Death's Gambit (PS4): Facing Death

My friends. I have a confession to make to all of you: I am a fan of Dark Souls. I know, I know. I'll give you a minute to recover from this staggering bit of realization, but it's actually true. Before even! When From Software put out Demon's Souls they essentially created a game genre that was eventually perfected with their magnum opus: Dark Souls. Since then many companies made their own iterations to try to capture some of the magic. Some are bad, some are ok, some are compared even when they shouldn't be (look'n at you, Nioh). 

But it's the ones that try to take that gameplay style and mechanics system and blend it into their own creations that grab my attention. And when this one came out this past summer, there were certainly more than a few reviews of this one that I started to take notice. Made by White Rabbit studios and published by Adult Swim Games, I felt this would be a good investment for my recent PlayStation store gift card and sat down with....

DEATH'S GAMBIT:(PS4)

In Death's Gambit you play Soren, a knight in service to the nation of Vados. When Soren was born his father was drafted to a war known the "Great Expedition" per the fiefdom of their home. His father never returned, so Soren grew up under his mother, Evelyn, who tried to instill to him to live a life that is one worth remembering. As the campaign continued onward, eventually Soren's mother was also drafted and did not return.

To follow in his mother's footsteps, Soren also became a knight to join the Great Expedition as well and led a company into battle. The game begins shortly after this, where a Vil'dradur (A Dragon/Lizardesq race of people) warrior called Vrael is seen dragging Soren's body to a burning pile of Soren's company. Nobody else survived. Taking a jaded pity on Soren, he tells him to return to Vados. The battle was lost and there is nothing left for him here.

But just as he goes to leave the battlefield, Soren is confronted by Death himself. Death has granted Soren immortality, but only if he accepts a contract into Death's service, asking for a single favor. With nowhere to return to and without any cause other than to try to find his mother, Soren accepts the contract and continues forward.

As I eluded to in the introduction paragraph, Death's Gambit is a 2D metroidvania style Souls clone similar to the vein of my previously reviewed Salt and Sanctuary. Many of the mechanics that you would recognize from these games are going to be in play here as well as a number of unique mechanics as well.

While using the Souls comparison for the game mechanics, I would say its actual play style feels closer to Castlevania. It has a pretty arcade speed to it as the character moves reasonably fast and the jump is quick, although a little loose. It uses the face button scheme instead of the more traditional souls trigger system, which makes more sense given the 2D plane that you play the game on.

Combat is generally what you would expect. You are able to equip two different weapons (usually a melee and ranged) that will deplete your stamina as you fight, forcing you to back up and replenish before you can resume. You have a dodge roll move that like its Soulsian heritage also depletes stamina but gives you invincibility frames for a significant portion of the roll. This is a essentially the core, and about where the comparisons to Dark Souls ends.

You also have a "Soul Energy" gauge and this is bit of a clever mechanic because when designing your character, your character class actually directs how you actually fill this gauge. For example, I use a rogue in this game, and they fill the soul energy by attacking relentlessly and with aggression. But if you were to say play as the defensive minded sentinel, this gauge increases by defending or parrying attacks.

This gauge is how you perform up to 3 different special attacks, in lieu of a magic system. On top of having to fight to build energy for these attacks, your soul energy also degrades over time so you may not always have an attack ready to go at the start of a fight. These abilities also have cool downs that naturally force you wait between uses. In conjunction between the stamina, energy, and cool down it produces this interesting balance that both rewards aggression and pace, while preventing spamming abilities and forcing awareness of your limits and defense.

A good deal of the of the equipment that you use of the game pretty boldfacedly tells you that many of the weapons are stat specific, so right at the onset when you build your initial character you will have general idea of where you want allocate your built stats.

This too, follows the standard RPG/Souls stat system. I'd probably akin it more to Bloodborne as it's relatively simplified to Vitality, Strength, Endurance, Finesse, Intelligence, and Haste. You could balance your build if you like, but more than likely you will find yourself splitting between your main attack attribute and more life and endurance.

Much like its inspiration, your starting character is just a jump off point for you to customize.

Also, much like its inspiration, it bills itself as an open world game for you to freely explore and tackle in any order. It starts off on a somewhat linear starting point and once you reach the main sanctuary (eg: firelink shrine) you are then free to branch out in multiple directions and see what path works for you.

The experience system, however, has a few subtle differences that I really liked. As you know with most of the games aping this system as you gain experience, souls, blood echos, diamyo, etc you then use that level your character, purchase items, learn new abilities, and upgrade your equipment, when you collect it and you die, you drop it and have to go back for it. If you die again, it's lost. Right?

That is not Death's Gambit does things. It's equally more forgiving and punishing. Because now when you die, you don't actually lose your experience. So you will never find yourself caught under-leveled and panicking to find the next death statue you spend those points. Instead, you drop your phoenix feathers. These are your primary rechargeable healing item and they are in a limited supply. Say you have 5 feathers and you die in the boss encounter, you then warp back to your last save and have to go back with 4 feathers. If you die again before getting back to the boss, you drop another. Now you have 2 less and still need to get back to where you dropped them. It's a unique punishment to carelessness.

These feathers also have a interesting strength buffing mechanic. When at checkpoints you can choose to limit your supply of them for 10% damage increase. I think the max number of feathers you find is 10, so when I play in NG+ modes I find myself allocating 6 of them to give me 60% attack boost to really layer the damage on enemies and bosses. If 4 feathers isn't enough for me to fight then I am playing much to carelessly. These feathers are not lost for good because you are able to spend experience to reclaim them (including ones yo, but it does cost more to do every level higher you get.

I will say boss fights have an interesting reward mechanic that will keep you engaged. If you happen to lose in a boss fight, it takes you to a screen where it shows you the boss and their life bar. That life bar will deplete to the amount of damage you did. As it decreases it awards you the experience you would have earned by taking out that much health. When you try again, you won't be awarded more experience unless you do better than when you last attempted the fight. This provides a nice little psychological push to make you give the boss another try.

This game as an incredibly chill, piano based symphonic soundtrack to it. It never really dips itself out of the classic territories, and makes for very good ambiance music. I wouldn't really consider the soundtrack to be iconic in any capacity, but it does have a very somber opening theme that I enjoy, and all of the music seems fitting for the scenes. A lot of Souls comparisons could be drawn here as well.

But the best aspect of the sound design is how competently voice acted this game was.  Matt Mercer plays Death and he has pretty much become a staple in the video game voice acting world so naturally he just nailed his part. But a lot of the voice actors according to the IMDB pulled multiple roles, basically reducing all the roles of the game to about 10 or so voice actors. It was very impressively done, I didn't find any of the lines to be particularly cheesy and hokey. Once I actually started to progress in the game, the voice did a lot to help me get lost in the story.

Although I do have to knock that, for some reason, Soren is a silent protagonist despite having lines of dialogue that don't change from play through to play through. What is the purpose of this? I complained about it in Tales of Xillia 2 and it makes just about as much sense here. You gave him lines of dialogue, you armed your game with very established and competent voice actors, many of them already doing multiple roles. You couldn't have one of them read Soren's lines? Fuck, have Matt Mercer just use his Troy Baker voice to continue further to confuse me, and that would have worked just as well. I do not understand this decision.

Graphically, it's another game that draws inspiration from graphics of old so it's another one that resorts to pixel animation as opposed to rendering. That being said the games monster design is fairly well detailed with lots of different frames of animation. Some of them fair better than others, I will admit. There is one particular boss fight, The Tundra Lord Kaern, that has a failing attack that looks like it could have used a few more animation frames to look a bit more fluid.

That actually kinda leads to one of my biggest issues in the game. Salt and Sanctuary managed to completely nail the timing that made their game feel like a 2d souls game would feel. Its timing, fluidity, weight of actions all felt... right. Death's Gambit gives me kind of a loose, arcadey feel to it. Specifically when it comes to jumping. The jump is very fast and immediately halts the moment when you let up off the button, which makes the jump feel very bouncy and forced me to pay more attention to my jumps because now the timing is significantly more important.

Combat as a whole took some getting use to because depending on the weapon you chose it affects how you move in the battle when you swing. I first started the game as a Scythe user and I couldn't get the knack of it because the animations would move me so much farther forward than I was expecting to go and multiple times I'd helplessly fall into traps or miss my target because I was moving too much in combat. I eventually restarted and switched to daggers.

But even then, I found some of these controls to be somewhat unnatural. Perhaps that is not the correct word but some of these actions do not roll fluidly for me. For example, you have a kick move that you are supposed to use on enemies who are in a guard position, to do this you need to hold the button that draws up your shield, then hit a shoulder button that allows you to throw the kick. I never, ever get this right on the first time. I typically will take a hit or two trying to do this, and if I have more than one enemy after chances are I am going to take way more damage than I want to.

This game also has an incredibly frustrating barrier to entry. From a relatively stable easing into the game, one of the first bosses you come across is the Bulwark. Now, I've heard this guy can be beaten at level 20 (and there is already a level 1 speed run) but mother fucker this guy put a massive roadblock up in my game. Tack this on a period of still figuring out the controls and it's going to lead to a significant number of deaths in a row.  I'll be honest I was getting ready to put it down after a while

They say that the game is non-linear, but it really feels like it's not. There is a pattern I've found where the curve is definitely more forgiving and that you really should do because it unlocks all the necessary NPCs required to learn the skills in the game. I usually end up dealing with the Bulwark next to last. By finding this path it ended up giving a more fair leveling path and now I have pretty much have it down to memory.

The amount of equipment is tragically minimal. Most of the gear in the game only has one or two variants, and some weapons like the daggers there is no 2nd version at all. So you don't really need to worry about leveling up the wrong equipment because honestly there isn't much to level, just wear what matches your leveled stats. So it doesn't leave very much in the way of customization and that is pretty disappointing. This is also hampered in addition to the game's skill tree because there is no option to respec (even in new game plus), so it's entirely possible that you can miss big sections or treasures because you didn't commit to a specific skillset that allowed you to get there.

I was sort of prepared to go after the game for its story because it felt like your standard fantasy speechifying where they sling a bunch of names and fantasy terms together, and it felt like I wasn't retaining much of it because it doesn't sound like it means anything. But there was one area of the game that took a very strange tonal shift that caught me completely off guard, and by that point I was starting to find my groove in the game that was progressing a bit more smoothly. There is a lot of lore in this game, but again, like Dark Souls you have to go out and find it.

And this game feels like it is hiding a lot of secrets that I haven't unearthed. It has to be, there are too many mechanics that haven't been explained that have to mean something: You can cancel your contract with death, so when you die it deletes you game. You have to make story decisions on some characters at one point. NPCs can be killed (or murdered by other NPCs) and you can stop that, There is a NG+ option where you can raise the level from 1-10. There is an unexplained "fear" mechanic that has to do something.  So I hesitate to rip this story apart because they did actually put in a pretty significant amount of voiced over lore. There has to be more to this than what I am seeing.

Not every boss is beaten by fighting. Sometimes the goal is just to survive.

But worst of all, most unforgivably of all is this game crashes. Constantly. This game crashes with out any rhyme or reason to it. This game crashes when transitioning from one map to another, this game crashes when there are too many enemy projectiles on the screen, this game crashes when I am jumping to much and the animation doesn't catch up fast enough, this game crashes in the middle of dramatic boss fights in prompt of nothing that I can immediately see, this game FUCKING CRASHES WHEN YOU ARE SAVING YOUR GAME CAUSING ME TO LOSE ALL MY FUCKING PROGRESS WITH A CORRUPT SAVE.

This game has been patched more than once already, so the amount of crashes I have had with Death's Gambit is fucking unbelievable and ridiculous. No game close to release, and especially months after release should be crashing as much as this game has. So either the patches you are putting in is not fixing the problems, or you haven't even bothered to address them yet. Either way, it is a completely massive fucking black eye on this game because now I can't enjoy it to its fullest because I am constantly in fear of having this game just randomly close on me for no reason, and possibly lose all my work.

Look. The bottom line here is that I like Death's Gambit. It takes some pretty established mechanics and does a good job of implementing it and tweaking it for their own system. The sprite work is well done and the sound design is pleasing. It has fun boss fights when I get the controls down, and I'm working through a third play through of the game as I write this.

But son of a bitch it doesn't feel like it's ready yet. There is just no excuse of a multi-platform game to have this many problems months after its release. I hate day one patches but I would take 30 of them if it got this game to run properly. So I am torn how I want to deliver this. I want to give Death's Gambit a recommendation because ultimately I got a great deal of play out of it once the game started to click for me. But frankly, it might be worth waiting a few more months so they can hopefully address some of this shit.

If you lost your progress because you left Death's contract, that's on you. If you lost your progress because Death's Gambit crashed on you, that's on the devs. Purchase at own risk.

I'm going to be pissed if I finish NG+10

and there is no secret ending. 

A Hat In Time (Steam): A surprise hat thrown in the ring.

Sometimes there are games that you hear about and just from the couple of sources you trust you know that you are going to want to try it. That was kind of where is was at with this one. I heard the game mentioned a couple of times and I heard some pretty positive reviews about it without reading too much into it.

So naturally when the steam summer comes around I have games like this one locked, loaded, and ready for purchase. It dropped a bit so I jumped on this one. It sat in the backlog for a bit, but while looking for something new to play on my Thursday stream and this seemed like a good change of pace. So with that, we donned our best cap and dove into.....

A HAT IN TIME:(STEAM)

So contrary to what I had assumed, this is not about time traveling girl in a dashing top hat. That's only part of it. Hat Girl, as she is known, is an alien simply flying home in her spaceship. But as she passes over a specific world, a member of their local mafia bangs on her front screen demanding a toll. Hat Girl refuses and the Mafia smashes her window, causing her vault to fly open and suck out these glowing hour glass "time pieces" as well as herself out into space to the planet below.

There, Hat girl meets a local trouble maker in a red hood and a dashing mustache, hilariously called Mustache Girl. Initially, after Hat Girl helps her get free from the Mafia, Mustache Girl agrees to help find the missing time pieces if Hat Girl helps her run the Mafia out of town. Things go well until Mustache girl learns the time pieces can be used to actually alter time, and has the idea to use these to be time traveling heroes and ride the world, and other worlds of their bad guys.

Unfortunately, Hat Girl needs to them to power her ship and get home so she declines. Mustache girl claims this is a selfish use of them, and after stealing from Hat girl and dissolving their friendship, it then becomes a race to see who can collect the time pieces first.

Spoiled a little of the story there to give context, but that is more or less the framework of the story and its as good a motivation as I needed.  As I eluded to in the intro to this one, I basically went into the game pretty much not knowing a thing about. But now that I have played through the game from start to finish, there is only one way I can describe it:  A Hat in Time is a love letter to the 3D Super Mario platfomer. So expect a good number of comparisons to it.

At the onset of the game, Hat Girl has pretty limited bag of tricks. She can run around, and jump, and has a umbrella that she can swing at enemies. When she is airborne and someone comes into range, you can hit the attack button to do kind of a homing flying dive at a baddie. Its a generally invulnerable move but its not fluid or fast. So you will more than likely bash things with your umbrella until you are prompted to use the aerial attack, usually by bosses or specific enemy types.

You have 3 primary objectives every time you drop into a new level. You need to A: collect pons which are gems that will let you unlock new buttons for you hats which give you new passive abilities. B: collect balls of yarn which allow you to unlock new hats, which give you new active abilities like dash, bombs, etc. and C: collect that level's time piece, which allow you to progress to the next chapter of the game. 40 time pieces in total.

As I sort of mentioned before, it draws a great deal from the formula that made Super Mario 64 work so well. Each chapter of the game is broken up into 4 to 8 acts which drop you into that world to go after a new time piece. And like much like its inspiration, each change of act might produce some subtle changes to the level on top of your ultimate goal.  For example, in the first world of Mafia town, the entire place is somewhat of a tropical beach island city.

Man, the Mafia are friggen jerks.

But in one of the acts, Mustache Girl turns on all these giant faucets that basically make them spout out lava instead of water, so now any of the water you could previously swim in now causes damage and require more precise platforming. The goal to unlock the time piece is to navigate around the new terrain to reach said faucets and turn them off. Worlds are generally open so you can explore around and see what changes and learn where you can go now or what ability you might need to come back later.

After completing a certain number of acts (you don't need every time piece) you can move to the finale of the act which usually results with a fun, interesting boss fight and the closing of the story for that set of worlds. All of them individual to each other so while it does lead to a big final story arc, each chapter feels contained and different so they feel different, fresh, and unique.

You can always replay levels to go back to reload on pons or try to get more yarn to get new hats for more abilities. It is entirely possible to beat the game without having all of them because I was able to do so and do so without much difficulty. As you play, you can also find time shifts. Again, much like in the 3D Mario games and would say Mario Sunshine in particular, time shifts are these kinda surreal floating in space pocket levels that usually involves some trickier platforming to complete in basically a wide infinite undersea/spacescape. Most chapters have 2 or 3 of these.

So I'm not gonna lie, There is a lot to love about this game. First off this game bills itself as "A Cute as HECK platformer" and I'm hard pressed to disagree. Everything about the art style gives me a nostalgic Saturday morning cartoon feeling about it. Cartoony style caricature with big eyes and character proportions. A lot of absurdist scenery. Each world has its own differing theme with characters to go with it be it a train car of birds, a forest of ghosts, or a mountain of shamanic goat people. In the recent DLC update, they also added a "retro" mode to make the graphics looks like they are on the N64, and somehow that feels like it fits just as well.

Hat girl, who never actually has a full speaking line I think, has a lot of little character building animations that will happen when she idles or during the course of the story or level. She is a bit of a fun loving prankster and when approaching enemies she stick her tongue out and make a "bleeeeeeeaahh" sound at them. She'll make faces at people and tease. But she is also a sweetheart and if she befriends someone she'll blow kisses that have little hearts. This game is adorable.

In more than one level, she'll have to sneak around silently. During these levels of the game you will notice that if you aren't using your dash, you will see that she is walking around holding up her hand in a finger gun pose like she's playing that she's a spy. It's a lot of these little animations that end up giving Hat Girl so much character to her personality without having to deliver a single line of dialog.

There are some pretty great supporting characters too. My hands down favorite is the antagonist from the 3rd or 4th act, a ghost called the Snatcher. He basically traps you at the start of the level and yanks your soul out, and then forces you into a contract to be his fixer. Everything about this character makes me laugh. His voice, the 4th wall breaking cynicism of his boss fight, he even has brief Undertale reference if you are looking for it.

One character I was expecting more from is the shopkeeper you use to buy new button abilities for your hats. He is a ghostly, spectral character with a floating mask and broken speech. Just from his overall design I expected there to be more story, or content relating to him. He ended up just being a shopkeeper like he said he was, which actually kind of impressed me because that is an awful lot of attention to detail for a character that essentially has no bearing on the story.

Every part of the game with the Snatcher is my favorite part. I love this character.

They throw in a lot of little game mechanics in this one to change the feel of it too. I mentioned the stealth levels that borrow mechanics you might see in a Metal Gear game. In one level you are just racing forward as the stage falls apart around you, using your gear to navigate the jumps properly to keep moving forward, like you might see in Uncharted, Tomb Raider, or even Crash Bandicoot really. At one stage a character wanted me to doctor up my picture for a movie, and so I am basically doing an MS Paint job over my picture as part of an actual story mission. It's hilarious.

Hat In Time also does some camera tricks like Nier: Automata did change the feel of a segment. The game for the most part is generally 3D in all its segments, but one boss encounter with the Mafia Boss, the game sticks a 2D plane for the entirety of the encounter. It limits the range of movement which requires you to have more precise jumping and timing of your aerial attacks to complete. Some of these changes also completely change the tone and feel of the game from level to level.

The game has some very funny writing. It's incredibly cheeky and plays with a lot of the tropes you expect in video games. A lot of segments are very sarcastically written. And while I have called this game a love letter to 3D Mario titles, there is a lot of love to go around as there are references upon references in this game, such as the C.A.W. agents from the Murder Mystery level, which are clearly drawing inspiration from the G-Men from Psychonauts.  There is even a text adventure on the ship that you can play that has some rather hilarious outcomes if you continue to play it. It even turns a trope I generally hate on its head and made it feel hilarious and new, while also providing me a much more difficult moral choice than I was expecting.

Right down to how they deliever their lines, the agents of C.A.W
are a direct parody of the agents in Psychonauts.

This soundtrack completely nails it. This is an OST that sort of does a lot with a little, and ends up giving us a ton. Each stage has their own unique theme, so naturally they all have a complimenting song that go along with them. But as you complete each of the acts in each stage, The song remixes to adjust to the changes of level, thus giving it the song a different feel while still being the same theme for said level.

But then, the game blindsided me with the exceptional rock-as-fuck boss fight themes. I first noticed it with the fight with the Snatcher and its highly covered theme "Your contract has expired". So it caused to me to go back and listen to some of the other encounter themes and almost every one of them is fantastic. I am really loving Contract and "The Battle of Award 42". Pascal Michael Stiefel absolutely knocked it out of the park with this OST. Some of you might be hearing some of these songs in my upcoming Extra Life highlight reel.

The game has a decent length to it as well and what I like about it is that it does not require 100% competition to get through.  It tells you right at the onset that there are 40 time pieces to gather, but you don't actually need all 40 to play through all the main chapters of the game. You DO need most of the hats to navigate through all the levels, but you don't need all of them. This allows for some additional replay value after you have completed the main story. If you wish to do the DLC chapter, it does require a bit more completion than required to finish the game, but I consider that post game content and don't hold it against it.

In addition to all of this, for the first day of its release they gave away the first DLC chapter away for free. While I can never be rid of the bane that is DLC, I appreciate gestures like this. The devs also released an update that provides modding support for fans to customize the game, and a multi player split screen mode that looks to provide some fun cooperative play/teammate trolling as you can hit the other player. I personally haven't had the chance to try the multiplayer, but for collector missions or finding time riffs, this seems like it could be useful.

Awwwww.. These girls...

There are some minor complaints at best. There is a looseness to the controls that 90 percent of the time feels generally feels pretty great when you are playing, but it becomes a massive annoyance when trying to time a jump right at the edge of a ledge. More than once I would be trying to time my jump and go over the edge because I wasn't hitting it as soon as I felt I needed to.

There is an air dash kinda move that you use to extend the length of your jump, which I hate. Not that mechanic doesn't work, but it also functions as your slide move when going down a hill. Again, also fine. The problem comes in is because this animation doesn't cancel itself, or with any of the main actions such as jumping again or swinging your umbrella. So in the occasional tight situation I would be trying to navigate tight platforms, land my extended jump, then die because I was scrambling to swing my umbrella or jump out of the way. It's annoying and seems like an easily fixable issue, and may be with upcoming patches.

As with most 3D games of this nature, there is some camera fuckery that can be a mild aggravation.  When having to do some wall jumping, climbing, or worse yet when you have to land on narrow platforms, you also need to sort of guide your camera while you jump to make sure you stick the landing. It's not exactly fluid and not comfortable to do, so chances are you will be making more than one attempt to hit a jump. This is incredibly frustrating when trying to jump on a clothesline because of the narrow target to hit. The level "The Big Parade" was probably the most frustrating example of this.

This is more of a personal complaint, but I would have liked health to be a little more forgiving. I wouldn't say this game is exceptionally hard, but hearts aren't as common as pons are. Unlike 3D Mario games where you get 8 health and coins restore it, Hat In Time only gives you 4 and only specific heart pickups restore your health. This makes the latter stages, and specifically the DLC update on a WAY higher difficulty curve than the rest of the game, which can lead to some frustration.

But ultimately, these are minor complaints on an all around solidly built game. The fact that this was done by an incredibly small team and basically shared in bits in pieces instead of working together at one office makes it even more impressive to me. A Hat in Time hits all the right points for me for a new property: fun characters, good soundtrack, great replayability, adorable art direction, the right amount of skill to be challenging without being frustrating, and so on.

Sometimes when there is a buzz around a title and you take a cursory glance at it you know that it's going to be right for you, and that is exactly where I put A Hat in Time. This game is appropriate for everyone and has a little something to offer everyone's gaming tastes a bit. I very much enjoyed this game and give it a wholehearted recommendation to anyone who is looking at it.  I just wish that I started it sooner.

Sorry Mustache Girl. But every British sounding
woman just sounds like Tracer to me now.

God of War (PS4): An Interesting Development.

So I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm totally aware of how behind I am getting on updates on this thing. This is mainly because when I started working on it I was on a very part time schedule. This allotted me a lot of time play games and subsequently write about them. Now that I have pretty regular employment, I barely I have time to finish or even start the games I am buying. I know I am dropping the ball on this, and I'm trying to keep up. But for those of you who actually wait for updates, I apologize.

I can't believe I forgot to write about this one. So as you know from some of my earlier reviews, I didn't initially care for this series, but after playing through one of the prequel games, I suddenly became a lot more invested, and it allowed to carry through every installment of the game. I left this one pretty satisfied.

But then an E3 trailer came out, showing a much calmer and aged version of the protagonist. He was accompanying a small child and the combat and camera looked much different compared to others. The biggest change however was that a game that was knee deep in Greek mythology, had made a polar shift to Norse mythology. Now THAT had my attention. So it was with little hesitation I plunked down my reserve on....

GOD OF WAR(PS4)

So to recap the story, the dramatic finale of God of War 3 culminates our favorite indestructible psychopath Kratos literally punching Zeus to a horrifically bloody death, and frees the powers of Pandora by sacrificing himself, instead of giving them to Athena. He was left bleeding out and dying, but in the post credits we learn that he managed to leave, and his whereabouts were unknown.

God of War picks up a significant number of years after this event, and it unlike previous games where we start off right in the action this one starts on a somber note. We are with a older, more tired Kratos as he hacks down a specifically marked tree, and begins to drag it home. He is with a young child named Atreus, and we come to learn that this is actually his son. There is a coldness to their relationship, as we see that the two of them really don't know how to speak to each other about the loss of their mother and wife, Faye.

After taking the tree home they prepare her funeral rights and collect her ashes. Her last wish was to have her remains taken the highest point of the nine realms and have them spread to the four winds by the two that she loved. 

Wow. Talk about "press X to pay respects", right? But right out of the gate you can see a number of things in play here that show us this is not going to be one of our normal God of War romps. First and foremost, and in my humble opinion probably the most important, in a matter of moments we see something we have not seen from Kratos in seven previous games: growth and development as a character.

He's not the shouty "slaughter first, ask questions never" rage beast he has always been. He is quiet, reserved, perhaps a bit cold but probably more accurately lost in his thoughts. We see in the first few scenes that he does love his son, but he doesn't really now how to display the affection. He's always been a warrior first, and the bridge that connected him to is son is gone now.

There is a scene very early where he tries to just put his hand on Atreus' shoulder and falters. This honestly to me shows more development than I have ever seen in him, because I actually believe his internal conflict to be real. As opposed to earlier games where he is claiming that he is still the same mortal man with a family but vengeance justifies his actions, and then uses a helpless innocent to viscerally gum up a door mechanism by jamming her in the gears. It rang laughably hollow before, not so much now.

We also notice a significant change to the visual art direction of the game and cinematography. Obviously with the transition to Norse mythology the scenery was going to change, but more notably the game has gone away from its far angled crane shot gameplay to the much tighter and much closer over-the-shoulder third person gameplay. This is significant because it completely changes how we used to approach the God of War style combat system.

Originally, it was designed so you could dispatch a large number of baddies at one so it would pan out so you could see them all, punctuated with larger than life mini bosses that can literally be the size of buildings. So the camera would pan out very far away from Kratos to give a sense of the massive scale of enemies.

There are still big enemies in the new God of War but everything is much closer to scale and enemies are roughly the same size as Kratos is. The game is essentially shot as if the entirety of the game done in a single take, as the game never makes a hard cut to another camera angle. It just kinda moves out of the way of the actors while keeping them in frame, so to speak.  This causes the camera to be much tighter and close up on the action. You might still find yourself dealing with a number of enemies at once, but I found myself feeling reminiscent of HellBlade: Senua's Sacrifice as I played through and hacked with my ax.

Because of this change in perspective, the combat feels drastically different now. I've used this term before but there feels like there is a lot more weight to my actions. I'm not just swinging around the Blades of Chaos and reducing everything to red paste.  Now my ax swings feel harder, slower, and more realistic. When you connect there is a recoil on the enemy as well as the impact of the weapon bouncing back. You can still mash if you want to, but the combat now feels more methodical than it used to.

I hesitate to use the Dark Souls comparison, but it would make sense a little bit because the control scheme in this game has drastically changed as well. Before it used the standard spectacle fighter control scheme with the face buttons like you might expect from Devil May Cry or Bayonetta but now it uses the right shoulder and trigger to attack and left to block. This is a convention that From Software's Demon's Souls basically created, now with the face buttons having different supplemental effects like dodging  and controlling Atreus.

You could argue that this fundamentally changes everything that a God of War is, and I know a number of people didn't like it but I personally liked the new direction it took. When God of War III or Ascension came out, they games were fun sure, but it ultimately felt like a rehash of all the games I played before. This made it feel new, different, and on the whole a lot more skillful. And sometimes changes like this are necessary to keep a game fresh. Think Resident Evil's jump from 3 to 4. That's basically what is happening here.

This game is visually stunning, top to bottom. I don't have a PS4 Pro or a 4K tv but this is one of those games where I just find myself marveling at the environments, skin textures and animations of the characters, and so on. As a whole, it is done in a very cinematic "single take" camera styling. Meaning that from the moment you press start (or options I guess), The camera continuously pans and zooms in, out, and around the action as you play. There is no hard cuts, no transitions really. Just a fade to black or two that comes right back in the same position we left in.

And honestly? For the overall tone and pacing of the game, it fits on a very significant level. I don't know what it is but something about the single shot makes everything feel more dramatic.  From tight frame ups during conversations between characters, or slow pan-arounds for a one character introspective moment it just feels like I am watching a  movie. Whoever directed the cinematography and blocking on this one needs a raise.

I do have to say that I was disappointed when I found out they changed Kratos' voice from long time role owner Terrance C. Carson. He WAS Kratos. But Christopher Judge did an exceptional job with the character. The change in voice honestly feels like it reflects in Kratos' change of demeanor. Oh yeah, we still have the occasionally bouts of "Shouty Kratos", but for the most part Judge's depiction of him is generally softer, more somber, and dare I say "smoother?" Inside of a few the first few "Boy's" I honestly didn't even notice the change in voice anymore.

Very well voice acted all around, too. From serious characters to more comedic types, nobody felt overly hokey or out of place. Well, maybe not nobody. The primary antagonist of the game really has some very over the top lines and reactions, but part of that is because of the nature of his character. He is a god who is essentially cursed by his blessing, and naturally the madness from it has affected him. So when he banters with Kratos, he comes off as playing crazy a bit too hard for my liking.

At the end of the day, It's still God of War so its combat cinematics are still insane and over the top.

Now, while I do feel that this games pacing fits for it on a thematic level, I did find this edition of God of War to be a bit slower than they usually are. Half of this is because it has has somewhat moved to semi-open world style of gameplay instead of its typical level style progression you might recognize from previous iterations of the game. Midgard is your main sprawling open world that you get a pretty good deal of freedom to explore, and its in these quiet boat travels from area to area where you get a lot of the interaction between Kratos and Atreus. And while it is interesting, it really does slow the pace to a crawl when traveling from place to place.

Then you have the separate realms you can take Yggdrasil for, and these would always annoy me because they fucking take forever. You have to enter, wait for the root bridge to form, use a slow moving dial to select your world, wait for the teleport light show loading screen barrage to end, and then wait for a second root bridge to form before finally exiting to this new area. And sadly, many of these new areas really only consist of one to get in, do your mission, and then leave.

The difficulty curve is a bit wonky too. As mentioned before if you have played any of the previous games this isn't the same control scheme, and it throws a lot of mechanics at you. It took a bit of time for me to get all the intricacies of timing my blocks and learning the correct set of button prompts to combo or execute my moves correctly. They don't really explain the block mechanic at all except for what button does so. But it has this closing ring mechanic which I understood as it closed it was my timing. But It would shift from red to green, which made me assume blockable and unblockable.

While this is true, it never really explains this. So while you spend time trying to get the timing down, it basically allots you enough time to make mistakes and question if that's actually what is happening here. I distinctly remember looking online for an answer, then asking a friend who was farther than I was, THEN going back to the game and still getting the blocking wrong somehow. How about not tutorializing walking and cutting the tree down for the intro cinematic, and actually tutorializing the main fucking component of your game?

And MAN, some of these optional boss fights would kick the ever loving shit out of me. During the course of gameplay you have these optional Valkyrie boss fights you can do that are scattered across the map. A number of them aren't too bad but holy shit, as you get to the last few of them they just completely grind you into paste and smear you off the carpet. Some of these will excruciatingly test your patience. I can't even imagine trying them on a harder difficulty than normal.

This particular move is fitting a Valkyrie, because you usually have to pay for a woman to step on your face anyways.

It takes a bit to get into the rhythm of combat in this game too. Basically you are adjusting to a new tighter camera angle, different combat controls, and a much more precise difficulty. It makes the earlier stages of the game when you are still feeling out how to play a little bit frustrating and annoying. I often would find myself not bothering to waste any healing items because it was just easier to take the death and get the full health recovery from a checkpoint instead.

There was at the time I played it a mild lack of polish to the subtitling as well. As I was playing through the earlier stages of the game, you often cross paths with a major support character who assists Kratos and Atreus a number of times. But before they actually reveal who she is, one set of subtitles actually gives her name as she says goodbye. It made me happy because she ended up being one of my favorite norse goddesses, but it kinda spoiled a reveal that was going to be happening later. It wasn't a big plot shifting reveal or anything like that, but it did kind of bury the lead.

My last two complaints of this game are a bit spoilery, so feel free to skip this section but the game has been out for a while now so I'm gonna talk about it. First off, the antagonists. Or rather, the antagonists that they lead up with that basically never appear. Throughout the entirety of the game you find yourself learning a lot of the lore about a number of stories in Norse mythology, specifically about Odin's interactions with Thor, Tyr, the Freya, and the Frost Giants. The game basically paints for hours what unruly and savage dicks Odin and Thor can be, and by the end of the game only one of them makes an appearance for less than a few seconds.

This infuriates me because it basically took what was otherwise a pretty good experience and tells me that this was a game meant solely to set up the next game in the series. A teaser is fine and all, but it basically made think that this whole game was meant to be a teaser, and that is a little a bit annoying. Primarily because it ultimately withheld a lot of the big names of Norse mythology out of this one and saved them for another game. These games are getting longer and longer dev cycles, and I don't know how much more waiting I want to do.

But the biggest one is a major story pivot. This games big underlying theme is that Kratos has moved on. Everything is different. He found a new love, has a new family, has a new life. He fights with different weapons, has a different personality. Everything about this is supposed to be a new beginning, but midway through the game they send him back to face his old life. Sure enough, this causes him to go back and bring back the Blades of Chaos, the iconic chained twin swords Kratos is known for using.

Fucking, Shit. Why did these come back?! I know they are iconic to who he is, but the moment I equipped them and the tutorial on how to use them came back, it felt like I felt like I was playing the same old tired God of War that I have played for close to a decade. I didn't want to play this version of the game. I was having fun playing the new one, learning its intricacies and mechanics. As soon as I start to get into the groove of using this new system it throws me right back to the old one, and I'm effortlessly mashing the same combos I've done before, practically neutralizing the challenges I was overcoming prior. It really was a huge letdown for me.

While a cool story moment, just like that we are back to same ole tired God of War classic combat.

Ultimately, these are minor niggling complaints on an otherwise fantastic experience. I know a lot of reviewers were talking game of the year with this one when I came out. But I feel this is a situation much like Breath of the Wild where pedigree is inflating the perception. It's a radical and much needed set of changes to the God of War franchise, and I would certainly say that its probably one of if not the best installment in this franchise.

But game of the year? Ehhhh, I would say pump the breaks on that one. It's absolutely worth your time and its absolutely worth the full retail experience. It's a visually stunning game with some superb voice acting, excellent story tellings, and a fun combat mechanics. But just because it's a God of War game doesn't immediately mean that it is perfect.  As I've learned with Tales of Berseria last year, games that come out in Q1 of the year are a little soon to start heralding as the best the year has to offer.

God of War (2018) is an incredibly solid addition to this long running franchise, and makes the necessary changes it needed to become fresh and new. It suffers a little bit from pacing, curving difficulty, and ultimately is just a set up for a future release but this does very little to mar the overall experience. I give this one a strong recommendation.

I will not be happy if one of the characters in this one

is a boss in the next one. I don't want to fight them.

Please don't make me.

Yakuza 6: Song of Life (PS4) - A retrospective on the series as a whole.

It's baffling to me that I have worked on this blog for as long as I have. As I've told before this blog was started actually as part of a masters course project. Seemed easy enough, start a blog and make a post. I play video games, so why not talk about a game I really liked? That game was Yakuza 4.

Since then it's a pretty winding road for the franchise (originally known as Ryu Ga Gotoku) as a whole. After a lukewarm launch and niche audience, interest in western releases waned for Sega and they basically gave up after the very poorly received zombie offshoot, Yazuka: Dead Souls. Thus began the 3 year fight to try to get Yakuza 5 released to the west. Once that battle was won, they tried again by releasing the prequel game Yakuza 0.

THAT was the game really allowed the tires to dig into the western soil and get some tread going. Now people were at the start of the story, and with the release of the Kiwami games, people are getting to experience the full story now. For those like me, this culminates with today's entry and the newest installment of this long running franchise. I've fallen too far behind to give each game a proper review. So instead while covering this one, I will speak on the franchise as a whole. Be warned: There may be spoilers ahead.

YAKUZA 6: SONG OF LIFE(PS4)

Yakuza 6 picks up mere moments after the ending of Yakuza 5 with longtime protagonist Kazama Kiryu bleeding out and injured in the streets after his last over-the-top battles with the Tojo and Omi when he is found by and finally reunited with Haruka. Haruka after winning a contest to become an idol and had just formed a supergroup with rival group T-Set, had just admitted to a live audience her guardian was former Yakuza, and publicly announced she was quitting the entertainment industry before running out of the Tokyo Dome.

While Kiryu was recovering from his injuries, he was approached by the police about his responsibility to the public damage that was caused with his battles with the Tojo and Omi clans. Instead of fighting back or using connections to get out of jail, he instead opts to do his time, and get out with a clean slate. When he does, he can return to the Sunshine Orphanage with Haruka and live as a family with the children there waiting for him.

But when he finally makes it back, he comes to find out that Haruka has left. She wanted the press and reputation of her ties to Yakuza to not hinder the other children's opportunities. Kiryu returns to Kamurocho to try to pick up her trail, only to find she is comatose from a hit an run accident and that she apparently had a son. With only a trace amount of leads, Kiryu takes the child and heads out to search Kamurocho and Hiroshima to find the alleged father of the baby and to find out who hurt Haruka and why?

As you saw in the last year end wrap up, I showered a little praise on both Yakuza 0 & Yakuza Kiwami for being standards of excellence in gaming. I have played nearly all of them available to me at this point, and outside of Yakuza: Dead Souls (a non-cannon offshoot, mind you) almost all of them rank equally in how they are built. Primarily because despite being a long running series, there really isn't a lot that changes in the core formula of a Yakuza game. It's the main reason most of them haven't gotten full reviews.

When you first look at screens and game play footage, you would assume its in that open world vein that you may expect Grand Theft Auto to fall under. And while to a small extent this is true for a basic framework for missions, this really isn't at all how the Yakuza franchise plays. It's more of a blend of sandbox, beat em up, and rpg if I had to narrow it down. As you walk around town you cant just start creating mayhem (because Kiryu is an honorable criminal?) and start smashing people. In this series combat appeared almost like random battles with thugs coming up with laughably obscure reasons to attack you. In Yakuza 6 this was made a bit more seamless by skipping the dialog to make it feel more natural.

The combat of the Yakuza franchise is really the bread and butter and this is why you play. It's a variant of the standard 3rd person action game and typically sticks to a light attack, heavy attack, grab/weapon, dodge convention. It can lend to button mashing if that is your style of play, but it goes to great pains to show you all the various combos and heat moves you can unlock that really can open up your strategy when you play. It's primary selling point is the heat mechanic: As you deal damage to enemies you raise a heat bar, and once it reaches capacity you would be surrounded by a flame like aura. When in the right situation, you will be prompted with a heavy attack prompt that will go into a brief but visceral animation of your character dispatching an enemy in brutal fashion. These are the heat moves and they are hard to watch at first but oh... so satisfying.

And there are TONS of ways to do these moves and they change by what you are standing by, what character you are using, what weapon you are holding, what stance you are in, if your heat gauge is full to certain levels. Its almost like a puzzle game itself to try to find and perform all of them, and its actually rewarded because the Yakuza games tend to be known for 100% completion excess.

Heat move from Yakuza Kiwami

The fighting styles in this game are also generally the same across the board but there are instances in which it does change where it makes sense. Typically the fighting style changes when you are playing different characters, and that works because naturally each character would fight differently. Seijima, a character from Yakuza 4, is a burly beast of a man so naturally his fighting style are big hulking swings and smashing heavy weapons to Kiryu's straight forward aggressive striking style. Akiyama is known for being suave and deceptive, so he uses a fighting style that employs kicks and tricky moves.

The times where this didn't happen for example are in Yakuza 0 & Kiwami respectively. Which almost make sense where this is the beginning of the timeline. Kiryu and Majima are still cutting their teeth in the yakuza so they actually employ 3 fighting styles you can change between as they develop their signature style. Since they are the only characters in those games, this mechanic works because it allows variance to the game play without forcing the game to take the narrative off the primary characters.

Combat suffered a little bit in Yakuza 6 because with the step up to PS4 hardware caused a step up in graphical display and game performance, and I feel to make time for all the rendering the move set was cut back a bit. It was still fun to do and visceral as ever, but it certainly felt lacking in comparison the rest of the series as a whole. The bottom line though is for skill, quick paced combat with a weighty feel to it? The Yakuza franchise nails it on that front.

Another trait that this series is known for is the straight jacket wearing level of distraction this game provides. See, the focus of these games is the primary narrative which sometimes can be a little bit samey. But in between the major story moments of the game, you get explore the streets of Kamurocho. This is actually a fun little recreation of actual Toyko red light district Kabukicho. And it features all the distractions you might expect from a downtown district of Tokyo: streets filled with restaurants, arcade games, gambling parlors, hostess clubs, night clubs, stores and filled with actual Yakuza members.

In this specific series of games, almost all of these are interactable, like an inception of games. Sega has on more than one occasion put in older games within Yakuza.  So I would stop my progress in the game so I can play Taiko Drum Master, Virtua Fighter, or Out run. Sometimes there are side quests with random NPCs involved with these, but 90% of the time they are thrown in there as just extra bullshit to play with while you do. You might think why would you put in there then if it doesn't mean anything, but I can't tell you how easy it is to sunk into other game instead of moving on. The number of distractions only increased with each installment of the game (Yakuza 5 had so much side shit they could be sold as separate games) before finally dialing back some in Yakuza 6.

As mentioned prior there is a fair amount of side questing to do. A lot of the times this will just involve you having to go to a place and beat somebody up, but a lot of these are a way to introduce some of the mini games. Most of these provide experience bonuses to level your character faster, and some of them will unlock item rewards. None of them are required to actually beat the game but the experience helps as bosses will force you to get more skillful in your fighting.

Although some are really fucking out of place. Most egregiously, and I've talked about this before, is the required hostess club missions in Yakuza 4. In a game where I am suplexing someone onto a bike rail and them smashing his friend with the actual bike, being forced to stop so I can play Pretty Pretty Princess THREE TIMES is incredibly jarring and unnecessary. One time made sense for story context, three times was just ridiculous and excessive. But if you wanted to get the completion, you had to do this with like six girls. No thank you.

I'm not kidding. In the midst of the story of crime, betrayal, and honor you
need to take 3 breaks to make sure your hostess fashion is up to snuff.

Or like in Yakuza Kiwami, I'm being constantly hounded and mugged by Majima, but then suddenly he stops because he feels he needs to be better than me at pocket cart racing. What?! Perhaps this is a way of leading horse to water as it were for getting the player to notice and try these mini games, but honestly in the game that lets you go out and explore what there is it see, I can't image there is much a need to make the player try them. A friend I recently turned on to the series told me she couldn't progress with the story because she was enjoying the side questing too much. So yeah, not a big problem on that front.

From a graphics perspective, the Yakuza franchise made some strides when going from the PS2 to the PS3, and from that point on has remained incredibly consistent on that front. Once they had down their design in Yakuza 3, the character appearance never really changed. They just continued to overhaul and tweak it's visual design to where we are now with Yakuza 6 where all the textures have damn near photo realistic skin imperfections and lifelike glisten to sweat and tears. I found myself on more than one occasion marveling at how good the series has come to look.

Actually, looking at it now Yakuza 1's graphics really laid the foundation well.

There has to be a degree of motion capture as well because the most recent iteration of this game featured a number of NJPW wrestlers and Kiryu had busted out more than one pro wrestling move into his new arsenal on more than on occasion. But more so than that is this is the first time I recognized a character as an actual personality as one of the primary characters in Yakuza 6 was famed Japanese actor Takeshi Kintao who you may know from the new Ghost in the Shell movie, The Blind Swordsman, and probably most famously Battle Royale.

Additionally, the Yakuza games are somewhat of a fun time capsule for this depiction of contemporary Tokyo. with Yakuza 0 it starts off in the 80's where outfits are garish, technology is dated, and clubs had very different visual stylings to them. And as you play through the series you always stay in, or wind up coming back to Kamurocho. Kind of like Nier:Automata you could argue that by reusing the same map it feels cut and paste, but really I always feel nostalgic and familiar with the streets, and enjoying finding what stayed and what changed.

Majima's "Breaker Style" from Yakuza 0

This series soundtrack tends to be fairly complimentary as well. 90% of the time you probably wont even notice the OST as much of it shifts from droning overbearing ambiance for it's dramatic moments, and a hard rock bed during fight sequences. You will notice more iconic sounding theme in the bigger moments of the game where you have long drawn out action sequences, and each game usually has some big main theme that goes down during the fight sequences of the game. Yakuza 4's "for faith" for all 4 final boss sequences is still hands down the best. In each game only a few tracks will truly stand out, but all of these OSTs are ones you can toss on a playlist and get lost in while you do stuff around the house.

But most importantly of all for the Yakuza franchise, is that if there is any one selling point above all else is that this game has some truly exceptional story telling. Throughout the series and primarily in the early stages of the franchise, the narrative is based around Kazama Kiryu and Haruka Sawamura. Despite being in and out with the yakuza, Kiryu is still a pretty predominant figure in it's politics and despite his best efforts seems to constantly drawn into the fold be it power struggles, murders, or turf wars.

Much like the setting the game takes place in, I love the dedication to the development times of the games in correlation to the characters. This isn't as notable with most of the cast but is primarily noticed with Haruka. When you first meet her in Yakuza 1/Kiwami is only 9 years old. By the time you see her in Yakuza 6 she is almost 20. When you look at the development times of the games, she is always aged just as old as you saw her from the last game release over the course of the entire franchise. You basically get to see her grow from child to adult through the series. Resident Evil 6 did this with Sherry Birkin, and that is a chronology continuity I have always appreciated seeing when it comes to storytelling.

Haruka: Age 9 as of Yakuza: Kiwami

Haruka: Age 18 as of Yakuza 5

Yakuza 4 set off as a branching point where we started to deviating from Kiryu as the primary focus, introducing us to a wave of new characters and stories to follow before branching back to our stalwart hero. With new characters allowed to take the stage, we are now starting to see a bigger focus on new fan favorites like Akimaya and Seijima in 4 and 5, and Majima in 0, Dead Souls, and the upcoming Kiwami 2 remake. So while Yakuza 6 marks the end of the Kiryu arc, there is plenty of people who could carry the story if need be. But not Tanimura, that character basically vanished after having a lead role in Yakuza 4.

Ultimately though, this series is crime drama through and through. So despite reasonably stable starting off points for the story (usually a murder), there will be so many twists and turns during the course of the story, that you will never really know what to expect by the end of it and some of it can be pretty ridiculous. Well, that's not entirely true. When talking to a friend, I described what I call my "Shirts off, Shit's Serious" rule. You always know when a fight is important contextually, because MAN do the dudes in Yakuza love to rip their shirts off to show off their bitchin' ink jobs on their back.  When you see guys ripping off their shirts and jackets in one seamless transition, you know things are about to go down in a big way (this is extremely hilarious in 4, where 8 people do it in one segment).

There are a small handful of complaints I can make. Like I mentioned before, fights in these games almost have a very Final Fantasy random battle feel about them, as people stop you on the street to make some ridiculous commentary about why they are going to kick your ass before having a fade transition to the battle sequence. This was worked out in the newer games, but it certainly can affect the pacing in some of the earlier ones. Although I have to admit I loved some of the sillier reasons people would fight me.

If you are a player who is obsessed with 100% completion, best of luck to you because this game fucking counts everything. Fighting styles, scores in arcade games, money won in all casino games, eaten every one of the food items in the 100's of restaurants, dated all the hostesses, and on and on and on. My first play through of  Yakuza 4 I want to say ended with just under 90 hours of game play. By the time I was all said and done with it, the game told me I had just under 25% complete. That is literally insane. Its even harder with some like Yakuza 0 where you have to buy properties to complete that quest, but the game or map doesn't actually tell you which you bought or which you own.

I mean if Akiyama was courting me, I'd have full hearts too.
Dat Mauve blazer. *swoon*

It definitely suffers from the tropes of Japanese story telling sometimes. When watching cut-scenes of conversations they tend to repeat a lot of the same things they said to each other while pausing for effect or making confused sound effects. You will always have some low level shouty grunt losing their shit over the smallest perceived slight, and the antagonists in these series are usually so cartoonishly evil you can basically pick them out the moment you see them for the first time.

Also if you are like me and not starting with the actual beginning of the storyline (I started at 4), the beginnings of all these games are going to be confusing as hell because they will make reference to characters, clans, locations, and events that tie to the previous games. While it is confusing, once you learn the major players specific to the title and what the main plot of the game is, the back story isn't as necessary as you can focus on who you do know. It will all eventually tie together.

And this is somewhat of a personal gripe but if you are going to give a me a karaoke minigame to play, why would you only provide two songs? This is something that is consistent in like every one of these games and I have no idea why. The dual layered blu-ray disc is huge. I'm not saying pull a whole tracklist of DDR in there, but I don't think 5 or 10 total songs is asking a lot. You expect me to play them more than once if I'm doing the hostess club dating, some song options would help that.

It also will throw you to the wolves with some more traditional Japanese gambling too. Most of the games you might recognize from a usual casino, some you might recognize but not know how to play like majong or pachinko. But some of these games can be very, very culturally unique and require a lot of re-reading of the rules to go back to even get a loose idea of how to play it. I've played Majong for like 12 hours and I still don't eff'n understand that game.

Was this good? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING.

Lastly, and my biggest complaint: where the fuck is Yakuza Ishin!? Done in the same mechanics of the traditional series, it is a set period piece where the characters are used in historical japan. Basically the same kind of game only with samurai instead of gangsters and swords instead of fists. I've seen trailers and gameplay and this game looks fucking fun as hell, but because its knee deep in Japanese history they won't localize it because they don't think Americans would understand it. Bitch, we love Kung Fu movies, Anime, and now have a burgeoning K-pop community. How about you let us decide what we do or don't want. Thankfully, with the sudden growing success of the series, the hard no they were giving us about localizing it seems to have changed to a maybe. I have a small hope.

I really don't know what else I can say about this franchise other than its one of the best series I've ever played. None of them are perfect, but I love these characters, I love this universe, I love the music they use, I love the mind numbing amount of distraction, I love the brutally visceral combat, I love the drama, I love the idea of smashing a bicycle over a thugs head before smashing his friend with one of the wheels. I love that you fist fight a fucking bear. I love the Yakuza games.

You can read this review and apply basically everything I've said to any of them. I think they are all great and if slathering this series with praise isn't enough for you to give one a shot, then I don't know what else I can do. With the resurgence this series has been getting, we are getting a Kiwami 2 remake and remasters of the remaining titles on the PS4 so you have no excuse, because they will all be available in one place. Pick any of them, it won't steer you wrong.

Except Yakuza: Dead Souls. Don't pick that one.