I’m not sure what I’m meant to be getting out of Gaiden’s live action cabaret stuff. The Youtube ring lights in the hostesses eyes distract and disturb me more than they should? I just get the impression Kiryu enjoys being a cameraman.
yiikuza: a postmodern action rpg
Yakuza 7 has a like 45 minute boss fight against a guy who doesn’t hit women and iirc the only healer class is women only so the entire thing is a stupid waste of time. That’s when it really started to lose me. There’s at least two points where kiryu does a now you are the guy ichiban speech but doesn’t fucking leave the game. And then the dumb twist happens and it completely destroyed my desire to ever play the game again. I was getting really into one plotline and then it became some other shit I didn’t care about. I was so fucking psyched on that shit and it’s like the most disappointed I’ve ever been by a jrpg, I’m with bachelor. It was less fucking heartbreaking to discover .hack was dog shit despite being the coolest idea ever. I felt a spiritual connection to that man…and ichiban let me down…
also the entire way the game handles female party members does kind of suck…like what a great spread of jobs for them to do…but what do you expect from a game thats out there defending the rights of pimps. I do also generally wish more of the jobs were useful because I feel like I didnt switch my shit at all for 2/3 of the game, and also the summons are funny like once but they’re almost never useful except for the super OP past yakuza characters or the ones that straight up let you like restore the party’s hp/mp for a paltry 60k yens.
A bunch of the substories are really funny though and I liked the conversations the party has when you eat at restaurants
So much Of The Dead erasure in this thread. Tsk tsk.
Thought selectbutton of all places would have The Great Black Panther Reappraisal
You have to consciously ignore the existence of Black Panther because it makes the mainline titles’ combat way less enjoyable if you remember you could be playing BP games instead. Sweaty boss fights, superb presentation with no health bar abstractions, that Def Jam feel, what else do you want
Waiting for the complete translation patches before diving in properly but I’m so excited, those games were so fun even without knowing the language
I have a lot of fondness for PS2 Y1 since I still feel it’s the only one that succeeds at injecting actual pathos into Kiryu, the man who ultimately only seems to follow his code because that’s the one thing nobody could ever rob him of, plus the aesthetics really are as good as PS2 gets while the Kiwami arrangments of all the music from 1+2 are just way less impactful. Still need to beat 3 and 4, 5 is way too long but Shinada’s chapter feels underrated, the “I wonder if I looked that small too” line is killing me and I find it wild that a videogame game can blindside you with a sudden Show Aikawa appearance and Kyosuke Himuro needle drop 40 hours in.
I have come to fully embrace the pulp “everyone is good deep down (even though they’re also capable of devising decades long insanely cruel schemes)” convention of the series by now, especially that I no longer expect some particularly coherent storytelling or worldview from the writers. I regularly drop these for 6-12 months because of a burnout (as good as the gamefeel of everything always is, none of these games or minigames are well tuned or, hm, edited down well, again, Black Panther comes the closest), but the atemporal quality captainlove mentioned is good because even with total plot amnesia I can always come back and immediately vibe with these storylines on the level of cutscene direction and emotional performances. I feel RGG team regularly shames the rest of the industry on the basis of sheer fundamentals of filmic language.
I especially love what Tatsuro Koike (who, among other things, also worked on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s considerable DTV efforts, Seventh Code and Beautiful New Bay Area Project) is doing with action choreography in this series, sometimes I feel like half of the reason I play these is knowing some sick 90s Hong Kong style action scene is right behind the corner
i just realized Masamichi Amano, the composer for Quest 64 / Holy Magic Century / Eltale Monsters, is also the composer for Radiant Silvergun, the film Battle Royale (2000) and Tarantino’s Django Unchained(?), among a mess of symphonies (12 of 'em!), concert ensemble compositions, and anime/film/game work
need to check out more of this guy’s stuff
I think the patch for Black Panther came out in like literally August of this year which is why nobody played it yet, and the hostess club shit is still untranslated I guess. The first translation project from a few years ago died out. They also did the second game before the first one for some reason which didn’t help, and it’s also not finished yet either. I don’t think anybody wanted to play a half translated psp game where there’s like no ui in the combat, it took forever for a English gamefaqs guide of the jp version to appear
I would buy that if I hadn’t seen enough Why Yakuza Kenzan Is The Pinnacle Of The Series takes to last a lifetime.
isn’t this what people said about Ishin before it got localized
People literally just want the rest of these games and are hyping them up because they aren’t in English at this point. It’s not because they’re particularly amazing… Like I hate to say it but the combat everyones been waiting for in black panther…is just as half-baked and tedious as all other yakuza combat, it doesnt hold up worth a shit at all. It’s very easy to immediately figure out busted shit the AI can’t respond to (just use grab attacks every time you fight more than one guy lol and they will let you 1v1 no problem! do a fast special move and then punch people in the face when they’re on the ground in 1v1 fights until you can heat move them to death) and it’s you know…a fuckin PSP game. It’s okay. None of this shit is worth flipping out about like people do on youtube…
Here I was wondering what caused 26 posts in this thread.
Okay for You Specifically, I’d say PS2 Yakuza 1. If you can’t, then play Kiwami but only focus on the main story. It’s 2006 Kabukicho! You’ll be hell yeahing about the whole thing. It is both a remake of the 1st game and a sequel to Zero. It’s a bizarre broken mess of a game.
Judgement has a very rough start, about 8 hours straight of making you try all the different things the game has. I think the story eventually goes incredible places but woof.
Now I’ll put my other opinions in a different post.
really tickled that boiilng point’s re-release has a disclaimer in the launcher boasting how it’s being presented in its original unedited form to preserve the developers artistic intentions
going to time travel back and show this to 8 year old me so she is galvanized further in her mission to evangelize this game
Just a question but what twist does everyone hate so much in Y: LAD? I love that game almost whole-heartedly. The best part is Mirror Face.
In response to Gaiden being out I finally started Lost Judgement. So far I am shocked how many extremely jailable offenses the protagonists have done so far. Assaulting Minors, installing hidden cameras in high school, installing hidden cameras in a high school bathroom, assaulting minors, running away a student who caught their hidden cameras installed below waist level on a stairwell.
I can’t believe something this well-written is also this stupid. Ryu Ga Gotoku has always been ripped from the headlines stuff and this is as good as any Law and Order and yet, also, what the fuck. This is like when the Phoenix Wright crew’s office got reposessed because of a bad contract and 3 lawyers sat around going “what should we do?” Maybe don’t secretly spy on students under secret work from the School owner.
Anyways after the first major plot reveal I am sitting here thinking “can’t wait to see how we end up a thousand miles from this idea!”
Also excited to be in the city that is literally right outside. As someone that took the train from central tokyo to Yokohama proper two months ago that really is an all day afair, even if it doesn’t seem like it in reverse.
Ryu Murakami and never seen doctor brother and completely abandoning that a functioning “moral” society would let so many people fall through the cracks into helplessness and what those people then have to do to survive.
the coin locker baby storyline is terrible, nanba betraying you, how little the homelessness angle actually matters, i actually thought the ichiban political arc would be funny but then the game decided it shouldnt actually go anywhere, the story goes from being like actually touching to just a bunch of stupid bullshit that didn’t seem to have anything to do with what i actually liked about the game. actually arakawa or whatever is your DAD and that’s more important than literally everything else going on, actually. Also that kiryu boss fight is irredeemably awful next to the majima/saejima one, it’s embarrassing. There’s a lot of really bad stuff about that game actually.
I have never quit a yakuza game on the second to last chapter because it completely lost me before
huh so that’s where Far Cry 2 came from. damn
yeah!!! that’s what i’m always saying!!!
Wow you start listing plot threads 7 abandons after the 1/3rd mark and it won’t end.