fuckkkk i love yakuza so much but it doesnt help that like a good 50% of this is pure sloggery, 3 gets a bad rep but that game has a massive cia conspiracy regarding the american occupation of okinawa, Mine, Rikiya, an emotional ass throughline w/ the orphanage, and a constant development of Kiryu, 4 starts with Akiyama and hes so lovable and fun to play as that when youre forced to drop all your progress, character development, etc to play as Taiga Saejima its just bluuuuuuuh who gaf, it helps that Saejima is likable but not when you have to play the dumbfuckery that is 2 whole chapters of prison breaking with the worst boss of all time, when u get back to kamoruocho the added areas and verticality feel so empty with the exception of when Saejima must use them for exploration but then they just feel like a slog, then after u do his shit u get stuck with maybe the worst protagonist in the series!? who care, then u get kiryu again who is quite literally just stuffed in as the fourth guy, theres no reason he should be here, but regardless his entrance picks shit up again so i cant complain, from there out it just returns to solidity, idk ! they shouldve just made an akiyama game ! the side stuff like the investigation for tanimura or that weird guy atop theater square get sidelined so hard when u stop awarding the full game length to them and instead limit it to a quarter, and empty rooftops never rly mattered! idk theres so much to change here least of all the absurdism which remains a series strength, worst game in the series, i still had fun, onto 5 then what ive been told is the best one (0)

Playstation 1 gothic expressionism is odd because it relies on both low poly 3d but also the then-underestimated aspect of infinite space and rupture in level design, even today many games yearn for such a surreal, labyrinthine structure that was commonplace then before being cast aside for the sake of normality, that aesthetic survives in games such as <i>Ultrakill</i> and the like which pride themselves on such exaggerated distances and spaces and scale- <i>Iron Lung</i> perhaps delves at the root of the expression by having the game take place in a very tiny submarine, theres no room for playing with scale even though the submarine itself remains gorgeous in its deep, disgusting browns, the blood ocean seeping in, as the epilogue describes, like an open would that consumes the planet, the PS1-Gothic found power in getting lost within these structures (one can say <i>soulsborne, Silent Hill</i> were directly decended by this inclination) but the only structures here are stripped to their bareness, no longer even relying on sight, just machinic thought and blank spaces, gameplay-wise <i>Iron Lung</i> owes to <i>Space Invaders</i> as much as it does lovecraft, navigation itself is less trial and error or horror and more the dread of the death itself manifesting in limitation, probably the best allegory for biopolitics in a game since <i>Metal Gear</i> for the NES

Superliminal is a title i read much about before it launched, i remember its groundbreaking design being a topic of much discussion, speculation and the like, with the primary function of its custom built engine to facilitate this rather intriguing gimmick but like,,,,, this is it? Superliminal functions best at the points where its deeply reliant on its primary draw- the play with space, but it often simply doesn't use this device enough, theres a lack of willingness to diverge from indie puzzle tropes and embrace the uniqueness of the concept- i wanted portal 2 and i got a barebones edition of portal 1, the whole grandstanding arc of control over this presented reality really doesnt hit hard when control is this limited or underwhelming, a cheap trick