Wow. What a game. In true JRPG fashion it took about 8 hours for me to click with it, but once I did, I was in for the ride.That first chunk is pretty aimless and meandering, but eventually Kasuga himbos himself headfirst back into the plot and it becomes clear what was going on the whole time. And along the way you fight a giant robot vacuum cleaner, go on a date with a ghost, and become an important businessman??

A few major difficulty spikes at certain points frustrated me, but in general I found the combat pretty engaging, especially once I started unlocking skills that were more effective once another character first inflicted a status condition. No JRPG combat system will ever work for me as much as Persona's does, but that sort of got close.

This is the first game in the series I've finished. I had previously tried and bounced off Yakuza 0, but now that I've finished this one and have a better sense of the pacing of this sort of writing, I'm excited to go back and try the rest of the series.

I really loved the first 90% of this. Going through the clips and seeing the mystery slowly reveal itself was immensely satisfying. The 3 movies themselves are also really good, and I wish I could just watch the finished movies as regular films. The acting is great too, with the various layers expertly conveyed, which also makes rewatching clips you've already found rewarding.

I will say that once I had unlocked almost all the clips, finding new ones did become pretty tedious.There was little guidance as to what I should be clicking on to find new things. I also didn't like that the game seemingly blocks you from seeing certain clips by clicking on certain things that are in the scene. For example I noticed many times that I could only access 5 clips or so by clicking on one character despite that character appearing in much more than 5 clips. I suppose this is so the random match cutting mechanic doesn't fully ruin the pacing of the game, but it just made finding new clips towards the end that much more tedious.

Also I ran into a bug at the very end that kept me from seeing the credits and I had to watch the ending on YouTube, which sort of ended my experience on a pretty anticlimactic note.

On balance though, a really special game, and I'd love to see more like it.

This is the first time I've played this all the way through since I was a kid and I gotta say, it holds up shockingly well. There's a ton of polish here that's pretty rare for early-ish 3d games. You can skip cutscenes! In a 90s platformer! It's wild!

The game design is fun and varied, and almost nothing gets boring before you're done and on to the next thing. Some of the Orb tasks are a bit tedious but none are a true slog. I got 100% without trying very hard. I do wish the reward for doing so was more interesting, but I suppose it's the journey and not the destination.

The gameplay bits are great. The story bits are bad, at least until the every end when the writing gets actually pretty good. The last few missions also got a bit too hard for my taste, each level got to be just slightly too long. The very last one blew me away though and honestly saved the back half of the game for me.

Also, I really wish this would have been on a non-switch console. The load times between restarts were short enough but I would have gotten a lot less frustrated at certain points if they were instant, as on PC. The resolution is also pretty low, but at least the performance was basically perfect through my playthrough.