This game truly feels like a culmination and celebration of every single Yakuza game to come before it. I can’t express how much I love these characters. Ichiban and Kiryu are, quite simply, the perfect protagonists. Taking a trip down memory lane with Kiryu and seeing all of the people he’s affected throughout his life was such a special experience and had me on the verge of tears multiple times. Ichiban has once again proven how much of an amazing protagonist he is. The Like a Dragon series is in the right hands. As Kiryu said “I'll take on the Yakuza's past. But you... I want you to handle their future.”

I wasn’t as huge on the story in this game compared to Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which felt way more personal. Overall, it had much better pacing and a more compelling villain. Everything else though? Unmatched. The combat in this game is spectacular. It takes what was built previously in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and expands on it tenfold. Simply being able to move opens so many more opportunities for dealing with different enemies. Whether it be combos, weapons, or lineups; it lets you be more tactical with your moves. The amount of jobs to choose from adds even more crazy and outlandish attacks that had me dying when I first used them. I literally cooked these Japanese men in a giant wok and then served them on a plate as a move. What other game is doing this? Also, being able to say “fuck this” and break free of the turn-based shackles as Kiryu with Dragons Resurgence is S-tier.

This series holds a special place in my heart and I know whatever RGG cooks up next is going to absolutely destroy me.

It has Koromaru, therefore it's peak. I haven't played any other versions of Persona 3 so I'm glad I finally got to experience it after all these years.

Loved the story overall, especially the ending.. it was beautiful and left me very satisfied. Everything else was also on par, from the characters, to the voice acting, to the visuals, to the music, to the combat. It's consistently great throughout the entire game. It is also worth mentioning the UI because they most definitely cooked.

I had the most fun in Tartarus, grinding away, searching every corner for chests and fighting EVERY shadow I spot. I tried using all the characters and everyone felt strong which was really nice because I often tend to use the same party members in these types of games. I played 99% of the game with Direct Commands on because the one time I changed it to Act Freely, I didn't like it. Having controls over your party is just convenient, especially with the addition of Theurgy, which is basically your ultimate ability that you charge up over time and does crazy damage, heals your party or sometimes even buff them.

I will be running it back with another playthrough so I can get all of the achievements and I can't wait to go through Tartarus all over again with the SEES squad.

KOROMARUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!

"the sins of the yakuza are mine. and if i have to, i'll take on every last one."

i have spent the past month and a half playing the entire yakuza series. blood, sweat, tears, and hundreds of hours have gone into this journey that slowly rose to the crescendo that is infinite wealth. but now that i'm here, there is a void inside me left by the man whose entire legacy has been built up over the entire series.

it's rare i genuinely get deeply involved into the story of any game or series. these days games just seem to take the same plots and rehash them over and over again and so the idea of a good "story" was kind of lost to me. the story of kiryu is one that managed to slowly consume me as the series progressed, and i struggle to see how they can top what they managed to achieve with infinite wealth. it's not often you keep a main character around across almost 10 games and multiple decades, but they somehow managed to do it.

they connect all the dots between you and your past lives, and it feels like you are forcefully but hesitantly dragged into accepting fate alongside kiryu. the memory links you come across touch on aspects of every game and had me so emotional so many times. at times it felt like the world would fall apart without this man, yet he managed to hold it together every time.

"me? i'll take on the yakuza's past. but you... i want you to handle their future."

it really did feel like this game was kiryu passing the torch to ichiban in hopes of creating a better yakuza world. i didn't know how to feel about this since 7 left me with a weird taste, but over the course of this game i warmed up to the idea of it and like the character that ichiban has turned into, one who can obtain that legendary status.

the same goes for the gameplay; 7 was definitely pretty rough and i'll be the first to say i was not the biggest fan of the jrpg transition. 8 changed my mind completely on that matter; every small thing that annoyed me completely disappeared and was replaced with even more of what i loved. the combat, the jobs, the substories, everything just felt like it meshed together perfectly.

this isn't a game i can coherently explain in a review, it is something you need to experience yourself. play the yakuza series in its entirety. yes, it is going to take you forever to complete, but i promise you it is a peak gaming experience.

i really don't know what i'm going to do next, i don't know what rgg is going to do next, but i do know that whatever it is, i'm here for it.

it made it to my top 5 for a reason.

also i would die for seonhee.

bon voyage.

Amazing game.

As a precursor this is the first fighting game that I’ve seriously played. I’ve played Super Smash Bros casually and I tried start GBFVR albeit only casually button mashing with friends and never cared to look up meta or the nitty gritty, those games didn’t really appeal to me at the time or were just frustrating.



Competitive Scene

GBFVR I started as a brand new player, matching at the lowest rank into players that had 400 games over me on day 1.

Typically, the way I like to learn a game is to play against somebody who I consider slightly better than me, so it makes my learning experience digestible, when you’re against somebody who is leagues better than you, the experience is just a stomp, and I don’t really learn anything and the experience is incredibly demotivating.

In comes Tekken, the game that I’ve long since heard from some of my veteran friends as the hardest fighting game of all time; day 1 I log on and start mashing buttons and the opponent does too, but when I lose, I don’t feel like I got stomped (most of the time). Of course, there were veterans starting at the bottom too, as the ranks needed to distribute properly but it wasn’t much or the distribution felt like it worked pretty good, as I kept queueing up against people who mashed buttons just like me but knew the game a bit better, it wasn’t so demotivating at that time. When I could identify a pattern in a playstyle and made an adjustment it sometimes yielded positive results that affirmed that I could actually grow as a player.

That ends my competitive rant about FG, as Tekken 8 gave me at least a modicum of a window to be able to enjoy the game and grow as a player.



Gameplay

The game itself is very fleshed out, I realize they’ve literally had 8+ iterations of this game over the past 3 decades so if it was bad, I’d actually be pretty disappointed because what the fuck was Harada doing for the last 3 decades besides not implementing good roll back (It’s open source by the way, Harada if you ever read this).

The game feels really good, the movement is amazing, there are hundreds of different ways to defeat opponents, and inputs to attack correspond to L arm, R arm or their leg counterparts which also include unique stances; long story short the game is incredibly in depth despite such a simple concept. You could put in thousands of hours to properly learn a single character. The expression of skill is incredibly satisfying and the hours you put into learning tech/strings will likely convert to more wins in the game itself.

There’s only a few parts of the game that feel like bullshit, but I’d attribute those as being knowledge checks and they’re simply harder for newcomers like myself to deal with.

Actual bullshit is quickly recognized and patched, as there was a balance hotfix after like the first week.

Learning

The replay mode is amazing, many options to show your inputs to see if you’re doing them correctly as well as pop up tips to show what you ought to have done against an opponent that got hits on you. You can ever replay some of those segments to experiment to see what will and will not work.

The move list is pretty intuitive (mostly) and their examples of the combos with the metronome timing is not bad. One thing I wish they did change is to put maybe commas in some places for example a combo that reads like < 2 > might be back+2 THEN forward, but to my yakubian ape cranium that might read as do back and 2 AND forward at the same time like bro what. Other than that, it’s straight forward and if you actually take the time, you can do it.



Music

Not much to say here, it’s pretty good. I’m an outlier when it comes to music taste, and I just listen to the same genres and styles over and over in general so some of the Tekken 8 music activates my neurons but not all. I put the jukebox on random, so I feel like I’m entering a new game every time, so it doesn’t get old.



Customization

What can I say, with all the Monkey D Luffy, Tifa, Drake skins I’ve seen? It’s pretty great, player customizations of characters are hilariously recognizable. They did something right; wish they had more options but its part of what makes the game very fun. I can send my Paul cosplaying as Gon from HxH to beat up Bryan as Hitler. How much better could it get? It’s fortnite levels of universe crossover without the chug jug kids.



NetCode

Only part of the game that’s meh for me, at the bottom right of the screen it tells you how many rollback frames there are but I don’t feel it in game. In fact the rollback feel awful. It’s open source technology, you can do better after 30 years, Harada.



I also would’ve liked more options when it came to matchmaking, not that I don’t have a choice to reject or not it would just be nice to choose to connect to only Ethernet Players and to see their packet loss graph before you enter a game. Often times, I’ll enter a game against a dude with full bars of Wi-Fi, and in game their bar will fluctuate between 1 and 5 and suddenly it’s the worst game possible. I don’t care if I win or lose those, I don’t rematch those type of games; call me unsportsmanlike I don’t care I’m not putting myself through that.



The game is 70 USD or 80 CAD, some people are buying the wrong things, why are they buying Tekken? They need to buy a mf router or new internet, but that’s besides the point and it’s not Harada’s fault.



Performance

I think the game is optimized for Console, which makes sense. My game black screens once every session (while I can still input and hear audio), it also kills my discord. Would like for them to patch this in the future. I’m running a 5900x Ryzen and a 3070 GPU, do I need more? Would be ridiculous if so. Other than that, game mostly runs fine at an almost consistent 60fps.



Overall

Great entry into FGC for newcomers, as mashing early works and it feels immediately gratifying early giving you more incentive, motivation and interest to learn the game as you gradually get stomped and change your ways. The game’s progression is incredibly good at being a model of the dunning Krueger effect.

Start new game and think you know a lot, then quickly realize you know so little.

Would recommend. Not to pussies, though.

Hades was my first experience with any sort of rougelike/rougelite game. To be brief, I think it's a masterpiece on all levels, and a title that could stand the tests of time if it were stacked against games made 20 years down the road.

The long story is that it does everything right.

The art direction? God damn. You could run through the Underworld 1000 times and still notice things about each level that are beautiful. From the trinkets in Zagreus' chambers, to the backgrounds of the stages. Even the gods are created with such care that you can't imagine seeing them any other way. One bit I always came back to way the team's use of color theory. I find it difficult to think of another game that can use such an amalgamation of colors to create such a cohesive setting for a game. It's not often you find so many colors being used while them all complementing each other, especially with how vivid the hues are. Even before the game came out, the studio had a trailer released with some beautiful animation at the forefront. Spencer Wan of Grackle spearheading it with boards and two colossi, Chengxi Huang and Weilin Zhang blessing us with their action-packed animation work. Long before I would ever play the game, its art and world drew me in. I'm only sad I never experienced it sooner.

The characters have their own idiosyncrasies and pull from Greek history is tasteful ways. Apparently all the gods were British too, so that's fun. I never felt like any character was a different version of another. An added layer to this is that you could walk into a chamber and be so excited to be greeted by a certain god, or disappointed with the options of another. The dice-roll of the chambers is fun from both a power-up and character interaction stance.

One more run...one more run...one more run. As I said, I was completely unfamiliar with the rougelike formula before playing Hades. I felt myself going through a rollercoaster of emotions as I obtain ideal power ups for most of my run, then slowly become humbled when the tail-end of my attempt is soiled by the worst boons I've ever seen. Even so, hacking and slashing my way through the underworld never presented a dull moment. The challenge was there as well. I struggled quite a bit at first until I started to fully understand how to combine boons and certain blessings. That's the beauty of the game, though, yeah? Playing it enough to understand what combinations make you more powerful or provide you with the optimal advantage against whatever enemies give you the most trouble. I loved how it eases you into the game and doesn't bombard you with every facet at first. I think that would dissuade many new players. The game is considerably challenging as well. I know that's part of the formula, and escaping the underworld should be no easy feat, but it's hard to recommend Hades to someone who doesn't have the tenacity to stick it out until they understand the mechanics.

I also think the sound effects and music are worth mentioning because they further pull you into each interaction. They range from relaxing harp(?) work to a raging cacophony of guitar shredding. It seems like most of the music gets its backbone from strings, which I found nice. Darren Korb was the lead composer and blew it out of the water. The intro song alone is burned into my eardrums. It's one of the tracks that calls forth all the memories of the game with a single riff.

As was the Labyrinth of Ancient Greece, Hades is a meandering game that forces the player to battle the powers of gods, heroes of old, and many other wretches of myth along the way. It's a game I'd have no problem replaying down the line, and I'm deeply excited for its sequel.

Hollow Knight is one of the greatest metroidvanias of all-time. Getting lost in this beautiful world and slowly unravelling the mysteries of Hallownest’s past made me want to never stop exploring. The score and art really elevate the beauty of this game. From the dreary and terrifying depths, to the melancholic and pensive city of tears; each and every area has its own unique and different feel. Finding a new ability or charm is always around the corner and by the end of the game you feel like an absolute beast. Everything from the movement to the combat is so buttery smooth and it makes fighting the endless supply of amazing bosses such a blast. Once you figure out their patterns it’s like an elegant dance between the two of you. This game is incredible and I cannot rave about this game enough. The fact that this game was made by THREE people is beyond impressive. Play this game.

Silksong, I don’t know if you even exist, but I am ready.

What a beautiful game from start to finish! It's been over a week since I finished it and it took me about 90 hours to do so. This is just one of those games where you'll just be staring at your screen for hours after you complete it because you simply can't process the absolute masterpiece you just played. I genuinely think it's that good which is why I put it in my top 5, not sure when I'll get that feeling again after beating a game but it won't be any time soon...

It's been years since my Yakuza: Like a Dragon playthrough but luckily my friend recently played it so I have a fresh memory of the combat from that game and all I can say is that Infinite Wealth takes it to a whole other level. Simply being able to move around in a circle literally changes everything because now you can easily go for back attacks, combo attacks with your party members, hit an enemy into more enemies for additional damage, proximity attacks if you're close enough and finally you can use the environment to your advantage to grab items to attack with. The new jobs are great, I didn't try them all at max potential but the ones I did felt really good.

Infinite Wealth's soundtrack is REALLY good however I do think I prefer Yakuza 7's OST just a little bit more. I also have to bring up the Karaoke track list because it is the best out of any Yakuza/Like a Dragon title. I mean, have you heard "Honolulu City Lights"? That's a certified banger right there.

I don't wanna talk too much about the story, this is something you just have to experience for yourself. Only thing I'll say is that this is without a doubt RGG's best work so make of it as you will.

It's raw, kino, peak fiction, swag, goated with the sauce and life will never be the same. The Yakuza/LAD series will ruin your life and that's why you should join us.

Tekken 8 slaps, it's just that simple. The story mode was awesome even though it was really short, love majority of the soundtrack as well. I've never been hooked to a fighting game before and out of all the ones I've tried, this is the one I've enjoyed the most. It offers a variety of tools to help you improve which is nice because the learning curve is so crazy but they really nailed it for beginners like me. I almost forgot to mention the customization but it is REALLY good, people out here making their characters look like Drake, Leon S. Kennedy, Luffy etc. LOL

Anyway I have to wrap up the review here since I must hit the lab and practice more. Tekken 8 has been an absolute blast so far, hopefully I'll stick with it!