@grohac#12416 wow!! as a trans person playing 0 for the first time now: thank you for the heads up.
@grohac#12416 I appreciate your perspective here. I also find myself borderline dismayed with the amount of in joke winking the more recent games sometimes do.
and yeah I was recently wondering how these games seem to have gotten a pass wrt sexuality/gender/gender id themes. Not calling for a crusade just curious why they seem to skate when other popular games are interrogated a bit more. They’re not evil or anything just kind of dense and outmoded I guess
@grohac#12416 Appreciated and insightful commentary on Yakuza 0!
However...
...
...I sure _don't_ love Pocket Circuit.
WELL ok more like I hate everything to do with it that's about _playing_ it. I'm a fan of everything surrounding it, though. But a lot of it drives me up the wall and your decisions about customization don't seem to have nearly as much impact as you'd think they would. Eventually I just looked up what customizations other people used to beat the more difficult races and hoped for the best. Maybe a practice/fine tuning mode where you can test your pocket racer on the track as you pick customizations would have made for a more satisfying experience?
And actually, mild spoilers about a big side game in Yakuza: Like A Dragon: ||I feel like Dragon Kart, which, kinda sucks if I'm being honest, was the result of a monkey paw wish I made for Pocket Circuit to just be a mediocre Kart racer. So sorry to everyone who really didn't like Dragon Kart.||
@yeso#12418 @espercontrol#12417
Yeah, the later games definitely have some really nice trans inclusive side stories that are genuinely supportive and incredibly surprising coming from a popular game. But the stuff in 0 was a big yikes that came outta nowhere to my partner and I.
There's definitely a bunch of things in later entries to the series that are swing and a miss, but there's not that level of open malice or lack of care like some big studios have toward these issues. To put it nicely, and I may just be giving RGG too much slack, but it feels like they're slightly outta touch but trying? For every win there's some misogynistic thing just steamrolled over. _Like a Dragon_ went out of its way to humanize homelessness and reasons for it happening and be sympathic toward sex workers, but then also included a main character getting sexually assaulted and then just "being fine with it" and barely touched on except as a dunk on the abuser later.
There's also the issues of lauding "the good old days" of the yakuza which is intrinsically tied to imperialistic tendencies in Japan so, which I think goes over a lot of folks heads (including some of the devs) but is definitely a cause for critique given the real life bases for the Tojo and Omi Alliance. This is why on a surface level Kiwami 2 can be so good, but then also be a real hot offensive mess when you go "Holy moly there's so much anti-Korean stuff in here." Which later writers and devs tried to course correct to... mixed results imo.
In the end, Like a Dragon is the most fun i had with the series by a mile, but maybe that's cause I'm nearing my 40s and having protags of an RPG be actual adults was just such a novelty to me. It genuinely feels like every other RPG in a modern setting is about teens eventually fighting god and like... been there done that.
Edit to reply to @Gaagaagiins#12425
Pocket Circuit was more about it being the only thing to make Kiryu and Majima look THAT happy in the whole series to me and the goofy stakes. But yes, Dragon Kart racing was uhhh, woof. I finished all of it but yeesh. Best recc to anyone playing it is hit Triangle twice so you get a further out view, only way I was able to win races.
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@yeso#12418 and yeah I was recently wondering how these games seem to have gotten a pass wrt sexuality/gender/gender id themes.
What perplexes me even more about this is the relatively progressive stance on sex work, at least as far as Yakuza: Like A Dragon sets the bar. I haven't been a fan of the series all that long but like, a mass media videogame that at least alludes to things like how sex work criminalization just leaves sex workers vulnerable on all sides, one side to exploitation by pimps and johns and organized crime and trafficking, and the other to arrest by police, and on another to poverty. And then Y:LAD (mid-late game spoilers) ||just straight up putting in hypocritically puritanical neo-cons putting on a show to look good while practically entrapping undocumented sex workers into a fast-tracked deportation by tricking someone who was doing their best to look after them into selling them out. Downright hyperrealism right there.||
Got to writing my comment while you were also saying something similar, @grohac#12426 !
I can also echo what you said about ethnic minorities in Japan and how there is some good but still yet mixed things in there. I have not been playing the series for long and I've only really played 0, Kiwami, and now 7, so I haven't seen the series at its worst, I bet. I am in no way knowledgeable about the social dynamics in Japan in that regard, and am just inferring many things, but at least from my unaware and very generalized impressions, there were some interesting things discussed and shown in the game. If rumours are to believed, the game was reconfigured into an RPG quite late into the development process, which makes the inclusion of ||Han Joon-Gi and Zhao Tianyou as party members seem, well, as tacked on as it feels they are, considering they are relatively prominent in the story basically until they join the party and then more or less recede into the background, even if the opportunity to have them in your party is still more or less appreciated.|| On the other hand I can only speak from what I can infer and what media does get localized and localized faithfully in that respect but I think it's pretty neat nonetheless that a game would portray zainichi Korean communities at all and at least make an effort to portray the discrimination those communities face, even if it's a bit superficially done. But on the other _other_ hand, would it kill them to cast people in those roles who are actually bilingual in Japanese and Korean, or get better language coaches? Almost feels like they're telling on themselves when it would make sense for two Korean characters to speak Korean to each other, but they aren't because that would mean getting those voice actors to speak more of a language they probably don't speak...
Well, either way, Y:LAD feels like a few good steps forward, just not yet enough to make up for all of the steps backward from the past. If the next game continues and even increases the forward momentum then we'll know something good is happening, and I feel fairly optimistic for that, for now.
Since @yeso mentioned it: Shenmue. Tbf I only gave Shenmue II a fair shake, but I get the sense most of my issues with the sequel are transferrable. The localization/VO is so horrendous that it completely undermines the game's painstaking efforts to immerse you in a setting.
I like the idea of a game where you're immersed in a vivid setting and can talk to anyone and look at mundane things, and where there's a whole combat engine in place for just a handful of conflicts--in fact I was just recently daydreaming about a Blade Runner game like that, where you fly around a city and hunt down just four or five enemies. BUT...in practice I found Shenmue II really boring and tedious. All the odd-jobs, all the time spent following very slow people. Without a well told story to keep me going, I lost all motivation after the unintentional comedy wore off.
I always meant to withhold final judgment until trying out the Japanese version, but I guess I'm skeptical it'll make enough of a difference. Definitely file this one under "wish I liked it more" though. I like the spirit at Sega that fueled its existence.
@Lacquerware#12452 Other people can correct me, but I'm fairly certain Shenmue and Shenmue II were once 1 game they split in to two to try and begin recouping the enormously inflated expense the project had become, so never mind that the issues you have would be transferable, they might be either identical or even worse in Shenmue.
Also there is some hilarious story (rumour?) that Suzuki handpicked the voice actors because they resembled the I guess concept art or models for the characters and he might have at least picked the guy for Ryo's English voice because he was a martial artist or a stuntman or something. And that at least at the time Suzuki was not a fluent English speaker...
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@Lacquerware#12452 I was just recently daydreaming about a Blade Runner game like that, where you fly around a city and hunt down just four or five enemies
....I have good news for you
https://www.gog.com/game/blade_runner
late to the party but mine would be Symphony of the Night.
the rpg leveling makes the game a completely unbalanced mess; power ups are not that cool and you're left finding a bunch of underleveled weapons/armor; level design is not that great ESPECIALLY when you get to the inverted castle.
It kinda baffles me that some people consider the inverted castle a milestone of level design being that it is unplayable without the bat powerup that let's you fly freely.
Another one that I hate is Secret of Mana, but it seems Insert Credit peeps (at least the boys on the show) have already called it out for the mediocre game (with beautiful music) that it is. It might have been a lot better if the devs could've realized their true vision on the Super Nintendo Playstation CD Thing, but not sure how that would fix the battle system which is completely broken.
For me I guess it‘d be Sekiro. And I consider myself a pretty hardcore souls fan. I’ve played and beat them all except for demons souls, and I've played throught DS1 many many times.
Bloodborne was too much of a deviation for me. I'm a very defensive dark souls player, so in Bloodborne when they don't let you have a shield and kinda force you to be really offensive it threw me way off and I had a hard time getting into it. I still beat it and had a good time, but it's just not a souls game I can really sink my teeth into.
Sekiro took the bloodborne formula and turned it up a few notches. In Sekiro, you have to be relentlessly offensive in your tactics. In battle, you can't stop moving and you're constantly juggling perfectly timed parries and hits.
The other thing I don't like about Sekiro is its pacing. The game puts you up against walls far too often where you come up against a group of enemies that just keep killing you. I felt in other souls games there was a fair bit of rewarding exploration between tough combat sections, but not so much during the short time I've played Sekiro.
It upsets me because I want to like it. I've started it over 3 times and feel like I have the capacity to learn its nuances... But it's such a stressful experience that I end up with high blood pressure every time I play. And that's just no fun for me.
@yeso#12457 Haha I actually started playing this recently and yeah it‘s very rad. Basically imagining a modern take on that with free roaming, free flying car driving, and fully 3D environments. Although I suppose you’d lose the cinematography that only a game with fixed camera angles can offer.
@milo
>The game puts you up against walls far too often where you come up against a group of enemies that just keep killing you
Oh wow, I feel like we need to put our heads together because we have opposite views. That's exactly what I LIKE about Sekiro and don't like about the other games. When you hit a difficulty spike, you get to bang your head against it without much interruption until you figure it out. I mean, don't Dark Souls and Bloodborne also do this (put you up against enemies that keep killing you), the difference being that you often have to repeat a long and potentially dangerous trek back after each death? Is it that the trek back gives you time to cool off? To me it's the opposite--the trek back angers me. In Sekiro, a boss could kill me eighty times and I'd never get frustrated because all of my time was spent learning and improving at that boss fight.
I do think it's safe to say Sekiro has lots of rewarding exploration as well, but it's more compartmentalized, maybe? Like you'll have a boss fight that's easy to repeat until you win, _then_ a traversal/exploration sequence/area that's relatively safe.
@Lacquerware#12512
Yeah I can totally agree with that and to be honest that is something I appreciate in other games (megaman comes to mind).
But in Sekiro I felt those sections were just way too often and close together. I'd spend 30 minutes on a harrowing group of enemies, finally beat them and like 10 minutes later there's another group of enemies kicking my ass into the ground. I really like adventure games and I really treasure the exploration in dark souls so I didn't mind the crawl so much. Plus, like I said about dark souls, I'm able to be more defensive and kind of go about it at my own pace. Sekiro wants you to keep up with its pace, period.
Maybe one day though I'll come back to it and it'll finally click. In the mean time I'll just cry about it. :P
@fugazi57#12504 I just played SOTN for the first time a month or two ago and while I gotta say I loved the first half, I too was shocked at how much I hated the inverted castle. Flying around as the bat or floating around as the gas cloud is hecka tedious, and maybe it was just the path I took, but I thought it was absurdly hard all of a sudden compared to the regular castle until I farmed the Crissaegrim out of desperation… and instead of making it more manageable, it just completely trivialized everything!
I don't mind that the RPG elements kind of break the game in the first half, though. It's nice that there's a hangout Castlevania game.
The best (probably?) game I dislike completely is Hylics. Obviously crafted with loads of artistry and love on top of a bog standard RPGMaker engine. Like most people these days, confuses Surrealism for the merely weird, resulting in early 00s internet style “random” humor like attacking enemies with frozen burritos. It reminds me of the kind of educational film shorts they used to make in the 60s and 70s, where stuffy old men who had never done drugs tried to warn you about the dangers of LSD. Feels like whoever made the game discovered The Residents just a week ago and wants you to share their newfound enthusiasm.
Great art though. Looks fantastic in motion.
About the inverted castle in SotN: I feel like internet culture has ruined to some degree this one because it has become a thing so widely spread and well known that people sort of forget that in the 90s and physical magazine era of videogames this was a very obscure and obtuse secret to unlock in a videogame.
The fact that the inverted castle is so uncomfortable and weird to navigate sort of added to the feeling of discovering something amazing you weren't supposed to see. Omniscient walkthroughs and youtube channels dedicated to easter eggs have spoiled that moment, and for people who play the game now and have known how to unlock that secret for years even without having played the thing yet the impact of course is very different.
But yeah, the inverted castle to me is not about how "fun" it is, but about "I can't believe the game is allowing me to do this".
@Gaagaagiins#12455
I posted this one here before
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/vgsr8PV.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/vgsr8PVh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
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@JoJoestar#12772 for people who play the game now and have known how to unlock that secret for years even without having played the thing yet the impact of course is very different
hmmm yeah it sure is a lot different, it doesn't work as well without that wow factor. Without it it just seems kinda slapped on there
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@Fishie#12780 I posted this one here before
it baffles me so much that shenmue 3 was just one chapter of the story. Yu Suzuki sure is a mad man.
still wanna play it tho cause it looks like a dreamcast game lol
@Fishie#12780 I'm choosing to believe this was taken from deep within Ys Net HQ. Thank you to the brave folks who are a part of the Fishie Productions espionage unit
@Gaagaagiins#12790
I took the pic when I had interviews with people at AM2 long ago.
Chapter 2 of Shen Mue is what happens on the boat ride to China and was released as a comic.
@Fishie#13048 Wait… so what IS this picture…