Yakuza 3 is mostly very ass

 

On my stream I have been playing through the Yakuza series and right before I started the horror month, I polished off Yakuza 3.  This series is generally pretty fantastic but this game, both the original PS3 release AND the remastered version, are pretty fucking awful.  

There isn't really a lot to love about Yakuza 3 but I do want to start by saying that the story for this game is great.  Despite all the problems that I'm about to list off, I was still pretty excited to get around to this game every week just to see what was going to happen next.  I don't know what the gaming equivalent of a "page turner" is but this game is exactly that.  Even when the plot is doing some absolutely insane nonsense such as, without spoiling anything, a show down at a rodeo it's equal parts awesome spectacle and gripping narative.  Despite the stories strengths though there is some issues with pacing where Kiryu, having left Tokyo to start an orphanage in Okinawa, must spend large amounts of time within the main story doing stuff with and for the kids he's looking after.  I know WHY the pacing is like that but it's still a bunch of boring bullshit.  But when it comes to the plot, the positives far FAR outweigh the negatives.

But then there's the rest of the fucking game and holy fuck is it BAD.  The most obvious thing is the combat because you have to spend a lot of time doing it and it's almost never fun at any point.  Yakuza 1 and 2, at least in their original PS2 forms, had pretty stiff combat so I'm not going to begrudge the game for that but the enemies are CONSTANTLY blocking every attack you ever do.  I was also playing on hard mode so my incoming damage was pretty high which made dealing with groups an absolute nightmare and the absolute worst part of all this is that no matter how much I upgraded Kiryu's skills, it never got any easier.  The blocking problem could sort of been circumvented by just grabbing dudes constantly but when you are against enemies that can't be grabbed the combat is just absolutely unbearable.  Eventually you will learn a combo where you do a sort of overhead smash after a 3 punch combo which, even if blocked, will do a very VERY small amount of damage, so most encounters devolved into just spamming that combo until you win which takes a long ass time and is not fun even a little bit.  One thing to point out though is that the final boss just sort of forgets to block at all and ends up being a complete pushover.  Your random street goons will throw up guards so strong that even a bicycle to the forearms won't make them flinch but the head honcho of a Yakuza family seems to be completely oblivious to the idea of self preservation. 

Aside from fighting in the main story though you can also fight and blunder your way through a number of side stories, none of which are particularly interesting and most are overly short and completely forgetable with rewards that are almost never worth it.  There are side stories from the first two Yakuza games that have stayed with me long after I finished and there are side stories in the later Yakuza games that I'm aware of just because the fans like to gush about them but there is basically NOTHING in Yakuza 3 worth talking about.  If there is a good one in there somewhere and it's just slipped my mind then I'd love to hear about it because I'm wracking my brains and got nothing.

The mini games are also very ass, most of which controlling like complete garbage or just being unfun to play.  The worst offender being darts which is basically impossible to control in any way.  I think I would have better luck scoring at real darts with 2 broken hands and a blindfold on than trying to play Yakuza 3 darts normally.  The best mini-game is Karaoke because its just a bare bones rhythm game that the devs basically couldn't fuck up.  Even the things that should be easy, like the gambling are annoying because the menus feel so stiff.  It's really hard to describe just how shitty it is but just navigating through slow menus to double down in blackjack feels shitty.

Then there are a bunch of non mini game side activities which are all stupid as fuck.  For example you can do these things called revelations where you see some funny sequence of events that Kiryu will snap pictures off on his phone via QTE.  Then you get 3 prompts and if you choose the right one Kiryu will become inspired and write a blog post on his piece of shit gara-kei which will then allow him to learn a new move.  It's fine but if you mess up the prompt at the end you fail the revelation and must leave the area for a while for it to come back and then watch the whole silly animation again.  It's funny the first time but when you messed up the prompts twice and are watching the same "tee hee isn't this very silly" chain of events for the third time it's just annoying.  The worst side activity though in this regard is a chase game where you must avoid bystanders and shoulder ram a guy until he runs out of stamina and if you take too long you run out of stamina and the guy gets away.  The problem comes from the fact that judging depth is basically impossible so unless you're sprinting right up the guys butthole you're probably going to miss and the margin for error in these games are very small.  You do it a few times as part of main story missions but the game was so proud of this inclusion that it becomes a full on mini-game all by itself near the end and I think I'd have more fun swallowing nails.

Also in 2022 this is sort of a non-issue but I want to write about it anyway, that this entry in the series on PS3 was the point where I stopped playing the franchise because I was pretty upset about cut content.  There are a few things cut from the original release but the worst of which was the removal of Shogi and Mahjong.  Not only did the PS2 version of Yakuza 2 have both shogi and mahjong, but they even came with extra manuals in the box with explinations on how to play but then Yakuza 3 rolls around and all that shit is just gone.  As someone who is a huge enjoyer of Japanese mahjong I was so mad about its exclusion that I didn't play a single Yakuza game until I started up the series again with Kiwami 1 last year.  Like I said though, Yakuza 3 Remastered on steam puts all this cut content back in, so no fear if you're buying it today, but the fact it happened at all its unforgivable.  

There are a few things to really love about Yakuza 3, for sure, but it's all wrapped in such a thick layer of complete and total bullshit that it's really hard to recommend to people.  If you're playing through the series like I am and want to experience everything the franchise has to offer then I guess you will have ot just grin and bare it but if you're just a casual fan of it then just skip it.  Watch the cutscenes on YouTube and save yourself a bunch of stress. 

Criticism and Developers

 

Being a creative can be tough, I think this is one of those things that everyone knows regardless of how creative you are personally.  Coming up with those ideas, putting those ideas together and then having the confidence in that idea to put it out into the world is quite an amazing feat.  But when you go through that process you are obviously going to come up against criticism for the thing you made in one form or another.  Sometimes it'll be constructive and sometimes your stuff will miss the mark with someone so hard that you'll get a petty and probably dishearening insult towards your work but this is just something you have to deal with as a creative.  Read it, take from it what you can to improve and move on to the next thing.  Some developers, or groups of developers, do not deal particularly well with criticism and the resulting events and both kind of funny and kind of sad.

The reason for this post stems from the recent release of a game called Super Lone Survivor, a re-release of the 2012 game Lone Survivor.  I just want to start by saying that I played the original version of this game and it was actually pretty good.  The atmosphere was heavy and despite the low resolution visual style the visuals were nice and creepy.  The gameplay felt sort of stiff but nothing that you couldn't adapt to and overall I had a good time with it.  One user who bought this game, a guy known in online spaces for playing and speedrunning horror games, bought it as a big fan of the original after being told about the games additional content.  He plays through it about 2 times, encounters basically none of the new stuff and then proceeds to give it a negative Steam review saying that he was expecting a bit more considering the 20 GPB price of entry.  

This then causes Jasper Byrne, the developer of the game, to throw a strop basically blaming him for sales slowing down, rants about him on twitter and causes video game shit-rag Destructoid to make an article on him.  Fast foward one day and the Destructoid article is taken down and Jasper proceeds to claim that he has issued an apology to the writer for the escalation but he did it the "apology" on his personal twitter page with his account locked so no one could see it.  Complete shit show

Lone Survivor has 23 reviews at time of writing and 22 of them are positive.  It's kind of silly to argue that a single bad review would be solely responsible for the slow sales of the game.  Maybe the game is just niche as fuck with the re-release being bought only by fans and a couple of curious new adopters and after that initial rush sales just slowed down naturally.  The worst part is, that despite Jasper's little outburst regarding the review, the store page has been changed to reflect that Super is probably not for people who already own the original and the new content is "hard to find", it's sort of sad.

Let's not single out just Jasper though because this is not the first time that indie devs salty about not being showered with constant praise has led to some embarassing bullshit and this one is arguably way worse.  Summer of 58 by EMIKA_GAMES is an under 2 hour, poorly written, unscary walking simulator with shit game play.  One thing you have to understand is that on steam, if you play a game for less than 2 hours you can actually get a refund on it.  It's not a feature I've ever used, not even for this piece of garbage, but apparently with just a few clicks you can have a full refund for a title as long as the play time is under the 2 hour mark.  

So people bought this game, played it, beat it and then refunded it.  There may have been SOME users who were refunding it just because they could but I would be willing to bet both of my kidneys that most people refunded it mainly because it's just not a good game.  This of course leads to the developer throwing a twitter sook, claiming that he's quitting development entirely because of the high number of refunds.  This of course leads people to start buying the game because they feel sorry for the guy which is actually pretty clever because instead of taking that feedback and improving, he took that pity sale money and instead developed another shitty thing that he released in October of this year.  So much for quitting, huh? 

But these are indie devs, so if we want to be charitable we can at least argue that they are probably a bit more emotionally attatched to the game that they made than something from a AAA company and a huge team.  But even developers of generic AAA dross like Horizon Forbidden West aren't immune to petulant complaining due to bad press or, in this case, a lack of interest in their game.  Horizon, an open world game about killing robotic dinosaurs or something, has had a bit of bad luck when it comes to release timing.  The first game released roughly at the same time as Breath of the Wild and was completely overshadowed as a result and when the sequel Forbidden West came out it was again completely overshadowed by the release of Elden Ring.  

This led to a number of Horizon developers making some extremely petty comments about the game probably just out of jealousy for From Softwares success over their own.  The tweets that got the most traction online out of these were a number of comments from one developer regarding Elden Ring's UI, which is really funny because Forbidden West has that semi-cluttered generic ass open world UI that people having been ragging on for years.  

This case is even worse that the previous two indies because its not even a case of direct criticism really, at least not intially.  It's just being mad another companies game being more successful which makes the petulant whining about Elden Ring and its team even more embarassing.

If you're in a creative field, harsh and/or constructive criticism is something that you just have to face and deal with.  The best approach is to read it, take from it any lessons than you can and then move on.  Trying to rally against "the haters" is just sad and at least indicates to me than you probably have your head up your ass a fair bit.

Less whinging, more creatin' please? Thank you

AVGNs Misaligned Retro Games

Recently The Angry Video Game Nerd released his latest video about DOOM and its various versions and before I get into the meat of this post, can we just take a moment to appriciate just how long James Rolfe has been going with this thing.  DOOM is his 205th episode and while you could argue there's been somewhat of a dip in quality compared to his older stuff, the show is still pretty entertaining to watch.  Hell, I remember being in highschool watching this shit on gametrailers.com when he was a member of that weird duo called Screwattack and his name was the Angry Nintendo Nerd, remember that shit?  Regardless of how you feel about his show, being able to run a web series for THIS long is quite the achievement.

I've noticed over the years from talking to people both in person and online that AVGN has at least had some hand in shaping general opinions on retro games.  There are a pretty significant number of people who will watch an episode of AVGN, see the footage that Rolfe has taken and his comments on the game and come away with a rather strong opinion of the game sucking despite never having played it themselves.  Then, when the topic of that game comes up, they will state very strongly and very confidently about its suckage because they've been totally convinced by the episode.  Having played most of the games that AVGN has covered and having beaten most of them, I'd say that most of the time if a game has appeared on the show, you're probably safe in assuming that it sucks shit.  No one is going to argue that Super Pitfall is some kind of hidden NES gem that has got a bad rap, just looking at it really is enough to just tell that it sucks

But there are a couple games that he has covered that have this awful reputation online that are actually pretty good and I want to talk about those a little bit

Simon's Quest was AVGNS very first episode.  It's an interesting episode too since it's basically got none of the production that we would come to see shortly after it being put out, it's just James talking over bits of game play footage.  There IS a lot of criticise in this game as well, to be fair such as kind of bland level design in the mansions, cryptic puzzles that I'm not sure how you're supposed to figure out and a stupid day/night transition but the game, overall, isn't THAT bad.  Traversing the overworld is generally pretty fun, upgrading your gear is cool and this game basically laid a bit of groundwork down for what modern Castlevania would end up turning into.  If you like the later entries in the series such as Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow then it can be cool to come back to this one and see the beginning of the idea.  Sure, progress is a little hard to just intuit by yourself but play with a guide and a lot of the frustration sort of just goes away.  I've met a lot of people who have played and really love Castlevania 1 and 3 but have completely skipped over 2 because they "have heard it sucks" and that's a damn shame.

 

This is one that actually really grinds my gears because Silver Surfer for the NES is actually really fucking good but because of that, admittedly quite funny, episode of AVGN I feel like this game gets a lot of flak in retro gaming spaces for no reason.  The graphics are decent-ish, and soundtrack is amazing and the gameplay is tight but holy fucking shit is it HARD.  But that's the problem, bring up a conversation about Silver Surfer and people will go on about how much it sucks when really those "problems" are things that are true for a lot of other shmups.  The big example is how you can't touch any of the walls in a stage or you just die, which yes is sort of annoying but there are plenty of other games where that's true.  R-Type and Gradius do that shit too but you don't see anyone knocking those games for that.  The real issue with Silver Surfer is that your hitbox is MASSIVE which makes avoiding things pretty hard but its something you just adapt to.  With a little bit of memorization and enough skill to keep your power ups, the difficulty of Silver Surfer is no worse than literally any other shmup on the system.  

This was the game that inspired this post, fucking Countdown Vampires.  When I played this as part of my 31 game horror challenge I was also kind of guilty of just thinking it was shit because it was an AVGN feature.  I wanted one shitty game on the list that we could all laugh at but really it was just fine.  Nothing spectacular, not the kind of thing that will be remembered as a survival horror great or anything but functional.  Also we still got a laugh from the weird script and voice acting and overall the experience was pretty enjoyable.  That said though, anyone who even had a passing knowledge of this game all said the same thing of "oh god it's THAT game, that game SUCKS" despite most of them having never played it in their lives.  There's even a decent amount of effort on display with the amount of guns, monster variety and pre-renders.  Hell, there's even one bit near the end of the game where there are 3 different pre-renders for an area that has nothing in it aside from a single box of ammo.  Someone modelled, rendered and got that shit to work in the game just so we could run up and down it and barely pay attention to it while we get an item.  I see you Mr or Mrs 3D artist, good for you.

Yes it's easy, yes the dialogue is terrible but in a sort of endering way that I quite like and yes the game barely has any countdowns OR vampires but you know what, good game.

Countdown Vampires is fucking good

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There are some other examples outside of these 3 of games that he rages at but are really just fine.  Nightmare on Elm Street on NES comes to mind in this regard but you get the picture.  Usually he's pretty accurate about a game being shitty but every so often he does miss.

The Weird Longevity of DDR and IIDX

 

Rhythm games are a thing that I assume most people, even the most enthusiastic of gamers, don't think about very often.  Around 2005 the genre got a pretty big boost in popularity for a while with the release of Guitar Hero and that boost was bolstered in part by the subsequent release of Rock Band but the whole thing turned out to be just a fad and the genre once again faded back into obscurity once those games died.  If you are a person who owns a Guitar Hero, Rock Band or DJ Hero controller I can almost guarantee that it's caked in dust and you probably forgot to take the batteries out and they have no leaked everywhere.

This is a bit less true for the Japanese arcade scene where the genre has been a staple almost for as long as the genre has existed but even in a space like this games come and go all the time.  Various rhythm games will pop up for a while and then vanish without a trace or be reduced to one machine stuffed in a single corner of the arcade that never gets used.  For example when I first moved into my new house in January of this year, there was a new game called Chrono Circle and at current time of writing I am completely unable to find a single cab for it anywhere.  It's been removed from my local place despite them initially having 5 cabinets and none of the bigger arcades I frequent in central Nagoya have them either, dead on arrival.  

But then there's Dance Dance Revolution, a game that has been a core part of the arcade experience both in Japan and the west since I was in primary school and a series that doesn't seem to be slowing down its content updates even in the current day.  I remember seeing it for the first time, I must have been about 10, in a bowling alley near my old house in Manchester.  Most arcades were either sit-down fighting game cabs, novelty games or rail shooters but then this motherfucker just sat there with its giant pad and massive speakers blasting out J-Beats and it sure as hell got peoples attention.  I played in that arcade pretty much all the way to me graduating high school and it was the one machine that would often stay fairly well maintained and updated with the place replacing the Euromix 1 cab with a Euromix 2 cab almost as soon as that version dropped.  Fast foward to my life in Japan in 2022 and DDR is STILL going strong, being one of the most popular games in basically any game center you go to and still being updated on the regular.  Hell, the last version to be released was DDR A3 which came out March of THIS YEAR with new songs being added constantly.  Also I can't speak with any degree of certainty but the few enthusiast arcade places I know about in the UK seem to always be packing at least a Euromix 1 or 2 cab.

Beatmania IIDX is another game with a similar life span as DDR but with it being Japan only its a game that most people outside of the rhythm game enthusiast circles actually know about.  It started with Beatmania back in 1997 which had 5 buttons and a turn table for a controller which was probably quite unique at the time.  Then in 1999 Konami released Beatmania IIDX which was a bigger, badder, louder looking machine with 7 buttons and then there was a Beatmania 3 in 2000 which had a pedal or something? and everyone hated it and it died after 2 years.  IIDX however, like DDR, is still getting content updates and new versions to this very day with the newest version IIDX 30: Resident being released very recently 

There are other games in the Bemani franchise such as Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania which have also had similar life spans and still get updates but the machines are stocked less and barely used by anyone that I can see.  Meanwhile, DDR and IIDX are so popular that most places have to have multiple copies of them and even with an average (based on places I go to) of 2 DDR cabs and 4 IIDX cabs there are still queues CONSTANTLY to actually get to play them.  Some of newer games from the Konami library are starting to cement their places in the arcade such as Jubeat and Voltex but if they are still around in, lets say 10 years, only time will tell 

I can't imagine why this is the case really other than that the skill ceiling for mastering these two games inparticular is IMMENSELY high.  Seeing extremely high level play for games like Voltex, Chunithm, Taiko etc. isn't exactly uncommon if you spend enough time hanging around these places but really high level play for DDR and IIDX is not something you see very often at all.  If I was to hazard a guess I guess it's the drive that these players have to truly master these games that keeps them coming back and pumping coins or Paseli credit into the machines which in turn keeps Konami updating them and pumping out new versions for people to get good at.

That's just my game theory on the matter anyway.  Does make me wonder if DDR will still be around in 30 more years.....and if I'll still be able to play it at that point

2022 Horror Challenge Roundup

 

On October 1st 2022 I started a challenge that involved playing though 31 horror games within a month (outlined in this post http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2022/09/31-game-horror-challenge-2022.html) and on October 30th 2022 I completed that challenge!  It was a stressful month, for sure, but it was an immensely fun challenge and I'm totally planning to do it all again next October.  For now I wanted to just go over a few of the games from the challenge that I thought stood out, so think of this post as a sort of "Halloween spooky game award post" 

Best Game

I did a horror game challenge about 2 years ago and failed it miserably because I'm an idiot that put some IMMENSELY long (and shitty, Days Gone) games and Yuppie Psycho was one of the ones I didn't get to back then, so better late than never I guess.  It's a game that's truly best experienced by knowing as little as possible about it but, let's be honest, is there anything more frightening that office work?  Pepper in a unique setting and some occult-type beats and you have a rather unique experience that is as charming as it is scary. 

That's all you're getting for this one, go play it

Worst Game

Dread X Collection is a collection of short horror games made by various developers that I played off stream and was deeply disappointed by.  Dread X Collection 2 I played on stream and it was probably one of the most miserable experiences I've had with a horror title in a very long time.  The ideas behind the games are bad, the games themselves are bad and there's this sort of air of smugness about the whole thing that makes it pretty unbearable to play.  It's a level of incompetancy that is rarely found anywhere within game development and I feel that most of the people involved should probably fuck off to some other medium.  Most of the games in this collection are barely playing, boring, try-hard messes that despite having an extremely short length feel like they drag on and on just because of how vile they are.

There are 2 exceptions to this though.  One game was called Squirrel Stapler which was really daft but sort of fun to play.  The other was called Sucker for Love which is a sort of joke dating-sim where you have to try and woo an Eldritch God which was pretty funny and also came with some decently creepy concepts and imagery.  However play Sucker for Love with the voices OFF because the voice acting was extremely cringe worthy.  

I own 3 or 4 more Dread X games since I got a bunch of them as a set and after playing these two I have 0 motivation to continue the Action52 of horror games.  

Biggest Surprise

After seeing the AVGN review and being told about it by various people I was expecting something truly awful, something akin to the level of quality of Dread X Collection 2.  However Countdown Vampires is a game that's actually pretty fun to play, at least on stream with a group of people to banter with and revel in its insanity.  It's just a shoddy clone of Resident Evil that has basically no vampires and like, 4 countdowns in it but there's something sort of endering about the whole thing.  The 3D FMV sequences are non-sensical but weirdly well produced and a decent amount of effort went into the pre-rendered backgrounds even if the actual render quality is sort of shoddy.  Also the game is really, REALLY funny between absolute batshit character design and voice acting that makes Resident Evil 1 sound like Shakespear; the whole thing, while not good, was highly entertaining and I'd happily play it again 

Scariest Game

I know that saying Silent Hill 2 is scary is like saying that the sky is blue, just obvious bullshit thus making this pick seem like a complete cop-out but the one "mistake" I made this year was that most of the games I picked almost completely failed on their horror fronts.  F.E.A.R gets a close second for, while not being scary in the slightest, at least TRYING to get an ambience down and Alien Isolation gets props for making me make silly noises when I messed up but I wasn't actually scared by any of the games this year except for maybe this one. Even then its more fear of a concept of my wife getting sick and dying before my eyes than it is of the actual game but it scared me pretty badly in my teenage years so it gets the scariest game spot for being creepy on multiple levels at least. 

Least Scary Game

I didn't know anything about Geist when I put it on the list.  I mean, it's called "Ghost" but in German so I was expecting something at least a little spooky but what I got was a sort of ghost-themed action game/puzzle game?  Not that I'm going to bash it too hard, it was fun to play and the ghost-based puzzles were equal parts interesting and funny but there was a bit too much just shooting dudes with guns in first person for me to really consider it a proper horror game.  Still, I feel like a lot of people haven't tried this one so if you get a chance, give it a go. 

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So that's it for this year!  There will be other horror games peppered into the stream here and there throughout the year, of course, but we wont be going full spooky again until next October.  Keep me informed of any cool horror games you find via Discord or twitch chat and maybe they'll get put on the list! 

 

It Follows? It Sucks! (Kinda)

 

Between streaming horror games on my Twitch channel I've been trying to squeeze in a few horror movies as well, with it currently being the season for it and all.  One film that I've had my eye on since it came out and never got around to watching was It Follows from 2015 a film that has had quite a lot of positive press surrounding it for a long time and now I finally got to see it.  

Despite the title of this blog post I'm not about to attempt to tear it a new one, it wasn't THAT bad.  The acting is fine, the cinematography is really nice and there's a handful of pretty effective scenes and touches that stop it from being a stinker but overall the whole thing is just kind of silly

The premise to the film is that there is a person who is being followed by some kind of thing in human form that is invisible to everyone except the person who is the current target and previous targets.  If you are the target, the only way to get the creature off you is to have sex with another person, where the curse is then sexually transmitted to the person that you had sex with and then they must pass it on to someone else.  However, if the person you had sex with is killed, then the thing starts going back up the line so, for example, if I was the creatures current target and then I have sex with you, the reader, and then the monster kills you it will then come right after me again.  This isn't a Ring style situation where you can just have someone watch the tape and then be rid of it, you'll always be sort of concerned that your turn is coming. 

The idea of a slow yet tireless thing that will follow you for all of time is a decent premise despite the whole "sexually transmitted" part being a bit daft and the scene at the very start of the film is extremely good in giving you an idea of whats going on while still leaving a bit of mystery.  It's after that scene though where the whole thing starts to fall apart a little.

See, the thing in It Follows is a real thing that exists in the world its inhabiting.  It's not a ghost than can walk through walls, its got maybe some slightly higher than average strength but for the most part its similar to a human and while its invisible to everyone except the victim, other people can interact with it and you can even make it partially visible by throwing a sheet on it.  Also you seemingly can't kill it but you can stun it for a small amount of time but shooting it in the head or using some other means.

Now that I've explained all that, the reason I think this movie is quite silly is that despite all of this being figured out by a group of about 5 people, they spend the entire movie making absolutely braindead decisions and putting themselves in danger for pretty much no reason.  Anyone watching the movie could figure out that the trick to stopping it would be to simply trap it in something.  The main character in a scene about half way through the film stuns it by blasting it in the head and on multiple occasions she also sees it being blocked by doors and walls and yet, despite this, the idea to lock it inside a place NEVER CROSSES HER MIND.  Instead she goes for some absolutely batshit insane plan where they try and electrocute it inside a swimming pool which completely fails and then their plan after that is to just....have sex with hookers?  

A long time ago I watched an anime that I quite enjoyed called Ajin, a series about immortal people getting up to some shenanigans.  There's a scene in that show where the army is trying to aprehend an Ajin who's up to no good and they know that while they can't kill him they can stun him, like the thing from It Follows, for a small amount of time by hitting him in the head.  So they get the first hit on him and then their plan is nearly successful because they surround the body and have a guy with a rifle putting another bullet between his eyes every couple of seconds as they try to carry him into containment.  

The characters in It Follows have a gun, have a means to blast it in the head over and over and could probably quite easily get their hands on some kind of container that they could lob into the ocean and yet it's never done, it's never tried and its never even talked about.  They are more than willing to barricade themselves IN to rooms at multiple points but the very basic idea of just trapping the thing is left completely off the table.

The situation in It Follows reminds me of why I had such a problem with other horror movies such as A Quiet Place, where very obvious solutions to an issue seem to be all around around them but because they are "horror movie characters" they go with the most stupid, nonsensical actions possible so that the film actually has something to work with which in my opinion is just shitty writing.  My first thought actually was to just flee to a different country but the film actually establishes that the thing can swim so that obviously goes right out the window but it puts so many solutions so blatently there on the table that the characters not rubbing their brain cells together just takes me out of the film completely.

Like I said, it's not an awful film by any stretch and if you're looking for a competently shot, competently acted movie with some decent scares here and there to maybe have on in the background or watch with friends, It Follows is a good pick for that.  Just don't buy into all that hype about it being "striking" or those weirdo critics claiming that its "deep" because the demon is sexually transmitted.  

One of the most 6/10 movies I've ever seen

The Bayonetta 3 Debacle

 It's been a hot minute since I've paid any kind of attention to some industry drama and good golly has a sort of big one managed to fall in front of me.  

Bayonetta is a sort of niche series I think but she IS featured in Smash so I assume most people know about her but just in case you live under a rock being stored in a nuclear bunkers panic room Bayonetta is game series about a freakishly tall women fighting angels or something.  Granted I've only played the first game and even that was way back when it first came out but I'm pretty sure its something to that effect.  It's basically Devil May Cry but with a freakishly tall and lanky lady instead of a freakishly handsome and funny dude.

On Sunday I came across a series of videos from the voice actor for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor, talking through sobs and tears about how shes SO well educated and SO well versed in her field and was somehow only offered a total of $4000 to voice the entire game.  Not only this, but as a result of her shitty offer she was calling upon fans of the Bayonetta series to boycott the release of the game and not buy it.  Also at this point I think news came out that by not taking the offer she was dropped from the series and a new woman, Jennifer Hale, has now taken up the role for the third game.  ALSO  ALSO Hideki Kamiya, one of the big boys over at Platinum Games, the developer of Bayonetta, went on an all caps tirade about how shes lying and the offer was closer to $150,000 before his account got deleted, seemingly by his own volition but I have no idea whats going on with him.

So at this point I was sort of torn.  It's a well known thing that voice actors are underpaid in a lot of cases and $4000 to do all the voice work for the 3rd game in a niche yet quite succesful franchise of character action games seems insanely low even by shitty game industry standards.  But something felt off about Taylor's videos.  The chest beating regarding her education and experience, the call for a boycott and the crying just gave her videos a weird stank that had me siding with Platinum Games instead of her despite her shitty situation.

Now I'm not going to go down the stupid Twitter argument route of "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER DEVS BEING PAID FOR THEIR WORK" because, like most people are eager to point out, the other developers of the game are probably salaried or have some kind of other contract going on and have already made their money or have agreements about their money with the company.  But put the money aside for a second.  Imagine you are a programmer, a level designer, sound engineer, 3D or 2D artist or one of the myriad other jobs required for a game to get made.  You've spent YEARS of your life putting this thing together, working hard, probably doing a fair bit of overtime and maybe even making some personal sacrifice to try and ensure that the fans of this game get an experience that they enjoy and that you can be proud of.  Then, some suit in your company, completely devoid and separate from your work goes and makes a bad decision and makes ONE member of the team a crappy offer suddenly all the work you did for all those years is getting hate thrown at it and potentially thrown to the wayside just because of that.  You'd feel like complete shit.  If I was, for example, Takaaki Yamaguchi (the lead Animator according to Bayonetta 2s credits, assuming its still him) and I heard that you were trying to sabotage years of my animation work because some businessman in the company offered you a shitty contract, I would want to find you and smash a glass bottle right across your stupid fucking head.  Takaaki is probably a bit more level headed than that, but the rage I would feel over even the SUGGESTION of something like that would be incredible.

BUT THEN I load up Twitter this morning and I find that the plot had thickened.

Turns out that, if true, the actual offer for Hellena Taylor's voice over was $4000 per session in the booth (which according to the same Twitter user is 4 hours) and that she would be paid that 4 or 5 times.  That's considerably more money than what she was claiming to be the case in her original videos.  This still seems sort of low, I guess, I am not entirely sure what is considered to be a "good wage" for video game voice work but its still significantly higher than what she originally suggested in her fishy as fuck run of videos on Twitter.

My inital theory on Sunday when discussing it with a friend of mine was that Bayonetta is just not a very voice heavy game.  Most of it is high action with a couple of cutscenes here and there and even of those cutscenes, a percentage of those are going to be mostly unvoiced action scenes.  Getting $4000 for 4 hours of work to get into a booth, say a few lines in an over the top British accent and then spend the rest of my work day going "HYA!" "HOO YA!" "TAKE THIS!" into a microphone seems like a pretty good fucking deal to me.  Then again I guess I don't have the "pedigree" that Ms Taylor has now, do I?

If Taylor hadn't have made an attempt at emotional manipulation in that first run of videos my reaction would have been "wow, that sucks, I hope she can negotiate something better" and I would have moved on.  But this has now EXPLODED into a big story with people potentially lying and parties skirting what can and cant be said thanks to NDAs and it's now something I'll be watching quite closely.

Oh and by the way, I'm going to go play Bayo 2 right now and I'll pick up Bayo 3 on launch, fuck you and fuck your tears, Hellena

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game

31 Game Horror Challenge 2022

 A couple of years ago I attempted a 31 game horror challenge for October and failed due to the fact I mistakenly picked some very long games.  I will be trying again this year and hopefully I have picked some more reasonable games.  Here's this list of games and the order they will be played in 

1. Silent Hill 2

2. INMOST 

3. House of the Dead Remake

4. Bloodwash 

5. Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles

6. F.E.A.R

7. Splatterhouse 2 

8. Deathsmiles Mega Black Label 

9. Among the Sleep 

10. Lucius

11. Resident Evil 3 Remake

12. Maid of Sker

13. No Delivery 

14. Dead Space 2 

15. Dementium: The Ward

16. Yuppie Psycho

17. CASE: Animatronics

18. The Witches House

19. Project H

20. Onimusha Warlords 

21. Geist

22. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

23. Mr Bones

24. Nosferatu

25. Rule of Rose

26. Penubra Overture

27. Countdown Vampires 

28. Deep Fear

29. Dino Crisis 2 

30. Dread X Collection 2 

31. Alien Isolation

For every game on this list I do not finish I will be donating 10 GPB and adding prizes to the prize list.  

Lets get spooky!

Free Indie Game Roundup

 Recently I did a event on my stream that I titled "Free Indie Game Dumpster Diving" and despite the word dumpster in the title, most of the games I played during that stream were actually really good.  Here's a quite roundup of those games 

1) Gun Devil 

Gun Devil, avaliable for free on Steam, is a 2D side scrolling platformer.  It starts with a story sequence about your characters wife being kidnapped and its full of semi-edgy early Newgrounds tier writing that's a little bit cringeworthy but once the game gets going its a rather enjoyable experience.  It has tight controls, some very nice pixel art and despite being a quite a short game has some replay value after you are finished because you can get these giant coins at the end of each stage for doing it no hit and killing all the enemies.  I would have happily paid a few bucks for this one but you can play it right now, for free. 

2) The Backrooms: Lost and Found

The Backrooms are some creepy-pasta thing that I dont fully understand but there seems to be a lot of media surrounding it.  This game involves navigating through the backrooms looking for wooden giraffes while you are on the hunt for an exit.  Depending on how much you explore you can get one of SEVEN endings which I have to admit is quite a lot for a free game.  However, the game has a really stupid stamina system that makes running around sort of tedious and after the first run I can't really see myself ever going back to see what those other 6 endings were.  Not terrible by any means but you can do a lot better in terms of free indie horror

3) Freight Hopper

There was a game that came out a while ago on Steam that cost money called Clustertruck (I think) that involved free running across the tops of trucks as they sped down the stages.  It's the kind of game that's made for speedrunning with its emphasis on clearly levels quickly and movement mechanics.  Well this is just a free version of that.  Not many levels and the controls are sort of floaty and weird but once I got used to them I had a pretty good time.  If you liked Clustertruck and you need some more of it in your life, play this one I guess.

4) Workaholic

A first person shooter about shooting your co-workers in the face with finger guns.  There isn't really much more to it than that, you just blast your way through 4 stages that have sort of random layouts and then your done.  The art is cool and the gameplay is fast but its way too short and is just begging for some kind of endless mode which I don't think would have been too hard to implement given that the levels are procedurally generated anyway.  There's a fairly impressive selection of weapons for you to find which is cool but picking up a life steal, super kick or dual weild powerup puts a weird filter over the graphics that make it borderline unplayble.  Pretty good as long as you avoid those items, would play again .

5) Ghost Trap 

Very basic precision platformer that doesn't go too crazy with the difficulty.  My only real complaint is that there's a lot of waiting around for the games 2 bosses that make them quite annoying.  Comes with a cool speedrun mode which lets you play all the levels back to back without having to go through the annoying menu every time.  

6) Resonance of the Ocean 

Some kind of art game about a person on a island trying to communicate with someone by copying strange noises that come from another nearby island.  You have to go around picking up and combining items to make the right sound and then take them to a big megaphone to end the stage.  Very basic, very easy and very much has its head shoved up its own ass.  Nice art though

7) The Night that Speaks

When someone in my chat told me about this game they described it as "a game where you fight monsters by giving them the finger" which got me very excited.  Upon playing it though it's just a bland and boring horror game and giving the baddie the finger to make it go away isn't awesome like I thought it would be and it isn't even really all that funny.  Also the game was made to look like it was on Game Boy, which sounds cool but it just makes all the graphics murky and its hard to make anything out.  I got it for free and felt ripped off

8) Self

A interesting platformer where instead of jumping you sort of expand a big rubber band and use it to flick yourself around the level.  Not much more to it than that but its short, sweet and has some really good music.  Comes with some bonus challenge levels that are actually really hard and its very satisfying to clear them after some practice

10) Grippy

A Pico-8 game where you play as a piece of chewing gum that has to grab its way around a bunch of stages.  Its interesting because you play it by using the arrow keys to direct your fists and then you have to hold and release either Z or X for each hand in order to swing around.  Takes a while to get used to but really fun once you get the hang of it.  Also has multiple routes through each section with the harder ones being shorter so the more skilled player can get a faster clear time, which is a nice touch.  Will probably play again some time to get my time down.  

11) 13 Gates

A very basic first person platforming game.  You play the 13 levels, have a sort of good time and then never play it again 

12) Guardian Sphere

The game I chose for this posts header image because it was EASILY the best one I played in the entire 14 hour stream.  A top down shooter that has the cool gimmick of your life points also being your shot power AND a form of currency.  There are 5 stages and each stage has a couple of shops in them where you can spend your HP for various upgrades creating a sort of risk/reward system that can be really satisfying when you gamble all your HP for a sick upgrade and then survive long enough to collect a few more hit points again.  The game also has 8 playable characters to choose from each with there own shot type and 3 difficulty settings.  I did a 1cc run of the game on my first try on normal but that's because I'm an actual shmup God rather than the game being overly easy, I think for your average player this game may be kind tough depending on how lucky you are with the RNG shops.  You coulda put that on Steam for $10 and I woulda been happy but giving it away for free on Itch is just Godlike  

13) Plead with the Mountain God

A PS1-like platforming game which rips off the story of Shadow of the Collossus almost enitirely.  Only instead of having epic battles with giant monsters, you're very clunkily jumping up a tower.  Gameplay gets very dull very fast, has no music and at once point I glitched through the floor but not an awful experience by any stretch.  A forgettable game

14) Ashes 2063

A full, stand alone Doom conversion that I didnt finish during the marathon but happily added to my "now playing" list as it was a ton of fun.  Adds a bunch of stuff that base Doom doesn't have like towns, dialouge and shopping.  Quite challenging as well but there's a chance that I thought that because I was 12 hours deep when I started it.  Will post more about it in the future

15) Mini-Doom

A Doom fan game that I played for about 20 minutes but that seems really good.  A 2D platforming version of Doom that has a Mario 3 style world map and elements of a Metroidvania.  Didn't play enough to form a proper opinion but at a glance it seems very interesting indeed

That was all the games I played during the marathon and overall I had a damn good time.  If we get enough channel points via the stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis then we'll do another one!

The Last of Us Part 1 Is Pointless (and stupid)

 

Oh boy here we fucking go again. 

I remember when The Last of Us: Remastered came out on PS4 and I had all sorts of nasty things to say about that because is there anything more obviously money grubbing than "remastering" a game only a year after the release of the inital version?  Well history does like to repeat itself as yet another lazy cash grab from the hacks at Naughty Dog, who haven't done anything other than bottom of the barrel, shallow dross since the early 2000s I might add, are doing yet ANOTHER version of the first Last of Us game.

See, there is nothing inherently wrong with a remastering of a game as evidenced by the release of Resident Evil on the Gamecube. 

 When this came out it was cool to see because there was a 6 year gap between the release of the original and this one and in that time there were HUGE leaps in graphical tech and game play conventions.  We went from the game having cereal box people walking around on low poly pre-renders to models that actually looked like people walking around some really high detail environments.  On top of that the game was changed up a little with some additional mechanics, new areas and new bosses and a few other things.  When this came out it was absolutely incredible to play.

The problem with The Last of Us Part 1 is that even though there is technically a bigger year gap (9 years) the tech hasn't jumped up quite as dramatically as it had back then and game play conventions have become a homogenised mess that even the PS3 version back then was very much playing into.  If what I've read about the game is true also there is no extra content or nothing particularly special about it so it's literally a case of throwing it into an up-res machine, spitting it out and charging $70 for it.  It's disgraceful, lazy bullshit and the fact that anyone is even remotely excited for absolutely boggles my mind.  

If I'm being really honest, if a company MUST wallow in their back catalogue I'd rather they remake a game entirely rather than just remaster it and slap a new price tag on it.

For example I'm much more a fan of something like the Final Fantasy VII Remake because is's basically an entirely new game.  The good thing about a remake over a remaster is that it's not really a replacement for the original game and therefore feels like almost an entirely new experience.  If I want to go back to my 3 disc semi-turn based RPG with Duplo people on the PS1 then I can pop that game into my PS1 and enjoy that.  Then if I want to play a stealth-sequel retelling of those events with real time combat and modern graphics, I can play that and now both the old and new retain equal value. The same thing goes for the Resi 2 Remake.  If I want to enjoy some classic zombie murdering with tank controls, RE2 is right there for me to enjoy and if I want the same thing but a bit more modern then I can fire up the remake and enjoy both the game and the ugliest 3D burger ever produced by an artist ever made.

If The Last of Us Part 1 had waited, let's say, 10 more years to come out.  When the first game was nothing more than a memory in some old mans mind and then he could re-live that memory in 2032 turbo-graphic-o-vision then I wouldnt mind.  If the game had been added too, or reworked in some way akin to REMake then I also wouldnt have minded.  But as it stands The Last of Us Part 1 seems like a soulless, lazy, cash grab pile of bullshit because Naughty Dog KNOW they can milk your comfort zone to cash and they are willing to do it, as hard as possible, with absolutely no remorse

Shameful bullshit

Amnesia Rebirth: A Good Idea Left Unimplemented

 

At time of writing I have just finished Amnesia Rebirth, provided to me for free by the Epic Game Store.  I am also maybe the most frustrated I have ever been with a horror game in my life.

I'm not really here to write a review or anything but I'll quickly cover my thoughts on my playthrough.  Amnesia Rebirth is a game I was expecting very little out of based on the previous entry in the series called A Machine For Pigs.  The first game, The Dark Descent was greatly entertaining but Machine For Pigs was no more than a walking simulator spook-house made by a group of devs so devoid of talent that you could have probably made a better game by giving a new born baby a 1970s IBM and a big stick to hit it with.  Luckily Amnesia Rebirth is a bit more of an actual game and tells the story of a woman called Tasi as she gets stranded in the desert in a plane crash as she goes through caves and some alternate dimension in an attempt to escape and save not just her life, but the life of her unborn child as well.

Gameplay involves exploring areas, solving puzzles and occasionally hiding/running away from a monster.  The sanity management thing from Dark Descent is back where spending too much time in the dark or looking directly at the creature will cause you to freak out and die so managing things like your supply of matches and latern oil is something the game tries to convince you is important.  However Rebirth is also incredibly easy with pathetically easy puzzles and no punishment for failing encounters with the creatures, but I'll talk about that later.  That said though, it was just entertaining enough to keep me playing to the end without getting too angry with it so as far as "run and hide" horror games go you could in fact do a lot worse.  

So why am I so frustrated with it?  Well one of the main things in the game is the main character "controlling her fear" and "not succumbing to anger" and all that bullshit.  It's pretty clear, pretty early on unless you have some kind of brain problem that the events of the game are somehow her fault and she's actually retracing her steps finding out what happned to her and the crew of the plane that went down at the start.  As you play you encounter a monster that will, in certain areas, attempt to chase you down and get you, only if and when it does get you, you don't actually die or game over.  The game throws you a mini cutscene of the main character running through a couple of previous explored areas and then waking up either just before or sometimes just after the area you were just in.  

What I thought was going on was that every time the creature caught you, that was her "succumbing to her fear" and so each failed creature encounter would somehow affect the ending in some way.  What compounded my impression of that happening was the fact that after you are caught and get back to the monster area, the monster is gone from that zone.  Like you are now free to progress the game monster free at the cost of the ending.  Not failing any monster encounters would mean that she managed to stay mentally strong during the whole ordeal and you would get the best ending and failing all or nearly all of them would give you the worst one, maybe with some other factors thrown in as well.  

However none of this actually happened.  As soon as I hit the final cutscene and was given a "do X or Y" choice the rug was pulled from underneath me and I realized that all of that hiding and running away that I did barely mattered at all.  The only monster encounters that actually matter are the spoopy ghosts with the lanterns near the end because they dont actually despawn when you fail but, and I'd have to test thing, they lose the ability to "kill" you after the first time.  

The other reason I thought this was the case is because when you start the game you are given a choice between "normal mode" and "adventure mode".  Adventure mode basically just turns off the monsters and the sanity mechanic and lets you just explore and puzzle solve and is described by the game as "for people that don't want to deal with horror".  

There are two things wrong with this

One is that, like I said before, getting caught by the monster just deletes it from the area anyway so even if you're the worst hide and seek player of ALL TIME you still only need to suffer one minor failiure before you are allowed to progress.  Two is what the fuck do you mean by "dont want to deal with horror"?!  Why in the name of bloody fuck would you buy the THIRD GAME IN A SERIES OF HORROR GAMES if you didn't like horror?  That would be like me going to see a movie called "Love Actually 3" and then getting pissed off at the fact its a romance movie and not a supernatural thiller, what a stupid fucking mode to have in your game.

So what could have been a cool mechanic that encourages repeat playthroughs just wasn't used at all and now if I want to see the other endings all I have to do is load my save and pick the other other thing.  "Push a button on the Ending-tron 3000" is the shittiest, laziest most bullshit way a developer can implement multiple endings and anyone who's used that method deserves to have an entire day spent in wet socks, you're a disgrace.

Despite my griping though, Rebirth is still SIGNIFICANTLY better than A Machine for Pigs which granted, is not a very high bar to pass, but at least there is an attempt at an actual game here.  The most 5/10 horror game you'll ever play in your life

Fire Emblem Perma Death is Important

 

In the last week or so I've fallen down a sort of rabbit hole of Fire Emblem content on YouTube which has acted as the inpiration for this post and I want to take a moment to discuss one of the franchises sort of controversial mechanics

If you have never played a Fire Emblem game allow me to fill you in on what I'm talking about real quick.  Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that has been running since the NES with stories focused on warring nations and their armies and such.  Unlike something like Advance Wars though each unit in a Fire Emblem game is its own character with dialogue, story beats, personalities etc. and if they fall in combat they are usually gone for good.  Some Fire Emblem games have methods of reviving dead party members in extremely limited capacity but generally speaking if someone dies in FE, they are gone for good.

What a lot of players have been doing for years and years, then, is to reset a mission as soon as a single character falls and in the case of the later games the perma death has become a toggleable feature that can be turned off entirely so a fallen unit just "retreats" from the battlefield and can be re-deployed again next chapter.  People do this generally for two reasons.  The first being that they have sort of grown attatched to the character either for mechanical or story reasons and the idea of moving on without them fills the player with such dread that they would rather hit reset and tediously do an entire mission over than carry on without them.  The other reason is fear of "softlocking" themselves by losing either a character they feel is proficient or losing too many characters in a single chapter.  They worry that by losing certain characters they will be totally unable to clear the next chapters and thus have to restart at an earlier save or, in the worst case, the entire game.

Well on both fronts this is completely stupid because these games are designed with player loss in mind.

The softlocking thing generally speaking will not happen on a normal play through of a Fire Emblem game almost no matter how many units you lose.  In each game you are given a lord character and if this guy or gal falls then you are met with a game over and are forced to restart the chapter.  If you're losing bad enough on a map to get more than 1 or 2 characters killed, chances are your lord is going right down with them so progressing past a massacre like that is probably not going to happen.  But even if it does, what Fire Emblem has been doing even since the NES is constantly giving you a stream of replacement units that you can use if the worst case scenario happens.  If you play a Fire Emblem with the perma death turned off or you reset upon a death you will generally find your roster to be filled with tons of duplicate classes.  The units you get later are probably not going to be quite as good as ones you get early that you can train for an entire games worth of maps but if you press on through every death, the chance of you making the game unbeatable are EXTREMELY low.  

Just to really hammer the point home here is a video example of how hard it is to softlock a Fire Emblem game in this manner.  The amount of effort this guy has to go through to get a handful of maps to be in an unbeatable state would never happen in normal play (also sub to this guy he's very cool)

The idea that being able to turn off perma death "for new players" in complete nonsense because Fire Emblem has ALWAYS been kind to new players.  All you're really doing is allowing for sloppy strategy in your STRATEGY. WAR. GAME.

But then there's the other more personal reason of become attatched to the cast and not wanting to continue if someone you like bites the dust.  Well I also think you're being silly by resetting or toggling to off because you are sort of undermining the entire point of these games' stories and removing any and all tension from individual story beats.  These games are about war and war is both brutal and unpredictable.  What the perma death does in a Fire Emblem game is really make you feel the weight of what these characters are going through and adds a lot of immersion to you, they player and supposedly master tacticain, as you work as hard as you possibly can to keep all these indviduals safe.

Here's an example

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses there is a mission when you're looking for a kidnapped person inside a spooky basement.  As you're going through the mission a guy on a horse weilding a schythe with a skull mask on turns up and starts threatening to push your shit through your nose if you don't get lost.  His stats are very high for that point in the game and you are supposed to be intimidated by this guy.  If you have the perma death turned off for this mission you are sucking every last part of the tension out of this scene.  If you screw up and get one of your students in range of him, he will just bonk them on the head, they will say "owie zowie see you next mission" and vanish off the map.  Only with the perma death turned on do you get the intended effect of this enemy.  With it on you'll probably want to stay well away from him to stop that scythe from dicing your cute mage waifu into little pieces or cutting your handsome lance boy right down the middle and thus you must also play smarter and be more creative with how you play.  It's the difference between having a story about war and having a story about a paintball match with swords.

I think the best sort of half way point that has been devised by the developers in the pulse system thing found in 3 Houses on the Switch.  In that game your lord character has a power to rewind time a little bit.  What this translates to for the missions is that if something goes wrong, you can pulse and reset a few turns and try to re-jig your strategy to not get someone killed or get a more favorable position.  This allows the player to still make mistakes or try risky strategy but not get punished too hard for it.  Do it too many times and your pulses run out so after that you're up shit creek so the tension is still there but you still have to play smart.  It then goes and ruins it by ALSO having the death on/off toggle but at the very least I have to give it credit for trying a solution more involved than just a lazy on/off switch.  The best thing about the pulse system is that players who were turned off by the perma death but still wanted to be a little brave and play with it turned on now have a title in the series to help them realize that it's not as punishing as they might think, and as a way of gathering new eyes for the series that's a good thing.

But whatever, if you enjoy FE as a reset-fest or you want to play with it turned off, then power to you.  These are single player games either way so just enjoy them your way.  All I'm saying is that I feel you might get a little more of these games if you played with it turned on.  Greater stakes equals to greater satisfaction when you win which equals greater amounts of fun.

Yakuza Kiwami 2

 

I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 on stream recently so I thought I'd share some thoughts on it.  

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2 on the PS2 originally released in 2006 but with beefed up graphics and extra content out the wazoo.  Being a direct follow up from Yakuza 1 it follows Kazuma Kiryu as he gets involved in an inter-family war between the Osaka and Tokyo branches of the Yakuza.  There's also a korean mafia involved and a plot involving the police and if I tried to write up a true plot summary this post would take me literally all day considering how many twists and turns it takes.  But really I'm not out to spoil anything in this post so all you really need to know is that the plot is absolutely bonkers and you MIGHT have some trouble following it completely if you have not played this first game.  There is also a remake of Yakuza 1 though (Called Yakuza Kiwami, go figure), so I might suggest giving that a go before jumping into the second one.  

This is a Yakuza game though so the plot is only about 25% of the overall experience because, as any fan of the series will tell you, these games are DENSE with additional stuff to do.  In fact, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is so dense with content that it's basically 3 games in one.

The first game is your classic Yakuza experience.  You wander around Sotenbori (based on Dontonbori in Osaka) or Kamurocho (a made up bit of Tokyo) progressing the story while you fight thugs, goons and other Yakuza clan members.  On top of that there are a ton of mini games including things like; Golf, Majong, Shogi, a karaoke rhythm game, UFO catchers and full versions of Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua On just to name a few.  They may seem like just distractions to pad out the game but not only are they fully formed games that are fun to sink a lot of time into in their own right, you get rewards such as experience and money for engaging with them so they directly help you out for the main game.  On top of that there is also an INSANE number of sub stories dotted around the two towns which also net things like rewards and extra finishing moves for combat.  Some of them are very basic and just involve beating up a couple guys and some of them are fully fleshed out, sometimes with cutscenes, mega side quests that involve going to multiple locations and really getting into the nitty gritty of the weird goings on of the two locations.  There is so much stuff to do in just the main game that you could play for multiple hours and not progress the main story a single beat but be constantly getting fun and engaging story and gameplay.  

But then on top of that you have the Cabaret Grand Prix.  The Cabaret game is unlocked pretty early on and involves Kiryu helping a down on its luck hostess club as it climbs the ranks of a sort of hostess battle tournament where the club with the most profits takes home the prize.

It's presented as a mini game but it's a full on hostess sim where you have to recruit girls, manage their mood, help them with customers during the game proper when you are making money and each segment of it has a full on plot going along with it where you get to know your staff and there's betrayal and intrigue and all sorts of shit going on.  The story and character development here is so well done that if you presented "Yakuza: Cabaret Grand Prix" as its own spin off title I would have bought it.  Also the "villains" of of the plot are cameos of various porn stars (pictured above) which is a fun little cherry on top of the cake if you're a complete degenerate like me.  

This content wasn't actually in the original release of Yakuza 2 and has been added for the Kiwami version.  I've been told it first appeared in another Yakuza game that I've not played and then was added to Kiwami.  I'm extremely looking forward to playing this one again in the other Yakuza game soon.

But even then it doesn't end

Majima Construction is another fully storied, fully fleshed out, could have sold it to me as its own game "mini game" where you have to play a sort of tower defence/real time strategy game to defend construction sites from a bunch of land sharks.  While in Cabaret GP the guest appearances where from popular porn stars, this one includes a rather large cast of professional wrestlers.  If you have ever watched the "No Laughing" series from a Japanese show called Gaki No Tsukai, Masahiro Chono who is well known for slapping a chubby Rakugo man in the face every year, is the main bad guy for most of the adventure, voiced by the man himself.  

This game gets intense too with some of the later missions being quite challenging if you aren't levelling up your team properly and sinking millions upon millions of yen into upgrades.  This is another mini game that was included in a later entry and then reincorporated for Kiwami 2 so I'm once again looking forward to doing it all again at a later date

My only real complaint about the game is that it's too easy.  I was playing on Hard mode and had no trouble beating up all the dudes throughout the story and the main game.  By the end of the game I was so skilled and powered up that I beat the final boss mostly by not moving and just pressing triangle to do a counter when he attacked me.  If you are having trouble with an enemy, the game is also far too easily cheesed but equipping a weapon, chugging an energy drink to fill your heat gauge and then spamming the unblockable heat attack with it until their health meter empties out.  

Still though, despite the lack of challenge Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a fun, hilarious, exciting and sometimes heart wrenching game that is absolutely brimming with content and will keep you going for a long LONG time.  Probably one of the best open world type games I've ever played, and you should play it too