The Devil May Cry format, set up as a rhythm game - and while its not uncommon for the game to fail you for QTEs, the real magic lies in how Hi Fi ties every aspect of the game to the beat. Encouraging (instead of strictly requiring) rhythm promotes a groove within players, a sense that with every action they take they are jamming along with the game - achieving a potent and unbelievably addictive sense of flow when synchronized.

Frankly, I think Hi Fi’s aesthetic would otherwise be a liability for me. Garish color palettes, generic and undiverse enemy design, even the music selection is not my favorite. The supreme, engrossing nature of the combat puts me on a wavelength that elevates every other aspect of the game, I can forgive significant holes in the character writing because I am actually, literally vibing. Any mission thats mostly a gauntlet of enemies is a great time - the opposite of how I usually feel about the genre.

Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

[ Story: TBD | Gameplay: 9?/10 | OST: TBD ]
{ Alpha Build }

While it's naturally really early to give this a proper score, from what I've played and see so far looks absolutely promising. Very smooth action RPG gameplay mixed with very adorable and stylized character/enemy designs; I can only imagine this'll be so much more fun with the addition of multiplayer.
Also it's a furry RPG game yes I'm gonna fucking love it :3

I think I am one of the 5 people that played this on wii u. Yeah that wii u. Why? Because yakuza 1 had an additional new game plus mode in it. So yeah that reason was enough to replay it for me(I also played it on 480i damn ps2 so I wanted to see it hd). So yeah. It was still as fun and atmospheric as ever and also this is it's BEST version of this 1&2 dualogy pack in my opinion if you know japanese. Also I already reviewed these games before, so I am just gonna talk about differences and what I didn't experienced before.

While playing the wii u version I realized that they removed slot machine minigame(so volcano slot house doesn't exist) from yakuza 2 but stays on yakuza 1...? I don't know why they did this and kind of bothered me for a bit until realizing that I can actually fully complete yakuza 2 for the first time. (also meant I won't be able to complete yakuza 1 because slot machine completion with haruka's trust sucks doo doo)

I didn't fully completed the yakuza 2 but %90 of it is done(encounter bosses, every substories, tournaments, amon etc.). I didn't do the minigame completion also heat completion left on %99(I didn't know amano building long battle had exclusive heat action). But yeah. I did it and don't recommend to anyone.

Why? Because minigame substories suck. Baseball and golf are like... unbelievable levels of hard and cheap with their bullsh#t timings. Oh also there is a mahjong substory.

This is a whole topic by itself so I decided to jump to an another paragraph.

I thought I could do the mahjong substory because I did it at judgment and said why not here also? What I didn't know that is, mahjong is rigged on the damn yakuza 2. How can I know that? Because in every one of mine mahjong tries, there is always one garbage opponent that is selected by the "game" itself to win and gets riichi(equals saying uno) in every two turns in every round. Like every every time. That is near impossible because getting a near perfect beginning deck is a super low possibility. But that opponent always does it of course "somehow". Oh also I forgot to tell you about your beginning point is 10000 rather than 25000? So losing one round equals you are defeated. Also means that you have to at least win 3 times in every round back to back so you have enough points to maybe have a shot at winning. That is near impossible and yeah it was. I spent 12 damn hours and barely won in the last one. How do you ask? Randomizer gods decided to give me a super good beginning deck back to back for 4 turns somehow and also I got what tile I need in 5 turns somehow before that rigged opponent did. So yeah, in conclusion, fu#k this substory. This is the worst substory I had ever played in a yakuza game. Pure randomness and cheapness. Heck no.

Another thing I realized with playing yakuza ps2 games are, not locking on actually a better option for the most of the time, because lock on easily breaks in these games

Tbh both yakuza 1 and yakuza 2 still have it's clunkiness(especially yakuza 1 with it's nonexistent lock on) but their hazy blurry atmosphere with it's dark colors also cinematic fixed camera angles feels just... perfect and the reason that they are still worth playing again and again and the reason I play them again and again compared to the later titles. Some indie studios needs to bring back cinematic fixed camera angles in my opinion. They really up the atmosphere.

One thing weird to me in this wii u version is, they put quick map and completion list options at the gamepad, but... why not quick inventory option as well like all of the zelda games? I guess maybe old inventory system designed to pause the gameplay but at least still it would be a handy option...

Other than that, yeah. Best way to play this lovely games I guess. If there is gonna be a translation than it will be the best.

if you think this game “plays weird” and don’t get the hype i beg you to play 5 other NES platformers then come back, relax, and feel the lushness of the first true strand type game.

super mario bros is not the primordially simple jumping game it is often introduced as. platformers had ages to mature in the hypercompetitive arena of the arcade throughout the 70’s and early 80’s. aside from its understatedly elegant aesthetic, the ambition in SMB is in the elevation of movement from merely a mode of traversal to a gymnastic, expressive activity.

megaman, simon belmont, and ryu hayabusa are all transparently simple state machines— the amount of possible actions they can take is finite and countable. super mario bros did not invent momentum in platforming, nor was it the first to leverage the additional complications that a more involved system of movement entails. the friction between the player avatar and the ground. the acceleration from a dead stop to a full run. the short moment after taking your finger off the jump button before the character truly starts to fall. all the little intricacies and details compound to make mario a much more expressive vessel for a player to inhabit. what sets SMB apart is that the movement is honed to the extent it becomes even more natural than the comparatively simple systems of the above games.

mario’s body doesn’t literally move like the human form does, but negotiating the balance of a jump in mid-air, trying to establish steady footing on unhelpful terrain, and wheelin and dealing with newton’s first law in general is central to the human experience. in super mario bros, nintendo squarely refocuses the platformer from a cabaret of obstacles to a celebration of acrobatic motivity

and so, it became the bedrock upon which their castle was built