CWs for Arrest of a Stone Buddah: sui*, breaking bones, execution by gun, dismemberment

This is a game that has a very clear vision that I understand and appreciate the aims of. This is a French new wave homage piece that tries to lean into the misery of an armed assassin. The action missions are a plodding mechanical affair where you simply count your bullets and move slowly to succeed in mowing down hundreds of endless dudes in your escape. Between work, you live your day-to-day life in Paris either getting a drink, seeing the woman who passes out like a rock after your fuck, and watching what seems to be the same movie airing 24/7 at a nearby theater.

This game lands the cinematic register of it's touchstones and then drops it. I get exactly what I would get out of the film version of this game, all the way up to it's abrupt and unceremonious conclusion. There is a strong commitment to the duration and plainness of the entire affair, but this is fundamentally not what video games are suited for. To have truly nothing shift over the course of a game double the length of a long film feels like a waste of the medium. I think there's better general system of nothing changing that could have been deployed, a more specific system of violence, or some combination of the two, to land the same misery but in a way which is expansive and suited to the medium. I think Yeo's sense of narrative design is some of the best in the industry for it's willingness to be loose and unceremonious and I really wish there was an iteration of this game that let the ideas here stew instead of rot.

This was the first Atlus game I decided to try out and I had a pretty good time! It’s a really fun monster collector with some fantastic music, an incredibly fun combat system with tons of expression, and some pretty great presentation. Theres just a level of quality here that I appreciate sooo much, you can really tell they polished the 𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗧 out of this game… imma big fan.

Sadly the game isn’t without problems, it gets held back by some 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 bland and underdeveloped characters, visually repetitive locations, and an incredibly uninteresting story. I did have fun in the end regardless of the issues, but I’m really curious to see where they go from here. They definitely have something here, they just need to tighten up the loose ends a bit