Shogi Is Impossible

 

Back when the Corona pandemic was in full swing there was a bit of a Chess boom.  A few content creators went hard during the lockdowns, some interest was whipped up and a bunch of people starting playing Chess a bit more seriously to pass the time.  Me and a few of my friends also go swept up in the Chess hype and now I like to fiddle with a few puzzles or a game of bullet pretty much every day.

On Stream, one of the segments that I am doing is playing every single Yakuza (Now "Like a Dragon", a lame, overly direct translation of the Japanese title) to at least 75%.  If you have played a Yakuza game then you will now that in order to score some of those sweet, sweet completion points you are required to engage with at least a few of the mini games.  Now I thought, with my new found 1000-ish rating Chess skills I might be able to adapt to Shogi pretty easily and score some easy percent.  Well I was very fucking wrong and Shogi is completely impossible.

On a surface level, the two games are extremely similar.  You have pieces that have different ways that they move, a king that you must lock into place in order to win and a system of upgrading pieces when they get to the opposite end of the board.  Well that's the first big difference because in Chess its only pawns that upgrade when they hit the back rank.  In Shogi, getting a piece, any piece, to the back 3 rows or so allows you to flip it and upgrade it.  These upgrades aren't just into higher tiers of pieces like pawns becoming queens or rooks, they gain a whole new set of movement and if it wasn't for the video game versions of Shogi that I stick to showing me the valid moves I think I'd have hard time remembering it all.

But the large amount of basic shit to remember is just the very tippy top of this fucking iceberg.  The thing that really makes Shogi impossible for me to comprehend, the thing that fucks me up basically every time I play, is the ability for you to play pieces that you have taken back to the board instead of making a move.  Losing a piece in Shogi isn't just you losing strength in your forces, you are handing your opponent ammo to use whenever the fuck they like, takes and exchanges have to be considered way more carefully than they do in chess.  It adds a layer of strategy to the game that is deeply fascinating and that I don't think I will ever be able to get my head around.

It's not just me that struggles with this shit either.  I have lost the link (if I find it I'll edit the post) where there was a Chess grandmaster talking about Shogi.  He said that Chess GMs usually end up eating shit if they try to play Shogi but Shogi players can adept to Chess pretty easily.  However though, apparently Shogi players giving chess a try will absolutely fall apart and shit their pants in Chess endgames because of the lack of ability to put shit back on the board.  It was an interesting chat and I wish I could find the video again to share here, maybe one day.

But this post isn't me complaining about Shogi as much as it's me sharing my reverance for the game and the people who are good at it.  I suck at it, I'm clearly too caveman to understand it on a deeper level but with that said, I sure as shit will keep trying my luck against the easy CPUs in the Shogi halls of the Yakuza games.

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. 

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

Shenmue 3: Good Idea, Bad Idea?

Very recently, I have been made aware of a rather sizable community of people all in support of a Shenmue 3 to be released.  This makes me very happy, Shenmue and its sequel are amazing games and it's a story that has been left unfinished for years now and that's just wrong.

Just to fill people in who don't know, Shenmue was a Dreamcast game that came out in Japan at the end of 1999 and in the year 2000 for everyone else.  It was, at it's core, an adventure game about a guy called Ryo Hazuki trying to get revenge for his father who was killed in front of him by a dude called Lan Di.  The player would walk around town, talking to people, gathering clues and items to progress the plot and having a few fights on the way.

Now after reading that you may think "what's the big deal?" but that's the problem with Shenmue, it's really REALLY hard to describe.  It's so much more than just a bog standard adventure game and there is so much to do crammed into what today would be called a small playable area it's staggering.  Aside from the adventurey revenge plot stuff, there is basically a Japan life simulator in here.  As Ryo you are free to go to shops, talk to basically anybody in the street who all have fully voiced lines, play games in the game center, enjoy some slots, collect gatcha figures....the list of stuff to do is fucking huge.

Hell, if you bought Shenmue you had access to full versions of fucking Hang On and Space Harrier as goddamn MINI GAMES.  Games that you could literally sit there and play for hours are nought but side attractions in the world of Shenmue.  So if the story is so good, and the game play is awesome with lots of content, how could a potential Shenmue 3 possibly be a bad idea?

To put it simply, gaming has changed and it's changed a lot.  Shenmue, as good as it is, is a slow methodical game.  Even the battle system revolves around finding spacious areas to practice in because it's not a simple one and if you don't put in at least a little time getting the hang of it, you'll be screwed.  There's also a lot of aspects to Shenmue that really weren't all that good but gave the game it's own charm.  The voice acting is a good example of this, it's kind of slow, stilted and weird in a lot of cases but not once has anyone called it bad, including myself.  Although, if you sit our current generation of gamers in front of a Shenmue title and I guarantee it'll be nothing but complaints.

Yes, this is what I'm worried about, Shenmue being drastically changed to suit the lowest common denominator.  The battle system being simplified, the amount of freedom being reduced for a "more streamlined experience", the once well placed and well done QTE's turned into a massive annoyance as they just do most of the combat for you, just like the list of the old games positives, the list of things that could go wrong is also huge.

Not that I don't have any faith in good old, Yu Suzuki.  I'm sure if he's in charge of a Shenmue 3 it'll turn out just fine, but keep in mind that he works for Sega, the company that basically wrote the rulebook on how to shit on your own gaming series'.  The other risk a Shenmue 3 runs is that it might come way to close to becoming another Yakuza game.

Not that there is anything at all wrong with Yakuza, but Yakuza is NOT Shenmue, not even close.  If a Shenmue 3 came out and it played just like a Yakuza game I can guarantee there would be the same amount of fan outcry as if you made the game shit.

Don't get me wrong with any of this post, I WANT a Shenmue 3, I really really do.  Nothing pains me more than to see something this good go unfinished and not get the degree of love and attention that it deserves.  My point is that Shenmue was very much a game of it's time and if it was made now, I can guarantee that Sega would not allow it to be made the way that we want it, it would be changed because they want it to sell.  Remember, gaming is now this mainstream thing filled with people who don't want to put in the time and effort to experience something like the people back in my day.

One final point to address.  There is some talk of people wanting a Shenmue HD collection, which sounds like a great idea at first, but let me just leave you with one image about why you might want to be careful with that idea too.

Yeah, this isn't the good old days of the Dreamcast anymore, let's pray that maybe something will happen with the Shenmue series, but let's also be very careful what we wish for.

The Japan Purchases (vlog)

So yeah, don't really need to write anything here since everything I want to say is in the video, so have at it