Last night I was playing Yakuza 6. I haven’t been able to game much for the past week or so and was excited to get back into it. The first thing I did was play the RTS minigame for about 45 minutes. Then I advanced the story to one boss fight and after a bunch of cutscenes found myself back in Kamurocho. Then I went to the batting center and hit tanks for another 45 minutes. Then it was time for bed.
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i’ve been playing xenoblade x but found myself, at 80 hours by chapter 9, entering elden ring levels of “this is going to impact my gpa”.
so i’m taking a break from it and have been spending a little time in the mornings leveling NIN in FFXIV. I love it. I might make it my main melee dps?
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Started Arco last night.
This is a good game but not a refined one. The UI is an overall nightmare on controller. Tutorial wasn’t great and the combat can be frustration with not having control over the length of some actions. The combat is good though. First chapter was impactful, reassures me that the story is probably going to meet my expectation.
It makes me wish I could program worth a damn because I’d mod the hell out of these menus. They are clunky.
Additionally, I grabbed Cookie Cutter from the eShop alongside Crow Country. Before I go further -
After playing it, I get why. It’s very cool looking, combat has legs, and now performance better then it did at initial launch on PC. I think they made basic mistakes that get in the way of it feeling remarkable on the switch and that actually is pretty hard for Metroidvanias imo. There is one thing switch can sell is a RPG, and then probably next a isometric horror game or other, but definitely 3rd is a side-scrolling action game. You just need to be able to see the game in both TV and handheld mode. The camera just is so wide and the sprites too small.
They are proportional and that points out the problem. It’s intended to look like this in motion. Perhaps to get pass the resolution issues. I would have been happier just seeing the pixels.
The telegraphic for parry doesn’t feel good. I don’t wanna say it does work, it just feels bad. I don’t feel like they introduce the upgrade system fast enough. You get your first special attack type and I haven’t seen anything else for like 30 mins. The art is really cool and the writing seems funny enough. I just let me actually see all this hard work. This game took a really long time to make let alone get on the switch. It seems like they had a year under their belt already at reveal.
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i’m still playing through kiwami 2, 32 hours in and still in chapter 11. i’ve spent most of my time hunting down substories to do, winning all of the darts, playing golf, baseball, competing in the cabaret club grand prix, doing bouncer missions and the underground tournaments.
and of course, majimaaaaaa kensetsuuuuuuu
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I played three hours of Promise Mascot Agency and it’s SO GOOD. Indie Yakuza!
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Finished Promise Mascot Agency. I’m wondering what I should be playing next for all the time before I have the baby moon on the 25th, but as for the game, here are some of my conclusions:
- The game was fun. I’ve loved going for hours through the island, gliding with the truck to get to the islands and collecting all type of shit. Having certain power-ups be unlockable from the get go with a side quest has been a 10/10 experience, since you can do most of the secondary quests and objectives just on the first episode. I was the one doing that, and I tend to do that on the Yakuzas until I get tired and I decide to move on with the plot.
- There has been several moments where people compare this to the Yakuzas and said that the game has some sense of ironic distance. While that is true, it’s been much less than I’d have expected. The ending in that sense has been really satisfying, because I was getting tired of the game, and the last chapter is bonkers in the sense that it completely erases the distance once you get all cards in the table. Also, props to the writing team: all the characters are nicely written, and the plot is amazingly bittersweet. I decided to end on a good note.
- What is true is that maybe there was too much. This is my opinion, but I think that having too much collectibles, while fine, wasn’t the thing for me. For Yakuza players who are used to that, I’d say you would have an amazing time on this (in a much simplified experience).
- My doubts have been partially erased. Turns out the whole money mechanic develops into something else, which manages to erase to me the worst problem of the game: there’s an inconsistency from having serious problems with money to having too much. I think that Kaizen can make a third game where they can fully explore that mechanic and the problem of money/greed. Not going to say much more since it would be a spoiler, but good game.
There are things that don’t click with me, but it’s an interesting game to think and give it some time. It’s not as fascinating to me as other games I’ve played this year (and my fave game released this year atm is Urban Myth Dissolution Center), but I think it’s a pretty solid to great experience from top to bottom.
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I think you’re incredibly considerate for not spoiling a hypothetical future game a studio could one day make.
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That is an enticing suggestion.
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I did this same thing last night! It did so many things right and in the particular ways that rock my lobster. It was an embarrassment of riches.
Purposefully not reading @xhekros thoughts until I finish, but for now I’m really enjoying it. The best compliment I can give is it’s the type of game I want to play on a sunny afternoon (i.e., it’s so good I want to disrupt my normal routines to play it).
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I’m playing Promise Mascot Agency by finally firing up the copy of Paradise Killer I purchased on Switch years and years ago to prepare for Promise Mascot Agency, playing it for 20 minutes and deciding that I like the art too much to play it at such a blurry resolution, and then buying Paradise Killer (again) for $5 on Xbox
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I like the green guy with the round head
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Kofu chan
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There’s a new demo out for Unbeatable that has some of the story in it this time! I played the White Label version a TON back in like 2021. It’s a neat rhythm game with what seems like some light JRPG to it, but White Label was just the rhythm game part cut out into it’s own thing. The tagline for the game is “Music is illegal and you do crimes.” which sounds like they’re riffing off what is now a very dated meme but wasn’t when development started. I’m of the opinion that games leaning on memes are instantly outdated and “cringe” as the kids say. Kind of like Borderlands!
The demo has me mildly excited for the full release, though it’s not without rough spots. The first scene that tutorializes the rhythm game broke and I had to skip the rest. Then I got hard locked at a vending machine and had to force quit. Not to mention many little things that betray a lack of polish. I can forgive these things in a demo, but I really wish there was a text speed option. I find it very grating to press A twice for every text box because the crawl is so slow.
They put a lot of work into pulling everything together aesthetically over the past 4(?!) years. It’s hand drawn sprites on low poly 3D backgrounds with heaps of fancy post-processing. I like the lively idle animations and punchy sound effects. The sprites get a little skewed and start to look like cutouts from time to time because of the 3D camera, which takes away from the look a bit, but they do little things like casting simple shadows on other characters when you stand close to them to add a little depth back in. I really like the half tone effect used with bloom. That’s some tasty half tone.
There are little rhythm minigames scattered about the world. They’re nothing special, but fun little moments with short tracks. The batting cage minigame rules. There are “random” encounters peppered in that use the main rhythm game mechanics with some weird sounding, almost improvisational music. I wonder if it’s procedural in some way, but none of them were memorable. I was waiting for one of the 8 actual* songs to come up in the story to play through in context, but the demo ends just when it seems that’s going to happen. The whole thing was sort of aimless. I wasn’t sure where to go, but I didn’t mind hanging out in the world and exploring. There were plenty of little moments like silly pamphlets or bizarre NPCs to keep me entertained.
There are many small criticisms that I couldn’t stop myself from noticing. I’m seeing aliasing that makes me think they didn’t have 1440p support in mind, sprite reflections are super low res, some interiors look like they’re missing walls, the jump button is the west face button which should be illegal, they zoom in too far to characters in some scenes but don’t have high res enough sprites to avoid ugly upscaling, text box tails don’t always point to the speaker, sometimes they cover eachother, yadda yadda. Sometimes I wish I could just enjoy things lol.
This game has a pet peeve of mine that I don’t see often and that’s a run cycle with an exaggerated sprint that looks out of place with the tone of the movement. And not like Symphony of the Night with Alucard’s run. That’s fine! It’s the sprint that looks like the character is trying to outrun a bus that gets me. This is something Demonschool does as well. I find it distracting, but I’ve never seen anyone else mention this so maybe it’s just me.
You get to make a little poster out of some stickers and such that you put over the copaganda. I made this one:
Normally I avoid posts this long, assuming no one wants to read a glorified article, but I had fun with this one and felt like letting the Verbosity Goblin out for once. Thank you for reading if you got this far!
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I really enjoyed that demo. I played (most of?) the story part and found it meh, especially as I was still learning the controls. The baseball minigame was my favorite part.
Then I opened arcade mode and there were like a dozen songs to play, and it absolutely ruled.
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I watched the trailer for this one and found the push and pull between really cool and tryhard cringe to be pretty powerful. I haven’t played the demo but I was hoping that that was just an annoying advertising tactic because everything else looked great
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Yeah it’s a rapid oscillation between “this was made for me specifically” and “cringe”. Especially the trailer.
There’s definitely lots of Lulz So Random in there, but a lot of it works for me too. Theres a gag with a pamphlet advertising a proper casino just for kids that I liked, and the Pokemon style Jessie and James duo that I’m super on board with. Then it’s deflated by a joke where they say “chips” weird for a little too long.
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The story seemed like they wanted a vertical slice that showed mechanics other than the rhythm game, but maybe it should have been a short narrative arc. There was no momentum to the narrative ongoing and characters kept talking about events that you need the context of to care.
But yeah, same here. I haven’t played the new songs yet but Worn Out Tapes was my favourite from White Label, which seems to not be here :(.
Edit: Nevermind! Maybe it was never there and I just got it from their EP or something. It’s not in White Label either :(
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Well, I just finished up Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice (No. 6 in the main series if you get lost in the naming structure), and I’ve got some thoughts on it and, I suppose, the Apollo Justice Trilogy as a whole.
Apollo Justice: Fine. They pulled an SFIII and tried to reboot the cast and I liked it. I liked the interplay between Trucy and Apollo, and I thought the story was decent enough.
Dual Destinies: Weird that they felt the need to introduce another protagonist, but I liked Athena as well. The transition to 3D lost a bit of charm and there’s a little too much in the way of gimmicks, but I didn’t hate it. I was exhausted by the end, though.
Then there’s the last game, which I thought was a bad way to end Apollo’s story. Calling this The Apollo Justice Trilogy is really weird, especially since he’s kind of a background character in the second game and Phoenix takes center stage in this one. The stakes are way too high with half of it taking place in an anti-defense lawyer dictatorship. At this point, there’s far too much going on and I often found myself hating characters less out of how they were written (I don’t like the main prosecutor much, though), but because of their lengthy, unskippable animations. They’re really proud of their animation work and they want to make sure you see it. It is overstuffed.
It becomes pretty clear that with three lawyer protagonists that one gets left out in the cold and it’s Athena’s turn this time. She gets one trial that is fairly short. It’s a shame, I wanted to see her and Blackquill interact a lot more. I also think the, uh… “Mytharc” regarding Apollo Justice is most of the worst stuff in the game. There are some fine new characters, but too many annoying ones. The fact that so much of it is about Apollo’s secret lineage or whatever just felt unnecessary. And as much as I enjoyed the original thrillogy, seeing Phoenix, Maya, Pearl, and Edgeworth felt more like the game was trying to remind me of the original trilogy than anything else. You liked those games, right? Well look, your favorites are all here (except for ever-popular himbo Dick Gumshoe)!
Like I said, there’s too much going on. That’s my biggest problem with it, more than anything else. Technically, it’s fine, but the story is a much less interesting than what’s been done before and the biggest problem with the series is still present. I still found myself getting to conclusions that the game wanted me to take a few more steps to get to and it was very easy to figure out whodunnit. Personally, it’s fighting for the title of worst in the series for me, neck-and-neck with the first Great Ace Attorney game.
And seriously, where is Dick Gumshoe?
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Now playing: Chants of Sennaar (2023)
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Want to say for newer members of the community: we all love posts like this! You might even say they’re the point of this website. Don’t hold back.
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