I'm putting this on Shelved and not Abandoned out of sheer cope.

Damn, I'm fairly torn on this. On one side of the scale, it has a very deep implementation of Pathfinder that warms my heart. I got all the nostalgia fuzzies seeing everything - I spent a huge amount of time playing Pathfinder and it's what I learned to DM on, so I really loved that. Golarion is a fantastic setting as well, and it's really cool to see storytelling take place here with everything I'd only read in handbooks brought to life. I loved that so much.

Unfortunately, while in theory I should be gushing about this game, there's something about it that just does not hook me. The writing is solid, but the characters still somehow feel stale in execution, even when the ideas of the characters are solid. The gameplay system is a treat as well - as I said, I really enjoy this implementation of the ruleset's intricacies, but I can't help but feel that somehow the encounter design is a bit hollow. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just does not click.

Still, I was enjoying myself and found myself sinking deeper and deeper in the game during Act 1, and by the time that finished was ready for the game to dive in and go for it. Then...I was hit with the Crusade system instead, which put a little bit of weight on the opposite end of the scale. I tolerated it in Act 2, but in Act 3 it gets even more robust and combined with everything else outlined above, this bit of friction firmly tipped the negative side of the scale downward, killing most of my interest in coming back. It feels like Owlcat made two separate games and then mashed them together, and it just does not work. I realize there is a mod that pretty much removes the Crusade component, but I think I'm done for now. I'll use that mod as my cope for labeling this as shelved and not abandoned. Maybe someday.

This day has finally come.
That's right -- the day when you and I will meet.

I was always thinking of you,
here with this DS4 controller in my hand.
I never even knew your name
or face until today.

But now I know.
Oh how I love you, Heather.

It's okay that you run funny
with your feet out to the side.
Or that you got killed by a mirror.
Hey, it happens.

You are still a great protagonist.
Your skill rivaling Sekiro,
with a blade as sharp as your snark.
I guess a hair dryer works too, in a pinch.

I knew you'd defeat your competition.
She doesn't even have eyebrows.
Wait, did she really just eat that???

Either way, great job at being cool.
Thanks for letting me play your game.

After all, you and I exist as one.
What I give to you is the same as
what I give to me.

- Stanley Coleman

At first glance, I thought this was more or less budget Hypnospace Outlaw, with the old internet/Geocities inspiration replaced by some amalgamation of Miiverse, Swapnote, and MSN Messenger. That wouldn't be giving enough credit to Videoverse however; instead of focusing on the mystique of the deep web, Videoverse tackles the intricacies of navigating a dying social network tied to increasingly redundant technology and highlights the relationships within. The game forgoes Hypnospace Outlaw's discovery puzzles, and cuts right to the core of interacting with the community itself, instinctively conveying the fragility of maintaining such relationships. You're constantly scouring the same forums over and over for new comments and any changes, trying to decipher exactly what this particular user meant with just one sentence while playing the simulations in your head about how particular responses (or not responding at all) could make their day a little bit better or potentially upset another member due to unintended consequences.

It's a surprisingly gripping experience despite its limitations: sometimes there are certain responses that the game forbids you from picking because you're not "lawful/cocky" enough even if the responses feel more blunt than out of character, and browsing the same posts repeatedly can feel a bit plodding when the trigger to proceed requires you to leave more comments but the system itself can only mark whether a post is left read/unread. Despite that, the payoff makes the occasional tedium worthwhile; marking down "top posts" in a notebook lets you reiterate those statements to others later on, and the game really comes together when you're using small tidbits of wisdom to brighten an online friend's day. If you're looking for an cathartic blast to the past that depicts the ephemerality of online spaces while thoughtfully forcing players to confront the ambiguity of the interactions stemming within, then Videoverse may be just what you're looking for.

The following write-up is divided into two parts: a general overview of Echoes of the Eye in relation to Outer Wilds’ base game, and a more spoiler-heavy breakdown of the execution.

Have you ever had that feeling where upon playing through a remake or sequel of a game, you start to question whether or not you liked the original game to begin with?

I’ve been going through this a lot in 2023. Ys: Memories of Celceta comes to mind first; it took me almost an entire year to finally complete it after beating Ys Seven last fall, because despite carrying over the baseline mechanics, the actual pacing of the game felt noticeably different. Then, I went through a similar feeling in the first few hours of Oxenfree II back in October, and despite the similarities to the original, I quickly shelved it and haven't returned since. Finally, this occurred a third time just a few weeks ago with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, which upon further investigation I found that despite retaining the base structure of the original Blue/Red Rescue team, the remake directly pulled mechanics and inspiration from more recent games in the series, resulting in a system that no longer served its original purpose. Needless to say, it’s a frustrating experience that often requires a lot of scrutiny and soul searching to resolve: did the sequels/remakes change mechanics in ways that felt contrary to the spirit of the originals, or have I just been viewing the originals through rose-tinted glasses this whole time?

This brings us to Echoes of the Eye, my fourth example. In its defense, the cards were already stacked against it; practically every friend I’ve talked to has spoken very positively about how Echoes of the Eye serves as an extension of the base Outer Wilds, and how it greatly enriches the lore of its universe, so it’s hard to see even slight deviations as anything less than a disappointment. Perhaps it is also not entirely fair to lump Echoes of the Eye in with standard sequels and remakes, for Mobius Games was careful to market the DLC as an expansion instead of a separate adventure. I get that this sounds like semantics, but I’d argue that this in itself is representative of Echoes of the Eye’s identity within the game’s scope, or rather, its identity crisis as part of the game’s scope.

In theory, Echoes of the Eye needed to provide an expansion to the game without becoming a “mandatory” part of the experience, since it’s paid DLC released two years after the base game. At the same time though, the expansion also had to fulfill the role of providing a different experience from the base game (otherwise why not just release a free content patch?) while concurrently remaining consistent within the game’s lore and at the very least, capturing the spirit of what made Outer Wilds so compelling. Therein lies the dilemma: how do you make a separate expansion that doesn’t force the player to play the base game prior or coerce/spoil the player in their playthrough of the base game afterwards, while thematically capturing the design philosophy of a game that to me, felt complete?

I realize that it is difficult to discuss the topic at hand without at least explaining how the base game plays into this, so here is my brief (and admittingly, watered-down) summary since I sincerely believe that saying any more would lessen the individual experience. Outer Wilds, to me, is a game about pure discovery. It’s about struggling through life and death, time after time, making sense of something that is so much bigger than you to where it is almost unfathomable to conceptualize. At its core, the mechanics seem fairly simple and concrete; you’ve got a base set of tools and controls that never need to evolve, because much of the game is dictated by the individual circumstances around you in exploiting the set rules of the planetary system to progress further. Internalizing Outer Wilds’ baseline structure and governing mechanics and making the connections between discoveries and mysteries is every bit as key as the execution itself, and as a result, what seems to be this astronomical conundrum stemming from this vast universe becomes seemingly more manageable with each new revelation until the player puts all the pieces together to bring the tale to its close.

Unfortunately, this is not how Echoes of the Eye operates whatsoever.

Spoilers for both base Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye will be covered beyond this point.

BeachEpisode brings up a fundamental point in their review that I'd like to expand upon: despite separate planets and areas in Outer Wilds operating under different conditions, the universe nevertheless remains mechanically consistent because at their core, the same set of underlying systems and mechanics never changes. For example, once you learn the three rules of quantum mechanics in base Outer Wilds, you can exploit these same rules regardless of what planet you are on to manipulate quantum objects; capturing a moving quantum object with a photograph will always work on said quantum object regardless of what the quantum object is or the system it exists within. As a result, Outer Wilds also has the benefit of not having a set progression path. I like to imagine the game as a vast series of tunnels intersecting one another at various junctions; it’s super easy to jump back and forth between systems at one’s own will with no negative consequences whatsoever, and regardless of the starting point or route taken, anyone can play through the game and discover all of the content, inevitably coming to the same conclusions.

Meanwhile, Echoes of the Eye takes place almost entirely in one location, dubbed “The Stranger.” My best guess is that Mobius Games chose to isolate and contain all of the expansion’s content in one hub as to prevent players from accidentally stumbling upon the DLC’s side story, though it is still theoretically possible to unintentionally discover the strange black void in the sky without ever following the intended path of following radio tower interference to lead into the expansion, much like I did in my own base game playthrough. Already, you can see the conceptual conflicts; the player isn’t going to know that the Stranger is separate from the base game’s ending until they check their ship logs specifically demarcating the DLC from the base game, but the more troubling issue is the artificiality of creating an intended path with only one real trigger/clue for the Stranger. Either way, it puts the presence of the DLC in an awkward place.

Furthermore, centralizing the DLC around one set location makes exploration in the expansion much more deliberate. This doesn’t inherently sound like a negative at first, but again, consider this in relation to the base game. As implied above, one understated strength is that clues are spread across the entire system and can often be linked to other outlying clues in completely different locations, which encourages the player to more thoroughly explore around the planetary system while lessening burnout from getting walled by the same mysteries in certain locations. The player can simply switch tasks yet continually progress despite doing so. What makes this particularly grating when translated to Echoes of the Eye is that despite all the DLC content being present in the Stranger, the game is still completely connected to the base game and thus will always spawn you back at Timber Hearth even if you die/lapse within the DLC. It makes complete sense for the game to utilize Timber Hearth as a respawn in the base game, but it presents a real lack of quality-of-life issue during an Echoes of the Eye run when the player has to fly back to the Stranger over and over again during the beginning of each time loop, making death feel far more punishing.

This disconnect from the main planetary system becomes even more apparent thanks to the game’s baseline mechanics feeling very underutilized in the exploration of the Stranger. For instance, the Signalscope (used to detect radio wave sources) isn’t used a single time. The aforementioned quantum mechanic laws are also absent, most likely because knowledge of such laws would require you to have played the base game. The ship’s log, used for keeping track of rumors and connecting locations, does at least take note of discoveries in the Stranger, but its presence feels minimal because there’s no space travel involved once you’ve docked in the Stranger’s hangar and actively going back to the docked hangar to check rumors in the middle of runs becomes a huge commitment when considering the one-directional flowing river in the way. Even the time loop itself becomes a detriment. In the base game, the time loop simply makes environments different to navigate, rather than strictly more difficult; for example, Brittle Hollow slowly falls apart over time into a black hole, while the Ash and Ember twins swap sand volumes like an hourglass. That’s not really the case for Echoes of the Eye: the main event dictated by the time loop is the destruction of dam causing the river to overflow, which aside from a couple of key differences from extinguishing some campfire flames, mostly just makes the river more difficult to navigate by flooding the environment with stronger currents.

Here's where another key wrinkle comes into play: the player is unable to translate the alien language of the Stranger’s inhabitants (for reasons I can’t completely explain due to excess spoilers but thematically fit into the series’ lore), and as such, most of the Stranger’s narrative is told via slides that are manually viewed from a projector. I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, the art is beautifully drawn to quickly explain concepts and lore. On the other hand, this is indicative of Echoes of the Eye’s progression feeling fairly linear; the loop then becomes exploring around areas to find reels that hint you upon how to explore other areas for more reels, and instead of making the discoveries for yourself, the gameplay becomes an elaborate exercise of just following illustrated instructions really well. At least the base game left plenty of ambiguity from other forms of given context clues (such as Nomai translations and character dialogue) creating vague hints of what to follow up upon, but the reels often quite literally display exact solutions of what to do in particular scenarios (i.e. look in this direction during this specific part of the raft path to teleport to a new area), which can leave players feeling like they didn’t need to do much extrapolating and thus rob them of the thrill of discovery. Again, this isn’t necessarily a pressing issue in isolation, but when compared to the open-ended problems that the base game loved to present, Echoes of the Eye’s reels leave something to be desired.

And then, there’s the dream world, which basically exacerbates every issue I’ve described above and adds some more to boot. The separate areas of the dream world eschew many of the governing laws that dictate the base game and the Stranger’s overworlds (so you won’t be able to use your jetpack/flashlight/scout launcher/etc), and instead force the player to adhere to exclusive mechanics present only in the dream world, such as the teleporting hands and the wooden totems that can extinguish/illuminate distant light sources. Much of these areas are enveloped in this blanketing darkness where you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you, unless you make the conscious decision to focus your lantern’s light and slow your movement to a crawl. Navigation of these areas is annoying enough as is, but they become even more troublesome thanks to these roaming owls that upon spotting you in the light, will immediately dash towards you and extinguish your lantern, waking you up and forcing another reentry with more backtracking. Oddly, while the slide reels at least give you the hint on where to go for objectives, they don’t give context regarding the owls, which means that avoiding detection more or less comes down to memorizing their routes via trial and error and shutting off your lantern so you can tip-toe around them in total darkness. At that point, the forced stealth-horror sections fail to spark any enthusiasm; the in-your-face scary monsters aren’t scary anymore when you’re just getting caught over and over trying to sneak past, and the learning curve feels far more punishing than difficult thanks to the time loop cutting your experimentation short before you’ve got to redo the whole shebang and reacquire the lantern/get back to the campfire entry to try again.

I’ve been fairly critical of Echoes of the Eye so far, but I can at least concede that within the DLC, the mechanics feel internally consistent and serve their situations well. The light/dark mechanics used to steer the raft, open doors, and display reels capture the expansion’s theme really well and match the player’s expectations (i.e. you’re shining your flashlight onto poles on the raft to steer, and it makes sense that you’d want to steer in the direction you’re looking in), which led to one particular light puzzle utilizing the scout launcher that I really appreciated. Exploration feels a bit tempered, partially because of the reels often spelling too much out and partially because using the jetpack feels risky when the flowing current can send you careening down the river, but at least the player usually isn’t lost or confused despite often not having the ship’s log within reach.

Sadly, I find it difficult to extend that same courtesy to the dream world. Aside from the tedious forced-stealth, some of the puzzles feel outright unintuitive, while others feel undercooked. For instance, one area requires you to tail hostile owls to figure out the location of a hidden stairway into an archive. However, the game has been instinctively signaling to you this entire time that the owls should be avoided entirely, especially when they can quickly spot and hunt you down as soon as they notice your light source. Why then, does the game expect you to completely invert this learning for one particular puzzle? Similarly, there are several instances in another area where the player is expected to walk between seeming gaps in mid-air using candles to mark invisible bridges. It’s not until you’ve accessed the area’s vault that you find out that those invisible bridges can be spotted all along by placing your lantern on the floor and walking a certain distance away to “reveal” the simulation and display the invisible bridges. Again, it’s a cool concept, but certainly it would have made more sense to learn the exploit before the puzzles instead of presenting it in a reel afterwards like some sort of revelation that’s not quite as useful anymore.

Many of the game’s discrepancies troubled me greatly at this time, so I decided to hunt down a primary source to better understand what was going through the dev team’s minds after completing the game a few hours later. It should then come as no surprise that many of the differences between Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye are a result of the DLC requiring a different design philosophy out of necessity because the base game already existed. Co-designer Alex Beachum describes Echoes of the Eye’s design philosophy in an interview as essentially the reverse approach to base Outer Wilds. While Outer Wilds was designed with story organically arising from gameplay possibilities, Echoes of the Eye had to implement the gameplay with preestablished premises in mind, building locations around the story. This then, explains the rigidity of the game’s overworld progress in phases (find the Stranger -> explore around the river -> explore the dream world -> solve the case) and hints towards why the designers settled upon reels as the solution for explaining lore and guiding players towards the intended routes of discovery.

There’s also evidence which suggests that scope creep was a pressing concern during Echoes of the Eye's development. Beachum mentions during that same interview that there were originally three worlds to be designed within the Stranger: a light world, a dark world, and a dream/simulated world. Originally, the pitch was that the Stranger was to operate on a day-night cycle, and that the big twist was that the light and dark world were really two sides of the same coin, using an elevator to flip you to the other side. The dream world essentially existed as a “matrix” where the ghosts manifesting in the overworld were plugged in. Eventually, this idea had to be greatly simplified when the designers realized it was far too much work to implement all three worlds at once. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting thought experiment considering how these three worlds would operate differently, and perhaps the distinct mechanics present in the dream world would not feel nearly as jarring if it operated as a transition world between the light and dark environments.

Finally, the interview confirmed that as a result of the game’s linearity, the development team had to deliberately scale back certain elements that they feared would lead to accidental findings outright skipping entire sections of the game. Essentially, the designers believed it made no intentional sense for the civilization to store away the “answers” to the security system. Instead, they hoped to make the final revelations of exploiting glitches in the system feel like deliberately timed discoveries. For example, Mobius Games increased the steepness of the angle at which the player has to tilt their camera to place down the lantern, so accidentally finding out about the virtual world from walking away from the lantern became much more difficult.

That more than anything, illustrates what I think is the main point of friction between the base game and Echoes of the Eye. Despite having strict solutions per hand-crafted puzzle, Outer Wilds felt like a game firmly within the player’s control thanks to its open-ended structure. By no means was it focused upon emergent gameplay, but the ability to turn accidental discoveries into tangible threads was nevertheless greatly appreciated and really made me feel like I was doing the brunt of the work. Echoes of the Eye on the other hand, is a game that had to be much more carefully scripted as to not take away from both its internal runtime and the larger overall mystery from which it stemmed from. The fact that Mobius Games had to intentionally limit the available possibilities by removing utility and filled up much of its planned runtime with forced stealth that felt like banging my head against the wall speaks to a much more visible artificiality (quite literally, in this case) present within the deliberately constrained and separated areas of the DLC.

The conclusion at least, brings Echoes of the Eye down to earth. After exploiting the simulation with the glitches that you learned about in the dream world vaults, you finally get to meet the lone survivor and learn more about what happened from their perspective. It’s a shame that the exploits are used exactly once and all at once instead of incrementally throughout explorations of the virtual world, but I can respect an ending that quickly comes to a natural close and serves as a succinct foil to the much more illustrious finale of the base game. The story is not quite complete yet though, because then it becomes time to share your side as the prisoner hands over the vision staff. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that this moment is perhaps the most satisfying catharsis in the entire game’s runtime. Such a simple act as becoming the storyteller yourself, coupled with the developer’s care to alter the specific pictured events depending on what your character has witnessed in the base game prior to opening the vault, really brings the whole piece together. I may have my gripes with the expansion’s conceptualization with respect to the base game, but I am certainly glad that it ended on such a memorable final message that only serves to bolster the sum of its parts.

All things considered, I think that Echoes of the Eye could have been a damn good game if it was entirely self-contained. I did feel that the light-dark mechanics were thoroughly explored within the scope of its environments, and if the game were uncoupled from the base game as to provide simple quality of life updates like a spawn point within the Stranger or a portable version of the ship-log to access at any time, I think the expansion would have been far less frustrating. Hell, if the time loop was removed entirely and I had more time to thoroughly explore the dream world without time constraints, I could definitely see myself attempting to patiently manipulate the AI for a more tense experience rather than simply bum-rushing each forced stealth section. In isolation, I think Echoes of the Eye’s mechanics and overall message are mostly thematically consistent and sound.

Major spoilers end here.

At the end of the day though, that’s exactly the core problem. Outer Wilds is a game about connection. It’s about making sense of subtle clues here and there and linking all the details together to process this overwhelming sensation of confronting something that’s so much more than you could have ever imagined. Echoes of the Eye is supposed to be an expansion that doesn't require prior knowledge of Outer Wilds, yet this linkage to the base game is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Without the base game as a reference point, its final message would not have such lasting impact, but as a result of being an expansion, it’s forever stuck playing second fiddle to something that was already so conceptually realized while feeling drastically different from its already established conventions.

Echoes of the Eye is the best DLC that never needed to exist. That’s simultaneously a knock on the DLC and praise for Outer Wilds itself, as it’s quite difficult to evaluate Echoes of the Eye on its own merits for better or for worse. Perhaps it could have been something more if it didn’t need to live in the shadow of something greater, but what purpose would it have served otherwise? It’s hard to think of any obvious and practical improvements when it feels like conceptually, Mobius Digital may have written themselves into a corner. I'm relieved that my love for the original game was not unfounded, though it's still a bummer at the end of the day that its artistic vision didn't translate too well into its expansion. As such, while I’m glad to have experienced Echoes of the Eye, I’m just as glad to have finally made some sense of this all and have seen this behemoth of modern indie games to its natural conclusion.

Got this for free via PS+ and gave it a few hours, and it was relaxing enough to begin with. Who wouldn't enjoy completely rinsing a car in five minutes with minimal effort? Unfortunately, the game gets real picky as you progress. Having to scour for that last invisible speck of dirt to fully clean a large wall or finding out which one of the sixteen identical wooden trims I had to more thoroughly investigate for every job really wore me out. Also, this might just be my experience playing on PS5 with a controller, but my right hand started aching after a half hour of constantly holding down the right trigger to continuously spray surfaces. Not a great feeling when you need a break from your gaming break!

I’ll confess: I’ve never beaten a single Zelda game in my life. Sure, I grew up a Nintendo kid playing almost nothing but Mario and Pokemon, but for some reason I never really felt enticed to give Nintendo’s most critically acclaimed series a serious shot. I’ve tried out the opening hours of Wind Waker (something that I desperately need to finish one of these days) and have played plenty of scattered hours of Ocarina of Time at a friend’s house, and yet it wasn’t enough considering the series has eluded me until now. So, it felt like a solid challenge to cap off 2023, given my recent run with time loop adventure games… and that poyfuh recommended the game to me over a year ago. It took a while to muster up the commitment, but I finally got there! Feel free to take my readings here with a grain of salt given my lack of nostalgia for Zelda, but hopefully I can bring something different to the table by focusing on what impact it had upon a relative newcomer.

For lack of better words, The Legend of Zelda is an adventure game series. Maybe the adventure game series. Quite a few good friends and users I closely follow have commented about how Zelda is really a mish-mosh of different genres, which in essence forms the adventure game. Innuendo Studios has defined this as “games that tell stories using puzzles,” though this is a very loose definition as both narratives and puzzles take many different forms. Essentially, the genre has become a blanket term that has come to incorporate many different types of games. Zelda, as the platonic encapsulation of adventure games, has as a result, come to include many different types of genre-specific gameplay in one cohesive product. To sum this up, here’s a bit that I’ve jokingly brought up with friends: every game is basically Zelda, because Zelda is basically every game.

What I’m trying to say here, is that Majora’s Mask, much like the rest of Zelda, is not so much about any one single game mechanic so much as the coalescence of them all. No one particular element is going to stand out as exceptional because many games before and after have surpassed them, but the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. Much like how a classic adventure game is a fusion of different game mechanics, Majora’s Mask focuses on the intersection of different narratives and activities to evoke “the adventurer’s spirit.” It’s very easy to be critical of specific mechanics and ideas presented within the game in isolation (and I absolutely will be due to my point of reference), but they nevertheless come together to create a game unlike any other.

I suppose the easiest way to explain the premise of Majora’s Mask is to describe it as a cross between a metroidvania (item/ability gating) and a mystroidvania (knowledge gating). The time loop facilitates both of these aspects: as Link repeats the three-day cycle to gather information regarding Termina’s workings, he also gains new key items (both classic Zelda tools like the Hookshot and masks to wear/transform), learns new songs for his ocarina, and gains access to new areas and allies that can further aid his progress. The pressing issue then, is that Majora’s Mask doesn’t fully lean into the strengths of either genre.

Majora’s Mask feels underwhelming when compared to traditional metroidvanias, because key items feel underutilized. Much of this is due to the lock-and-key nature of the puzzles. Classic Zelda games focused on items with multiple facets via both dealing damage in fights and traversal/exploration: one classic example is the hookshot, which can let Link grapple up towards wooden surfaces/chests while also acting as a ranged weapon capable of pulling items and enemies towards him. However, Majora’s Mask focuses on the collection of masks as the vast majority of key items, and most are used for one exact situation (i.e. Don Gero’s mask lets you talk to frogs) and nothing else. Additionally, the masks aren’t very balanced in terms of utility, as some masks are useless once obtained (i.e. the Troupe Leader’s mask) while some are so conventionally strong that you’ll be constantly relying upon them (i.e. the Bunny Hood increases Link’s running speed and agility, so it’s a godsend for general traversal and boss fights).

On the other hand, Majora’s Mask also feels a little lacking as a mystroidvania, because there’s relatively little observation involved when compared to similar titles. The Bomber’s Notebook is your main tool is your main tool to keep track of everyone’s schedules across the three-day time loop, but it’s a bit limited in scope. There’s only twenty inhabitants recorded with schedules, and of those twenty, at least a fourth of them can be stamped as resolved by simply speaking to them once at the right time with the right item/mask. In fact, there’s only two side-questlines that force Link to commit to strict and specific time limits across the three-day cycle (Kafei and the main Romani Ranch quest). As a result, completing the Bomber’s Notebook is surprisingly straightforward, and usually doesn’t require more than one iteration of the time loop to follow and solve each case, given that Link has the appropriate items on hand when necessary.

That's not to say that the time loop is a net negative in the scope of Majora’s Mask, but rather that in comparison to other time loop games since then, it doesn’t capitalize as much in its execution. For example, there is very little usage of the time loop in regards to its four main dungeons. As Scamsley has pointed out, the presence of a time loop should lend naturally to speedrunning (via both knowledge gating to clear the dungeon faster with skips and ability-gating to use obtained items for shortcuts), but this is more or less made redundant by beating the dungeon’s boss, as the game is content giving you a direct teleport to refight dungeon bosses in subsequent resets instead. Additionally, almost all of the time-sensitive content is located within Clock Town; while it’s quite satisfying figuring out how schedules play out in the main hub, it feels like a squandered opportunity to not include enough specifically timed events elsewhere to fully utilize the three-day cycle. The presence of owl statues throughout the map sort of speaks to this; rather than have the player spend time traversing on foot and potentially stumble upon other time sensitive events, the developers would prefer for players to jump to whatever destinations they had in mind as to avoid wasting time in areas where these time-sensitive quests didn’t exist.

On top of all of this is a general clunkiness that exists between many of the game’s various systems. There’s just enough quality-of-life to where the game feels thoughtful for its time, but also plenty of wasted time here and there that made me wonder if the developers could have gone a little further. The sheer number of key items in the menu is a huge culprit; with only three key item slots accessible at any time (and the ocarina/three transformation masks constantly taking up slots), the player is constantly roaming through the four menu screens to select the appropriate item for each situation, and it’s made worse because most items are used once and then immediately replaced as a stream of inventory puzzles. There’s also a ton of downtime from having to watch the same cutscenes over and over even if you’ve seen them in previous loops, and from being subjected to the same non-skippable Song of Soaring animation every time you teleport to an owl statue. At the very least, you can skip the mask transformations once viewed for the first time. Parsing through the three-day cycle can also be a bit annoying; the Song of Double Time does at least let you skip a full twelve hours ahead to the start of each day/night cycle, but oftentimes the timed events in question begin at midnight or midday, meaning that you’ll have to wait around for a few in-game hours since the Song of Double Time plants you at 6 AM/PM. Finally, I think it’s an interesting idea resetting the player’s rupee and general ammo count (i.e. bombs, arrows, Deku Nuts, etc) with each new loop while allowing the player to farm pre-existing Rupee chests that have been opened in previous cycles. However, while there is a bank that allows the player to store Rupees between loops, there’s no item storage facility to stockpile ammo between loops, meaning that the player will likely spend a few minutes at the start of each loop whacking bushes and enemies for basic resources (or at least eat into the player’s account to buy supplies at shops, if they don’t spend time farming chests for the Rupees instead).

Honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when trying to judge Majora’s Mask against today’s standards of what we consider a “good” adventure game. I do have other scattered complaints, such as boss fights being generally underwhelming (I might have legitimately spent more time fighting dungeon mini-bosses than the four main masked bosses themselves), certain tedious side-games like the RNG-heavy Dampé grave digging or the Goron race with rubber-banding AI, a few overused mini-bosses such as having to fight Wizzrobe six different times, and how outside of the Stone Temple, mask abilities are never satisfyingly blended together in puzzles/quests. The cherry on top of all this is the presence of the Stone Mask, which I’d say is a bit too good since it lets you completely ignore most dungeon enemies. That in itself made me question the quality of that one forced stealth section in Great Bay; if the optimal solution is to wear a mask which lets you outright ignore the entire system, then should it even exist? Even from the perspective of someone who’s never cleared a Zelda game before, I find myself nodding in agreement when others claim that Majora’s Mask shows its age a bit more than Ocarina of Time.

But that’s not really why we play Zelda games, right? Despite the clunkiness of some mechanics and the many areas of potential improvement, many of us are willing to sit through and accept these flaws because the general experience is the selling point. The obvious argument to be made is that while plenty of MM’s mechanics feel undercooked, the actual mechanism of gameplay is constantly shifting about to suit the specific context. In a sense, Majora’s Mask can be viewed as an antecedent to the modern possession game: the basic control scheme remains the same regardless of the mask worn, but the functionality of the basic control scheme differs. This allows the game to stick to a grounded and consistent formula even though Link’s toolkit is constantly evolving on the fly, and while there are occasional moments of jank from certain side-games, most are over in a flash and still contribute positively towards the final goal of gaining enough knowledge and utility to prevent the impending crisis.

Essentially, many of the previously mentioned shortcomings end up inverting in on themselves. While Majora’s Mask has plenty of rough edges due to its rushed development and heavy re-use of assets, it’s these rough edges that lend so much towards its personality. I love how absolutely absurd and deranged the writing becomes, and the adventure game structure lets Majora’s Mask take complete advantage of the situation. One minute you’re tracking down a circus performer so he can spill his life story about joining an animal troupe since humans are also animals, then the next minute you’re fending off these zombie lantern alien ghosts with searchlight eyes so they don’t kidnap your new friend and her cows before the sun rises. The seeming lack of focus with the constant barrage of minigames and side-quests keeps the player constantly guessing what the next twist of events will bring, and the game is more than happy to ask rather than answer questions.

The backing time loop connecting all of these events together is really what drives the message home. Even though it’s absolutely tedious having to watch the same cutscenes over and over again, nothing illustrates the plight of Termina more starkly than forcing players to endlessly relive the day’s events and realizing that they are the only chance this world stands at reaching a new timeline. The ending credits bring such a gratifying emotional rush because the game deliberately withholds any semblance of permanent catharsis until you finally break through. You can’t help everyone in a single time loop, and they will never be free of their troubles until the moon stops falling. Until then, they’ll be hopelessly repeating the same tasks three days at a time, waiting for the dawn of a new day that will never come.

At the end of the day, I could keep finding things to nitpick about Majora’s Mask, but I also can’t imagine the game without these shortcomings since they form an integral part of the game’s identity. The masks might be glorified gimmicks, but they’re fantastic symbolism that are forever carried with you upon your journey even as time is constantly erased, and ultimately strengthen the adventure game aspect by assigning you new tasks to peruse. The time loop might not be fully utilized outside of Clock Town and contain extended gaps of waiting to get to important events, but it’s the forced repetition of the three-day cycle’s events that enforces the gravity of the situation upon the player. Individual characters aside from Skull Kid might not have the fleshed-out backgrounds that I had hoped for, but it’s a non-issue when Majora’s Mask is ultimately the story of Termina itself, formed from the intersecting schedules of all the different characters and elements at play. Separately, I think all of these elements are easily picked apart, but meshed together, they contribute to this pervasive nightmare of abject misery where even in the face of imminent death, fleeting moments of joy and comfort are enough to humanize the fantastical elements of Termina and keep the player moving forward towards a better future.

The story of and surrounding Majora’s Mask fascinates me, especially when learning that director Eiji Aonuma has since expressed regrets regarding its development. I and many others, however, see nothing to be ashamed of with their final product. If anything, Majora’s Mask is classic Nintendo at its core: instead of making a product that was visibly better than its competition, the developers took a chance and sought out to make something that was visibly different. The Wii is often cited as the most prevalent example of this “blue ocean strategy," though I firmly believe that Majora’s Mask was Nintendo’s first notable crack at it. Having to follow-up a game considered by many as the greatest of all time with an even shorter development period was a daunting ask, but as far I’m concerned, they absolutely succeeded. It doesn’t matter that other time loop adventure games have since outclassed their grandfather; there’s simply nothing like Majora’s Mask, and I doubt there ever will be.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.

This fucking game, man.

Here I sit in front of the dim glow of a computer monitor, inebriated, ready to spill my guts over a video game. I will just embrace the cringe and do as the Elden Ring meta dictates and smash that L2 Seppuku.

Playing through the Souls games was a sort-of gaming evolution for me - a transition away from Bioware and Bethesda RPG dominance into widening my perspective. I talked about that in my Dark Souls Remastered review, so if you're interested in more saccharine reflection, it's there. So when Elden Ring was announced and trailers debuted, I thought "holy shit. This is going to be my favorite game of all time."

It's this expectation that has killed me over and over again. I have thought so many times that I loved open world games. I probably put over a thousand hours each into Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. I also love Souls, with over a thousand hours in Dark Souls 3, let alone the series, so it should be the marriage of both things into an epic triumph of everything that I want from a video game. Yet, I remember after finishing Elden Ring for the first time, where this intense excitement and longing had been burning, the shadow of disappointment set in instead. Then followed the guilt.

What a stupid thing to feel - guilt over not liking a video game as much as I expected, and yet it destroyed me all the same. So I parsed out my feelings into a review and then guarded them by joking Elden Ring was a "bad game," because you can't critique me if I'm just being funny! It, obviously, is not a bad game.

And then, I played Elden Ring for about 700 more hours, battling with other Tarnished, and helping others overcome Malenia and her incessant need to remind us of who she is.

Here's the deal: I still mostly feel and believe the same things I did about Elden Ring as I did in my first review, however what has left is the guilt and frustration over those opinions. I still dislike several of the end-game bosses. I still think after the first playthrough the world feels lonely and lacking. I still prefer the more closed structure in these types of games. I still feel like some of the balance is lazy. I still think the multi-player in this game is a big step back.

I don't really care anymore though. The art direction is incredible from the just horrific nightmare that is Caelid to staring down giant arrow-shooting golems in Limgrave in the face of a thunderstorm. The framing of events is spectacular, and I get to be the camera man. There is a ton of customization and build-crafting that can be done, a thousand different ways to overcome obstacles, and despite the irritation I have with some of the end-game bosses, I still look forward to running through the game and fighting everything, as I find something new each time. Sure, some of this transformation does stem from "mad because bad," but so much of it is a result of eschewing expectations.

I have managed to make some amazing memories in the Lands Between, and will continue to find more. I hereby change my disappointed 9/10 review to a 10/10. Please, cringe at me. I invite it - I know the Vow of the Indomitable.

Lessons learned from Frog Detective:

- Crime? Not real.
- Books? Trash.
- Moles? Not to be trusted.
- Extortion? Fun.
- Your address? Give it to everybody.
- Frog Detective? #1 in my heart.

Highly recommended, this is an absolutely adorable little adventure trilogy. The dialogue might be my favorite of any game since Golf Story. (Am I Australia-pilled now? Has listening to The Weekly Planet for a decade conditioned my brain to think Aussie text is always funny? Who can say)


This might seem heretical, but nothing about this game really grabbed or captivated me. I’ve been plunking through it on and off for about six months now, and the best I can muster is a distant appreciation for its craft and aesthetics. Everything else—the combat, mechanics, narrative, level design—didn’t really click with me. I kept waiting for something—ANYTHING—to make me stand up and take notice of what so many have described as one of the greatest games of all time — but it never happened. And now that it’s leaving the Playstation Plus network, I guess it’s time to call it quits and move on. Oh well. Different strokes, etc.

I spent a lot of time editing this review with Pangburn and discussing the game's various aspects thoroughly with him. Thanks again for all the help!

I’ll get my major gripes out of the way first: many of them are due to potential areas of improvement in Yakuza 0’s combat. I admit that I’m not a huge fan of the Style System, which felt underwhelming to me because it usually results in spreading myself too thin while locking the best abilities until the very late game. Money is a bit harder to come by in the early game (unless you can consistently win against the roaming enemy Mr Shakedown, who can just as easily bankrupt you upon defeat if you aren’t prepared with the adequate combat upgrades), and each combat style is tuned to adapt for specific situations (i.e. Rush Style is agile and allows Kiryu to quickly slip behind single enemies and bog them down with attacks, while Beast Style is often better at handling multiple foes by picking up large objects and swinging them for effective crowd control). However, a lot of the valuable defining traits for specific styles (i.e. Iron Gut on Beast Style to guard against knife/gun attacks, or Quickstep Blow on Rush Style for quick evasion into powerful attacks) cost significantly more than previous steps (2 million yen for Rank 2 abilities to 30 million yen for the above Rank 3 abilities), so I felt incentivized to invest equally into the different styles instead of trying to specialize. As a result, my characters felt somewhat lacking through most of the game’s runtime, since I had to split my investments equally between the different styles to accommodate for different situations (and thus often lacking crucial abilities). Eventually, the three-style system becomes effectively superseded once your protagonists finish their main side-quest lines and unlock a “true” 4th style reminiscent of prior entries in the series that combines traits of the previous styles, which to me seems to only further highlight how insignificant progress within the style system can feel.

Enemy variety is also rather bland in the Yakuza games (most likely due to the beat-em-up structure), which in turn further homogenizes combat. Most enemies are simple grunts around your size that will charge at you with standard close range attacks. Some will try and stagger you with knives and swords, a few have tasers on hand, and near the late game, a couple of enemies will have guns. While tasers and guns can stunlock you and force you to mash to stand back up, you can just pay for the corresponding expensive upgrade in each style to nullify stuns altogether. As such, I ended up fighting every enemy as if they were functionally the same, and once I purchased the necessary unlocks, tearing through them like paper became a simple task. The only time I had to accommodate for a different enemy type occurred during specific story missions, where sometimes larger grunts with superarmor appear that actively require baiting and punishing. Otherwise, most non-boss combat starts to all blend together, and it never quite hits that sweet spot between mindlessly mashing to take out scores of enemies or getting tossed around like a salad by guns and tasers.

There’s also a weapons system involved in all this, but it feels rather extraneous. There’s never any real need for weapons given the functional homogeneity of most of the enemies. Moreover, many of the combat scenes in the game are placed in locations with plenty of breakable loose objects lying astray that often serve that exact purpose as is. Additionally, weapons have a durability counter, and to repair weapons, you either have to use Repair Kits (which are obtained randomly from Dream Machines) or trek to the local Dragon & Tiger. The actual fees involved are a trifle considering how much money you’ll end up earning, but having to waste tons of time farming Repair Kits from Dream Machines to fix your weapon in the middle of combat or spend time outside of combat walking back and forth from the Dragon & Tiger is a pain in the ass. As such, I basically never bothered with weapons in-game, save for the one quest with Simon where you have to purchase and farm weapons & materials/recipes from Dragon and Tiger (and that is a whole different time-consuming RNG endeavor altogether, though again, it never felt crucial due to how little I used weapons).

If there’s one silver lining to all this, it’s that the combat never truly felt like a significant barrier to me due to its simplicity. It becomes pretty straightforward to cheese and simplify combat once you figure out the easiest strategies for each protagonist. Majima’s Breaker style was fantastic at stunlocking enemies due to how many hitboxes got thrown out in each cycle, and later on, Slugger became my go-to because the extended X-X-X-Y-Y cartwheel combo broke every enemy’s stance and was actually positive on hit in every story fight I encountered on Normal difficulty. Meanwhile, Kiryu’s Beast style quickly became my mainstay; picking up large objects and batting away foes was a bit too overpowered most of the time. As mentioned previously, the quick crowd control options, alongside better defensive tools such as superarmor, provided Beast Style with most of the utility necessary to clear the majority of the game’s standard fights. Thus, even if combat was uninteresting most of the time, it was at least over quickly enough to where I could proceed with little stress, especially when utilizing stamina drink stockpiles for powering through damage.

I’ll give Yakuza 0 some credit though, as a few of the boss fights were engaging enough to leave a mark on me. The Kuze fights are a huge highlight here, considering that his first fight resulted in my first game-over, and it was extremely satisfying performing visibly better with each consecutive fight, especially since a few of these fights are no-frills 1v1 fights that forced me to rely upon more of my toolkit. In particular, I found Kuze and other bosses to be far more aggressive and willing to combo me for larger damage margins and chipping away at my health while I was knocked down. Defensively, they were more up to par too, with much more emphasis placed upon quick dodges and guards to nullify my lighter attacks. The final boss fight for Kiryu takes the cake for my favorite boss encounter overall given how the different phases mirror Kiryu’s own abilities, and it put a smile on my face when I realized that they were willing to pull the exact same stunts that I had also been abusing in combat. In particular, I couldn’t stop smirking during the second phase of the final boss, when my opponent began picking up tables and chairs to slam and hurl at me. It’s a very visceral yet humanizing way to top off the game, and I do wish that more of the other fights had enemies that were willing to resort to similar underhanded tactics to highlight just how dirty the crime world can get.

That said, you’re not really here for the mostly inoffensive combat: the real bulk of the game is everything else, more specifically the various interactions between every other system in the game including the different connecting narratives and side/substories. Perhaps that is the true strength behind the franchise: no one system stands out above the others, and as a result it becomes something much more than the sum of its parts. It may sound like a weakness, and it is a major weakness of many games that try to do everything at once, yet Yakuza 0 escapes this pitfall because everything is seamlessly and inexorably linked.

A lot of this is in part due to the centralization of progression systems within the game. Everything is linked to exorbitant amounts of money, which is not only thematically appropriate but also results in all grinding leading to the same collected pool. Money can be earned through fights, certain sidegames, and most importantly, Kiryu’s real estate and Majima’s cabaret club. In turn, money is used to upgrade your characters (and weapons) for fights, pay for entering certain sidegames as well as upgrading necessary materials for better performance, and paying for properties and staff in your respective side gigs. I was afraid at first that the existence of all these different activities would result in a million different systems that I’d have to memorize and optimize for different purposes, but since they all feed back into the same resource, everything you do ultimately results in some form of progress towards the same end goal, resulting in a much more focused experience than what I had first assumed on a surface level.

To expand upon the two main side stories, Kiryu and Majima must essentially fight rival head honchos of each section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori through the collection of landshare/influence. Kiryu can purchase certain properties in each area to later invest and gain dividends, while Majima can partner with properties to increase Club Sunshine’s fanbase and gain more notoriety during cabaret club nights. As the player gains more control over each sector, more of the background behind the opposing head honchos is revealed until inevitable confrontation occurs, usually in the form of a minigame/street fight for Kiryu and a “club battle” for Majima where Club Sunshine must outcompete its opposition while enduring enemy abilities. These side stories feed right into the overall progression system, since they provide a reliable source of income as well as an incentive to engage in outside activities and explore the two hub areas for staff and valuable resources. As mentioned previously, the definitive and more overpowered 4th fighting style unlocked from completion is a great cherry on top of this whole endeavor.

Aiding all of this are the numerous substories scattered throughout the two main hubs. No side quests are marked immediately on the map with markers when you first start new chapters; instead, you have to unlock them by stumbling into the correct section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori or by engaging in certain activities long enough. Once you do unlock these side quests, actually fulfilling them is simple enough, since blue question box markers will appear on the map showing you where to head next to progress. The result is that exploration in the overworld opens up fairly organically; the player is incentivized to wander about naturally without any pressure to eliminate all the lit up checkpoints on the map from the start. Additionally, side quests often are completed in spurts, and players often have to travel outside of a given quest’s area to activate its next section on the map, meaning that they have a choice of whether or not they want to continue seeing the quest through at that very moment or spend time elsewhere and return to that sidequest later. Finally, completing sidequests can lead to unlocking other related side quests as well as gaining aforementioned helpful staff, properties, and useful items (such as an encounter finder, to track down street fights more easily). Yet, there’s no single substory that feels so important in terms of personal or monetary gain that players have to go out of their way to fulfill all necessary conditions for it. By doing this, Yakuza 0 never imposes and merely suggests; players can complete and explore as much as they wish with little negative externalities if they choose not to go all the way.

To add on the above, the actual activities themselves are designed in a way where there’s just enough depth to allow for significant improvement if players choose to dedicate more time to their favorite pastimes, but again, not too much depth to where it takes an eternity and a half to master certain activities. For instance, consider the bowling minigame. It’s quite simple to pick up: you can adjust your ball’s weight, starting position, trajectory, and power, with the obvious caveat that heavier balls are tougher to aim but better at retaining momentum. You don’t necessarily need to keep close track of every option to succeed and best your buddies in three-frame sets, but there are nice little side rewards in the form of completion points (CP) (which can be used at shrines to unlock unnecessary yet helpful little abilities such as longer dashing times and more Nouveau Riche encounters to fight for more cash) for bowling ten strikes. Further plays also increase friendship with the attendant there, which will result in a sidequest that allows you to recruit a chicken as staff for your real estate firm once you bowl a turkey. There’s also a separate side mode called Split Game where you have to more carefully aim your ball across special split pin arrangements that allows you to earn more cash and a potential CP. Again, there’s plenty of optional rewards that are great for upgrading your character and systems if you choose to invest a bit of time here and there, but even then, more grindy minigames are optional to the point where they become unobtrusive; as such, you can switch between a multitude of different activities with little consequence whenever your current focus starts to wear you down.

The story can also be thought of as another of the game’s smaller systems, thanks to how it never feels particularly intrusive. After clearing the first chain of events in Chapter 1 as well as the associated tutorials, the main introductions take a step back and you can begin messing around with the aforementioned sidequests and minigames. The game is very good at telegraphing exactly when the player needs to be committed to the story and when they are free to meander about; at no point does the game ever feel like it is forcing you to put down what you are doing at that exact moment in time to return to the main storyline. At the same time, progressing through the story events is greatly streamlined whenever the player needs to do so. Therefore, despite the main storyline’s linearity, the game manages to retain a visage of non-linearity; the wide variety of activities available at any given time allow you to swap between the story and optional content effortlessly at your heart’s content.

Just as there’s a balance between story progression and player-driven exploration, there’s a certain balance struck in the game’s tone that’s present throughout each narrative thread weaving into one another that exemplifies an undercurrent of sincerity. The central plotline jumps back and forth between Kiryu’s struggles escaping the Dojima family after being framed for murder, and Majima’s struggles serving as a blackmailed affiliate of his old yakuza family while seeking release from his gilded cage. Both are constantly caught in increasingly absurd scenarios by old friends and random strangers alike, and play fantastic straight men juxtaposed to the sticky situations that they must resolve. Alongside this, RGG Studio balances frenzied street brawls between topless yakuza members with dramatic scenes of characters pouring their hearts out. Even the substories carefully walk this tightrope between cheesiness and earnestness: one of my personal favorites has to be Stadium Jumper Strut, where you have to escort a guy whose dream is to walk across Iwao Bridge. He begs for Majima’s assistance, for every time he tries, he is beaten up by thugs because he refuses to take off his stajun jacket that’s riling them up. It’s an absolutely ridiculous premise, yet even I had to admit that sealing the deal with the life lesson of “pursuing dreams regardless of what others think” put a smile on my face. Camp meets candor time and time again, and as a result, Yakuza 0 never feels too sarcastic or too overbearing; it’s a cozy and compelling mix that kept me hooked during every story beat throughout.

There’s so much more I could say regarding Yakuza’s imperfections thanks to its many ambitions. There’s a forced stealth section that feels a bit clumsy since you have to guide and protect an escort at the same time. To do so, you must hide amongst crowds to avoid detection by patrolling foes, and this becomes a bit awkward since enemies can spot you from far away and enter/leaving crowds has a noticeably long animation with a forced delay between entering and leaving, so staying out of these optional fights is much more tricky in practice. Majima’s cabaret management progression feels not quite as well-integrated, since it’s actually possible to keep gaining fans by playing the club minigame over and over without purchasing properties, and the final stretch requires a bit more grinding as preparation to avoid your hostesses losing all their HP from the opposing club’s special ability. Finally, special moves can be taught by mentors through their respective side missions, and while Majima’s mentor missions are fantastic (Fei Hu’s lessons are a thrill, having to adapt against his quick Kali Sticks and Nunchakus), Kiryu’s mentor missions feel a bit squandered and too by-the-books. My favorite mentor missions there would have to be Miss Tatsu’s training, which involves puzzles where you have to destroy crates for money while eliminating mannequins with guns. It’s a bit more clunky than expected, since you often don’t have enough time to react and throw/dodge when picking up boxes to attack these targets, but it’s definitely an interesting thought exercise of what could have been and it helps that it’s accompanied by a track that quite frankly puts the main Beast Style theme to shame.

Yet at the end of the day, I have to wonder how much these nitpicks matter in the overall scheme of things. I came into Yakuza 0 wanting to fight Kuze and experience a change in pace, and I left feeling quite emotionally invested and fulfilled considering how much time I wasted cheering to x3 Shine and flaunting my new disco moves to Let’s Dance I Wanna Take You Home. While I have to admit that I can’t see myself 100%ing the game anytime soon, and I’m not quite ready to dive into the rest of the series lest the experience begins to outstay its welcome, I’m more than content leaving everything as it stands. It’s obviously doing something right if I’ve managed to spend over 70 hours messing around with everything that even mildly interested me without any single aspect feeling too disjointed or particularly irritating. My fears that Yakuza 0’s wide appeal was an indicator of numerous hours of padding and shallow interaction between systems appear to have been unfounded, and needless to say, I can wholeheartedly recommend Yakuza 0 despite the rough patches. I’m looking forward to the inevitable YaKuze spinoff where we get to play as the old man in the profession where men tend to die young.