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.

Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4): It's FighterZ, Not Fighter-Zee. Also, Holy SHIT.

If I can get all anime hipster for a second? Dragon Ball Z fans can go SCREW. I had to wake up at 5am on a sunday mornings so I could watch the original Dragon Ball series and Dragon Ball Z. I WAS COMMITTED YOU LAZY PRICKS. Unfortunately for me I started to lose steam on the series not long after it got its big push on Toonami in the late 90's when the series really started to build a head of steam. Sorry, when the Namek saga ran like 400 episodes, I decided that was enough time I could devote to it. I pretty much lived devoid of Dragon Ball since.

But you know what I love? Fighting games created by Arc Systems. Specifically the Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and the Persona Arena series. I know people live and die by Street Fighter but the speed and intensity of Arc Systems just always feel so much better to me. So when one E3 showed off an over the top Arc Systems variant to Marvel vs Capcom I literally started salivating at the pairing with this anime series. It was a natural fit, and so started months upon months of chomping at the bit for.....

DRAGON BALL FIGTHERZ (PS4)

So I am super out of date on my Dragon Ball timeline so I'll explain the story as best I can. Sometime after/during the events of Dragon Ball Super the world has basically become overrun with with clones of the Z warriors and some of their notable villains. The problem is most of the Z warriors have gone missing, so Bulma goes to find Goku to try to take the fight to the clones and stop this invasion.

The problem is, Goku isn't actually Goku. Oh sure, he's still him but he has been severely depowered. There are a series of waves being pulsed out that are weakening everyone, and the only way to counteract it is link with a separate soul. A separate soul that happens to be currently controlling Goku. The soul is actually you as the player, so the characters are talking directly to you. While its not ideal, it does allow Goku to fight back against the clones. So first things first: Go find the other Z warriors, then once assembled go find the source of the waves and put a stop to this attack.

This story glosses over a lot, because they actually do something pretty interesting with the story. There are essentially 3 story mode arcs for you to play through: A heroes arc, a villains arc, and an Androids arc. The story basically functions the same way among all three modes: you get placed on a map with set enemies to fight. As you play through, you unlock story events depending on the team you are using. You also have set story events based on the boss of that set map, or characters you rescue. On top of this the more you use characters, the more they will interact with you to give them more of their inner monologue about the situation.

Although they use the term Arc, that isn't actually accurate because each Arc doesn't continue off of the last one. The levels you've earned remain, but instead of the story continuing you actually are playing an alternate timeline situation. Basically how things would have happened if you controlled the different set of characters and how that might have changed things.

It's only after you complete all three Arcs you receive the final true ending of the game and unlock FighterZ only original character: Android 21. She is basically a combination of one of the android characters and a Buu style character. And SHE, IS, DELIGHTFUL. Something about her voice and the almost innocent evil she exudes when threatening characters. She's tricky to use but an absolute joy and god do I hope she becomes canon to the series.

I. LOVE. HER.

God I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. So as I mentioned before, FighterZ comes from the minds over at Arc Systems. When I saw the initial trailer of the game, it really looked like Arc was trying to doing their own take on the Marvel Vs. Capcom 3-vs-3 series using Dragon Ball as the setting, and I will be damned if that's pretty much exactly what I got. But what they really wanted to emphasize was a much less complicated barrier to entry, which has been a long standing complaint to those new to the Guilty Gear or BlazBlue franchise.

It operates on a pretty standard fighting game control scheme with light, medium, heavy attack, and a ki blast mapped to the 4 buttons. Your right shoulder buttons allow for two forms of rush called your Hyper dash (which allows you to fly across the screen to start or pursue a combo) and your Meteor rush (which is essentially a guard breaking combo launcher). Lastly your left shoulder buttons are mapped to your tag partners for quick assists to extend combos, or tagging them to take your current fighters place.

Whole lotta Goku Black in high level FighterZ play.

There are lots of little mechanics that blend these various games together as well. Like Marvel vs Capcom, characters that are tagged out will slowly recover some of their lost health. They appeared to fuse the Guilty Gear Burst effect with MVC's X-factor called the Sparking Blast, which will knock back your enemies and give you a temporary increase to power and health recovery for one last ditch effort to keep fighting,which increases the fewer teammates you have left. You are able to use your meteor rush to break a guard and force opponents to tag out and so forth.

There are also a lot of little mechanics in this game to make it easier to play. For example, in using just the light attack button you can automatically string together a short combo that will launch, follow, and complete with a slam back down. Persona 4 Arena (another Arc fighter) did something similar to this. If using the medium attack button you will string a stronger combo that ends with a flashy special move. Every character has a universal anti-air by hitting down and heavy. And generally, all of the special moves are pretty simplified as well as the majority of every character's move set can be done with the standard Hadoken motion (quarter circle, 2-3-6/2-1-4, d-dr-r or whatever scheme you subscribe to).

Then you have a bunch of little mechanics unique to the game. On top of the Sparking Blast, you can tap two buttons to instantly teleport behind an enemy for a heavy kick to close the gap quickly, or use to keep a combo airborne. When completing auto-combos or combos over 10 hits, you basically earn dragon balls. If you collect all 7, the player that hits an autocombo with a fully charged gauge can be granted a wish such as revive teammate, recover health, more power, etc.

In the story mode, there is also an additional stat boosting mechanic where you can give your characters various attribute changes to accommodate for the increasing difficulty of the enemies, but it won't be until your second playthrough or so where the enemy levels will force you to be very strategic about what attributes you need to give yourself. I basically would ride with increased experience and post match recovery to hang with teams I wanted to level longer.

Now, despite what the fighting game community and game developers would have me to believe, having just an online VS mode does not push me to buy a game. Street Fighter V tried to get away with this garbage, and that's why that game eats shit. So I will be holding it up on its single player experience because other people suck and I am not good enough to have an enjoyable match with the frothing, quick twitch, rage quitting jerks who pollute online fighters.

In crazier moments, it really does just become an episode of DBZ

So as I stated before the game has a Story mode, which is fine but after you complete it there is little reason to keep playing it other than increasing difficulty and stat customization. It has an arcade mode which has an interesting scaling mechanic for the difficulty, so if you are blowing the the first matches too easily you will be scaled upwards to increasingly more difficult matches. If you lose or have a hard time, you keep level or move back down. It makes getting an S-rank run in arcade a bit more tougher than it appears. There is also an 2nd tier of difficulty which increases all of the matches.  This is the mode I most frequently play.

There is a pretty comprehensive tutorial on how to play the game, and the first run of the story mode is going to basically be vomiting tutorial at you for a significant portion of the story. It got to the point where I realized like some 4 hours into the game I was still getting tutorial, but the story was actually really good so it wasn't bothering me like it normally would have. The training mode also has a combo trainer, which was not actually as difficult to go through as some of these combo trainers usually are in these games. Usually with like Street Fighter or Tekken I would get about halfway through and be like "fuck it, I can't get this frame perfect timing."

FighterZ also as a recording replay feature that I have never used, mainly because I am not impressive with this game. This is mainly used to supplement the multitude of online modes the game features. Once you are placed in a lobby for multiplayer, you can open a ring to fight other people present in the lobby (up to 8 people), or wait in line for your turn to go at someone. You have have two matches going at a time but for some strange reason, people waiting don't get to spectate the match. I have no idea why they would do this since being able to watch would keep people in the ring.

There is also an Arena battle mode, which also features the lobby you play in but I don't think there is a player restriction on this one. I actually haven't played an arena battle. There is also the World Stage mode, which is where you can queue up to Ranked and Unranked matches worldwide. Whats nice about this is your queue can hold if you are playing the arcade, training, or story modes. There is an offline vs mode as well for local play.

This is seriously some GO1 (go-ichi) level defense.

Everything about this game is pretty fuckin' great because its basically aping off of the incredibly solid Guilty Gear Xrd iterations in the unreal engine: using 3d models shaped in a way to give it a 2d look which allows for interesting camera tricks and dramatic angles. Animations are high intensity, fast, and fluid as every good fighting game should be. It translates well to the story mode cut-scenes as well and is simply gorgeous.

Surprisingly to me, Guilty Gear luminary Daisuke Ishiwatari outside of a little casual advice thrown in, had practically nothing to do with the production of the game despite it using a similar engine. And like many of the other Arc System fighting games, I would have thought he did the soundtrack because it has that same high energy rock his games are known for. Hell the FighterZ is basically a copy of what they did in Guilty Gear Xrd.

It even shows a lot of appreciation to the source material, as every characters moves and specials are faithfully recreated in the game so they look like they fight the same way they did in your favorite episodes. Even more so, if you use the right characters in the right stage settings, you can trigger cinematics that re-create some of the more famous moments of the show (such as beating Frieza with Goku on Destroyed Namek).

Yamcha is one of the few who got an original Dramatic Finish. Finishing
his fight with Nappa LIKE IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

But if I did have to criticize some things, I would say the online play is a chore to set up and there is not a lot of punishment for rage quitters. I feel the game has some serious balancing issues because the casual players basically spam the hyperdash relentlessly because there is little way to punish it after it connects. Usually everyone universal anti-air will counter it but you still have to time it right and that's not exactly easy to do. So unless you get that trick down, expect to have that dash in your face a lot.

And since this is in that MvC kinda vein, combos can get long and stretched out. This game rewards offense more than defense (despite the best in the world right now being a primarily defensive player). So once you are tagged with a combo you are basically relegated to stay in it until the opponent drops it or finishes it. I don't know why the Sparking Blast in this game couldn't count as one free combo break like Guilty Gear's Burst does. That'd be a small concession to give a player one free fighting chance. So any time you think are you are ready to tackle some online play, please be warned that you are probably not.

One of the easiest jokes in the series.

Lastly my ongoing crusade against the DLC. I've clearly lost this battle. There is a 35 dollar "Fighter Pass" that was released with the game with a schedule of no less than 8 DLC characters to come out by the end of the summer. And at this point I just said "Fuck it, fine. Here." and paid for the thing when the first 2 additional characters came out. I've lost. Retail games aren't 60 dollars anymore. They are 90 going on infinity because we as gamers needed to say as a whole "We aren't going to let you nickle and dime every aspect of the game." and we didn't. We let the EA, Biowares, and Capcoms of the world win and get away with this, and now its just something that is accepted. This blows. Fuck DLC.

But complaints not withstanding, Dragon Ball: FighterZ after a somewhat rocky beta basically fucking nailed it on this one.  I don't know if this has supplanted Guilty Gear as my favorite fighting game series but I really feel it is making a hell of a case for it. I play this game constantly and have been practicing to play it in my first EVO championship trip. It's hands down one of the best fighting games in the market right now and its easy to see why its already so immensely popular. It's fast paced and frenetic, easy to pick up but skillful. And if that's what you look for in a fighter you can't go wrong with Dragon Ball: FighterZ.

The first nerfs came out, too
Arc dared to disappoint Vegeta.

Little Nightmares (PS4): Only a little.

I took a swing on this one at the recommendation of my siblings. I'll be 100 percent honest going in I didn't really know anything about it. But since its an indie game, going by its title and I had a general idea. But I never really had the opportunity to play it. It was always kinda on my back burner. Well after a random flash sale had the complete version down to 10 bucks, I figured why the hell not.

LITTLE NIGHTMARES: COMPLETE EDITION(PS4)

As is the case with a number of these types of games, we don't get a whole lot of story to start with and are left to figure it out as we play. When we start the game, we are greeted by a dark and foggy screen. As the fog begins to clear we see the form of a person start to take shape. Clearing further we make out that it appears to be a geisha in a kimono, and slowly she starts to turn to the camera. 

Eventually she sharply faces the 4th wall, and we cut to a small child (named Six apparently) jarring awake from sleep. She is tiny if less than a foot tall, wearing a yellow raincoat with a hood that covers her face. She is currently trapped on a traveling ship called "the Maw" and after awakening, leaves to find an escape.

Honestly, after the waking up the game pretty much immediately begins and I really only have Wikipedia to confirm that the location is called the maw, and I'm basically just guessing that she is trying to escape.  Pretty much from the word go you take control of the game so any story that you can gather comes from the pieces you can put together as you proceed along the game. 

And right from the word go, and rather unsurprisingly, Little Nightmares confirms what I guessed and that the play is that of the spooky indie puzzle platformer variety a la Limbo, Unravel, or Inside.  Its got a pretty functionally simple control scheme for the most part, although I will say some button combo's don't feel very intuitive which I will get into later.

You use your analog to move, you have jump button, a run button, and grab so you can pick up objects and pull levers. If you have played the aforementioned Limbo or Inside the control scheme is going to feel very familiar to you. There is also a button to crouch and sneak/slide but for the most part these indie platformers really like to stick to simple game design and sell their product with impressive visuals and subtle story telling.

I will say though, unlike the previous two titles I've compared to, Little Nightmares operates on a full three dimensional plane, so you aren't just moving left or right like a classic Mario game. When you press up or down, you move in the fore and background. Some of the maps will require you to change your directions, and there are some chase sequences that involve this as well. It only became a point of frustration when trying to tightrope on some pathway, veering too far up or down, and falling off and usually falling to my death.

Little Nightmares is pretty fair with checkpoints though, so if you do happen to bumble with ledge like that, you can count on being respawned relatively close to where you fell in the first place so its not going to set you back too far. Honestly with the exception of one section of the game, this was the way I most frequently died until I adjusted to the control scheme.

It's not a very long game either, and I'm waffling if that is to its benefit or detriment. Full story, with no DLC chapers is about 5 levels long and holds roughly about a 2-3 hour play time. Granted its not a full release, but Inside managed to cram 8 hours into their game. The question is what is the appropriate length for a game like this, because I will be the first to admit that after a while it felt like Inside was getting a little too long. Now, that is just on my assessment of the start to finish of the main game. There are 3 DLC levels I have not got to yet and that might appropriately flesh out length, although for a game this size it probably couldn't have hurt to just include it in the main game.

During the course of gameplay there are handful of different "collectibles" you can gather for trophies. As you play through the game there are lanterns to light, little geisha dolls you can smash, and then if you look in the nooks and crannies, little people called Nooms skitter away and hide. But if you can find where they end up hiding you can pick them up and give them a hug, which I think changes the ending slightly? I have been told there is only one ending, which is a little disappointing. Since this is one of those games without scripts they could have tweaked the ending to chance the subtext. Would have added some replayability to a shorter game. This worked really well in the early Atelier series, and would have done well here too.

It's got a very interesting visual style, as most of these indie platformers do. While streaming it my mom (yes my mom watches my stream, I'm popular), she described it as a darker version of The Borrowers. If I had to describe its visual style, I would say its as if Tim Burton did his take on the Spirited Away. With the exception of the Geisha, the nooms, and Six, all the of the enemies in this game have this bloated or grotesque form to them to the point where it looked like they were wearing skin that isn't theirs. It certainly has a fucked up look that supplements the dark tone of the game well.

Seriously, I think this exact blocking occurs in a Studio Ghibli movie.

There really isn't a lot for me to nitpick here either. The game is dark, but with an title like Little Nightmares I guess I was expecting the game to be scary. It really wasn't. Dark, oppressive, somber, but it really wasn't scary. Again, a nitpick at best, because I don't think being scary was the games intention. It really just wanted a dark undertone, and it basically nails it there.

I've already complained about the length of the game somewhat, but the length can be subjective really. A few hours can be the perfect length for some, but 5 levels for 20 bucks? 8 levels for 30? I dunno, despite me getting it on sale for less I still can't help but feel a little bit of short changed. I paid about 10 for the complete edition of the game and that seemed like more fair price to me.

The biggest issues I had with the game through is that some of the mechanics don't feel like they were properly optimized. The crouch and grab are on the shoulders and run and jump are on the face buttons. Despite them being in the positions where you would typically find these buttons in other games, they never felt natural to me in a way that felt right. I could run and jump with ease, but if I needed to slide or grab something on the fly (like climb a chain) holding down the trigger never felt natural to me. I would lose my grip, or fail to grab something.

But the biggest frustrations I had came in the 4th level in a spot that wasn't even really a puzzle.  There is a segment where you basically have run across a table and avoid gorging heavy patrons or else they will shove you into their mouth. Once you do this, you need to leap off the table to a climbable wall. The problem I was having is I was having real issues with the grab radius. When you see something reach with full extent of their arm, by most video game logic you would think that you have safely found the range to avoid losing in this segment. This is not the case here, and the grabs were always just a bit more than I expected them to be. So in trying to avoid getting grabbed, I would walk right into the range of another.

This was only made even more frustrating from when I reached the end, when I would go to make the jump, the physics would not consider me close enough, and basically glitch push me away from the wall. This happened to me like 3 or 4 times which made me think that there was a different solution to get past this area. So naturally, while exploring some other option I was constantly getting killed in the same spot of what otherwise would be a pretty easy game and it was getting immensely frustrating. Lo and behold I actually just needed to step one more step off the ledge to actually get the distanced needed to clear this jump. Fucking annoying.

But if I am being honest I really can't hold that as a point against it, because it was me playing poorly. The circumstance caused a clipping that made me think it was just a poor design, but when pulling clips it really was just my goof. But all things considered It didn't really mar my experience with the game, just added a pointless 20 minutes of fuckuppery.

At the time of writing I haven't gone back and finished the DLC chapters yet, but I intend to do so. All in all I would say that I enjoyed my time with Little Nightmares but I wouldn't say it blew the doors off for me. That isn't the negative knock it sounds like though. The gaming market place is getting pretty flush with arty, minimalistic story platformers. I basically had an idea of what I was getting into when I started this game and it was exactly what I got. I will say the story wasn't what I expected it to be so that was the pleasant surprise.

I honestly really don't have much more I can expound upon here. Little Nightmares is a pretty solid game, although perhaps a little pricier than I would have liked if not on sale. If you are into this style of platformer the it is going to check all the boxes for you. If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, I would advise for the complete edition of the game.

Evil Within 2 (PS4): Learning from one's mistakes.

Over three years ago, I wrote a bout a game I was very excited to play that ended up being very difficult and very dumb. I played it to finish, but I did not much enjoy myself. That game was The Evil Within and I consider it to be one of the biggest flops and disappointments of 2014. It came from the mind of Shinji Makami (who gave us Resident Evil 4, btw) who I usually expect much better from. I blamed Bethesda getting their dirty hands on it.

So naturally, as you might imagine, I was not exactly rushing to reserve or pick up the the next installment of this game. I did throw it on my Amazon wishlist though and promptly forgot about it. But occasionally Amazon will occasionally let know when a game is on sale, and it eventually dropped to 20. Ok, I'd bite on 20 bucks. So after sitting through my pile while I worked through games I actually wanted to play, I did eventually make time for....

THE EVIL WITHIN 2 (PS4)

Three years have passed since Sebastian Castellanos narrowly escaped the incident at Beacon Mental Hospital and has left the Krimson City Police force. Times have become hard on him as Sebastian as become an embittered alcoholic. He is haunted by dreams of his past, of a house fire that destroyed his home, the life of his daughter Lily, and the departure of his wife Myra. 

After being jarred awake from a drunken stupor by another nightmare, Sebastian awakens to find his former partner and betrayer from the previous title, Juli Kidman seated across from him. He furiously exclaims he's been after her to try to get some answers about the Beacon incident of the prior game but she shuts him down by telling him that his daughter is alive, and that she is currently in the hands of MOBIUS, the shadowy corporation that Kidman is a part of. Lily is in danger, and they want Sebastian's help. After a small scuffle with MOBIUS agents, Sebastian is subdued and taken.

When Sebastian comes to, he learns from Kidman and a MOBIUS administrator that Lily as currently being used as a Core for another STEM device, the machine that allows people to share consciousness. But she has disconnected and has not responded to them. They have sent in teams to fix the problem, but they have gone silent. So despite not trusting MOBIUS or Kidman, Sebastian again plunges into the STEM for a chance to get his daughter back.

Ok, well that is a step in the right direction. Right from the onset of the story we are given a pretty clear and concise storyline, even if a little overused in video games: Broken father's chance at redemption by saving his daughter/wife/girlfriend. That is very easy to follow and gives me a clear and direct goal to achieve. Way better than the previous games "go investigate this murder, and then all this random shit happens."

It's also furthered by slipping in just enough story to remember the last game without dwelling on it. Oh I have to go back into that fucked up machine again that shares consciousness, but it's going to look like a small community of everyday America. Ok, that's a setting that makes more sense, and now the characters can explain the shifts as they happen. We are essentially able to play with settings because we are in a dreamscape. The continuation of the last game's stupid story is indeed still stupid, but we off in the right direction to start.

But what as a nice surprise is that after a brief linear set (basically used to reteach you the game controls) where we meet one of our antagonists, we are then dropped into the town and free to explore. We have a set goal to reach, but we also can find trace memories that open new quests from other people. So as I was wandering towards one of these checkpoints, I saw a woman running and screaming across my path being chased by three Lost (the zombie like standard baddie of this game) and Sebastian narrates "Man she's gonna die if I don't help her, but I really need to save some ammo."

That's when it hit me. Is this actually an open world horror game? I don't think I've actually played an open world horror game before. You could argue that the classic Silent Hill games are open world but there is not really questing to do, just set pieces to find. In the Evil Within 2 I am able to wander the town, and sometimes when I go to investigate a house to find ammo, I might get swept into a survival mission where waves of baddies are coming in, or I get shifted to a new area and have stealth around a very grudge like ghost to get back to the reality I was in.

Some of the behaviors show that the Lost aren't just zombies. This scene is tough to watch.

Giving me the freedom to explore opened the world up and didn't make me feel like the game was linear. I liked that. It felt like the next logical step from how some of Shingi Mikami's previous games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadows of the Damned are designed. We have larger sprawling maps, now we have more options for things to do in them.

So with the previous Evil Within game, I had a lot of complain about with the combat mechanics and stat upgrade systems. It again uses the very familiar 3rd person shooter controls we are all familiar with at this point, and next to useless melee attack, d-pad quick menu options, a stealthy crouch and a loud run with stamina mechanic. If you have played any modern 3rd person shooter I shouldn't need to explain the majority of the buttons. They did add an aim assist feature which I used because I wanted to blow through the game, and to its credit it does help hold your headshots, but you still have to be pretty on point with your aim for it actually lock on. So I don't feel it made the game too easy.

I foolishly ignored my bow gun, but its different arrow types will be super useful later because of the various effects.

But my big complaints were lack of ammo with steep difficulty, and relatively useless stat upgrades. Well, Tango Gameworks and Bethesda addressed the first by introducing a new crafting mechanic to the game. It's small and uncluttered basically with 10 items to use, and almost all of them require gunpowder. You can use this at workbenches to make new ammo or healing items if you are running short, or if you are out in the field and need some in a pinch you can craft from you menu and get some at an increased supply cost. Supplies are found and dropped all over, but It never felt like I was getting too much of it. You can also improve your weapons from the work benches to boost their damage, capacity, reload speed, etc.

So now it feels like I have the ammo to get into some gunfights with the baddies, but not enough that I can run in guns blazing. Which forces me to use the game's stealth mechanic more strategically because if I don't I'd be wasting more ammo than intended. The enemies have really twitchy motions, so you really need to make use the environment to slink around and stay hidden and moving slowly so you can get your instant kill stabs off and as many as you can before needing to resort to the gun. This makes for incredibly tense situations where you are desperately trying to take down enemies as quickly and quietly as possible to stretch your ammo a little further.

It works even better in new maps with tight corridors, because you just know something is going to pop out and rattle you. Yes, it manages to actually raise horror tension in a open world game which did way the hell better than the first installment of Evil Within did. Sometimes you are presented with situations where you HAVE to stealth so it makes use of the mechanic well. The one hit kill axes make a return as well, but you really should consider these a last ditch effort to save you from a tough group of baddies, or botched stealth attempt. Thankfully on the normal difficulty the stealth is pretty forgiving even with bosses so if a fight is not going well you can retreat and regroup while baddies lose sight of you.

Holy shit, the game has boss fights! Remember boss fights? Periodic appearing unique enemies that require you to use all your learned skills and abilities to find an effective way to beat them? I keep starting to think that video games in general have moved away from this, but Evil Within 2 boasts a reasonable amount of unique enemies as you play through to test your mettle. Many of them become regular baddies by game end but it was still greatly appreciated. I love a good boss fight and it feels like there are fewer and fewer games putting them in.

Then we have the skill mechanic. Like the last game, beating up enemies makes them drop "green ooze" which can be used at your safe house (or room) where our mysteriously friendly yet stoic nurse returns to strap you to a chair and pump juice into your skull. They overhauled the skills this time so now they make sense and are actually useful. No more of the shitty Fallout accuracy stat that makes you miss even though you have a perfectly lined up reticle. Now the skills affect you stamina, health, recover rates and so on.

But they also added reaction abilities depending on what skill tree you are working. Like if I am increasing my stealth I can do a quick scurry to chase after an enemy for a stealth kill. Or a reaction to where if I get grabbed by an enemy, I will instantly use a bottle that is typically used to distract enemies to knock them off of me to save me from damage. Or a speedy reaction that will allow my character to automatically dodge attacks from lesser enemies. They are useful and actually worth unlocking, so now I'm more willing to hunt enemies because the skills actually help me out.

Who the nurse is, is still never really explained, but I find her to be less abrasive this time around.
She manages to squeeze in a pop culture joke or two if you are listening.

Graphically the game has made major improvements too. I complained last time that they tried to do the grindhouse film grain look and it just made the graphics look shitty, washed out, and last gen. All the mouth animations were off and it overall looked sloppy. That just doesn't feel like the case in this one. There is no grindhouse washout so now despite the dark settings and tones, there are splashes of color around, and the world generally feels more alive. It makes the shifts to more demonic settings that much more jarring because the Everytown America setting sets a control line to shift from. Animations are synced up nicely and voice acting (while still hokey and goofy) is much improved this time as well.

And perhaps as a nod to Resident Evil 4, they added a shooting gallery mini game. I would spend rather insulting amounts of time trying to complete every level of difficulty on two shooting gallery game types. One bites into the addictive need for color matching puzzlers so shame on you Bethesda, you clever pricks for knowing about my penchant for Bejeweled Blitz.

Honestly as I run through the list of things from the previous game, I find myself with very little to complain about. I'll say that the barrier to entry is still a little bit steep as you learn your controls and nuances to enemy behavior. It's got a pretty generous autosave so there where more than a number of times where I felt it was just better to die and get my ammo and healing back than it was to win the fight and be left shorthanded. That sort of impacts the horror aspect when you aren't afraid of dying and losing progress.

Bethesda hid little nicknacks all over the game from the other games they worked on.
They don't do anything, but they are fun little nods to other games.

There is a tiny down pointing arrow or v on your screen for a majority of the game, and I had no idea if it was a waypoint marker or what and I found it very confusing. It wasn't till the very late game that at one point it was red and I realized it was indicating that I could use my stealth dash, which I had unlocked before but had no idea how to use. Some of the game's mechanics could be better explained. Like the game tells you that you can drink coffee in safe houses to recover, but doesn't ell you that coffee recharges over time so you can't keep using it.

In a later portion of the game it actually rehashes a gauntlet of enemies of the last game for you to fight again. It felt like a filler segment to raise the tension but I had been playing it for like 12 hours at that point so honestly it doesn't feel like it needed to be there. Not problematic I guess but felt kinda thrown in.

Some Spoiler Warning here, so skip these next three paragraphs if you want: the game still occasionally feels like it is dangling out plot threads from both versions of the game that never end up getting explained or resolved. I still have no idea why Sebastian almost zombied out last game, and they bring up that his partner isn't actually dead but then that plot point is never actually followed up on. Honestly I had forgotten that character even existed, he could have been left out and it wouldn't have impacted the game at all.

Anita Sarkeesian is certainly not going to like this game, so don't be surprised to see it on Feminist Frequency. Like I said above the general theme of the plot line is a pretty tired trope to begin with, with the damsel in the distress variant. But the story goes out of the way to make all these interesting and strong female characters with different skill sets, and you can bet your ass that things to do not go well for a lot of them. But to be fair, for a horror game of this nature, a significant number of them men are going to die too. It's a horror game. How many horror games and movies end with almost everyone surviving?

Esmeralda Torres is confident, strong, deep, and a hell of a fighter.
So I bet you'll never guess how her story unfolds.

Really my biggest beef with the game is it does the annoying trope of the constantly changing primary antagonist. For a large portion of the game you pursing a psycho who is clearly after your daughter too. But after a challenging fight with him the story pulls the "oh you've killed me, but now have to go after the REAL villain who you've never met yet!" More annoyingly is it actually pulls this shit twice!

Lastly I made the big complaint that The Evil Within was not scary. I could argue that the Evil Within 2 was not scary either, but in this case I don't think it was really trying to be. You can go to a horror movie and not be scared, but what it did very well was make you tense. Especially in the stealth sections of the game with tight environments. It did actually manage to get me with one jump-scare so that's an improvement over the last game. But honestly, some of my favorite horror movies aren't ones that jump-scare the shit out of you, but the ones that kick up your heart rate and have you leaning out of your chair because the tension just has you rigid. Evil Within 2 nails it there.

Anima is not technically a boss. You can't fight her and you have to stealth to get away.
She appears at scripted points, but can also just appear at random to send you hiding.

I walked into Evil Within 2 with a very lukewarm mindset, even as the story played out I felt that it was a stupid plot line. I didn't care about Sebastian or Kidman in the last game, so I was hard sell going into this one. But I think somewhere around the six hour mark, I realized I was completely fucking riveted by the story. I was genuinely loving my experience in this ride I was on, the development of the characters were logical and making sense. I was interested to see how the story was going to play out for the parties involved. The combat was fun, the stealth was tense. I was having a great time playing this game, and when I was at work I'd constantly be thinking about playing it when I got home.

I'll just say it: The Evil Within 2 was great. Not just ok, not good, great. It's like they took my review, handed it to Shinji Mikami and it personally pissed him off. So he remade the game specifically so I would like it. It addressed almost every complaint I had for it and it provided me an exciting and fun experience that I would rank as one of my betters during the PS4 life cycle. Some reviews said the same but they wouldn't go back to it, but I am already playing new game plus, which says even more that I am not ready to put it down. Easily an 8 or 9 and I would highly recommend The Evil Within 2 to those who like the horror/action genre. Color me genuinely surprised.

Seriously, a few more survivors at the game end couldn't have hurt.

Bravely Second: End Layer (3DS): Grinding down.

When this first one came out, I quite literally dove into buying a new handheld to try it because I knew I had some long flights and a convention to spend time with it. In my review I had more than my share of nitpicks but ultimately I left it saying that I hoped that this would be come a franchise and hoped that this would have a nice linage behind it.

Well sure enough this series did get a sequel in April of 2016. And while I was enjoying it, I eventually set it down and moved on to other games. But after working through my pile I did go back to grind out and finish. So while the game has been out for a while, I got my thoughts on it now. 

BRAVELY SECOND: END LAYER (3DS)

Bravely Second picks up two and half years after the events of the first game. Agnes for her work as a crystal vestal has become a Pope in the crystal orthodoxy and is currently brokering a peace treaty with Braev Lee, the duke of Eternia. Just as they are about to sign the accords, they are interrupted by Kaiser Oblivion.

The attack is devastating and Agnes is taken hostage and brought to the Kaiser's floating sky fortress. Yew Geneolgia is the leader of Agnes personal security detail, the Crystalgard (and our primary protagonist for this game), and looks to rally his allies and the remaining orthodoxy forces to try to take the fight to the skyhold and bring Agnes back.

The game starts pretty much in battle, which is a great way to get JRPGs going

Obviously, the story of Bravely Second is more complex than that but after we pass where I've mentioned we get into spoiler territory very quickly. I will say that this time around the story is a bit more involved and fleshed out and the previous iteration. Bravely Default was by no means a simple story line but its basis was you need to restore the 4 crystals, and if you played the previous title then you know you did that a lot.

Bravely Second follows a more traditional damsel in distress trope where Yew rallies heroes to give pursuit to a new threat. And along that path there are twists and turns, old faces and new appear along the way. It does make you replay certain segments like the last one did which is something I still found annoying, but not the same amount of times so I won't ding it too hard for that.

This is probably going to end up being a shorter review than my usual shtick because this game is a pretty stone for stone copy of the original Bravely Default, so I would basically be repeating a lot of what I said in my previous review. Much like I said before, the Bravely series is basically a classic Final Fantasy JRPG in all but name: A 60+ hour fantasy adventure with turn based combat, random encounters and exceptional music. Since this is a direct sequel, many of the characters, enemies, and bosses return to reprise their roles.

Agnes is not a primary party member this time, but she is a relevant part of the story.

But it wouldn't be a sequel if they didn't add something new to switch up the palette, so with a new set of characters naturally we get a new set of bosses. And with new bosses we get a new set of job classes to use (called Asterisks in game). Twelve new jobs in all which gives you a pretty mind bending amount of variety to what your party can do. Some of them are pretty straight forward which just allow you to plow with damaging abilities, some of them are a bit more bizarre like the Patissier which requires using items to use the special abilities. Then you get some that make old ones irrelevant like the Bishop, which basically can do everything the White Mage does but to the whole party making it vastly superior.

What I always loved about how they implement the job system in this one is you have the ability to really play around with what skills you have to min/max your characters abilities. In the late game I was basically combo the right sets of jobs and abilities to make a very damaging spell attack all the enemies up to 4 times in a row and sometimes cast twice in a single turn, basically allowing me to just rain down offense in the returning Brave/Default system. Or you could go the classic route like I did in the first game and equip a ninja with as many weapons as they can hold and charge 4 attacks in a row. There are lots of viable ways to play.

Generally the combat system hasn't changed from the previous game, but the Brave Points from the old game are now Sleep Points which are used to trigger the Bravely Second ability. What this does is expends one of these point to allow one of your characters to have a free turn to use up to 4 abilities. You have to have the available turns to spend to do them still, but the benefit is that the damage limiters are removed, so if properly set up, you can unload with an attack that can reach the millions in damage. SP however can only be charged up when you 3DS is in sleep mode, so use them sparingly or you have to spend real money to buy SP drinks. Honestly I almost never needed to use this sans one story moment.

Outside of that, really there isn't a lot of change between the two games on a mechanical level. It uses the same world map, a lot of the same dungeons that appeared in the previous game, you fight a lot of the same bosses and monsters. The "build a town" with street pass mechanic returns more or less the same way (although you can fight optional bosses from other players this time around). You could say that this game basically is more of an extension or an epilogue to Bravely Default than it is a true sequel.

Bravely Second's soundtrack is pretty good as well on top of being fully voice acted. There are lots of little cutscenes and character interactions that help flesh out the story and almost all of them were fun to listen to. The only downfall to the music is that my favorite tracks that played in this one were just songs from the first game.

While all of the characters from the previous game make a return in some fashion in Bravely Second, many of them take a back seat to new protagonists Yew and Magnolia arch. The two major plots basically revolve around these two characters: Yew's mission to rescue Agnes, and Magnolia's mission to save the Moon and defeat the massive monsters (Baals) currently attacking the planet. Basically Ringabel is the only character we kinda lose between games and good riddance. I hate the amnesiac trope.

But whats nice is that even though the old characters return, it focuses on the new characters story with the returning characters as more of a supplement. I like this better because this is what allows the universe to expand and become more interesting. The Atelier games are excellent at this because when an old character drops in, They feel like a welcome Easter egg, and doesn't affect how I feel about them from the previous game.

I think there was another controversy about censoring the girls costumes again,
Honesty guys, if a little cleavage on 3DS pixels being taken away ruins your
experience of the game? You might be picking the wrong hill to die on.

What I didn't like is the flippin' tedium that the Bravely series has now become known for. If you are truly going to play this game in its full capacity, you are expected to grind all your characters up to the max level, and go through and max out all of their job classes if you want to have the right set of abilities to really go up against the tougher bosses in the game. And sorry, even with the fast forwarding mechanics grinding is still grinding. And grinding is boring. It's the problem I always have in the Disgaea games. If you are making a boss so overpowered that its going to take me 100+ hours of grind to stand a chance, I will sooner just not do it.

Which ultimately brings me to the biggest problem that I had in Bravely Second: the game was just too easy to put down and stop playing. As you can see from the date I listed in the intro, I basically played through this game over the course of two years. I would reach a point where I didn't want to waste time grinding so I could fight and had other games to play, so I would set the DS down and literally forget about the game for months on end. That says to me the story wasn't compelling enough to keep me bolted down with the game.

When raining down with 4 meteors on one turn rips baddies a sunder. But you really
need to use the right skills, or Magic can be some of the weakest attacks in the game.

I will say that the grinding aid features such as fast-forwarding the battles and being able to turn off all the random encounters makes a welcome return and honestly I don't know why every JRPG doesn't do this. I suppose it does make final dungeons that much easier, but it also takes out the path of attrition its supposed to be for the climatic final battle. Honestly, if I am grinded out to max level, I turn off random battles and never look back.

The other thing I could talk about is how the ending of the game played out. There really is no way to explain it without spoiling it to a degree, but it does the same kinda thing Undertale did when it played around with the medium and actually addresses the player and not the characters. Technically, if you go by release dates Bravely Second did it first, but only by a few months so they were in the same dev cycle, but I will say Undertale did it better. Both great though, I love how games are starting to mess with the medium to tell their story.

Edea Lee is still best girl. Love her to death.

I did ultimately like Bravely Second but the problem between the two iterations is that Bravely Default was a fresh breath of a new IP done to homage the classic style JRPG. Bravely Second is just more of Default. As said above, it's essentially a long epilogue. They are not going be caught in the Final Fantasy catch 22: Do you change things to try to make it feel new? Or do you stick with the formula and put out a samey release? They honestly can't win either way they go with it.

That being said. I'm not unhappy with my purchase of Bravely Second. It is what it is, more of this franchise. If they make a third one I'll be getting it. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the series end here. Who knows, maybe they'll make a fancy new one for the Switch?

Lol, Baal Buster. Best job class ever.