Started “Blue Prince” yesterday, and the artwork is really lovely, the bits and pieces you get fromt he environment are really well done…
But i’m not convinced in the “rogue lite/like” approach. I’m starting to hit too many repetitions, so i’m doing similar puzzles again and again but can’t see it ending.
This game suggests you to keep a pen and paper log, and it feels fun to have to jot down notes to try and understand what is the overall story.
The environments and mechs in this remaster look so cool, but everytime I see the characters they look to me like the 3D equivalent of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters before they reverted to OG pixel art.
Anyone else get this sort of uncanny feel? The other games don’t look quite like this.
Wait, they reverted the pixel remasters to the OG art?!
I am curious about this, too. I just loaded up a few of the games on my Switch, and they don’t seem to have the original pixel art to my eyes at least. The remastered SNES titles are certainly closer to the original SNES pixel art than the remastered NES titles are, but there are still some slight differences, I think
I don’t personally mind the change in palette, but it would have been nice to have the original as an option in the same vein of being able to choose the original chiptune score or modernized versions or a pixelated font instead of that (frankly ugly) one the games had at launch
I don’t mind too much in 4-5, but pastels look so out of place in 6. I also don’t like how they removed all contrast so hair is flat shaded now and has no highlights.
i’m being asked to take a cab to meet with the tojo clan leadership but i’m instead wasting time doing all the sub stories i can in kamurocho. currently i’m trying to get a guy’s mahjong debt cleared, but the problem is i really suck at mahjong as i never played it before
Oops! Guess I was wrong on that one. Haven’t played them as I tend to emulate instead. Sorry to get your hopes up!
I actually knew how to play mahjong beforehand and still had issues with Yakuza’s mahjong. It’s a weird presentation of it or something.
I’m at the early part of Yakuza 6 where Kiryu is walking around a port town in Hiroshima with a baby in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. This being my seventh consecutive Yakuza, the series has never felt as deeply, beautifully Shenmue-coded as in this moment
well, turns out in the corner of an office in the same building there’s a peerless tile that allowed me to insta-win the match so i didn’t have to crack my head for too long!
that port town is onomichi! very special in japanese cinema as the setting for a lot of home-grown period pieces, will be most familiar to american audiences for tokyo story
and nobuhiko obayashi (the HOUSE guy) also filmed his last movie ever there, labyrinth of cinema:
i’m also quite partial to the town myself, having spent a few days there over the course of a few trips:
i’ve talked about it a few times on this forum because i love it so much and want to share that love. i encourage everyone to visit onomichi if you ever find yourself in japan. might be a good time to re-plug this thread, too:
mise en scene en scene
I’m about 9 hours into Promise Mascot Agency (I’m currently at the third chapter, so I’m doing a lot of side content), and doing it by my own. I’ve had a lot of fun with it, but there are also things that I didn’t like as much. And, at the same time, I feel this would be an interesting game to analyze why some things work and why some don’t as much.
So, to sum up, I had a lot of fun. You had an enormous hidden town which you can move through it with your vehicle, and by doing so you can also unlock several features that can serve you to explore the map. Added to it, you can get a turbo, which makes you able to get to any spot. I think this is by far the funniest feature the game has alongside the card game, and it also contributes to its own absurdity and goofiness. Not that the rest of the elements don’t add that, but the driving and the interfacing with the mascot agency are, in my opinion, the bread and the butter of the whole experience.
Adding that, the experience of having to manage the debt and be wary of the money you spend and you make is fueling also the absurdity of it, so it manages to straddle between the goofiness and the urgency. Everything is tied into trying to scrape every penny at the beginning, and then trying to make and generate as much money as you can. I don’t know which direction the game will take, but I feel like they add several things that, while not as successful as they may seem (because they are easy to achieve if you do what I’ve been doing), manages to try and cover that ground and make your experience of getting money a bit of a pain in the ass, which is the objective of the game. Mind you, I have a lot of main content still to do.
There are several things that I’m more skeptical about. The passives are one. At a point in the game, you can unlock several territories which gives you passive income and alleviate your money situation. This is one of the things that annoy me because I feel it gives you an easier time that the game requires to, but I can understand why Kaizen would do that and in which sense. The other one are the side content by interacting with each person, which I feel ends up leading to the mayor. That at the moment doesn’t sit well with me, because while the characters and specially the writer is really good, I am not that fond on how the idea of the city and the corruption mixes that well with the city. I think I’ve yet to see several things more, but let’s see.
(There are more things to say, but I need to give it a little bit more thought to it).
god dang, I would love to go on a quest to find some milk at a convenience store there
Right before I moved, one of my friends in Venice whose name is Snow Leopard gave me his sisters Donkey Konga Bongos. Now my gf and I are playing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat having a barrel blast.
As a person who really dislikes when people compare Yakuza to Shenmue; I agree.
Onomichi is lovely beyond belief–and also the start of the loveliest series of cycling roads I’ve ever ridden on; just the best ever
To see how my hand is faring, I gave the demo for Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree a try. It’s a side-scrolling RPG with some clear Dark Souls / Fromsoftware influence, though with a more standard and direct storytelling style
I couldn’t play for too long (seems it’s going to be a little while yet before I’m fully controller-ready), I liked what I did play. The combat seems fairly simple thus far (and not as punishing as a full-on Souls title), though there are multiple classes and a dense enough skill tree that I expect it to gain some depth as the game goes on. The visuals are solid even if I did have to playfully roll my eyes at the Dark Souls health bar for bosses, and I found the writing workable enough from what small bits of it I experienced. There’s also character creation, and while the character creator is somewhat basic, it does the job I needed it to do
All in all, I put the demo down intrigued enough to both avoid going too far and to put the game on my Steam wishlist. For now it feels like more of a sale game than one I would pick up at full price, but who knows how the Steam Deck I’m hoping to order next week will change my gaming habits…
