Didn't realise this was on here lol
As someone with ADHD, finding study methods that work for me is virtually impossible, but this did wonders for my kanji skills. As Baxter said, you could do this on paper, but I think it being on the DS tricks my brain into thinking it's a game. Not sure if this is the intended method but what I like to do is jump into the drill section and complete 3-5 passages a day, while also looking up any words I don't know so I can read the full passage. Super quick and simple, and if you can keep up with doing it daily for a while, you will definitely start to feel more confident I think.

Does it have a Double Jump? No.

The Big Catch fucking rocks the presentation so hard. Probably one of my favourite PS1 throwback renditions so far. The collectables are sooo fucking good man, the way they look, the sound. The game also feels incredibly smooth.

However, this game is very demanding with its platforming (at least to a novice platformer like I). I also do not like the open "Bowser's Fury" style world in this. Riding these creatures that control not exactly how you'd want to ski to the platforming islands is really boring in this to me. Just feels like it takes too long. I would probably vastly enjoy this more if it was just level based. I'm kind of getting sick of open world crap.

I did not play Nier: Automata with the intention to dislike it. I wanted to be part of the experience, to have it sweep me off my feet with the brilliant storytelling and soundtrack and deep reflections on the human condition its fans extol. As it turns out, 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong, but 10 million gamers can be.

What an obnoxious fucking game. This is one of the most miserable experiences I've had with something I was actually hyped for. Nier: Automata promises something it can't deliver at every step. Its chameleonic gameplay design desperately wishes to be a definitive experience. It wants to be THE video game. It's a bullet hell shmup one second, a side-scrolling beat 'em up the next, an open-world action RPG a little while later, and it even dips its toes into being a roguelite. This could work, but it requires a very high degree of polish, which Automata simply doesn't have. It very quickly devolves into a button masher, where its bastard controls and aggressively bad targeting system are of no help. Not because it's that hard (on Normal difficulty) but because there is no feeling of achievement as you mash two buttons while keeping one held down. I recalibrated my controller, I restarted my PC, all because I believed there was no way the lock-on system could be this bad. The issue had to be on my end. But it wasn't.

But God knows a game that plays terribly can still win you over if its story is transcendent - Deadly Premonition isn't one of my favourite games for nothing, and that plays like arse. Yet nothing about NieR: Automata disappointed, frustrated and annoyed me more than its story. Even if its fans hadn't spent the last seven years bleating that it was special, I would have been let down. You see, when Pixar does a plot twist like this, it's just Wall-E. When Yoko Taro does it, it's suddenly profound and existentialist and says a lot about our society. It's the kind of plot twist you want to un-know because it's so pissweak, especially after so much of the game is fetch-quest-y; it never thinks to keep stringing you along as good stories do, it wants you to do your chores before you get a crumb of plot. It was the kind of twist I considered at the very start and discarded because there would be no fucking way a story this lauded would end up so trite. Not even in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that with all the acclaim, with all the praise, with all the awards, this is what they actually went with. Gamers really need to become more literate if this game's plot is what passes for incredible.

Right at the very start 2B says emotions aren't allowed, yet she feels like a fucking weirdo when she's the only one behaving properly. The rest of the androids are undermined by their meainingless, charmless anime writing while the robot assistants grow annoying because they try to keep the guise of professionalism up after you've already read through dozens of lines of 'Kyaaa! My date rejected me! Uwaaaa!' It's just not a good plot. I found nobody likeable. 2B has more character in her nighttime job of being a virtual porn star than she does in her actual game.

Even the soundtrack is obnoxious. It wails on and on like it believes its own legend already, but in a game so self-assured yet so bad in actuality, I couldn't expect much more. The graphics are ugly in the manner of high-end mobile phone games, where they're trying to be photorealistic but can't quite manage it so everything is plasticky and sheeny and the environments are more barren than they should be.

I don't think Automata is intentionally this bad, though there are no doubt a few fans out there who think having the world be a cage of invisible walls and narrow tunnels is part of Yoko Taro's unseen brilliance. I just think it's the work of a very inept director with an awfully high opinion of himself - judging off of this game. Because he wears a mask in public and acts quirky, it should follow that he's brilliant. But not everyone is a Salvador Dali. Not everyone is a Hideo Kojima either, much as Druckmann. Suda or Taro want to be. Guys, bring the goods before you start inserting yourself into your games. Otherwise you're not just a bad director, you're a hack.

I'm marking this game as 'Abandoned' because I feel completing only route A doesn't count as beating the game. Yet I can think of more humane forms of torture than playing through it two more times, like being boiled alive or watching High School Musical with the sound on.

It's not that Ridge Racer V is a bad game, it's just that it's not Ridge Racer Type-4. Really, it's almost unfair to compare them. How do you follow up something that so perfectly nails the feel it's trying to evoke, both mechanically and aesthetically?

Ridge Racer V adopts that late 90s/early 2000s futurist vibe, rearranges the grand prix to include time trials and reverse courses as part of its standard progression, and leans in on drifting, and it's fine. Nothing about it plays poorly, though there is a lack of variety in some of the tracks and, personally, I never cared much for the "look" of the early 2000s, so the presentation here carries less weight for me.

The ability to customize the paint job of your cars and swap engines was something I wasn't able to fully explore due to issues with (I assume) my PS2's hard drive, or the software used to read games off of it. Every time I attempted to change my car, the game crashed, so I was forced to play through the entire thing with the same starting vehicle. Between this and my Wii, I'm realizing that hard drives aren't the best way to go about playing these games due to some of the stability issues they cause. Ridge Racer V is pretty cheap on the aftermarket, but... that's probably for a reason. Why would you go for RRV when any system that can play it would also support Ridge Racer 4?

I think that's more or less where I fall on this game. It's good, but I know what my Ridge Racer of choice is, and I don't see RRV doing anything more noteworthy outside the bump in fidelity.

BUT IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?

Get real low, stick your face to the ground, feel the hot pavement stick to your cheek as you watch as the air above it ripples against the asphalt fumes. You know what that is? Summah! Inhale, absorb its power.

The screech of tires, the cool blast of the AC contrasting the hot air licking at your cheek as it wafts through the open driver's side window, cars fading into the distance in your rearview... I wouldn't know what that's like, I used to drive a Sazuki Swift with a busted AC belt, but I'll tell you this: you can only get heat stroke in the Summah! Boiling to death in the slow-and-go is a rite of Summah passage, and road trips to the beach are as Summah as palm trees, boardwalks, and shark attacks. The smell of the Summah is a gas station, so pick up the nozzle and breeeathe it in... Cars are so tied to the season that I make it a point to play at least one racing game every month, but the question is, does Ridge Racer V meet the lofty expectations set by the Summah index scale?

Unfortunately, no. The vibes are all wrong. Sure, many of the tracks are set near the beach, there's palm trees, but we're talking the difference between Summer and Summah here. At 65.5, we have the first game of the 2024 season to not make a passing grade, and per Summah law, I must now go into a tremendous amount of debt buying every copy so that they may be destroyed.

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This is a wonderful RPG that I almost dropped several times a day, and in the end I can say it is the best wuxia title I have personally gotten to experience. The game looks and sounds fantastic, which is impressive given its obviously lower budget. The locales are some of the best I have seen in any HD-2D game and the art style is actually a lot more coherent than even some of the Square titles (or the recently released Eiyuden Chronicles, which falls into a more similar indie category.) This is a really strong option if you're looking for a new RPG to play. This recommendation comes with some deep caveats though, because this game has a veritable spiderweb of divergent paths throughout. The amount of barely signposted alternate sidequests, missable companions, multiple endings and hidden content is overwhelming.

While the main story quest follows a linear progression typical of such a narrative; wherein the protagonist travels the world, cultivates several martial art techniques, and acscends from lowly peasantry to literal godhood; the side content represents a dense web of interlocking stories where nearly every action can have later consequences. Going in blind, it is extremely easy to miss small dialogue cues that will open up entirely new narrative paths. While this can result in an innocuous change like getting different quest rewards, more often than not it can lead you to missing out on the chance to recruit companions. This can take the form of not being able to build the needed affection to recruit them; resigning them to just standing there taunting you with one line of generic NPC dialogue; to them getting murdered offscreen because you progressed too far in the main story quest. Several very important characters arcs are accessible only at certain points of progression, and only through very specific quest progression and dialogue choices can you see them to their true conclusion. And while it stings to miss out on some rare gear or skills because you can't reach 100 affection, this really comes to ahead with the Southern Chronicles DLC, where not having 4 very easily missable companions will summarily lock you out of 4 additional recruitable characters and lock you into a bad ending for the DLC.

The Southern Chronicles is easily the best content in the game, with compelling character writing, awesome locales based on Chinese wetlands, and a twisting plot regarding political intrigue and national self-determination (something that I really enjoy out of Chinese RPGs, which often tackle the subject with gusto in comparison to their milquetoast neoliberal cousins in Japan). But the fact that I started playing this blind and missed out on three characters, because I didn't complete one throwaway sidequest before going where the game told me to go, had serious consequences. It forced me out of a lot of really interesting content. It was frustrating to the point I actually did want to drop it, but the rest of the game's high quality made up for it, and I am unashamed to say I used Cheat Engine to at least grab the healer before the DLC concluded. With the addition of the DLC, NG+ functionality was added anyways, greatly complimenting the core conceit of the game's multiple routes and endings. The opportunity to carry over skill points, manuals, etc. to expedite the grindy earlygame will really encourage players to run through the game multiple times, this time with the benefit of hindsight and voluminous google docs to assist them.

Outside of the issue of signposting progression, Wandering Sword is still a top-caliber game. Players are locked to one of the top martial arts sects, but can consult other NPCs to unlock skills from various other sects. Once you get strong enough, you can just run around the top martial arts schools, beating ("sparring") the elderly masters senseless for all their loot. Being able to rob the "Invincible" and "Supreme" masters blind is such a satisfying barometer of your progression. Along the way you will build a trusty nakama of interesting and varied characters: among them is a female swordfighter looking to train with a sect of solely women; a wheelchair-bound detective who rejects the martial arts; a spurned vagabond who is basically the protagonist of his own story. The side characters are a nice change of pace from some of the more common wuxia tropes - for every character that is typecast into a sort of plastic love interest for the MC (this sort of boring and sexist romance writing is one of Wandering Sword's most glaring narrative faults, but that's the norm in a lot of pop fiction sadly) there's also women in the game who aren't just treated as romantic partners and instead as equal comrades in battle. For the most part (meaning outside of the MC's inner circle of love interests) all the characters are well written with a lot of depth to their personal storylines, and you can have basically all of them in your party all the time once you're able to recruit them. The build variety for each individual character can get pretty staggering, and theres mods to recruit a ton of the NPCs too which elevates the potential teambuilding even higher.

The combat is also a high-point, with the ability to swap between a turn-based tactical RPG style of combat and a real-time mode, both with autoplay capability. I could take my time with the more difficult fights but for longer and more tedious busywork (like fights where you control 10+ units against big enemy hordes) you can set auto and let it run without having to laboriously move all the crappy NPC units. The cultivation system is typical of wuxia power fantasies, allowing you to grow from zero to hero but offers a diversity of combat styles and stats to play around with during the progression. Overall, as someone who loves messing around with builds in party-based RPGs, this game offers some really excellent content to sink your teeth into. For much of the game the combat is also quite strategically dense, until it isn't and you become an overpowered martial arts wizard. But this too offers its own satisfying conclusion and works ludonarratively with the theming of cultivation. It is hardly atypical of these sorts of games, either. For those who want more of a challenge, I have read (and observed) that the extreme mode offers insane challenge from start to finish. But for me, the power fantasy was well-earned- considering I actually dropped this game shortly after release cause I was hitting too many walls in the combat. Coming back, studying the game and learning how to build up my meridians, and watching my team overcome previously insurmountable fights is a nice shot of dopamine.

I think a game as dense and complex as this, where documentation outside of Chinese message boards can be a little hard to come by, presents a daunting challenge to those who are used to RPGs that hold your hand. Wandering Sword really requires a closer study to make meaningful progress in, but you're rewarded with a really well-constructed game that holds up very well against its contemporaries. But if you're a completionist this is like a couple hundred hours worth of content, for sure, with even more DLC likely to come and enhance subsequent runs. Just beware, if you're not very careful and don't save liberally, you're liable to get as pissed off as I did.

Wandering Sword gets a shining recommendation, worthy of its ancestors. Amitabha.

[guy who hasn’t played any adventure games besides Disco Elysium] Hmm...getting a lot of "Disco Elysium" vibes from this...

I think Stasis: Bone Totem is something of a victim of its own fan base. While I try not to let other peoples’ opinions of games influence my own, it’s impossible to fully deny that something getting wall-to-wall praise is going to set my expectations high. I’ve scarcely heard a single bad word said about any aspect of this besides the AI art that it launched with, and that all got patched out. This has a steep enough rating curve to suggest that it’s phenomenal. And while Stasis: Bone Totem is definitely good, I think that’s about all that it manages to be. This isn’t the earth-shaker that was promised. But hell, what is? We can’t all be juggernauts. There’s hardly anything wrong with only being good.

It’s not difficult to see why people love this game as much as they do. It has an interesting world, interesting characters, wonderful audio design, and a truly impressive pre-rendered graphical style on the interactables that hearkens back to old CD-ROM adventure games. I would die for Moses, but he wouldn’t want that for me. The relationship that he develops with Faran is far and away the juiciest piece of meat that the game asks you to sink your teeth into. Calaban is a distant second, though he’s still enjoyable; the irony is that the married couple seem to have the least chemistry out of anyone aboard this abandoned ship. I definitely think that the game tries to lean a bit too hard into crafting arc phrases that get repeated over and over and over again — every character independently thinks to themselves that "all you need to do is blink" for something to change — but there's a charm to it. Again, it's carried hard by Moses. He's a simple bear, but he's got a good soul. There's something deeply upsetting about a childish AI struggling to deal with feelings of loss and grief that it wasn't built to understand that could (and probably should have) carried this entire game by itself. I mostly just wanted everyone else to stop talking because they were taking up valuable screen time that otherwise would have gone to Moses and Faran, who remain two of the greatest homies to ever hang out on the bottom of the ocean floor.

While I liked the dialog, the narration prose gets on my nerves. Olga Moskvina is credited as the sole writer for the environmental descriptions — knowing that she worked on Disco Elysium before Stasis: Bone Totem is nothing short of shocking, seeing how steeply the writing quality has declined from that game to this one. A friend of mine spent several evenings trying to cope with the fact that Michael Kirkbride wrote Immortals of Aveum, and all of the laughter I directed at him has now rocketed back to me at double the velocity. How do you fall off this hard? This fiercely? I was convinced that it was all being written by someone who had never written before, not by a co-writer of one of my favorite pieces of media ever released.

Ten-dollar words are everywhere in every little green blob, covering them like smallpox blisters. So much of the vocabulary here feels almost as though it was destroyed in the editing stage by someone doing right-click thesaurus swaps on every other word. I feel like I'm reading something that was put together solely to flex the author's new English-to-Lovecraft translation program. Even the most boring of objects are "eldritch", or "Stygian", or "noctilucent", or any other archaic-ass word that doesn't quite mean what the writer seems to think they do. An emptied suitcase isn't an empty suitcase, it's "disemboweled". A film on top of water isn't an oily film, but an "odorous waxy complexion". Even when you are looking at something that's meant to be horrifying, the prose mostly just makes me roll my eyes; a cesspit of blood and bodies is described as a "thickening grume-river of congealed blood and matted offal [which] incites bubbles that vomit up distressing fetors of deep decay". Perhaps the worst of the lot is the simple statement that a bench "broadcasts discomfort". Ugh.

A big part of what I liked about Disco Elysium was the fact that it used some remarkably simple prose to convey some very heavy topics. It was as accessible as it was powerful. Similarly, a big part of what I liked about The Devil's Imago was that it knew when to invoke the sublime and when to dial it back; that which was beautiful was described as though it was beautiful, and the mundane was described as mundane. Disco Elysium was broadly simple, and The Devil's Imago was broadly complex, but neither of those works pigeon-holed themselves into being all of one or all of the other. There's nothing wrong with being straightforward as much as there's nothing wrong with being oblique, but when you're garrulously invoking expressions and articulations absent the favorable junction of circumstances by which your inscriptions may abide — that is to say, when you're dropping endless strings of big, fancy words without giving the rest of your writing a chance to breathe — it makes your work look amateurish.

I have to conclude that this is, ultimately, a directorial problem. I know that Olga Moskvina is capable of far better than what's here; I've read her poetry, and I've read her contributions to Disco Elysium. She's capable of some stunningly beautiful prose, and none of her other work falls into the overly-verbose trappings of the environmental descriptions in Stasis: Bone Totem. She writes with rhythm everywhere but here. The original Stasis had a similar problem — provided you consider any of what I've complained about here to be "a problem" — which only furthers my belief that she was encouraged to mangle her writing to make it fit into this universe. It's as if she was told to make it more gross every time she submitted a draft. This is like how potato chips were invented. Fifth tit revision in a row.

It's here that I realize that I've dedicated about six hundred words purely to Olga Moskvina's incidental descriptions and that there are other aspects of the game worth discussing. A decent pivot would be to say that this devolves into being tonally all over the place by the end of the game. Moses and Faran both die at the same time, with Faran succumbing to the loss of his life support, and Moses tearing himself in half to get the rescue suit to his humans. We're treated to a cutscene where Mac cries the Tear of the Goofy Goober over the sound of tinkling piano keys. He then rips the medkit off of the support suit that Moses died to retrieve and triumphantly states "Hmph! Medical kit retrieved!" not even five seconds later. He's back to sighing and rolling his eyes at the Russian ghost in his brain while Charlie lays dying of ancient parasites not ten feet away, so it's good to know that there's nothing so serious as to stop Mac from looking to camera like Office Jim whenever he discovers a new world-shattering revelation. Stone Age island-dwelling molepeople sank to the bottom of the ocean where they founded Latin American Atlantis and are currently preparing to re-invade the surface world, and Mac mostly just seems annoyed by the whole affair. Hell, Mac, I feel you. I can't pretend like this isn't stupid either.

Ultimately, Stasis: Bone Totem is good. I just can't shake the feeling that something is missing. Looking at all of the pieces individually, I feel like this should all work together; you assemble them into a singular work, and it feels like it's less than the sum of of its parts. Maybe that's wrong. It might be that the parts themselves failed to live up to their own potential. In the places where this had every opportunity to be a slam dunk, it instead manages only to drop in a lay-up, and the two points you get from the latter aren't worth the same two points you get from the former. Nobody's ever made a highlight reel worth watching comprised of just finger rolls.

I got the transcendence chip so that my immortal soul can go to the Nexus, sponsored by Walmart.

A few screens into this you come across a hole in the floor. You drop through it by pressing down on the d-pad, and then the right shoulder button very slightly afterwards, not at the same time, slightly afterwards. It was only by overexposure to the AVGN's video on Batman games did I already know how to do this, otherwise I would fumble about with the controller until I would eventually get Brian Smyj to drop down, whom is playing the part of Val Kilmer, who plays the part of Batman who daylights as "Bruce Wayne". If you had played this back in 1995, you would probably have to consult the instruction manual that came with your copy of Batman Forever on Super Nintendo, assuming your parent didn't carelessly throw it out along with the box. The manual actually does detail your moves and how to pull them off adequately, it doesn't make it any less clunky or unintuitive, but it exists. However, this hidden move where you get Brian Smyj to drop through this conspicuous orifice is actually completely unmentioned in the manual, and I even made sure that it wasn't hidden in the warranty or in some character's profile. So in a pre-James Rolfe/GameFAQs era, you're pretty much guaranteed to be lumbering around trying to find out how you're supposed to get down in order to make progress.

That was the SNES game, I would like to talk about the Genesis/MD version now.

The AVGN did not do this version of the game, and there is only one guide on GameFAQs that specifically talks about this version, and it also fails to mention how to do this secret move that is needed very early to make progress. When I got to this part, I attempted to do a combination similar to the SNES version with pretty much every button on my six button controller, including the shoulders on my Retrobit pad despite them essentially just acting like extra C and Z buttons when plugged into an actual Genesis console. For the first time in what seemed like years, I felt obligated to bust out my phone and look up something that didn't have to do with cheat codes or passwords. Keep in mind once again that the manual fails to mention how to do this move, because it's easily the biggest riddle you'll need to solve in Batman Forever for the Sega Genesis/MD. It turns out that you have to HOLD C, and then press down on the d-pad. A very different input from the SNES version, and one that I find hard for anyone to figure out on their own back in 1995 without wasting an hour of boredom on it. Was this incompetence or nefarious design to get kids to waste money calling Acclaim's help hotline? Who knows, maybe Jim Carrey was running the company.

I went two paragraphs talking about the world's greatest detective getting utterly bamboozled by a hole in the floor, but that's honestly the biggest thing I can talk about other than this possibly being the most 1995 game that could ever exist, because you're not gonna find another time in human history where a Batman movie license tie-in is bone grafted with Mortal Kombat moves and inputs. It might be the biggest sellout game to ever exist, combining two of the most overpushed things at the time, all while not being able to have blood, because McDonalds would possibly withdraw on their agreement to sell Batman Forever licensed glassware mugs.

I briefly booted this up for a Geoff Follin tribute stream with some friends of mine for shits and giggles, before I closed it and went to Wolverine on NES. My weekend was full of morbid curiosity of a potential funny-bad game, only to be met with mindlessly boring gameplay where you smack wet noodles with enemies, carelessly shoot your bat dick out at the ceiling to try to find hidden rooms, and jump around trying to see if you can hit any background objects to make explode and drop health items. A hard game that is only hard, because it's an endurance round of buffoonery with no continues or passwords. The NyQuil-laced bank stage ending with a fight against waves of henchmen on top of a small platform where they could easily throw you off to your doom was the final nail in the bat coffin for me, despite me actually clearing that stage and stepping foot into a circus that had the gonads to force a time limit on me. The most fun you would get out of this is dragging a friend along in co-op, and gaslighting them on how easy the controls are and never explaining them, which is something you can already do in Cyborg Justice, an infinitely superior experience. Fuck Goof Troop man, it's all about ruining friendships with Batman Forever.

I would end this with the Nerd's closing line on his review of the game, but I've been beaten to that at least twice on this page, so I'm gonna use a little bit of one from another review he did of a game I actually kinda like.

It sucking fucks, it fucking sucks, it fucking blows, it's a piece of shit....and I don't like it.

in the span of a few years i went from being a teenager who hated tedium in video games regardless of how it served a narrative and also one who thought kingdom hearts was dumb as shit to now being an adult who loves any given method of tedium if used well to serve a narrative and also just a more fully realized person who's more comfortable with herself and interests. this all happening around the same time made it so that a replay of 358/2 days was maybe a perfect storm for getting me to hyperfixate on a series i might not have been very fair to in the past. if somebody tells you that the movie is a better way to experience 358/2 days, they're either a total liar or just not even remotely worth listening to. everyone complaining that the best kingdom hearts story is locked behind tedious game mechanics or whatever should just uhhhh get better at appreciating games as art or something

There are many mysteries in this world. What cosmic force put us here on this planet? How deep does the ocean go? And most importantly: Why do Shenmue fans hype their games up so damn much?

Shenmue is secretly a fusion of 20 Questions and the longest game of Telephone ever conceived. 80% of your time in Shenmue is spent doing two things: walking around and asking random people about your current objective. Rinse and repeat until you get lucky and talk to the correct person, granting you a new thing to ask the whole town about. There is damn near nothing else to do outside of these two things. Buy gachapons, practice punching air in an empty parking lot, play a couple arcade games, or gamble your life savings away at the slot machines. If you're not interested in these meager side activities, then too bad! Ryu's not gonna diverge from his unbreakable circadian rhythm, because you can't go to sleep and move on to the next day until 8:00 PM in-game. Ryu would rather stand motionless in his room, like a statue, than go to bed.

The next 10% is spent on combat. Of the 3D fighters I've dabbled in, I've managed to neglect Virtua Fighter. I'm going to guess that this game plays nothing like it though. It's extremely stiff, inputs feel inconsistent at best, and your worst enemy is the damn camera. You can't control it, nor can you control what enemy Ryo is facing, making the process of picking your fights feel nigh impossible. The game neglects having much combat at all until the last third, at which point it eventually hits you with the 70 Man Battle. This is a 15 minute long ordeal of nothing but fodder enemies, until you hit the very last one, a boss who will most likely kill you and make you experience the monotony again. I speak from experience. On the other hand, I beat Gollum using nothing but the low sweep kick move over and over, and that was pretty funny.

The last 10% is (and final third of the game) is spent on the god damn forklift. If there's one thing I can commend Shenmue on, it's how it perfectly depicts the 9-to-5 wagecuck grindset like nothing else I've ever experienced in a virtual medium. Your first time on the forklift will feel like magic, a sudden shift from your mundane lifestyle. Next morning, you'll even be greeted by the glorious forklift race! And then you start to do your work, and the magic fades, like it was never there to begin with. That's because it never was there, the forklift job is work. You wake up, go to your job, (do the damn race,) work your shift, get off at a time when nearly everywhere is closed, go home, and play Sega Saturn games far past your bedtime. That last sentence describes my personal lifestyle in a way that hits a bit too close to home, but that's how it feels ingame. When I come home from work, I play video games to de-stress and escape the mundanity of real life, but coming home to Shenmue has legitimately kept me trapped in my work mindset. That in itself is one hell of an achievement.

People talk of this game being "revolutionary" back in 1999, and I see where they're coming from. Detailed items you can pick up and observe, a town of NPCs with their own daily routines, voiced dialogue for anyone you can talk to, a full day/night cycle, in-game weather that could match the real-life weather by using an internet connection, the list goes on. It makes for a very impressive tech demo, but it never clicked with me as an engaging video game. Anyways, I can hear the Shenmue fanbase coming to run me down with their forklifts. I'm not certified, so excuse me while I run away from a potential OSHA violation.

This is an interesting sequel. It’s a much MUCH better single player experience, I had a ton of fun, but there are much much less minigames. And that’s odd to me because this one is actually multiplayer, unlike the first. There’s only 4 and while they’re very fun, I had a lot more fun just running in the main world and making friends with pokemon. The ways you make them are way more interesting too, lots more stuff to do. Story was also oddly dark, I liked it. The new playable characters you get are cool but you’ll just mainly use Pikachu and Oshawott. Far and away the best. I’d recommend this just as much as the first if not more, it was super fun.