Everything wrong (or right) with Dragon's Dogma 2:

Fashion's Dogma is dead: Under-armor is completely gone (both the chest and legs slot) and so are the gloves. Instead, all you get are a slim number of accessories that you can wear in tandem with your helmet. The cloaks are also unusually large, but their ineffectiveness makes them the most interchangeable slot. The excuse we got was that there would be more armors to choose from, so did we? Hardly, the original game had 68 chest pieces for instance, while this one has 90. But when you include the under-armor, you have 124 pieces to choose from. Now let's include the 70 glove pieces, that's 194 chest options. See what I mean? This game has 68 pieces of the leg armor and the original had 79, when you include under-armor, you have 111. Helmets are comparable in quantity, there's 88 in the original and and 82 here, 97 if you include accessories. Clearly, armor choice is a massive downgrade this time around and it's unjustifiable.

Vocations are disappointing: They just had to restrict this system as well. Is it really okay to only have ten unlockable skills, (plus one mastery skill), when we can't even use two weapons anymore? Especially with so many skills returning, it's a real shame they couldn't come up with more. You only get to unlock 5 augments per class as well; down from six, most of which are useless. Like dealing 5% more damage when hitting a target's vitals or reducing the time it takes to revive a Pawn by 1 second. Not to mention, the game won't even tell you what the values are (that applies to rings as well). The archer is especially affected, since four of the skills require their respective arrow types when they used to require none. You can no longer equip arrows to use on any skill anymore, nor are there status inflicting skills like Invasive Arrow. Mages used to be able to aim their spells and pinpoint a location on the ground, now it's forcibly automatic. When it comes to new classes, trickster makes a jarring addition to the roster because they can't deal any damage. Why isn't this a pawn class? You're going to be much more effective at dealing damage than any pawn. Wayfarer is much worse than the comparable assassin and should have been an opportunity to combine weapons. Instead, you have the ability to switch between two or three vocations, but you only get three ability slots and worse stats. At least the Mystic Spearhand was incredibly unique and fun to play, it's really the only worthwhile addition. I've also got to point out that all the hybrid vocations involve magic, the thief got nothing to mix with.

The gameplay is excellent: Existing skills have been given additional flair and the physics engine will ensure that you can launch your foes straight into the stratosphere. It's very satisfying and fun, especially thanks to the improved AI. Enemies are much more aggressive, have better tracking, quickly gap close, can stunlock you to death, and will chase you to the ends of the earth. They can be genuinely terrifying and you will need your pawns to survive. Going solo is no longer a viable option, especially when most of the classes don't have a basic dodge. Maybe every single hit shouldn't stagger you though, you can only mitigate knockdowns. Most important of all, they fixed leveling stats. They're tied exclusively to your vocation, so there's no overlap. The max level is no longer 200 as well, now it's 999; which would have been cool if there were high level monsters.

The world is epic! Exploration is hollow: It's massive and sprawling, you'll really feel like you're on some sort of grand adventure; but it's landscapes are realistic to a fault; detrimental to the real meat of the game. For instance, every single dungeon is cave and only a handful of them are going to take you a significant amount of time to explore. You're not going to find anything like Bluemoon Tower, the Catacombs, or Watergod's Altar. Puzzles are gone, levers are gone, anything that could have made the locations district is largely missing. You can even see it in their names: "Strange Corridor", "Hidden Cavern", "Forgotten Tunnel" to name a few. Once more, they're not so rewarding either. There are chests absolutely everywhere, but more often than not, you're going to find a wakestone shard or an item you can already buy at the region's blacksmith. There are duplicates of several weapons and armors as well, why? Notable exceptions exist, but they're few and far between. If there were more armor slots to play with, this wouldn't have been a problem. Maybe focus on filling the world with quality content instead of simply making it large, Skyrim was 12 years ago. To make matters worse, enemy variety is about the same as the first game, just spread across a greater distance. If you were hoping for new additions, all you really get are variants of existing ones, slimes, and one-off bosses. Considering an encounter happens about every 15 seconds, it can get pretty exhausting.

Travelling could have been great: The addition of oxcarts is a welcome one, it's so nice to have more options beyond walking and ferrystones. However, the cart moves so slowly that I'm always opting to "doze off", which usually involves an enemy encounter along the way. Problem is, oxcarts are very destructible; I don't even think it's viable to take them without the time skip, because there are so many enemy encounters along the way. The addition of camping is great because you don't have to walk back to an inn whenever night arises. I do think their spread is too generous though, you'll have an easy time finding one when the need arises. Riftstones are everywhere too, so losing a pawn is hardly detrimental. What really bothers me are the portcrystals. Why are there only two naturally occurring ones in the entire game? Here are the places that should have one but don't: Melve, Bakbattahl, Rest Town, Sacred Arbor, Volcanic Island Camp. It's ridiculous, not to mention the non-existence of an eternal ferrystone, which was probably an excuse to fill up chests. Oh, and there's a portcrystal DLC, maybe that's why Bakbattahl doesn't have one.

Questing is better, but the quests aren't good: Quests are no longer tied to stages in the story, so you don't have to worry about automatically failing them. Timed quests will explicitly tell you in the UI, but I'd appreciate having a day counter. Failure was touted as a possibility, but it's not really something to worry about. They're usually started by encounters (you'll run into an NPC or they'll walk up to you) making them feel like a natural occurrence in the world. I appreciate how cryptic they can be, but sometimes the descriptors are unhelpful and you'll have to rely on a pawn's knowledge. Where they falter is in interest, because there aren't any exciting locations to unlock or exclusive rewards. I couldn't tell you a single memorable one, they all felt like a chore.

The plot is dreadful: The main story might just be the laziest I've ever seen in an RPG. It's even more of an afterthought than the first game. All that intrigue and buildup about the false sovran (which is really just a bunch of half-baked stealth missions) is squandered because of some Godsway MacGuffin. Which I thought was just the beginning of the story, turns out it's actually the half-way point. Your search for answers leads you to Bakbattahl, but the actual region is irrelevant to the plot. You'll head to an alter that raises from the sea, but it isn't a dungeon, just a cave with an elevator... Once you reach Moonglint Tower, it's just an elevator again. They seriously couldn't put a single fucking dungeon in this game to save their lives. Once you reach the top, bootleg Jafar accidentally summons the wrong dragon and it ends about the same way as the first game. Only this time, the post-game sucks bigtime. We're talking time limits, zero saves, three main quests, an obsession with the color red, and no dungeons. But don't worry, it's all doable in under 4 hours and the ending is just a hint at future DLC.

I have a very hard time accepting that this was Itsuno's true vision for Dragon's Dogma because it's worse than Dark Arisen. Not only does it fail to adequately improve on the original's shortcomings, in many ways it has doubled down on them. Meanwhile, its best aspects have been stripped away. Yet again, there's a great system buried beneath a pile of trash, only this time they took more pages from Ubisoft instead of lighting the book on fire. It's emblematic of everything wrong with modern gaming and this massive open world trend needs to stop already.

I think its fascinating that theres three dragon's dogma games and being unfinished is their defining trait. Crazy good time but disappointed by the lack of spell variety like the first game, the trickster feels undercooked, and warfarer feels like a band aid last minute fix for a lack of classes they could not ship on time.

I lost 50 hours heavily immersed and the game has had some of my fondest memories playing a game in recent memory, but it is about the same amount of undercooked as the first one. Its a recurring thing I have to say about this game: "This is all pretty good but x problem" or "This feels lacking but it has a lot of potential for expansion later".

The true ending route is truly crazy though, I cannot believe they went somewhere more cowardly devs would defer to a cutscene for a bad end.

The plot sort of stops existing after the first ten hours and it really was funny to see characters i barely interacted with brought in to up the stakes or be part of a readout of "Your best friends 4ever :)"

Y̵a̵k̵u̵z̵a̵ Like A Dragon Mission: “ K̵i̵r̵y̵u̵ Joryu, we need you to save the cancer-riddled children of Sunflower Orphange from the Big Baby Breakdancing Gang! I’ll give you 5,000 Bronze Dragon Points if you can finish them off with this flaming dildo shaped like a copyrighted anime character and livestream it all on Snitch.tv!”

Y̵a̵k̵u̵z̵a̵ Like A Dragon Cutscene: “I’ve survived past the point of death so many times, often in the place of others who meant so much more to me than I could have known in the moment. Only now, as I face my own end, do I understand the true pain of feelings left unsaid. I tried to live without regrets, but the consequences of a life left living are inevitable.”

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Long - though comparatively short by franchise standards - periods of drama wholly contingent on the viewer's pre-existing knowledge of plot and history from Yakuza 0, Yakuza, Yakuza 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6, Judgment and Yakuza: Like A Dragon exist in tandem with tutorials for complex game systems like "using the map" and "doing a kick", highlighting the epic contradictions this saga repeatedly unfolds and upholds upon itself. If you're an insane member of this subcultural phenomenon and have played through all ten games in the series, there is no spiritual need for anything beyond Kiryu's story, but ultimately all the Level-Up Daily Login Bonuses are in service of this game's overarching theme of going through the duties while you watch the exterior world move further away from you and begin to accept life in the interior world built for you by the actions of your past. Either you're new to this and woefully out of your depth (don't worry, Joryu will help you), or you've always known the man who erased his name and are now compelled by brotherly honour to remain with him until the end.

The idea of an extremely unfair edgy RPG has some appeal but I think some of the ways the game is unfair aren't as intended as others. Not a fan of how enemies can only die at the very end of a turn, so even if you have extremely powerful weapons and attack an enemy with a blow that kills it multiple times over, it can still get an extremely debilitating hit off before instantly dying a second after (I'm not talking about the particular undead enemies who are supposed to be able to live after decapitation, just the combat system in general works like this)
The game is a bit unpolished in general, I encountered a (beneficial) bug with the 2nd bed in the game where no matter how many times I failed the coin flip I would never be attacked by an enemy. I would just have to walk a few steps to wear off the adrenaline and I could try again, which essentially allowed it to become my cheap savescum spot. I feel like this warped my experience quite a bit away from the "intended" one. Despite the lack of polish and budget you'll notice my score for the game is above neutral. Despite what the game was working with on a budget level I think it was still pretty effective in creating an extremely oppressive yet engaging atmosphere. I also really liked the limb based targeting system that let you cripple enemies and disable some of the more dangerous attacks, very similar to a system in xenoblade X that I always considered underrated and wished to see in more RPG's. I think the difficulty and ridiculously brutal scenarios your growing party can get put through endeared me to the characters quite a bit, its definitely one of those games where you're constantly thinking about conversations between characters as you go through each room. A solid formula that with much more polish could make for a fantastic game. Will try out the sequel to see if it lives up to the potential.

Pros:
+ the look and general design are absolutely unique
+ the dungeon is huge and more complex than it seems at first
+ ability system is intriguing and affects every element of the game
+ exploration is a constant tug and pull between danger and reward
+ treasures are rare but incredibly useful
+ enemy locations are randomized
+ descend and ascend abilities are fun and can break the game
+ losing all party members does not lead to a complete game over
+ walking speed can be quickly adjusted

Cons:
- the general visual style, animations, and overall presentation are amateurish
- the game loop repeats without change from the first floor to the last
- playtime averages over 30 hours and feels artificially inflated
- exploring each floor in full is necessary but boring and time-consuming
- event numbers on the board seem to follow no discernible logic
- the number of useful abilities far outweighs the available slots
- user interface is ugly and badly designed
- combat mechanics are shallow and tedious
- characters have no personality and cannot be customized
- equipment cannot be changed mid-combat
- party strength is highly dependent on random enemy drops
- there is no no narrative beyond the barebones title card
- random number weapons turn fights into dice throwing competitions
- shop inventory is linked to party levels instead of floor progress
- music mostly consists of lazy versions of classical pieces
- hard rock combat theme in particular gets annoying fast
- even with the upgrade, the perspective is limiting and cannot be zoomed
- wanderer compass ability is necessary but frustrating to use
- losing and retrieving a party is terribly annoying
- a wandering, lost party is practically impossible to find
- optional characters can break the entire game
- enemies and traps can put you deeply into debt without warning


Playtime: Abandoned after 12 hours, with most floors uncovered, most characters collected and 46,000 tiles explored. Final boss found and fought but not beaten. -20,000 coins in debt because ... why not?

Blagic Moments: Using a weapon with randomized damage output for the first time and realizing that the damage number is indeed completely randomized, turning battles into endless dice throws. Losing a battle and having to retrieve it with level 1 characters for no apparent reason at all. Stepping on a trap that you have never seen before and going into debt for the rest of the game.

Magic Moment: Finally turning off the terrible sound to enjoy the game a tiny bit more.


Verdict:
Dungeon Encounters portrays itself as a modern take on classical RPG virtues that distills genre tropes down to the bare necessities, opting to focus on the strength of its the mechanics over the contemporary rat race of higher and higher production values. However, only a few hours in, the issue with this unique approach quickly becomes apparent: Exploring the same, grid-based maps over and over again gets grating fast, and the combat quickly amounts to little more than two spread sheets throwing dice with thousands of sides at each other.

Losing or winning a fight more often than not amounts to pure luck after the first third of the game, and certain enemy constellation can quickly lead to a party wipe even after copious amounts of grinding. One lost fight makes it necessary to retrieve the party with level 1 characters that can be lost even more quickly on the same boring maps. This combination of tedious exploration and unfair combat situations is the core design that the entire game is built around: by floor 20 or so, you will have spent hours repeating the same few actions without much of a reason to repeat them for 80 more floors due to the lack of a narrative or any other engaging elements. With this severe lack of dramatic heft, the game reveals itself to be a wholly superfluous time sink that offers nothing but hundreds of confrontations of still pictures, until the credits finally roll.

Skip this game if you value your time and play one of the classic progenitors of the genre instead if you value mechanics over presentation.

Hey, do you remember Jet Set Radio Future?

The folks at Team Reptile certainly do, that's for sure. The concept of "fine, we'll make our own -ABANDONED GAME FRANCHISE-, with blackjack, and hookers!" is a very risky proposition. Sometimes the new game can surpass its inspirations (Stardew Valley), and sometimes it falls flat on its fuckin' arse (Mighty No. 9). It's a fragile balancing act, as you want the new game to be reminiscent of the original, without being a carbon-copy ripoff. It should add some new mechanics or twists on the familiar formula, but not so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, impressively, manages to contain the worst of both worlds.

In many respects, it's creatively bankrupt. Almost every area I entered resulted in me muttering, "oh, cmon..." because they're instantly recognizable as "we have JSRF at home." Versum Hill is Dogenzaka Hill, Brink Terminal is Shibuya Terminal, Mataan is a combination of Highway Zero and Benten-Cho, etc. Even your gang's hideout is damn near identical to the hideout in JSRF. However, these areas also look significantly worse than JSRF's due to how sparsely populated they are. They're far less dense to begin with, but also suffer from a bizarrely short draw distance that makes them look even worse. Sure, you can see a few people scattered around, often in cute little diorama-esque poses that reminded me of Katamari Damacy, but you can only see them when you get within like 20 feet of them. This feeling of lifelessness is made even worse by the lack of voice acting. Most of the characters have short "yeah." or "uhh" clips when they talk, and that's fine, but the absence of DJ Professor K type figure is very apparent. You get cutscenes introducing gangs or saying what's happening in the city, like the ones he would narrate, but with no voice they all fall flat.

On the flipside, everything new here actively makes the game worse. Instead of solely inline skates, you can traverse via skateboard or BMX. In general gameplay, this makes absolutely no difference. All 3 handle the same, and their only purpose is to get you into certain areas that require one of the three. This just means going back to one of the very sparingly-placed spots where you can switch characters (not marked on the map, by the way, and neither are fast-travel points) and backtracking over there, because sliding on skates can break glass floors, skateboards can grind on little fire hydrant things to raise them, and bikes can... open doors by standing in front of them. None of this is ever explained in-game, by the way. I think I was 90% done before I was aware of the skateboard thing.

Another major change is the graffiti system. Rather than being presented with motions you have to complete to throw up tags, you just do whatever you want. The motions you make determine what tag appears, but it's entirely cosmetic except for one achievement that requires unique tags in a level. That achievement is also bugged, by the way. Anyway, this also removes pretty much the only source of challenge that was present in JSRF. Spraying was The Game, and collecting paint cans so you would have enough when you reached the tag spot was pretty much the entire point. Now you have unlimited paint. You can paint the same spot over and over if you want. Who cares. Technically, it is possible to fail the tagging minigame, as there is a meter in the bottom left that depletes during it, but it's so slow that it's never going to happen. After all, for the aforementioned reason, you can just waggle the stick around with wild abandon and it makes absolutely no difference.

But hey, maybe they made tagging completely braindead because they had the INCREDIBLE idea to make cops even more annoying than they were in the games they're ripping off! And, even better, they added combat!!! For real, whoever came up with this idea is going in The Contraption and I will feel no remorse. Your character just kinda does some breakdance moves in the cops' general vicinity and then they get knocked away. There's zero sense of impact. You can hit them, jump, and do a tag minigame to, I think, do more damage to them, but it doesn't matter. You're better off simply ignoring them, because once the cops have showed up, they're not leaving. Pretty much every tag you do will raise your heat meter another level, accompanied by a cutscene showing you the Tools of the State coming to kill your ass and plant fentanyl on your corpse. You can clear your heat by going into a port-a-potty (guess what: not marked on the map!) but if you haven't finished an area it's pretty pointless because they're going to be on you again immediately.

But okay. Time for the positives: there are a couple of areas that I think Team Reptile did a good job. The character designs, when they're not aping JSRF yet again (Bel is Gum, Rave is Garam, etc), are pretty good. The story is decent, and I particularly liked the dream sequences. They're platforming levels in a surreal floating environment in the middle of a swirly void, echoing the final boss of JSRF. The gangs are another highlight. They're the only place that BRC approaches JSRF, with groups like The Franks (a gang of b-ballin' frankingsteins), Eclipse (hot ladies into astrology), and Demon Theory (guys dressed like oni).

The soundtrack is pretty good, too. There are a couple of tracks I found very annoying (I never want to hear Precious Thing or Hair Dun Nails Dun ever again), and for some reason there is no option to create playlists or mute certain songs, but for the most part it's a great selection.

That's about it! Finally, adding insult to injury, they announced a physical version abouuuut 2 weeks after the "digital-only" release. Normally this would really piss me off, but I guess I'm okay with it because there's no way in hell I'm going to buy this again. I want a Fresh Experience, not warmed-up leftovers. Somehow, Sunset Overdrive remains the most faithful successor to Jet Set Radio. Now, on to Lies of P...