This is definitely a predecessor to the PS3 onward era Sony Cinematic Game, but whereas those suffer from being overly safe, this suffers from having experimental ideas that haven't really been refined further.
This was midway into the PS2 lifespan, the right stick still hadn't been fully embraced as being only the camera control/aim stick yet, so this game tries to make it the primary method of fighting, similar to Death by Degrees. This style gives lots of control over which direction you attack in, but also limits how much variety your attacks have. The speed you hit the right stick in a direction changes your attack, but this is something hard to actually get used to. Also got my thumb tired quite a bit. There's grabs and countering too. I found that countering often hit enemies just out of reach to continue combos, so that's annoying. I feel that the most obvious way to improve a game like this would be to add mild tracking to attacks. There's shooting segments too, these are pretty basic cause you don't even really aim, you just point the stick in a direction and it auto aims for you to shoot. Targeting enemies and objects is a separate button so that's annoying. There's actually a cover system too but you can only use it for dodging, no aiming from cover. Lots of segments like outrun explosions, stealth, and dodging snipers exist too for quick diversions.
The story is "Hong Kong action movie in video game form" more than anything else. Cory Yuen worked on the choreography of the motion capture. Lots of nods to Jet Li films, like a fight in a room with leaking gas where you have to constantly keep your oxygen up. Even the main menu has a bit of a DVD vibe, the level select screen looks the same way a DVD would make a scene select screen and there's behind the scenes interviews. Jet Li seems so happy to try motion capturing. Costumes you unlock for completing the game are neat

Like plenty of other people, I assume, I decided to try out OTXO after watching Raycevick's video that showered it with praise. Hotline Miami is one of my favorite games, and favorite game series, of all time, so a Hotline Miami inspired game felt right up my alley. I was looking forward to endlessly playing this for months on end if it was as good as Raycevick made it sound. However, while I understand most of the praise being given to this game, I ultimately just can't agree with it. It sacrifices so much of what made Hotline Miami work in service of its roguelike design that it ends up completely losing what made Hotline Miami so special in the first place.

I'll start of by pointing out what I liked about the game. The art style is pretty interesting, it's not the most unique style I've ever seen, but it gives the game a decently firm sense of identity. I also liked the general feel of the game, while I think it misses the mark of what Hotline Miami was aspiring to by quite a lot, it still manages to create a great combat loop, one that I would have loved a lot more if I wasn't constantly thinking about Hotline Miami while I was playing it.

Okay, now to get onto my big problem with the game.

Something that Raycevick forgot to mention (or maybe purposely didn't mention) while he was talking about Hotline Miami in his video was the importance of the quick restart. When you die in Hotline Miami, you just press a single button and you're thrown immeidtlay back in the fray with no loading screen. You just have to start at the beginning of the floor you died on. I firmly believe that this mechanic is the single most important aspect of Hotline Miami; it's what ties everything else together.

Hotline Miami is a game about aggression. reaction, and memorization. You're encouraged to run through the levels as fast as you can, obliterating anyone in front of you with whatever you have on you. And if you die? So what? Hit the restart button and get right back into it! The more you play, the more you'll memorize the layout of the buildings, the paths of the bots, and the reactions those bots will have. Once you get really good at the game, you can just blow through a level without even having to stop. Even those crazy levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number with ridiculously large areas become bearable once you remember death just means a quick restart. You're supposed to be a train going at ridiculously high speeds, and when you get into that conductor seat, there's really nothing else like it.

This is why the game is designed the way it is. Why enemies kill you in one hit, why you kill them in one hit, why enemies don't react to the carnage around them when you're using a silenced gun, and why enemies might not react to you if you're behind an ajar door. Every single thing is designed to make you be as fast and aggressive as possible, and it all starts with that quick restart.

Without that, you just wouldn't have Hotline Miami anymore.

And this is my biggest problem with OTXO.

Since OTXO is a roguelike that forces you to start at the very beginning of the game upon death, the game can't treat death as lightly as Hotline Miami. If the player could just die in one hit and be forced to go back to the beginning, it would be a miserable experience. And so, the game tips the scales in the player's favor in a more explicit manor than Hotline Miami does. It gives you way more health than the enemies, an insta-kill melee attack, and a bullet-time-like ability. And all of these are outside of the roguelike upgrades you can get!

But that's not all! Without the quick restart, the game also can't ask players to memorize layouts or enemy patterns, that would get far too frustrating far too quickly. So, it makes up for that by relying on procedurally generating level layouts, aside from the bosses who seem to all be the same as far as I can tell.

All of these shifts combined result in a game that is basically the exact opposite of Hotline Miami in a painfully frustrating way.

The level design gets so boring and tedious after only a few runs, bullet-time feels like a crutch to overly aid the player, enemies feel random and indistinct, and worst of all, the game doesn't feel fast.

Okay sure, it does feel fast, but not Hotline Miami fast. I'm not charging through these rooms obliterating everything I see as fast as I can for the thrill of it; I'm slowing bashing down doors and killing a few random dudes by going into slow-mo and trying to go quick so I can make more money to buy upgrades that are actually a little useful. Not only does it not feel quite like Hotline Miami, it feels like its in a completely different ballpark.

Also now that I mentioned it, I have to talk about the money system which reward you more money the faster you are. Hotline Miami also had an external reward for going fast, but that was just a high score and ranking system, it only mattered to the people who wanted to get A+ rankings. That way, people who were more timid could still play the game and get through it by doing the bare minimum. But in OTXO if you aren't fast, you're never going to get past the first floor, and that's something I just find aggravating.

There's also a few other issues I have, like how the story tries to be convoluted and unclear like Hotline Miami but fails to understand why Hotline Miami did that, and how you have to spend the money used for upgrades to unlock new weapons and trinkets which I find excessively annoying, but I don't think those complaints are all that important. My big problem is with the game's refusal to understand what made Hotline Miami work all while trying to "enhance" it.

Overall, I don't think OTXO is a bad game, but I don't think its a particularly great game either. It it was trying to be its own thing and had a visual style and gameplay that didn't just invoke Hotline Miami, I might have loved it. But as it is right now, I just can't recommend it to anyone that's coming to it in hopes of getting that same rush they got from playing Hotline Miami for the first time. If you want to play something that invokes the same sense of speed while having unique gameplay, please play Katana Zero instead. Or hell, just download the free community made levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. To me, there's just no real reason to play OTXO if you're a huge Hotline Miami fan like I am, and that's a damn shame.

The soundtrack is really good though.

IMPORTANT TIP: Before you go past that final point of no return, you're gonna want to complete the training sequences for Akiyama, Saejima, and Tanimura. Upon completion of each of these, you'll get a piece of armor. MAKE SURE you equip all three of them on Tanimura before you proceed with the finale. You'll thank me later.

Now that that's out of the way, I thought this was a pretty good game! For the first game in the series to have multiple playable characters, I think they pulled it off well. They're all pretty solid, except for Tanimura who, while still good, had some more annoying moments during his parts of the story than the other three (including what I referred to at the beginning; I just know it would've been terrible if i didn't follow my friends' advice). Also, as everyone else who's played has noticed, enemies grab pretty often in this game for whatever reason. It's nothing to worry about in most situations, but it can lead to some nasty combos in certain encounters, so be warned. Anyways, the story is pretty good too, but the twists do start to get kinda ridiculous. That aside, I think giving Kiryu a more minor role for the first time in order to focus on some new characters was a pretty cool choice, and I liked how their individual stories became more and more interconnected over time. I also felt like the OST was a bit weaker this time around too; still very good overall, but there definitely weren't as many standout tracks for me as there were in, say, Yakuza 0 or Yakuza 3. For all of those issues, though, I still think Yakuza 4 is very much worth playing if you've been enjoying the other games!

also they brought back the fishing minigame from the previous game and it still goes hard holy shit

Above all else this game succeeds on an aesthetic level. Detailed pixel art on 3D backgrounds that have change angles is a late 90s look that not a lot of modern games follow. The character designs are also great, committing to that biomechanical look the original had to move away from.
On the gameplay side, the initial impression is pretty positive, enemies and player alike have no invincibility frames until they hit the floor so you can get into lengthy combos, as can enemies. Unfortunately throwing more enemies at you so they can stunlock you is where most of the difficulty comes in. You can escape this with a burst mechanic straight like Guilty Gear, but the fact that most fights increase the difficulty by piling more enemies on rather than increasing complexity is unfrotunate, I feel the game could've benefited from more enemies/enemies having more abilities. On the defensive side, you get a brief invincibility dash and a SF3 style parry. The dash doesn't function so strongly as other invincible dodges in modern action games so that's nice, some attacks have long enough reach that you'll just dodge into them if you're not careful. The individual zones associated with each boss do feel like they set themselves apart enough that they stand out, as do each of the bosses.

This game is hard to get through. Despite its short length, I could not finish this. The levels start off fine, a little boring, and peak in the middle but they never introduce anything new in them. The game will later on start requiring players to hit pulls on walls and objects in the air but its hard to tell where you are on the y axis to line up these shots. Also, when you are in air, you can't turn 90 degrees to hit some of these angles the game wants you too. A lot of the later levels become more tedious than anything else. I would say its a difficulty thing and difficulty is cool, but it feels unfun here because the control you have is not enough to meet up to the games expectations. A lack of ideas, control and movement options make most levels pretty stale. The boss fights are also miserable. They take WAY too long that it makes me feel like I am playing sonic 4 again. They aren't that mechanically interesting and because these boss fights take place in wide open areas, your only movement options is walk and jump. Visually, the game nails an aesthetic but GOD DAMN is the real game rough to play.