one of the main strengths of the combat system, now that I’ve spent more time with it, is that they’ve actually made an action game where you eat almost as many hits as you do in a jRPG (though you can block and dodge to an extent) without it feeling like you’re just fucking up, and made constantly needing to heal or change stuff up dynamic and stressful as it should be.
it’s still kind of mushy and out of time but it’s actually extremely well conceived for what it is, which is true for a lot of the decisions they’ve made here. the weapon upgrades are kind of busywork but I think your stats would feel totally invisible otherwise so I see why they included them, and the materia arranging still works really well and is fun!
Aerith’s double cast and prayer are awesome but her normal attacks + tempest feel so bland to control esp compared to Barret and Tifa that I don’t really want her in the party, or at least only as passive AI.
still think parts of this are totally repulsive BUT playing though the big lamps dungeon and switching the voices to japanese have helped me warm up to it a bit
and the writing is surprisingly nice once in a while, i liked barret complaining about the military co-opting the cartoon dog and particularly that he was calling cloud by the dog’s name early on
called it a night on wall market yesterday, enjoying this a lot more after initially rolling my eyes so fuckin hard at the “kill ten rats in a warehouse” sidequests and finding the combat a bit sloppy
realised ive approached every third person with a sword combat system instinctively like a souls game for the last few years so maybe that didn’t help, groaning when my roll doesn’t have iframes
it is kinda spoiled by the anxiety that at any point scrooge mcduck could show up in a trench coat and make a deadpan speech about how sephiroth crossed worlds with the regulant novacrux
I thought the delivery on the “well hey you’re the new mercenary in town, time to get acquainted!” cutscene upstairs at the weapon shop was extremely cackhanded at a time when they really should’ve been sticking the landing, having that immediately after the gratuitous “cloud is chased by more shinra soldiers through the city after the reactor bombing and runs into sephiroth” embellishment was bad bad bad, it basically started to pick up for me after he got his sword stuck in the doorframe.
I kind of wonder how abrupt the pacing switch to running yakuza sidequests would’ve felt without all that stuff cut in before it, nothing since has seemed remotely as severe a misstep. I say all this because I’m wary of the line becoming “oh yeah the killing rats stuff was terrible” when I think that was in fact just past the nadir. it is also just dumb that final fantasy and zelda are the two franchises that are still doing english localization like it’s 2006 when everyone else has gotten it together.
its kind of hilarious that the last ff14 expansion feels like it had more care put into its english dialogue and voice acting than this AAA Cultural Event game that’s been in development for half a decade+
hello i am here in this thread now. i have taken a break from yakuza 5 because of this game. i played darts in seventh heaven and i just did the first motorcycle segment and i think i might be losing my shit over this in a really unexpected and good way. i think this game is good so far. i think i might be okay the changes they make to things.
all the best writing in the game is by natsuko ishikawa, the matsuno stuff is peppered in at different parts… like its good, but credit where its due for the actual story
First seeing Roche I thought he was gonna be some retrofitted drop in toward Sephy’s remnant trio from Advent Children, granted I barely remember anything about them besides their looks and some bike combat w/Cloud.
