Xbob42

Uhh, Yakuza's combat is neither brutal nor cinematic. It's more like comedy combat. It's silly as hell and kind of cheap looking. The actual cinematics that happen during combat are much higher quality, but they're just that: cinematics.

I just found it all very unsatisfying. Even when I beat the final boss it was more like "Well, that's over." followed by me immediately uninstalling and looking up any other endings/secrets on YouTube. Didn't help that I generally find Japan, especially medieval Japan, to be a fairly boring setting. Compared to the fantastical setting of the Souls games, the wider array of player choice and comparatively enormous variety of ways to engage in combat, including online play, Sekiro felt like a super limited gimmick rather than a brand new IP from the creators of Souls and Bloodborne. The few things I was sure I'd love like the grappling hook/prosthetic were unbelievably limited or underutilized. It really felt like they didn't know what they wanted to do, and were happy to settle for "just parry a lot, mostly" as the core design of an entire game.

Seems like a real galaxy brain move, try and flip multiple states with bullshit lawsuits, and after successfully doing so, you're still fucking losing, and then pray you get a faithless elector. Truly the plays of a winner.

I found Sekiro to actually be pretty easy, since it forces you into a single playstyle. If you're even mildly decent at building on a simple skillset, you can plow through that game very easily provided you're generally good at games. If you're not, though... I imagine it's a fucking terrible experience. That same shoehorning of everyone into the same playstyle is exactly why I disliked the game, though. Each time From makes a game, they get farther and farther from what drew me in to begin with, it feels like. That said, Sekiro still uses the basics from From's lineup. You will still have to fight the same bosses over and over as you learn them, but you'll have a wider array of ways to do so, including overleveling, using overpowered builds, or summoning other players/friends/NPCs to help you deal with battles. Sekiro gave none of these difficulty modifiers and instead forced every single player down the same route with the same build to fight every boss as though all players have an equal level of skill, when in reality many people have dramatically varying levels of skill, time, patience, dedication, etc. to devote to a single game. The Souls games are far more accommodating to those who lack one or more of these traits, and even if you have all of those traits, I still find them far more fun because I think variety is far more exciting in a long RPG than forcing me to play a single way.

That's a weirdly good fit if they go more for the N64-style games where the difficulty changed and/or added to your objectives. Hitman is already kind of that. I haven't given a single shit about a James Bond game (as I don't care about James Bond as a franchise) since the N64 title, which I adored. Can't wait to see if they can pull it off!

I'd rather my kid just skip a year of school rather than sending them out into the cesspits. And kids don't (usually) go to school in the Summer, so clearly people need to have a plan for when their kid isn't gone for most of the day.

The idea that anyone is actually physically sending their kids to school right now is patently absurd to me. We switched over to online only in like March, before the last school year was even over. No one threw a fuss and it's not a big deal. Jesus fucking Christ we have dumb people.

That kind of stuff makes me want to play more than the actual remake does. I'm such a fucking sucker for mysteries!

The workstation before this that launched in May was $199,000, so....

This game is fucking awesome and I've been playing it nonstop. I only kind of liked the previous Yakuza games. They have very simple combat that's not very fun, while the Yakuza melodrama does absolutely nothing for me. Top that off with the humor starting to grate on me after enough sidequests that all start feeling like the same writer handled each and every one of them, and I usually enjoy them a lot at the beginning and my interest quickly fades. This time is different for a few reasons: 1. Ichiban is not a stone-faced hard-ass like Kiryu and Majima. Majima was a little more interesting, but both were kind of meh. They basically just played the straight man for all the comedy bits, and the generic badass for all the melodrama. Ichiban is a lot different, he's a weirdly optimistic and hyperactive lunatic. I think Brad or Ben on Giant Bomb said he had shonen energy, and I guess that's true, but really he's more like if Dan Ryckert somehow wanted to be a Yakuza and was capable of fighting. 2. The party system makes the adventure a lot more fun. You have friends that go along with you on all your wacky hijinks. They're not really included in sidequests, but they don't just abandon you for main story missions or just exploring around town. Having a bond rating/drink links with them makes them seem like valuable additions to the game, like in Persona or other RPGs with similar mechanics. 3. The RPG system, from combat to stats to gear, makes it more exciting to explore and participate in battles. I never really cared too much about finding stuff in previous Yakuza games. You could equip a few things, sure, but the combat was braindead easy and most of your growth came from spending tons of money to get new skills from various methods. Now you get new skills from leveling up, and since encounters in Yakuza already felt like JRPG battles because you'd have to wait for the battle to start rather than just attacking people like in GTA, having an actual RPG system makes that transition less annoying and more enjoyable. I want to find and upgrade the best gear that I can, and my weapons won't just break on the rare occasion I decide to use them, they're proper gear now. 4. Expanding on the combat, while it's pretty easy for the most part (really wish there was a hard mode out the gate) it's still fun. You might think being a turn-based RPG would slow the game down, but I've found many battles are over much faster than I could end them in old Yakuza titles because I can use abilities that completely annihilate my enemies if I use them right. And when they take longer, it's fun to try to use the positioning and whatnot to maximize the amount of people I'm hitting and to try and get crap inbetween me and the enemy so that I can kick it into their faces or pick it up and deal bonus damage. Having it be this weird hybrid where everyone is always moving (you do not control movement, just actions) adds a rather interesting layer of light randomness to it that never really feels unfair, although the camera can sometimes lag behind the action and prevent you from getting perfect guards. 5. The writing seems more varied for the side quests this time around. There's a lot of wacky ones, and a lot of not-so-wacky ones. But even when you've got two wacky ones, they usually feel different enough that it doesn't feel like someone's just dipping into the anime comedy cliche bucket and pulling out something random. A little disappointing to see the reuse of the same exact joke that wasn't even funny the first time (like the Yakuza dudes in diapers being babied) that seems to be rather rare, as that's the only one in particular I can think of. Ben of Giant Bomb claimed he didn't like the whiplash of going from a sympathetic and nuanced discussion about some folks in a homeless camp and why they can't just "get out there and work again" followed immediately by you getting into a fight with enemies named "Battle Bum" and "Hungry Hungry Homeless," but I personally found that to make it even more hilarious. I think the entire point of that is that making silly jokes doesn't mean you're a heartless asshole who doesn't understand the plight of the people you're poking at. The writers obviously care a great deal about the downtrodden in Japan and really don't seem to be trying to be cruel, so I think that's just Ben being a little too sensitive, in my opinion at least. 6. The variety and interactivity of mini-games seems much better this time around. The slot car racing one in Yakuza 0 I remember as being especially disappointing. Just basically watching a video and hitting the boost at a certain point. Yawn. Dragon Kart is actual full control kart racing with power-ups! I could go on, but all this typing about it makes me want to get right back into playing it. A few minor complaints before I do that, though: 1. Camera issue described above. 2. All dialogue auto-advances for some reason. There is no way to disable this as far as I know, though you can pause at any time. This one is especially weird. 3. I had to lower the game to 1440p to get it running at 120 FPS. The game looks pretty alright, but hardly incredibly. However, setting it to 4k would drop it to the mid-60s, which seems like a wildly disproportionate hit to performance for the game looking slightly sharper. 4. I'd like to disable the start-up intros, but haven't looked it up yet. I continue to roll my eyes at the "REAL YAKUZA USE A GAMEPAD" splash screen that's Sega's way of saying "no, we didn't put any effort into keyboard and mouse controls, yet again" and spinning it in such a silly manner. I wouldn't use KBM on a third-person action game to begin with... but this one's a turn-based RPG, so you could've done better than whatever the fuck this is: Which I only know about since hitting the screenshot button brings up the KBM controls. Why not just make it a menu you can select with a mouse or by using WASD to navigate up and down at that point? So low effort.

I don't understand.

Same issue on PC. I looked on Reddit and it seems to be a problem for just about everyone, regardless of platform. Though I haven't heard much from the Playstation camp.

I could put my PS4 back into rest mode easier before, since I could do it even if I was on a different video input. Even if you pay attention to where the power options are on the PS5, it doesn't work because it saves your cursor's last position, meaning you can't reliably put it into rest mode/power it off with just the controller anymore. I find that way more annoying than I should. I find it doubly annoying since the Samsung Note I got has a somewhat similar issue, where before you'd just hold down the power button for several seconds to bring up the ability to restart/shutdown, and now you have to hold power+volume down for some dumb reason. Copying Apple or something, I assume?

The fact that people are still unironically calling them "Trump supporters" instead of Trump Fanatics or Zealots is amazing to me. There is nothing normal about this kind of submission of your entire self and your way of life to whatever a politician says. It's really disturbing. No one should treat any other human being on Earth like these people treat Trump, let alone someone as completely fucking useless as Trump himself.

Imagine if they kidnapped us to give us a checkup and a mental health wellness exam!

You mean to say they're not trying to stop the steal?

Sony willing to pay $5 million so people on PC can't play RE7 in VR seems like a tremendously stupid waste of Sony's resources. Not like Xbox had VR.

Pretty much. I wonder if these weird minor wins for the PS5 will keep up, though. It strikes me as incredibly bizarre that there'd be much of a difference at all since they're essentially the same exact system but with the Series X being more powerful and the PS5 having a faster SSD, which with these games really shouldn't matter much since they're cross-gen and not designed from the ground up for them. Seems like either people are developing primarily for PS5 first (which, again, wouldn't make much sense... damn near same hardware) or MS has got something funky going on with their firmware or drivers or something.

Don't talk dirty to me if you don't mean it.

If we just say the statues are of trans confederate generals, they'll tear them down on their own!

I found one that had the lyrics to the song, but I think that was the only one.

It feels so alien, watching competence and caution used to actually accomplish something.

That's the kind of high stakes gambles I want from my consoles.

Well shit if you told me you could brutalize someone like this in Spider-Man I might've made more of an effort to complete it the first time around!

Always genuinely excited for advancements in space travel!