like I mentioned above, Dragon of Dojima becomes a completely unviable style in this game simply because of how it’s clearly not designed to be played at .75x speed. The style you busted your ass for isn’t really worth using at any point in the game.

A true love letter

Despite it all, Yakuza 0 is an incredibly competent love letter towards the Yakuza franchise as a whole. Its consistent tone, airtight pacing, and avoidance of over-the-top twists characteristic of this franchise helped push Yakuza into the modestly successful franchise it's currently become in the West. Without this game, me and a lot of other people wouldn’t even know it existed. Zero raised the bar for maturity in the series’ storytelling and the games that would follow took the lessons from Zero to great success.


A compelling narrative about emotions visible and invisible, identity, storytelling, personhood, and the concept of mystery in itself.

I'd love to form a larger beat for beat analysis of its wider themes and mechanics, but the harsh truth is that I just do not enjoy ARG stuff at all. Once it becomes apparent that its required for a good number of endings, I just really get bummed out.

so janky, so good. even on a casual level this is, and has always been, my favourite smash game by FAR, i don't even care if it's hard and i'm bad.

Dude, Where's My Car?
Where's your car dude?
DUDE, where's my car?
Where's your car dude?