Oh The bloodstained thread spoiled that.
I mean I don’t know where I can go in the castle.
Kiwami 1 turned him into a joke, whereas in original 1, he was more of a chaotic force of possibly evil. Kiwami 1 went with “lolsowacky Majima” versus the original game’s “holy shit this guy might be trying to murder us all out of nihilistic rage Majima”.
It really undermines the ending of 0 in a way, because 0’s story is meant to be about how Majima goes from being this relatively decent-ish Yakuza dude who tries to show emotion and care for someone, only to have her completely reject him (or at least not know he is the person who did it) and how that rejection basically begins his downward slide to the almost pure nihilism he has at the beginning of the series. Original 1 is supposed to be him at rock bottom, just a force of destruction with little planning ahead, and his subsequent friendship/rivalry with Kiryu over the next few games shows him slowly getting his shit back together. Kiryu spends most of original 1 avoiding Majima (an early scene of Majima is literally him bashing the skull of one of his subordinates in, and Kiryu is basically like “nah, nope, not gonna”), or at least not directly interacting with him, until the part where Majima smashes a truck into a building and kinda accidentally rescues Kiryu. Kiwami just makes them wacky frenemies from the jump, which makes some of the more murderous and chaotic aspects of Majima’s behavior in the main story of the game seem to make no sense at all.
So far Majima hasn’t even shown up in Kiwami 2, which tracks with the original 2, but I know that is going to change.
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Yeah in 1 Majima is a chaos Joker (voiced by Mark Hammil). Can as easily murder as talk to you. No clue what his actual motivations are. In Yakuza 1 story he is really scary.
This carries into 2-5+DS. When Majima makes an apperance you don’t know what that means. Why is he obsessed with Kiryu? Because Kiryu has unmovable morals and conviction and Majima respects/tests those boundaries. 3 beginning with a Majima fight is a real oh-shit moment of the series that is lost on new fans. More when you play as him in Dead Souls. He also uhh straight up dies multiple times in the earlier games.
Dead Souls for PS4 IT IS CANON.
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He Booji why have we never done a deep dive Yakuza episode we really screwed up there because now everyone has done it and we actually played this whole series as it came out.
Maybe I should give Isshin a try again.
We did one for like episode 5 (edit: Episode 4 - Majima Always Comes Back), though that was like I think before part 5 came out so maybe we should do another? I haven’t listened to it again, but I am sure my thoughts have changed since then.
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playing it with no experience of the original I just took his behavior in kiwami 1 as partly the result of the events in 0 and partly classic Mad Dog tactics of not having the physicality of someone like kiryu and having to adopt a crazy persona to stay competitive and it ending up sticking
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Yeah the thing with original 1 and beyond is that you are never really sure Majima is trying to compete directly with Kiryu, or even what his goal is. He has big Chaotic energy that is diminished a lot by him just trying to best Kiryu in Kiwami. I get why this happened (he is a fan favorite character, which grew even more after 0) but it is still kinda sad. The ending of 0 is super sad, but only without wacky Majima, because then it’s not a personality he adopts as much as how his brain deals with what happened.
Zero also does some crazy recon with Kiryu because the thru-line from 1-4+DS is the increasing legend of Kiryu that is unbearable to him.
I can’t even remember if it is DS or 5 or 4 where The reveal that it was all orchestrated by some bit player from 1 I really didn’t remember.
Even 6 (I still haven’t played 5) has a lot of Kiryu being like “seriously, can people stop thinking I am some god already? I just want a small apartment and to chill for a bit”.
Also, having just started 2, holy shit Kiryu’s apartment at the beginning with Haruka is FUCKING HUGE. But he also only decorated it with one drawing made by Haruka, which seem accurate to him.
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dark souls
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Dead Souls really has a surprisingly fun story (even has some pathos via the villain from 2) for it just being Yakuza with Zombies.
replayed the re2 remake thinking that maybe the reason i didn’t like it was because i was playing it wrong (as in, playing it like the original resident evil 2, the game it is remaking)
no it’s still fucking shit
Oh man, Dreams early access copies got converted into the full Dreams release today ahead of it’s release this Friday. Let me sign on to see if there’s anything going today.
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Ah yikes, I knew trophies would ruin this 
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Oh also, stuff I played today.
I’m forcing myself to take a break from AC Odyssey. The finish line is in sight. Light at the end of the tunnel. But even putting 20 hours into it after not touching it for a year was too dang much.
I mean, the Atlantis DLC looks gorgeous and introduces a few new things, but then it makes the whole DLC those, uh, few new things.
Anyway! Moving onto Yakuza 3. Can’t wait to play through all these here Yakuza games til I keel over.
playing frostpunk and i can’t decide whether i like it mildly or loathe it completely. sick of playing games that always dangle self-sufficiency juuuuuuust out of reach
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all right well me and The Buds are firing up blue burst on private server soon, anyone who wants to play is invited, it seems real easy to get into
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don’t do this to me
please
Project Diva Mega39s: yes, it is Project Diva Arcade game, on the Switch. that’s good! it pretty up makes up for the some of the graphical shortcomings (it’s running at a lower res across the board, some of the PVs run at 30 fps or have drops but the game part is always 60 fps) that I can just fucking play it where ever. yeah I guess it sucks that about half the songs from Future Tone are missing but hey, we got 10 new songs and
wait, what do you mean they announced a season pass the morning it came out and it has some of the missing songs and it’s 40 bucks
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Nah, that’s the only trophy level I’ve seen. I just thought it was funny to be reminded that this is what happens with any game about creating stuff.
Been playing Xanadu Next (thanks @zeno), getting strong…Darkstone vibes??? Like, late 90’s/early naughts 3D dungeon crawler with cursor-based mechanics and pseudo-randomized loot…plus black fog…and good music… I dunno, it’s interesting.
That said, the writing is loads better than any dungeon crawler I’ve played, and it is definitely less grindy than something like Diablo. It feels more like Zelda met a JRPG, honestly. The biggest similarity between this and Diablo is that I’m using a mouse to click on badguys, y’know?
Really into the skill system - you learn new skills from weapons, and you can equip 4 at a time. Each skill is either passive OR has 20 charges, which recharge in town. So instead of managing MP, you’re managing these 20 charges PER skill. There’s also magic, which takes up the same slots and, again, has 20 charges.
I haven’t tried switching skills in the field though. That might actually make this very stupid, if you can switch in the field.
This chode murdered me and is also named after a keyboard.
Also you can level DOWN?? I tried to do this at level 1 and:
translated: “If you get any stupider you’re going to die, shithead.”
So yeah, I’m into it. The town song is a banger as well.
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