When I played Map, I felt much like an ordinary person perceiving the rupture in our material world, until finally spending the rest of my life in a city of giants as a purposeless element. 

When I played Apt. Map, all that human materiality was no longer present, and I felt much like an entity with no sense of mortality, navigating an infinite sea of universes of ideas and conceptual black holes. 

When I played Room Map, all these feelings surfaced but in a different way. Despite moving much like a two-legged being, I was trapped in a room, with nothing but the terror of isolation. So, it is in this that you find your escape, imagining and connecting through the mental worlds of other trapped individuals, much like how we as players did in the previous maps. 

When one is a human being our materiality is well-defined. We control this enormous flesh robot through a thing called a brain, and we segment our world through these principles of life: touch, speech, smell, etc., etc. And when we possess a brain, we use it precisely to imagine things, "what if I could fly?" "what if I were invisible?" "what if I were immortal?" "what if I was that person?" We often get caught up in these thoughts, but we always return to the real world and these concepts. 

Why not rethink all these concepts within a video game? When I played Map, I felt more detached from my physical existence and closer to my soul. As I passed through walls and everything around me grew while I gradually shrank, accompanied by whispers and audiences, this disruption of concepts that the physics of our world presents to us and that we treat as the norm, I felt more "real" than any lifelike RPG simulator video game has ever made me feel.

Map isn't the first video game to evoke this kind of feeling, and it certainly won't be the last, but it's always rewarding to play a video game like this.

i thrust awake in a cold sweat beneath the quiet roof of my sengoku ranch. i remember that the deed is nearly complete - i'm on the brink of the backloggd alignment lock

the panting starts. then the puke; panicking over what i must do. i reflect on what has brought me to this point. the truth sets in

humans are given two choices in the fleeting existence they call life:

1. they rate kichikuou rance with a half star. completion status: abandoned. review roughly reads, "dont let rance fans near children" or, "i feel like a worse person for playing this". these people absolutely rule at parties and you should unconditionally take everything they say completely seriously

2. ten out of ten. reasons enigmatic. their thoughts may be more driven by seemingly sociopathic notions regarding how their life was changed by a fun strategy game with cartoon humor about a guy who does bad shit for women, money and power. there's a good chance these ones aren't getting invited to the aforementioned parties

this is where i forge my path; where i shall walk the road to dawn

...in all seriousness, i'm pretty amazed that something this meticulously detailed came from an eroge company - let alone in 1996. there are so many moving parts and interlinked events that it borders on overwhelming. tons of characters too - many of which you even won't meet because of how structurally dynamic everything is. seemingly whimsical decisions could have lasting consequences, be they positive or negative. it's all so thorough that looking up just about anything in a guide seriously compromises the overall experience

alicesoft's sheer fuck-it-we-ball energy is impossible not to respect here. they crammed every ridiculous idea they had for the series at the time into one sprawling what-if finale and somehow it actually worked. that said, since it's a rough summary for five games that at the time didn't even exist, the narrative feels a little rushed even though it clocks in at 40+ hours. definitely left me wanting a little more from the antagonists and world, but that's what the hundreds of hours worth in sequels is for, i suppose

look - if you think crassness is funny and you've remained skeptical of this series as i have for so long, i'd suggest considering it. if you're on the "i'd never play that shit" side of the spectrum, then you've already made up your mind and that's fine too

if you think this game's bad mechanically, however: skill issue, filtered and so on

here is a pdf that better formats/clarifies the in-game how to play section without any spoilers

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)

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.”

------------------------

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.

+this game basically presents four mini yakuza games with a finale tying everything up, and it's all the better for it. trying to stretch a single plot over 45 hours of story would be a death sentence
+after putting kiryu at the end of y4 with little relevance to the plot, they made sure to put him front and center here, and he's got one of the better stories of the bunch. his loneliness and listlessness as he attempts to provide for haruka and morning glory from afar is a standout arc for him
+the half-step engine upgrade here (that would be used for ishin, 0, kiwami, and fotns following this) is quite good, and makes this one of the better looking ps3 games in my opinion. all the character models look much less like action figures and the level of detail in each city is staggering
+haruka's dance sequences may be my favorite thing in the whole game, with both her main performance minigame and dance battle minigame being the best rhythm games in the series. her story is an unflinching view at the idol industry, and haruka's timid optimism matches her mentor mirei park's bipolar violent/cold streak that hides a yearning for motherhood. haruka also gets briefly kidnapped, and the scene actually feels important and not like lazy filler!
+the princess league competition and japan dome concert are some of the coolest moments in the series. winning feels like a significant accomplishment (esp since losing has lasting consequences), and the performance preceding the final battle serves as a greek chorus richly laying out the thematic underpinnings that encompass kiryu and the villains. truly amazing sequence
+I've always wondered what a game where you're penalized for disobeying the rules of the road would be like, and the kiryu taxi driving sequences nail it. my only complaint is that there's so few missions!
+saejima's hunting sidestory is an interesting and oddly relaxing mode to play in. the area is just large enough to explore without having to commit too much time to it, and hunting larger creatures feels suitably tense without being frustrating
+the improved batting cage minigame feels like its best incarnation, and shinada's sidestory revolving around it shows off the mode rather well
+substories across the board are on par with yakuza 0, if not in wackiness than certainly in quality of writing and difficulty of the prompts. the ones that come to mind immediately are the magical girl idol that akiyama manages for a day, shinada working at the convenience store, haruka having dinner with her vain classmates, and kiryu's acting one (admittedly basically the same as in yakuza 3). substories are also instantly visible on the map, in a major QoL move for the series (one that would be rolled back a bit for later entires)
+the comedy routine minigame is infamous in this version for its difficulty, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the translation and feeling of getting prompts correct. iirc the team that localized the remaster couldn't improve it and instead just added a meter that indicates when to press the button, which definitely could have been used here... also just lowering the score required to pass would have been useful. none of them took me more than a few tries to get right though
+baka mitai appears for the first time here, and I got a real kick out of kiryu crying into his drink over the morning glory shibu inu. the saejima/akiyama versions are lovely as well, the akiyama VA in particular has a great voice!
+the ramen cooking minigame... I had no idea about this one going in and enjoyed it quite a bit. I honestly would play it sometimes just for the hell of it
+getting to play as akiyama in this engine was an absolute godsend. he's like the rush style from 0/kiwami on crack, especially with his new launcher/aerial rave move he gets. shinada is also pretty fun to play, and I like how he can grab in the middle of a combo to deal with guarding enemies
+the two omi captains watase and katsuya are great, especially katsuya who reminds me a bit of mine from yakuza 3. I wish they got more screen time, though katsuya gets plenty of great moments bumping up against dyna-chair during the haruka/akiyama section.
+this game might qualify for the least amount of random deaths in a yakuza game, surprisingly enough. you can tell that they sort of know what people expect tho, given how many close scares they throw in throughout the story
+the stakes are so damn high in this game... it truly feels like a game worthy of its length, roster, and size. it's also the first entry that really reflects on how far the series has come and the unquestionable legend surrounding kiryu and his exploits

-issues I have with the combat in 0/kiwami begin to appear here, though it's still reliant on a lot of mechanics from 3/4. encounter rates are much higher, and the combat feels less click-y than any in the older games (akiyama being the exception ofc).
-saejima's special throw is virtually useless, considering how many ways there are to deal much higher damage without expending heat gauge. special moves in general feel overly situational especially as bosses are virtually immune to all of them
-the bosses in this game aren't exceptional, especially as this game worsens the yakuza 4 problem where the entire game feels like its at an early-game difficulty thanks to how often you must switch between characters. anyone who's gotten to this point in the series will likely feel disappointed tackling these compared to previous entries
-majima is supposedly a pivotal character in this game but is incredibly underutilized. he literally appears once at the end and clears up little of the mystery surrounding the plot even though he supposedly was a major player behind the scenes
-the story as a whole... yakuza 4 is incomprehensible in a way that makes it feel sloppy. this game, on the other hand, is confusing in a different way that makes it feel unfinished. the main villain has flimsy motivations and the explanations given for his actions fail to account for parts of plot given prior (what the hell did shinada's section have to do with anything?). there are multiple unexplained plot threads, and the whole game ends without the usual "things go back to normal" scenes that yakuza games tend to have (though this isn't necessarily a bad thing). the game sort of implies that there was supposed to be a third omi alliance lieutenant vying for the chairman position, but he's only mentioned briefly and dies off-screen. characters in the finale often routinely discover or figure out things they have absolutely no reason to know, with no explanation on how they figured them out
-saejima's section has two chapters where you're stuck in prison, with brief dream sequences in tsukimino to chop up the otherwise linear gameplay. the third chapter is entirely hunting-based in a mountain village, leaving most of his actual action to the fourth chapter. this makes his section feel unnecessarily long, and his interactions with kitakata feel like a dead-end for the plot. as I've implied earlier, the only sections that matter from a plot perspective are kiryu's and haruka/akiyama's
-the drag racing minigame is stiff, which is confusing to me given sega's racing game pedigree. thankfully they're very easy thanks to heat actions you can pull off right before the finish line that make losing nigh impossible. I also was disappointed at how many of the submissions in kiryu's sidestory were text-based, given how fun the actual taxi missions are
-the snowball fight minigame is laughably bad, what a shockingly poor FPS engine. thank god the trophy requirements are very slim for it
-the final boss fight is an infamously stupid twist, and a big difficulty spike as well. it's nowhere near as hard as jingu, but it's odd to have a boss with over 10 health bars and a goddamn healing ability after the previous bosses rarely exceeded 2 bars.
-performance on ps3 is not that great, especially in kamurocho, fukuoka, and kineicho. not really an issue given the remaster however

this game is absolutely an incomparable opus, and in some ways a manifesto on what a yakuza game should be. it's riddled with some of the series' highest highs and some pretty low lows, but as a package it's undeniably a fantastic game that is worth stomaching even the worst entries in the series to reach. it's an absolute monster too, with my playthrough clocking in around 80 hours just to reach the end (though I did the vast majority of the substories and finished every sidestory). this is also where I feel like the characterization began really taking off for this series, with much less of a focus on devising characters to tell a plot, and more on fleshing out the characters and making them appealing. a titan of a game I'm glad to finally have completed.

I'm going to make a proper way better review for this when I put in 100+ more hours and try out more characters other than my disgusting C-Nanaya RPS you until you cry, but in the meantime.

Raw kino goat swag holy fuck does it feel good to play a fighting game with air footsies that are like, ACTUALLY air footsies. Having so much of the screen that you can control overall is almost overwhelming, balanced by how easy it is to really pick up characters and throw their buttons out. Absolutely mental, would play out of a trash can with my pals any day. I've seen the light.

"I Dive." -Dave

The surprise Indie* Hit Of The Year, Dave the Diver is a game that's occupied a strange space for me, as I've seen endless praise for it from vidja insider types but I have seen literally nobody actually talk about it. Maybe I just live under a rock but I heard nowhere near as much talk of this thing compared to something like Pizza Tower or Fear and Hunger, which dwarf this thing in cultural footprint despite apparently being less successful. Surely, something was amiss here.

There wasn't, the game's just a perfectly adequate AAA puppeting the skin of an indie game. The cycle of diving to restaurant managing is fun enough for a time, but after a while too many features creep their way in and I decided to hop off the ride before I knew I'd get bored n overstuffed. Wish the game had a smaller scope, it's definitely trying to do too much at once. I just want a game where you hunt for fish and serve them at a restaurant, I don't wanna do farming and gambling and shit! Dave's got too much dip on his chip!

The real thing that sinks the experience for me is just how soulless everything feels. The pixel art is nice but lacking in any real character or personalty, the dialogue has no wit or charm to it, and the ocean environments are largely vacant and bland. How anyone was convinced this was an actual indie game is beyond me, this has the "buffered and polished down all the edges and gnarly bits that leave the product with nothing to latch onto" vibe that basically all big budget games have now. just in 2D. One of the characters is just a weeaboo trope from 2013. It just ain't got no sauce to it!

If the last half-decade has demonstrated anything, it is that the terminally online rhetoric of post-ironic who-gives-a-shit is metastasising. Vine was a benign growth, TikTok a malignant tumour. The netizen-hive-mind-collective that 'solved' the Boston Bombing is directly responsible for the fashwave that is/has/does/will erode democracy. Your grandpa has FOMO and bought $GME to 💎🙌 to the moon and we're all gonna make it, gm, gn, and you're buying into my shitcoin so I can rugpull you because Blizzard nerfed Siphon Life during Obamna's first term. Video games and anime used to be so much better before this forced diversity bullshit ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴜᴄᴋ ᴀʀᴇ yᴏᴜ ꜱᴀyɪɴɢ ᴅᴏ yᴏᴜ ʜᴇᴀʀ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱʜɪᴛ ᴅʀɪʙʙʟɪɴɢ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ yᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴏᴜᴛʜ yᴏᴜ ᴄʀᴇᴛɪɴ took away the possibility of me getting a tradwife with Abigail Shapiro's body and Marin Kitagawa's face while I [REDACTED] to Angela White after a month of semen retention and get those GAIN$$$$ because there's always a bigger fool and it sure as fuck isn't me and you just don't get this new meme and I'm being gangstalked and I haven't [As the owner of a LandNFT, you own your individual Metalverse patch and secure a permanently assigned place on the Met---

The Milennials are the new Boomers [GEN-X ERASURE] and even the Zoomers are coming of age and they've been inundated with information and bullshit bullshit bullshit so they're casting a mirror back at this fucked up world we've made for them in their own art but some people are trying to be cute and coy with it and you get a YIIK or a Neon White but at least one of those was a good game even if it was still corpo-white-washed faux-sthetics. And your cute and coy attempts and being quirky fail to represent how angry you should be that you were born into this mess of a world because don't you know anger results in nothing? Why yes my favourite podcasts are My Brother, My Brother & Me, and The Adventure Zone, I love to choke down the fetid slurry that is the McElroys' toxic positivity of no bummers and horses and you're being force fed advertisements for fast food and you can't even open your eyes to realise it.

So when a game has the moxie to be viscerally angry, I have to take notice because that feels so genuine in the hyperrealistic world we inhabit. And Splatter is mad that the Internet has made us manipulative, lonely, nostalgic, deluded, greedy, and ultimately willing to harm others (or ourselves) for some gain, be it financial or spiritual or egotistical or chemical. This works where other games borne of the online mindset falter because this runs deep. Rat King Collective didn't disconnect to craft up some malformed half-simulacra that is outdated before it comes out. They never stopped being online, they didn't go for the here and now, they struck at the core of fourteen-year-old-me's identity. This isn't the cream of the crap, this is the dregs of a multitude of online cultures that you, yes, had to be there for. Or maybe you didn't. Does it matter? This goes deep enough that a missed referential quip refuses a reading of "oh this is one of those internet things I don't get," it simply recedes into the background, a cacophony of noise.

It isn't as if the gameplay is some marvel though. It's a spongy xoomer-shooter affair with hand guns and a Dark Souls Borne Ring dodge and commitment to the bit. A leaping enemy is gonna leap! Your dodge isn't going to give you i-frames but it'll get you out of the way and into a new harm's way. I'm not here for the gameplay anyways, it's a means to an end.

This is the video game equivalent of B.R. Yeager's Amygdalatropolis and I ravenously ate it up. Get mad. Wreck shit. Tear it all down. WORLD IS A FUCK

The lack of confidence saddens me. Good times were had, even great at some points, but always with the feeling that the game had to be weird with its gameplay usage for the sake of it. Since some of it was expected coming from Zeroranger, the devs went full on mystery mode and... well. Its mysticism falls flat due to its own expectations.

You can rest now Cif, you don't need to keep up with anyone's expectations. Not even on your own! That's why it saddens me, the game shares the same issues as this small bug. You are already an interesting challenge! Don't need to ask constantly "Are you being surprised? Are you liking it? Did I live to your expectations?"

Maybe it's true that the devil is in love with god.

I appreciate your existence and I pray for you.

Like a AAA indie honestly: All the content, production value and visual density of a big box game into a gameplay system that isn't 'western action rpg for jocknerd deadbeats'

Hades' universe and characters are great - if nothing else, the reason to play this. It's that eloquently-but-scathingly spoken brand of family drama that makes tales of foolhearty Gods so fun but depressing. The voice direction is superb - downright chilling in how smooth and airy the delivery is, and just how much recorded VA there is. Zagreus is a protagonist you can't help but root for, and his encounters with the well-meaning-but-emotionally-aloof Olympians is great setdressing to an equally-effective bad dad conflict.

The most surprising part of combat is how well the roguelike systems are handled - narratively AND mechanically. All your perks have meaningful boosts to your longterm strategy instead of feeling like a dripfeed and contextless percentages. It's the first time I played something of this caliber and felt the randomization was an intrinsic part of its identity instead of a binding for marketing and corner-cutting. You get a blessing from the Gods and it's just a new thing you can do for that run - more attack range, more damage, a status effect, none of this '3% poison buff when attacking airborne enemies undamaged' bullshittery (some of it does edge into that territory but the eventual damage payoff always makes up for it or is totally negligible). It's not the ideal I look for in arcade-paced games, but out of the roguelikes I have played, it's maybe one of the best to do it.

I felt less warm about the fundamental combat - specifically enemy design. There's so much visual flourish and the screen is so zoomed out, it's all too common for easily-avoidable hits to be obfuscated from view. Foes have these design quirks I don't like with how their animations wind-up and release; everything's a little too slow or too fast to deal with. The enemies in Elysium were the worst, trending closer to gimmicks and irritations than actually building on the game's difficulty. Bosses weren't hot either, as Western games tend to go unfortunately: Too much HP, I don't like how all of them summon backup minions to hide the fact they have so few moves, etc

I love all of the game's weapon types and the insane exploits you can build off their specials. Except the sword. The sword is garbage - which I wouldn't mind if it wasn't the default weapon. Encounters felt very bullet hell-y, where you have to pick a safe pivot point, attack from there, then micro/macro dodge your way to a better position. But the sword adds really average damage and movement momentum that forces you to take risks that don't feel properly rewarded. It's a weapon type built for a fluid, proactive combat system, where you can weave between enemies. It didn't click with me like I felt they intended it to. Its boons don't help it much easier; the strongest buffs were geared towards multi-hit attacks or barrages, neither of which the sword has. Even the similarly-melee-focused gauntlets felt like a better damage investment. It's on the box art, man; I wanna use the sword and feel any positive neurons about it.

I don't really know how to capstone this review. It's good shit. I'm late to the party; I assume everyone interested has already played it, but whatever.

Skelly is a dude. I'd get drinks with him, man. Chill guy.

Oh, how deep the rabbit hole goes. Even by the standard of the modern indie puzzle game that is a bit up it's own arse, the depths of Void Stranger's mysteries and secrets are inscruitable and seemingly endless. A full, complete 4-6 hour playthrough of the game where one comes to what seems like a mastery of it's mechanics and rules can also be one that leaves one basically having scratched the surface. I sincerely doubt anyo play of VS will ever see everything it has to offer, and that's kind of amazing. It's an insane strength for the game to have - it really feels like wandering the halls of an abyss you can never really fully see the end of, constantly coming across things that clearly all add up but feel alien and shocking all the same.

It's a game that commands attention. System erasure clearly have a knack for this stuff - amazing music, stark visuals and presentation, huge dedication to tiny moments of unique gamelay, brilliant music - just like Zeroranger, void stranger feels important and major.

In Zeroranger, that presence never really fades. I have a lot of problems with the game, mostly that it's just not a very good shooting game outside of it's major bosses and it ends up feeling a bit too much like cho ren sha x Radiant silvergun fanfiction than it's own thing, but it's relentless pacing, lightness on dialogue and text and exceptional ending sequences pushes it thorugh.

With VS, that presence feels more like a veneer that chips away the more I look.

The real issue is hat I just think the core gameplay is quite poor. I can't say im a sokoban savant but this can't be as good as it gets. I don't think the puzzle structure is that great for one - the difficulty veers absolutely all over the place and gimmicks are largely consigned to their own puzzle "block" - but also I just dont think the core mechanic is very good. The block-sucking staff is neat and occasionally leads to some very creative possibilities but I think more than not it leads to puzzles which are a bit inelegant. You'll spend minutes slowly using the one tedius 3-block technique to cross gaps just to fuck up one input and need to do it again, there's lots of puzzles where the solution feels drawn out even when it's obvious what to do,, and for me at least, i rarely felt accomplished for finding a solution in it. The mechanics are generally the sort of thing that sounds really cool but ultimately ends up more tedius than anythign else.

But maybe the bigger deal is the story. Awesome presentation and framing aside, there's absolute zero meat on the bones which sucks considering it must have 100 times the dialogue of zeroranger, a game who's characters I care a hundred times more about when almost the entirety of their characterisation is in actions and funny cute artwork and boss fights and stuff. I was really ready for a more involved, wordy slower story but it feels like a story from a different dev, its just a complete nothingburger. Thanks to it being a puzzle game with wildly varying difficulty too, the razor sharp pacing of ZR is left well behind and you can concievably go for hours without finding anything of note if you're bad enough.

And that's really what weighs on me. As boundless as VS's depths are, the hooks that drag me into that stuff are not there. I'm reminded, if anything, of the Witness - and VS is nowhere near that bad, but there is just an whiff of that kinda pretentiousness coming through here as a result of the story being so weak - which is more on the presentation being so good, granted.

So yes, it is a marvellous, deep rabbit hole, but I kinda just don't care. I really wish i did.

Scott PIlgrim - the iconic beat-em-up revival; the omgzlol gamer reference bonanza; the lost-to-time-for-nostalgia-fomo-profit prodigal son, - is not good!

On single player, anyway.

This is a sucky beat-em-up, but unlike most bad beat-em-ups, I don't think it's because of a lack of developer experience. Most of the time, the weak links in this genre are bad because developers had no interest in designing meaningful mechanics or enemies. It's games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, Altered Beast, Double Dragon and Simpsons that give the medium its unduly reputation as a junkfood button-masher.

Contrarily, Ubi Montreal and select staff had previous beat-em-up experience on GBA Revenge of the Sith: A solid and surprisingly inventive translation of Star Wars' world and rules into a fun, campy run. Being a handheld game, it bears genre modifications catered towards a single-player oriented run. Enemies populate in small numbers and die quickly, but can be individually aggressive and defensive. In turn, Anakin and Obi-Wan's movesets harken moreso to 3D action games, with lots of combination-specific force utilities to apply to different scenarios. There's also more passive differences like stat growth and diminished attack hitboxes. Some of these changes aren't ideal to what people look for in arcade brawlers - and that's fine. But applied to this game's structure and pacing, it fits, bringing few design roadbumps in the way. By all accounts, it's good - and by GBA licensed terms, it's kinda insane.

I bring this up because Scott Pilgrim totally re-uses this game design model - which is fine for its aesthetic elements. Scott PIlgrim has good production, faithfully re-creating the comic's spirit with Paul Robertson's obnoxious-but-fitting pixel chibi style. The trouble is in the 'game'. Scott Pilgrim isn't targeted as a 1-P handheld; it's a 4-P console thing. This leads to a myriad of incompatible mechanics, some being minute oversights while others are total flubs. Everyone has a huge unlockable move pool that amounts to little because enemies block everything and button-mashing is always more optimal damage output. And out of those huge movepools, there's somehow almost no crowd control - fine in RotS's 2-4 enemy waves, but not in 5-10 waves here. Any time you're surrounded on both sides, you're toast. Enemy design overall is too tanky to deal with. If you want to make it through without excess grinding, you gotta block constantly, which just feels like a terrible return on investment in beatemups. It's a killjoy to sit your ass down for 10 seconds, wait for the enemy to whiff often enough, then retaliate with a combo that can't even kill them.

Ironically, bosses were the one consistently good part, since they're usually 1-on-1 and have very readable patterns supported by fun gimmicks. Scott's overwrought, tacky design language is at its most creative here, and the fights actually got me kinda tense. This is clearly where their RotS experience paid off the most - doubly-ironic considering that RotS's bosses use a separate, close-quarters-locked combat structure.

Oh and River City Ransom's RPG shop progression is here in a linear game with dedicated stage setpieces and it feels extremely bad to engage with. Grinding gets old quick and too much important tech is locked behind it. It's fine in RPG's where things are low-key and optimized around contextually-repeated steps, but not in a game where levels have designated point-A-to-point-B design with tons of stage gimmicks between.

But the worst part? Menu-ing through the shops is really awkward and has tons of automated pauses. A single transaction takes like, 10x longer than it should. How.

I'm sure all these points would be mitigated when played with a group, though that introduces a bigger critique: A beat-em-up shouldn't use co-op as a mean's end to balance problems. Friends or not doesn't change the fact that everyone magically has a 3-page Tekken movelist they'll scarcely use, and it certainly doesn't fix enemies dealing 25 damage off of basic combos. I get it's probably too hard to make 1 campaign that suits solo AND co-op evenly - but hey, the good classics figured out how to do it 2 decades ago.

I don't imagine myself replaying this soon - if anything, I'm more curious about re-visitng RotS. What I am looking forward to, though, is when Jenny plays this a million bajillion years from now and gives it 4 stars.

CANNOT hold up on a second playthrough and I understand the reservations people have about its blocky, awkward storytelling, but I think everyone's aim is off. Good narrative in a game doesn't mean 10+ hours of self-serious cut scenes, and should extend to how the 'story' is delivered via play as well. And that's the thing: holy hell does this thing play like blood and pain and laughter all at once. It's not as tight as the first one, but that was a linear corridor of simplistic AI and repetitive beefcake chokeholds — a consciously retro angle on the action genre — where this is an accelerating mess of burned bridges and pointless anger, in short, the ideal sequel whatever way you look at it. The Polygon review is right when it argues this says nothing beyond the standard revenge text (that revenge is empty) and that the first game fit into a time along with Spec Ops and Hotline Miami where reflexively implicating the player in game violence was en vogue. But where that reviewer is happy to dismiss this sequel on those grounds as well as, implicitly, the revenge format in general, a more generous reading of this game is due. Yes, of course, it's dumb, and yes, horrifically violent, and so but great, but let's return to how and why the procedural logic of the game bears on the player, and what this means in terms of level and AI design that in fact works to consciously thwart their sense of being in control over their actions, in short, to keep them in a state of violent panic. Because in this panic, in this blind rage propelled not by thought but by rapidly accumulating mistakes, this is the game, and this feeling of nervous blood and cackling ecstasy and tears summoned not through cutscenes but by play, this is what cannot be achieved in another medium and this is where criticism needs to be directed.