the first couple hours are awesome but the second the extremely boring real estate/ second cabaret managing minigames get introduced everything goes downhill, at that point in the story the sidequests (by far the best part of the game, worth playing for them alone) suddenly stop appearing as frequently as before and so you start noticing how unalive kamurocho and sotenbori actually are when those aren't around, the same old tale of the videogame cities where you follow dots to give your characters a 1.2% boost in how hard they can punch the exact same two types of enemies. even the regular minigames seem trapped in their boxes without the back and forth from the stories (or the possibility that they might be out there somewhere), spending time at arcades and bars (as i used to in the first chapters every time the plot gave me a moment off) starts turning more unappealing when you realize they are all there is to the place, the old guy playing mahjong in the streets stops being a friendly face and becomes Content.

kamiya is an arcade guy, that's his sensibility, dmc3 and 4 aren't arcades and they don't mesh well with one, here there is a pretty good base for an expressive action game that gets cannibalized by vehicle sections and qtes and a lot of stuff that either limits character expression or is outright annoying in this context, this dumb mixeup now hangs on the shadow of almost all of platinum's work and that's a shame. also this is very unsexy because kamiya is incapable of charm, he tries too hard and he isn't itsuno, nothing here comes even close to the dmc3 dante pizza intro, i won't dream of bayonetta for years to come.

recently there's been a lot of praise for kane and lynch 2's camera (maybe too much), but i'd argue the way these early rockstar games do the exact opposite thing with the player pov is a lot more succesful - the handheld camera in that game may look superficially filmy, but it almost never helps you look at things a certain way, while bully's actively encourages players to throw objects into the frame in interesting combinations. there seems to have been a lot of consideration to stillness and distance, the way it pans and zooms in relation to the npcs and locations is beautiful (the diegetic camera is a delight), it doesn't encourage you to look at the world because there is no reward in doing so, it simply reminds you that the act itself can be something very nice. i think there's a slightly romantic quality to putting that on a game about a kid completing random objectives to get assimilated into a world that hates him.