Yakuza 5 is when the series’ scope increased massively. It makes sense - Yakuza was rapidly becoming one of Sega’s super star franchises, especially in Japan. And the series’ creator, Toshihiro Nagoshi, was becoming something of a video game rockstar at the time. Striking while the iron was hot (and with no reason to stop, really), Yakuza 5 released only two and a half years later after Yakuza 4, now developed by RGG Studio - an evolution of Amusement Vision, a studio Nagoshi headed.

In my eyes, Yakuza 5 releasing that shortly is nothing short of impressive. Sure, two years and a half is a lot of time, but Yakuza 5’s scope is insanely impressive: five characters, four hub worlds, and, more importantly, a new engine that’d go on to be used for Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami. One thing at a time, though.

I’m a big fan of Yakuza 5’s storyline. It somehow manages to be busier than Yakuza 4’s, but the characters aren’t idiots this time and the new cast members are actually memorable! That’s not to say it’s perfect, far from it - the final boss comes out of nowhere (albeit once I stepped back and pieced some story beats together I ended up quite liking his involvement), and the pacing shifts speeds constantly.

The main theme of this game’s story is dreams, and dear lord, the game beats you over the head with it; it’s impossible to walk away from this game without knowing what “yume” means. I don’t think it’s a bad theme - in fact, I find it fits Yakuza’s theme of fighting for yourself excellently -, but this game drives it way into the ground to the point of memeability.

Moving on, we have five characters to play with. Tanimura is gone, sadly, but I like the new additions. In play order:
- Kazuma Kiryu, the series’ main protagonist, is the first character you play as. His moveset is great! Although not as polished as in Yakuza 0 or Kiwami, the bones are still here, and they work splendidly, and his Climax Heat Move, Dragon Spirit, is a great way to change up his standard gameplay, allowing for him to become invulnerable, teleport, and utilize a new brutal combo at the cost of his Heat Gauge.
- Taiga Saejima is one of two returning protagonists from Yakuza 4, and he plays about the same as that game but better, with his moveset consisting of powerful-yet-slow kicks and punches, with a separate focus on charge attacks. His Climax Heat move is Tiger Puppetry, which allows for him to grab an enemy’s legs and swing them around, at the cost of his Heat Gauge. While considerably more situational than Dragon Spirit, it’s a perfect addition to his moveset and rewards good execution.
- Haruka Sawamura, Kiryu’s adopted daughter, is playable for the first time in the series. Her playstyle is completely different though, as she doesn’t fight - instead, she must play several (primarily rhythm) minigames to up her stats so she can defeat rival idol group T-Set. These minigames are (mostly) pretty fun, although her section feels incredibly slow compared to everyone else’s.
- Shun Akiyama from Yakuza 4 returns as the fourth playable character, with his moveset being about the same as that game, although with the inclusion of Launch Strike for his Climax Heat move - by pressing triangle, Akiyama kicks an opponent into the air and delivers a powerful kick combo before slamming them back to the ground, although at the cost of his Heat Gauge.
- And finally, Tatsuo Shinada is the main new protagonist. Shinada’s moveset is unrefined and grapple-based, although he is already very proficient with weapons, rendering them his primary means of damage. His Climax Heat move is My Meteor Tackle, in which he can grab and rush forwards with an enemy in his grasp at the cost of Heat. Definitely the least useful Climax Heat mechanic in this game, but it still has its uses.

Overall, the combat is excellent! The new engine makes it more fluid than the previous games, and the new Climax Heat moves make for very rewarding additions to the movesets. Haruka’s rhythm games and concert battles are mostly just alright (some are completely forgettable), but the music more than makes up for it - I love me some cheesy energetic idol J-Pop.

In addition, everyone (which includes Haruka, albeit hers works differently) now boasts Climax Heat Actions. A second meter can be filled up by performing Heat Actions, and when fully charged, the player can execute a tremendously powerful Heat Action. A very good universal addition that rewards exploring with Heat Actions; not sure why this was removed.

The game also features four cities to explore, whereas the previous games had two at best (Sotenbori in Yakuza 2 and Ryukyu in Yakuza 3). They’re fully realized hub worlds, including their own substories and activities, although only each city’s respective character can visit it - only Kiryu can visit Nagasugai, only Saejima can visit Tsukimino, you get the gist. Kinda lame, but I also wasn’t expecting each city to have substories for everyone, so fair enough move.

The soundtrack is excellent, too, as I expect from this franchise. A lot of rock with some more funk-esque influences, plus some licensed tracks and even a track by Hideki Naganuma! (Shame it only plays once, though…)

Where my praise slows down a bit is with the amount of bloat this game has. Every character (barring Haruka and Akiyama) has a side game. Kiryu has taxi driving/racing missions, Saejima has a hunting game, and Shinada has a baseball game. These are full side games with their own miniature storylines in them, and if one of them isn’t your cup of tea, then you’re pretty much screwed.

Plus, these games aren’t extremely polished. The racing minigame, while it worked well enough, is nowhere near as tight-controlling as I’d prefer, and Saejima’s hunting minigame is too convoluted and slow-paced for my liking. The rest of the minigames are back, and they’re what you’d expect (although there’s a few weird ones, like chicken racing for Shinada). Plus, this game has my favorite Karaoke song selection to boot!

To put it succinctly - this is the worst Yakuza game to 100%.

Substories this time are about the same deal you’d expect from the other games. There’s 75 (plus the standard superboss substory at the very end) of them - pretty good number, totalling 15 per character. Only a few jump out as very memorable, though; the one with Naganuma’s contribution is the one I immediately think of.

To conclude: Yakuza 5 is a game defined by its scope. Although it suffers from a heavy amount of bloat, this is the most complete Yakuza package, albeit it’s easy to suffer from series burnout in this entry - I’d recommend taking some time after beating Yakuza 4 before jumping into this game.

One of my favorites in the franchise.

Sega are these the men you want to hire?

Look I just don't even know where to begin, Sonic Omens is awful like i normally want to be somewhat positive and give a game the benefit of the doubt but no man, this game is bad, like shockingly so, it's genuinely baffling to me how any game releases as this, and I'm gonna talk about it today.

This review is gonna be split in two, talking about the devs and the game itself so strap in folks because this is gonna be wild.

The Dodgy Development

Okay let's get this over with, the developers are poopy shitheads, if you want more on their wacky antics check this doc here but in short, they sexualised a minor, had beta builds hidden behind a paywall subscription on Patreon, stole the How to Train Your Dragon IP as their own, have ads on Game Jolt with an insane amount of Traffic, alleged stealing from Cars 2: The Video Game (the most evil thing here, seriously of all games to steal music from why the tie-in game to a bad film) and passing it as their own and Bolt/Joh being asshats and causing drama on Twitter, devs and fans bullying people who worked on the game, plus a plethora of other heinous stuff, so if you don't want to play this (I don't know why you would) then look here, I'm not focusing on it as i feel the game itself is more important to me but i cannot ignore the development of this game since it gives context to my experience with this game plus Midrulean already went somewhat in depth with the development so go check out his review if you haven't already.

Sonic Omens and the Cost of Ambition

Being Ambitious means you have to live up to people's justifiably high expectations, if you don't deliver you have big bag of wasted potential, many games do this but none so much as Sonic Omens, this game is awful, it's trying to be something it clearly can't be due to the humongous scope and clueless people working on it and yet it's so desperately trying be something it can't, a good game. But seriously, everything around this game can be seen through how ambitious it is, wanting to be a modern 2000s styled Sonic Adventure that serves as competition to Sonic's next Open-Zone game, and it fails spectacularly, what started as a ambitious quaint little fangame in 2020 that while flawed showed some promise made out of passion has ended up becoming show detested, reviled and contropassion finished out of spite.

I haven't heard many people talk about the story but wow it is messy despite a more simple premise, it's trying to be a surrogate game to the 2000s but doesn't work, like it's essentially comes to referencing it and not making an interesting story around it's concepts, it weirdly has some X stuff involved which is funny since they want me to care about X in a Mainline setting and a whole heap of forced references to make the meta era haters go "Awooga this game is great!" like the story has a super sonic final boss, The Metarex, Gaia Temples, Song cues from X and other games, Chip and Chris stuff, Shadaw, Maria, Rouge, Knuckles, the Tornado from X, Big cameos, G.U.N, music from Shadow and so much more. It's admirable i guess but is absolutely shattered by the Voice Acting, I can at least admire the people trying they're hardest since you can very much tell they aren't native english speakers but wow they couldn't have hired some other people? Delivery feels stiff and wooden and are trying so hard to replicate the 4kids cast but fail so hard, mostly with Shadow and Eggman. The dialogue also feels pretty clunky which isn't helped by the awkard delivery since you can barely understand what they're saying sometimes. One thing this game's plot attempts to do is explain why the Chaos Emeralds aren't used in mainline entires plot wise, placing this between after Unleashed and before Lost World… Did they even play the games? Barring Gens using the emeralds as the driving force of the plots they never really had a reason to use them in the plot because it'll boil down to a boring played out macguffin hunt which this game kinda is, so overall i don't see why the plot played this angle if they don't do anything interesting or compelling with it but the mediocre story is the least of our worries.

Presentation wise, Omens is very admirable though still not all that great when it comes to this, one thing I can't complain about is the Music because it's really great, using a lot of stuff in the 2000s, it isn't original but good nonetheless, i also like the character animation despite some stiff moments but it's very expressive for the most part especially with Sonic, but that's where a lot of my postives end with this game for me, the game for one is very glitchy and poorly optimized, frequent pop-in, clipping into objects, floating in the air, camera getting stuck on stuff, respawn not working, collision issues, game freezes/crashes and no sfx playing at one point but the visuals while do look decent some original characters and environments don't look very sonic like and seem like they're plopped fron radically different game plus the framerate isn't very smooth, it isn't my PC since the one i played on is pretty strong so i feel this is on the developers part.

But yeah I know, I've been trying to avoid but Sonic Omens has got to be one of the worst gameplay experiences I've ever had, this game is trying to be more like Unleashed and maybe a bit of Generations in terms of mechanics but feels like Forces 2 in this regard. Sonic controls way too slippery and his jump is too limiting making platform into a chore, he has a lot of moves from the previous games like the bonuce which was welcome, light speed dash, stomp and the boost with a screen nuke and a grappling hook plus a plethora of Chaos abilities for Shadow but they aren't put to good use, i feel the lack of a drift function hurts this game even more than Forces since they're some very sharp turns that you sure as hell can't pull with the base movement, the boost meter depletes too quickly leading to moments where you a searching for rings and boost orbs.

This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the god awful level design (I mean if the game tells you that you need to respawn frequently then you're in for a treat), Disney's Bolt and his team decide too pull a Balan Wonderworld and use 2 completely near incompatible gameplay styles into one, this is time with Boost and Adventure level design, what you have are the most inexplicably open, spectacle relient and boring stages ever concived in a Sonic game, It's laughable how confusing the levels are, I don't know where I'm going most of the time only to have a giant arrow pointing to where I am, toppped with the controls, the levels utterly become both frustrating, confusing and boring all at once, death zones don't even make sense at points, when the game tries to pull force combat it takes way too long, Shadow's stages are way worse given how the destroy the pace of each stage using chaos powers and you can even get softlocked at points just again you can tell they wanted to do so many things with this game but it utterly falls flat on it's entire body, I was gonna do an episode by episode review of this game but what's the point? I'd be blabbering saying the exact same stuff about the levels since the marginally get better, the low point of the levels are the latter half of Episode 3 where they focus on the water parts, and now there's a very good reason why most sonic games don't have 3d water levels, You're scalling up this big tree and this was one of the breaking points for me, you have to be very precise with the platforming, almost too precise with the general structure of the tree just being annoying and monotonous especially with the water, switch and aforementioned control issues, when i lost nearly 30 Minutes of progress by a mistaken homing attack i just gave up and used a save file, this game does not respect your time and I won't either so i wanted to see if it got any better and it did, barely, the 3rd Episode as whole isn't great especially with the water escape sequence, good lord that was horrible especially with the amount of near unavoidable death zones you have in this, making you really wonder if they properly playtested this game and fixed the issues many people already had but no they barely did. But i mean when a lot of the unfair BS is over with Omens is as good as Forces worst moments so that's something i guess, I'd say Episode 1 is solid enough and Area 99 (nice X reference) is too but they have their fair share of BS and what i like to call OH WOW LOOK AT DA BLOOM AND THE SPECTACLE WOW THIS GAME IS GOOD like seriously it's in every level and I don't get why.

But i mean i would have rated this game a 3 maybe even 4/10 if it was just the levels… Then the Bosses and Tornado sections come in, seriously every single Boss is awful especially the final boss, way too long, the camera doesn't focus on them, bullshit insta kill moves, awful pacing, severe lack of rings in them and overall just not a fun time, I don't feel like i overcame a good challenge i feel relived that i don't have to undergo a painful experience.

And finally the crown shit jewel of this game, the Tornado sections. Just what the hell happened? The Tornado moves way too slow especially in reverse and moving upwards, the blaster does some pitful damage, the missles while can do some damage don't go far, Boosting has a risk reward system where you move faster but when you hit something you get damaged even more which is piled by the horrendous design which is the shining example of everything this game gets wrong, confusing because of how the world design and controls, boring because of how the Tornado feels and frustrating because of how the enemies have the giant near unavoidable laser and the entire 2nd Act of the Escape sequence due to the worm, truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had the pleasure of playing in a video game, I must apologize to Balan Wonderworld because at least that game was consistent in it's awfulness and never came close to this.

Conclusion
This game is awful, i put this game in my least favourite games list but removed it but i think Apollo Justice will be execused (for now) but i could just conclude saying "game bad bye bye now" but going back to the start of this review, the cost of ambition pays a heavy toll, every issue this game faces is linked due to ambition, the 2000s esque story, the next-gen presentation, advancing and expanding the boost gameplay, the Bosses and Tornado being more elaborate and in-depth than ever before, all linked due to the ambition this game wants to do and it would be if the developers weren't assholes and the game wasn't this horrible, like yeah it's somewhat impressive to have a near 3d sonic console game made by fans but Sonic GT beat them to it and is way better, so i don't think i even need to say why you shouldn't waste 14GB on this game and play many other Sonic fangames, mainly the Spark Trilogy and Sonic GT, that being said:

Game bad bye bye now

After playing this game in full now that it has been finished, I can now say that this fangame still sucks ass and it's just poorly designed in almost every way. The first two levels (with the exception of the tutorial) you play are decent but the game drops down in quality fast later on. Horrible game design, horrible gameplay and mechanics, bad voice acting, bad storywriting and Infinity Engine is just poorly optimized and messy in coding. There was no testing when making this game.
Anyone who unironically defends Omens and thinks it's better than most official Sonic titles should never play video games ever again. I refuse to believe these people even exist.

This game is fantastic, i have a lot of fond memories playing it and replaying it recently i still think it's good, i like how tight and focused it is, the game doesn't waste your time with grinding or padding.

The city is fantastic, you can see how they wanted to recreate the shady aspect of the red light district of Tokyo, the fixed camera works to its favor to show off the city at its best, it really does seem like a dangerous place full of scammers and thugs, it's also filled with little details like you can find the fake Mizuki or the white color gang hideout before the main story mentions them.
They also used the rain and snow really well in certain moments of the story, atmosphere isn't just a meme.

The combat is good and i'm tired of pretending it's not, sure it can start out pretty basic but you'll get everything you need during the course of the game, it really feels like Kiryu is becoming a more skilled fighter during the course of the game. I also really like how good it feels, it's a mix between the animations of your attacks, the enemy reactions to getting hit by your combos and the sound design being really crunchy, every game's combat after Yakuza 2 didn't feels quite as good as this imo but they were good in different ways.
I also never see anyone talk about how good Kiryu's moveset actually is, something about it is just really iconic, his kick is in the front cover for a reason.

The story is beautiful, i like the mistery and how everything unravels, my only complaint is that the death scenes for most characters aren't handled that well, that's certainly something they got better at in later games. Nishiki itself already worked in this game imo, the loss of his sister, Yumi and Kiryu all in a short time made him change and that's stated pretty clearly in game. I don't feel like the cutscenes added by Kiwami really add much to his character, instead they only made him look pathetic. 0 does a much better job at making you feel for Nishiki than Kiwami does.

Regarding the substories, it seems the first Yakuza has a reputation for having bad substories and i can't say i agree, sure most of them are scams but there's quite a bunch of more elaborate ones with cutscenes and all, i especially like those tying into the main story like The fake Mizuki or the Yakuza's wife(the rain and thunder in the background are so kino). Plus there is some light hearted substories here too, it's not like humour was invented with 0, it's just that this game has a different tone.

The music is good but that's true for all the games in this series so i won't talk about it more than that.

Edit: As of 25/06/2022 the restoration patch to get the japanese dub is actually out and it works perfectly, thank you Sylwahan

The original was better. 0's combat system is not designed around this game and as a remake it makes almost everything worse, worse bosses, more padding, lack of the gritty tone and dumb fanservice that ruins characters.
This game probably hampered Y6's development too which sucks.
The only saving grace is if you view this game as an expansion pack to 0 which its basically what it is, unfortunately people actually play this instead of Yakuza 1 and consider this one canon which is pretty annoying.

Bad remake, doesn't resemble the original at all and it makes things way worse, how do you turn one of the best games in this i have no idea. The amazing combat of the ps2 game is gone, now you'll have to endure the new messy and unfinished physics engine, i hope you like ragdolls and your combos stopping everytime an enemy blocks. Everything is copypasted from other games in the series, the combat is from 6 and the minigames are from 6 and 0, they didn't even try to remake the original game's unique minigames, which brings me to all the cut content, the cut soundtrack and all the dumb jrock instead of the melancholic jazz. This game is piss easy too, it sucks cause it makes some bosses way less memorable, especially the final one and Hayashi(this is unforgivable).
The only good part, that's original from this game at least, was the final bouncer mission.

Play Yakuza 2 instead.