One of the many great 2017 games criminally lost in the shuffle. February 2021's English Ys IX release can't come soon enough.
Hey friends. As you probably know, this year's been a bummer. A bummer for a great many reasons, but for the sake of our purposes here I'm specifically referring to the relative lack of new game releases and events, many of which were delayed or cancelled due to the Covid outbreak. September looks to start picking up the slack, and we're back to some state of normalcy across most of the world (the US and UK still sadly excluded), but 2020's going to be a light one either way, as will no doubt be attested to by the thoroughly reasonable lengths of the Giant Bomb GOTY podcasts this year.
As such, I've used this quarantime to fill some game-playing gaps in the previous few years of prestigious release cycles, and no one year more represents Vinny's oft-stated mantra of "there's never been a better time for games" than 2017. Despite being the first full year of what future historians will call the Oh Fucking Goddammit Why era of American presidential history, 2017 proved itself an incredible time for games of all stripes. As such, I've started anthropomorphizing the year's output as some sort of mighty mammoth or massive Megalodon; a beast utterly indomitable and almost too impressive to fully comprehend, yet one that could still be worn down slowly and surely by arrows and spears tipped with Mountain Dew and Cheeto dust in the manner of the hunter/gamers of old.
In much fewer words: The 2017 release library is my white whale, and I'm over here living in Hell's heart (2020) trying to stab away at it.
Down to Brass Tacks
This blog is constructed of two halves:
The first half will be a chart of 2017 games with their release dates and my current status with them: whether I've played them yet, what my thoughts on them were, and whether they're worth revisiting some three-plus years later as we sit on the cusp of a new generation of consoles.
The second half is where I open the floor to comments and suggestions on 2017 bangers, incorporating them into the chart or letting them stand as possible alternatives vouched for by the Giant Bomb community.
This won't be a fully comprehensive list of everything that came out in 2017 - I'm not interested in at least a third of it, and there's way too much to name regardless - but I want this to be a fairly comprehensive stock of the year's best games, a document I can refer back to for new backlog ideas if the well for 2018-202x is running dry, and maybe a handy guide for others also since I can occasionally poke my head out of my solipsistic bubble to recognize other video game playing folks exist.
Why 2017 specifically? Because the large number of well-discussed highlights have rendered the many excellent but not nearly as high-profile games, especially Indies, a little more invisible as a result. Therefore, even though we're a few years out now, I believe that 2017 still has something to offer even the most meticulous of us. Many somethings, as the case may be.
The List So Far
(NB: I've made this a Google spreadsheet to make it easier to navigate (sort A-Z by individual column, etc.).)
Inclusion requires a 2017 North American debut release. I've not included ports, unless that port was the first to receive an English localization, but I have included remakes and remasters if enough work has been done.
"My GOTY" ranking is based on my 2017 GOTY (Adjusted) list, which I edit and reorder every year with all the 2017 games I've since played.
This list incorporates (but has trouble ordering, for some reason) the fifty top 2017 games voted for by the Giant Bomb community as of the results of the site's annual community GOTY poll. Those are the only "Not Interested"s I was bothered to include for the time being, but they're clearly games to pay attention to otherwise.
If it wasn't clear: "Backlogged" means I own it but haven't played it, while "Wishlisted" means I've yet to own it but intend to. "Incomplete" are games that either can't be completed or... I... don't want to.
There's a whole mess of JRPGs, visual novels, and Indies that have yet to be added. I've not had the chance to go through them all yet, but feel free to recommend any good ones not presently included.
Granted, this whole exercise was mostly for my own benefit; I'm rolling around the idea a 2017-centric blog catch-up feature in the near future, just because I've become weirdly fixated on that wonderful twelve-month period for games. We all need lockdown hobbies I suppose. Even so, I plan to keep this public document updated with review scores and notes in the off-chance it proves useful to anyone else.
A mere twenty weeks after covering Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, I've found myself back in Monster World for the legally distinct adventures of Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. While both games directly homage the Westone series, which underwent many litigiously-motivated name changes of its own back in its time that ranged from Adventure Island to The Dynastic Hero to Bikkuriman World, The Dragon's Trap was simply a graphical remaster of a Master System game; Monster Boy, conversely, is a brand new entry in the series. In spirit, at least.
Retaining the same shapeshifting animal forms of Dragon's Trap, Monster Boy has the titular hero cursed to a mostly useless transmogrification (a pig that has a distinct resemblance to the cigar-chomping porcine shopkeepers of the original games, complete with eyepatch) before fighting bosses and acquiring new forms, the abilities of each opening up the world just a skosh in true explormer style. As well as all these returning animal forms - which includes a little snake for small gaps, a frog knight for easier swimming and tongue hookshot swinging, or a lion knight for a brutal block-smashing charge move - there's a huge array of equipment and collectibles to find. This includes the newly revamped magic system, which also brings back Wonder Boy's spell arsenal - fireballs, boomerangs, lightning, bombs, and tornadoes - but has scattered multiple truffles in well-hidden locations that each increase your stock, allowing for more spell uses before a recharge is needed. There's a truly staggering amount of gear and treasures and upgrades and wealth to find, and the in-game map is at least somewhat cooperative when it comes to finding them: locations of interest are marked on the map with question marks, and then a translucent image of the found object once acquired to help you keep track if you decide to check a guide for what you're missing. The game helpfully anticipates us collectathon completionists, however: there's a means of adding as-yet-undiscovered treasure icons to your map that's relatively expensive and only becomes accessible late-game after you've acquired the final form. This expense is a good way to incentivise players to search on their own, but a lifeline if they really don't have a clue where to start looking for some vital upgrade or another.
Monster Boy is very much positioning itself as a "Monster World V," and what better way to underline that than by having all four of the previous protagonists cameo like this?
Arguably, Monster Boy's best feature is one it shares with the Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap remake: a lavish, hand-drawn artistic rendition of the setting and characters, with an excellent musical score to boot from high-profile composers Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage, early Ys), Motoi Sakuraba (Tales, almost every tri-Ace RPG) and Michiru Yamane (Castlevania, Suikoden). A large part of the game's assets, both visual and musical, are lifted or inspired by the earlier Wonder Boy series but still feel fresh in their new forms here. (Or, well, they would feel fresh were it not for The Dragon Trap's equally impeccable Disneyfied take on this decades-old franchise.) Unfortunately, this style can also create some undesirable visual ambiguity with regards to hitboxes and other gameplay-centric mechanics; while I'm sure overall many would prefer this stylish hand-drawn approach to the overly familiar 16-bit pixel art, the latter is at least much better at communicating the language of video games and the boundaries between sprites and other active parts of the game world. Sounds like a minor gripe, but when lining up the shield to reflect enemy attacks or maneuvering around hazards in small corridors, it's a problem that soon makes itself apparent.
Even so, some visual confusion-related frustration is a small price to pay for a gorgeously rendered cartoon world with a catchy soundtrack and more explormer quality-of-life nirvana than you can shake an ice sword at. The world of Monster Boy (helpfully named Monster World, as it was in previous Wonder Boy games past) is truly enormous, but filled with warps and shortcuts to make traversal easier, as well as a teleport wand that lets you create town portals that stay active afterwards, allowing you to jump right back to where you were if you need to hit the vendors for a health refill or more spell charges. It's also never not challenging, in part because of the simplistic way it minimizes things like equipment stats: enemies and traps always hit hard, so you have to fairly skillful to get past most of the game's regions and particularly its bosses. The spells and different forms help with the latter, and there are plenty of checkpoints and elixir items (which act like fairies, bringing you back upon death) available. My completionist tendencies tend to take over and end up making the game too easy by giving myself way too much health or firepower to fall back on; rarely is that a problem here, and if I'm backtracking it's only to ensure I'm best able to weather the trials and tribulations to come.
To give you some idea of how much there is to find off the beaten path, not only are the thirty-six pieces of equipment here not the full extent of the inventory, but each has an upgrade path that requires their own well-hidden materials.
If you're a fan of explormers, this is possibly one of the best ones to come along in a while, combining a huge variety of powers and upgrades and never once easing up on the challenge it presents. Areas are varied both in their look and the type of obstacles they have in store (most are built around whichever new items/forms you'll find there), the presentation is amazing, and though it feels a little stuck in the past with its adherence to the conventions of a franchise created almost 35 years ago, it's never bereft of ideas and surprises. I'm having a blast with it, at least whenever it isn't kicking my ass.
Rating: 4 out of 5. (Downgraded to 4 due to the obnoxious second obstacle course. Absolute trash.)
This will probably be the last of these quintet round-ups. Truth be told, I'm not the greatest judge of how "substantial" any of these Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality Indie games might be: I've been going from my own impressions of the screenshots and trailers on their respective Itch/Steam pages, and whether or not they have any data on How Long to Beat (if not, good sign they're fairly underground). After this, I'm going to add the rest of the "potentially interesting" Indies I've earmarked from that bundle to my larger Indie Game of the Week pool; I'd say most of what I've covered so far deserve a little more scrutiny and critique than I'm giving them here.
Of course, that said, there sure were a lot of games included in that bundle that I'll probably never get around to in a one per week format. The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (BRJE) ended back in mid-June and yet will definitely continue to provide for many Indie game blogs to come (as well as, I hope, provide to the many protesters and victims of police brutality who sorely need those funds for legal battles).
Since this is Part 4, seems polite I should provide links back to the previous sets of reviews: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Affinity
A nice simple game to start us off, and one not too dissimilar to that Kintsugi game from the first pack of BRJE reviews. You're given a disparate pile of parts, at least one of which is already fixed in place, and are required to assemble the object they collectively depict in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle. Each object has a different shape and you have no way of knowing the contours of the puzzle before starting, so the usual approach is to start with what's already there and find pieces that fit the gaps and patterns around the edges. However, the game is also flexible enough to let you start anywhere, connecting several loose pieces together to create equally loose composites that makes the playing field less cluttered and also makes it easier through process of elimination to figure out where these larger pieces belong.
I'd say if you were a fan of the Glass Masquerade series, Affinity is very much working with those same strengths: a sort of freeform jigsaw puzzle approach where pieces could be shaped like anything, and are small and intricate as often as they are large and obvious. You can't simply rely on straight edges as the outer contours like you could with other jigsaw games, because the finished shape might have an outline as rounded and/or irregular as a person or a bowl of fruit; it only becomes apparent the more you piece it together what the shape will be, and any hints tend to be on the subtle side like the coloration of the pieces (they change from shades of gray to colors when placed correctly, but still have light and dark hues to set them apart). Even with only 25 puzzles, the game can start getting tricky fast with its obtuse pieces and unlikely finished shapes. Fortunately, there's the chill background music common to this genre and an added cute touch in that picking up and dropping pieces creates musical notes that, consecutively, plays a little ditty while you work - together, they help assuage any irritation that might set in as you scan your remaining pieces for where they might fit into the finished image.
A typically psychedelic layout, though one that makes it easier to visualize where each piece fits together.Man, this one already feels uncomfortably like that My Summer Car game.It honestly took me right up until halfway through the puzzle to figure out this was a person. I thought it was some weird mountain at first. (You can tell where all the individual pieces are from the different shades.)
Affinity is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.
Crystal Towers 2 XL
I wasn't sure what to make of this game for a while, since it's both so dissimilar to anything I've played in the Indie space and yet so oddly familiar at the same time. I can explain the latter: the game has the unmistakable vibe of a missing Atari ST/Amiga platformer from the late '80s and early '90s, and I grew up playing no end of those. The former's a little trickier to explain, but Crystal Towers 2XL (originally just Crystal Towers 2, but I guess it's gotten bigger since then) is in essence a stage-based explormer that has an uncommon skill-based, high-score-chasing focus to its progression.
Each stage is a linear affair with a Sonic-like approach to level design where you can usually find better treasure or a generally easier time by heading further up, but accidentally missing a platform sends you tumbling down to the less enriching and more dangerous lower regions. You are rated on your completion time, the amount of shards you found, and your existing score, which can be boosted by performing "combos" of defeating enemies while collecting shards without touching the ground: if you were to, for example, hop on one enemy, collect some shards, and then land on another enemy, collect some more shards, before you finally land, that's a huge amount of score you've just acquired. Your total score, cumulative across all stages, can open doors back in the hub area to new zones. Adding to the complexity are bonus gems which you can earn after completing a stage the first time and re-entering it: these are smaller challenges that reward you another type of progression currency, and can range from collecting a certain amount of shards in a time limit, avoiding new hazards and traps introduced to the stage, or finding a secret area. While the total score opens new doors in the hub, these gems will open the portals to new levels.
However, the game still has a prominent explormer element that serves two purposes: it can make certain challenges easier (or possible at all) with upgrades to health and magic, and it can provide you with new types of magical spells - perhaps to create new platforms or break through certain types of block - which allow you to reach new stages or new areas in older ones, and thus expand the amount of accessible territory in true explormer form. These upgrade items are well-hidden across levels and might require different upgrades to reach, so while you're completing stages and earning high-scores, I've found it prudent to poke around every corner for these permanent buffs and make notes on the those I'm currently unable to access. The game isn't without its annoyances - I can find the jumping to be a bit floaty at times and the enemy hitboxes aren't always agreeable - and it certainly isn't a looker (the game's Itch.io page proudly has "Programmer art galore!" as one of its bulletpoints), though I find I still appreciate its old-school computer platformer spirit, its goofy self-effacing humor, and its novel spin on a very well-represented Indie genre.
Bouncing between these two mushroom enemies while collecting gems will really start to ramp up the multipliers and points. Think Tony Hawk Pro Skater scoring, but with Super Mario mechanics.An idea of how levels keep giving you more goals to pursue. I'm sure it'll go through the whole rainbow eventually.Taking on one of the challenges, which requires me to find a bunch of circuit boards scattered around the level. Fortunately, the arrow tells me where the closest one is.
Crystal Towers 2 XL is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.
Stowaway
I really enjoyed this short first-person narrative adventure game; it didn't have the most original story, but the atmosphere and presentation were top-notch in how they achieved their goals, if not in terms of spectacle (which, given an Indie studio's budget, would be difficult to achieve). Stowaway tells a familiar tale of a spaceship limping into a nearby station with no living people on board but housing something else entirely, and how the panicked station crew deal with this unexpected extraterrestrial issue. The protagonist is the lowest ranked member of the staff: a technician and general dogsbody who is automatically nominated for every menial and dangerous task alike. This has you wandering around the core of the ship, first working through technical issues and later looking for missing crewmembers or helping survivors put their escape plans into action.
What's striking about Stowaway, and this was something put to similar effective use by Lucas Pope and Return of the Obra Dinn a few years later, are the very low-poly, largely monochrome graphics. Even when there's a light source - a flashlight is the only item you ever find - everything has a heavy dithering filter to it to obscure your peripheral vision. The other human characters look like indistinct polygons also, like those wireframe fighters from the early Smash Bros. games, and are helpfully distinguished by their different hues and shapes. The commander, for example, is recognizable by his orange color and shaved head, even if you can't really tell much more else about his features. The uncanny ambiguity of the ship and its crew, and the use of limited lighting, are put to excellent use in a tense chiller such as this, though the designers had enough sense to make it obvious where to go (most places are signposted) and what buttons to push (the screens of interactive terminals have glowy green icons that are easy to see even from a distance) to progress the story. Worth keeping in mind also that the entire game is about the length of an episode of TV, which I'd argue works in its favor as a punchy piece of horror media.
Gotta love these '70s boxy robots. Pretty much the only friendly face on the ship. Then again, it's not edible, so what does it have to fear?I'm given a tracker and then told to go into the vents. I'm guessing this is a future where the movie Alien doesn't exist. Or maybe it does and I'm just that despised by the crew.Following a Yaphet Kotto-type to the bridge for an escape plan that I'm totally sure will work. Though you can't really make out his face (especially in this shot, since he's facing away from us) you can tell which member of the crew it is from his cyan highlights and headband.
I suppose The Sword and the Slime counts as a puzzle-platformer game, but it's fairly unique in its execution. The player is a free-floating magical sword, ensorcelled into animated being by forest sprites to save their arboreal home from goblin invaders. The sword is invincible in battle, but has the unusual weakness of depowering as soon as it strays too far from a source of light, at which point it tumbles inertly to the ground. While the player flies the sword around the world, keeping to lanterns and lit areas while chopping through goblins and other foes, they eventually encounter a friendly slime who takes a liking to the sword and decides to follow it around. Thus, an unusual partnership is formed.
The slime is really a gelatinous cube. I guess you can't call it that without owing Wizards of the Coast some money, but in principle it works the same: a roughly square-shaped amorphous mass that consumes any living tissue that enters it, while inorganic objects like helmets just kinda float around inside. When the slime is well-fed and enormous, it can weigh down pressure plates to open doors; once it's taken a bit of damage and shed a few pounds, it's svelte enough to fit through narrow passageways. The slime can do things the sword cannot and vice versa, and eventually - through a pretty funny twist - the slime embodies a permanent light source to make the sword's journey easier, provided they can remain in close proximity with one another.
As you might expect, most of the game's puzzles boil down to keeping the slime around and in decent shape (too much damage destroys it completely) so it can perform tasks and keep the sword in an active light zone. It'll move towards the sword if you wander too far away, so you can use this behavior to maneuver it through tunnels or across moving platforms, whatever the case may be. The game is split into smaller zones that offer different scenarios to solve, and while some of these zones may be trickier than others they're all fairly short so there weren't too many times where I felt like I'd hit a brick wall and didn't want to keep going. Dropping between moving platforms was easily the worst of these scenarios and the game throws it at you twice (even an in-game character remarks on how much they hate it), but overall there's a nice mix of puzzles and more reflex-intensive movement sections. It's another game that's only an hour or so long, but is still the perfect length for the type of game it is and the number of variations its peculiar premise can provide.
The sword follows your cursor which gives you a lot of freedom of movement, though I can't wander too far up because the trees aren't well-lit up there.A situation where you're escorting the slime through a series of traps and platforms. It can take a few hits, at least, and if it gets to that apple bush it can refill its health.Meanwhile, here's the opposite situation. The slime is on an automated path as it drips down the chain, and you've got to keep pace with it. Can't follow it down directly because of those purple jerks (they'll automatically de-enchant the sword).
The Sword and the Slime is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.
You Died But A Necromancer Revived You
The loquaciously-titled You Died But a Necromancer Revived You (it's almost long enough to be the title of a Japanese light novel, though it perhaps needs "And Now She Wants to Marry You But Isn't That Necrophilia?!" at the end for the full effect) is another instance-based game, though one that I both sucked at and didn't enjoy a whole lot, for possibly related reasons. The goal of each stage is to dash to the exit in what is usually a spiral-shaped layout of blocks in a vaguely Zelda-ish top-down format, but there's a huge number of traps in the way and the path soon starts dissolving to force you to keep moving and take giant risks.
Progress is only saved every four stages, and each one has a randomly determined layout and set of traps - each "block" of four usually starts with a few traps and ramps it up towards many traps closer to the end - so you can't exactly memorize paths for easy speedrunning. The traps are obviously bad enough on their own, but honestly it's tough to make all those rapid 90 degree turns without your hitbox crossing over to the external tiles (all spikes, of course) and getting booted back one, two, or three whole stages. A stage will only take about fifteen to twenty seconds to complete - any longer and the chain of broken floor tiles will catch up with you - but it is slightly aggravating to repeat the same stages over and over. The game provides many difficulty-altering options including saving between individual stages instead of groups of stages, but that feels like throwing in the towel with a masocore game like this and you can't help but suspect the game's going to throw you the double deuces if you try to reach the conclusion on "easy mode"; like maybe the bad guy flips a lever that drops you into a ball pit with all the other babies.
I will say the game has a kinda cute Halloween charm to its aesthetic and seems better suited to multiplayer, where you and your friends are figuring out the timing on the traps to be the first past the finish line in a tense race (not unlike the recent smash hit Fall Guys) or working cooperatively so only one of you has to make it to the end for all of you to progress. I don't think I'll persist with it solo, but I might happily recommend it if you have friends or enemies to tackle it with.
A typical floor. Those sawblades are bouncing around the room, the skull icons on the floor are instant death traps but only if you step off the skull before they finish. Each trap has its own rules, so it takes a few false starts until you know what to expect from each block.As well as a checkpoint, you're also treated to these splash screens every four floors. Very Pac-Man.There's a lot of ways you can make the game easier on yourself if the standard difficulty is too much, but some of these maybe make things a little too easy...
You Died But A Necromancer Revived You is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.
Night in the Woods is one of those known quantities I'll sometimes work into this feature, like I'm spackling over a conspicuous gap in my own playing history than introducing something fairly obscure to what I'm hoping is a receptive audience of Indie-lovers. The brainchild of animator/illustrator Scott Benson and helped into video game reality by someone we probably don't need to name here, Night in the Woods is a... charitably, I think we'd call it an adventure game with an open-world aspect, but might more accurately name it a hanging out not doing much in particular simulator, or a HONDMIPS. I've noticed the HONDMIPS genre picking up in the Indie scene in recent years with the likes of Always Sometimes Monsters and, uh, that top-down coffee shop game Jan played a while back whose name I can't recall, as I suppose it fits the truism that you "write what you know": many creative types - myself assuredly included - are painstakingly familiar with the stage of a person's life where gainful employment and affording food to eat is an ever present threat to any and all artistic aspirations.
Night in the Woods follows Margaret "Mae" Borowski: a college dropout who finds herself returning to her depressing, run-down hometown of Possum Springs while she procrastinates on having to think about the next stage of her life. A few of her highschool friends are still around, including the overexcitable Gregg and lugubrious Bea (both of which working retail jobs they more or less hate), and Mae's old troublemaking behavior re-emerges as she follows a mostly nocturnal routine each day that starts late afternoon and terminates around midnight. There's also suggestions that something less than wholesome is affecting the town, though we're only getting hints of that in the opening chapters (like a severed arm in the middle of the street). Honestly, a lot of Mae's hometown blues hits uncomfortably close to home for me, and is a phase of my life I'm loath to revisit; more so than highschool even, since at least I was in the same boat as everyone else at that age and didn't feel like quite as isolated. Granted, I never dropped out of college like Mae did, but finding yourself stuck back in the quiet burg in the middle of nowhere that you were raised in, faced with the real possibility of never leaving again, is one of those unenviable situations that can be and has been the source of a lot of consternation and grief. I'm making it sound like this game is digging up a lot of past trauma, which it honestly isn't, but I know that there's drama on the horizon that neither I nor Mae wants to reckon with any time soon. Better to just throw rocks at windows and smash fluorescent tubes until the situation somehow resolves itself, for as self-defeating as that attitude is.
An excruciating encounter with a former flame (not that actual flame, the guy in front of it) at least birthed a sweet new nickname.
Anyway, when the game isn't making me feel bad emotions, it's making me feel good ones. The writing is delightful, with even incidental characters getting some amusing backstories and dialogue chains with Mae, who bounces between real and faked interest. Each day brings with it a number of possible activities to do around town, almost none of them essential beyond filling the playthrough with low-key shenanigans and optional worldbuilding. The visuals are also excellent: I can take or leave another game where all the principal cast are anthros and never seem to address it (it scrambles the gray matter a little that there are actual cats in a world with catpeople, where the catpeople even keep the cats as pets; I don't know how to logically parse any of that) but the character designs and backgrounds have this angular but cute look reminiscent of this excellent Beartato webcomic I used to read until its author decided to update once every other year. It also manages to hit that same easy-going groove that Mutazione does (though I should clarify that Night in the Woods came first) where you never have to walk around town talking to all the NPCs after a chunk of time has passed, but you find yourself wanting to anyway just to spend more time around these people and figuring them out for the sense of community it brings and for more of the game's mostly terrific writing. I also like that Mae regularly sketches in her journal after something piques her interest, either from an encounter or a remarkable object in the background; like the similarly arty journal entries in Life is Strange, it's both a window into the interiority of the protagonist as well as an occasional source of humor.
And now for the two other major bummers about the game, beyond the self-loathing early-20s awkwardness: the mini-games and the sense of FOMO that permeates its daily itinerary format. On the former: there's a compelling top-down hack'n'slasher introduced as a game-within-a-game that starts to lose its allure quick by decreasing your maximum health the further you climb its titular Demon Tower despite also increasing the difficulty of its bosses and regular enemy encounters; the other mini-game is an exasperating Guitar Hero rhythm game with enough lag to make me terrible at it, and the game makes you feel bad for playing badly (just as Dr. Zoidberg would have it). There's a few lesser mini-games, like a thievery-themed version of Red Light, Green Light and a vaguely interactive astronomy lesson on the lesser known "dusk star" constellations, but they're not quite as aggressively unfun. All the same, most of these are either incidental or have no bearing on the game progression if you screw them up, but they don't really add anything either. The FOMO thing, meanwhile, comes from when you're given options on how to spend each day and more specifically who you spend them with, perhaps the idea being that you play through the game again to see the other "route" while presumably taking note of all the clever foreshadowing the game may or may not be doing. I'm not really a "two playthroughs" kinda guy though, especially with an lesiurely paced adventure game like this where it takes a long while to move around and finish story sequences, so I'm just going to have to deal with not seeing a good portion of the game (unless there's a chapter select of which I'm not aware).
I spent way too long on this g-d mini-game when I could've been making more progress with the story for the sake of this blog. Impressive that something that could almost be its own separate game was squeezed in there though.
On the whole, and personal life stuff-related reservations aside, it's easy to see the appeal of the game and why it peppered so many GOTY lists back in 2017 despite all the heavy competition that year. It speaks to that uncomfortable, formative period in most of our lives where we were largely rudderless and enjoying our new-found independence and "adult" pursuits as a means to actually avoid being responsible adults for as long as possible. Once you sober up and take a long hard look towards the exhausting endless highway of nonsense that is adult living, you either shape up or burn out; that is to say, you either become Scarlett Johansson's character in Ghost World where you focus on finding a job that doesn't suck and eventually work up to starting families and owning your own place, or become Thora Birch's character in Ghost World where you fuck around with the local weirdos and relive the hits of your childhood until you eventually give up and take that mysterious bus to nowhere. I could also understand how that sort of post-adolescent navel-gazing could rub folks the wrong way - most of the hardscrabble grown-ups of Possum Springs aren't exactly receptive to Mae's "problems" either - especially if they're already put off by all the teenspeak dialogue and the directionless core progression as you bounce from one late evening juvenile antic to another. My opinion lies somewhere in the middle: while I can appreciate NitW's strengths (presentation, dialogue) I can also despair of its missteps and occasionally grating attitude. Still, I'd like to see where its story eventually goes, as well as keep up with the gaggle of strange townies I keep bumping into. I just hope my curiosity doesn't kill the cat, so to speak.
Rating: 4 out of 5. (Post-Completion Edit: Upgraded to 4, since I did enjoy my time with these characters despite the gripes.)
It's that time of the year again, give or take a month to get a special COVID-enforced online-only version up and running: the Summer Games Done Quick charity livestream event! This is the biannual (that's twice in one year, not once in two years) week-long marathon event that the prolific speedrunning communities of Twitch and Speedrun.com host to celebrate completing games in ways they were often not meant to be completed, all to raise money for worthy causes. This year's summer event starts tomorrow (Sunday the 16th of August, for those coming here late) and runs until the following Sunday (on the 23rd).
I've spoken before about my meager contributions to this magnanimous and Herculean effort, but it boils down to sorting out any problem Giant Bomb Wiki pages that might cause headaches for those organizing the event on Twitch; it's common knowledge that Twitch uses our wiki database for its "now playing" widget. The bare minimum requirement is that all games represented during the event are actually on the wiki (barring ROM hacks and other non-commercial fangames, since they fail to meet the conditions for inclusion), but I usually go a little extra so that any curious visitors don't have complete messes to parse if they wanted a little more info on the games being streamed.
Given there were only two missing game pages and a handful of skeletons to flesh out, I'm just going to focus on the streams I'm looking forward to most. I've compiled a list of twenty (plus) runs that most pique my interest, with an even mix of the familiar and the new/obscure. Be sure to study the schedule over here to plan your own viewing parties, though there's always the archives if you miss any of the streams live.
My beloved Souls series is well-represented at any given GDQ, though I note with interest that this SGDQ is starting with a speedrun of perhaps the least appreciated and understood: Demon's Souls, the game that started it all. With its lavish PS5 remake on the horizon, this is probably a good time to get reacquainted with Boletaria, Old King Doran, and World Tendencies, while marveling at how anyone can get through the confusing Tower of Latria this quickly. With only an hour for a projected completion time, I imagine this will be quite the show. At least they won't have to worry about invaders, eh?
Related: The other Souls game exhibited is Bloodborne, with an all-bosses showcase appearing towards the end of the SGDQ event on Saturday the 22nd. Most of us were once again privy to the spooky surprises Bloodborne has in store through Jan's recent endurance run of the game, so I could understand anyone being all Bloodborne'd out for the time being. However, I'm personally happy spending a mere 90 minutes watching a master hunter break those eldritch bad boys down to their constituent parts again.
Pro Skater fever has been reignited by the imminent release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, and 2x was itself a remaster of those same two games from much longer ago. We've already seen Jeff Gerstmann shred and grind his way through those levels, of course, but this all goals and golds run promises a similarly thorough exhibition of those games in a much shorter time frame. The all goals run is always fascinating by how runners decide how many tasks to complete in a single two-minute run: can you get the S.K.A.T.E. letters while achieving the three high score goals, or is it best to combine those with something else? Maybe complete the high score targets first and then focus the next run on finding all the collectibles? Could you squeeze everything into one run, even? Either way, it's always fascinating to watch.
Related: We also have runs for Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure, which for a joke game seems to pop up often in GDQ events, and the well-acclaimed first Tony Hawk's Underground. Fans of grabs and flips should be well catered to overall.
Out of the gaggle of relative obscurities I've pulled here, my favorite revelation might be that we have a whole three Saturn games in the running this SGDQ. Silhouette Mirage is the run I'm anticipating most, as a Treasure game I've not really seen before (no EU release for either its Saturn or PS1 versions), though there's also Keio Flying Squadron 2 and Elevator Action Returns: two games I've seen championed elsewhere on the internet (the latter just recently in one of Jeff's MiSTer streams). Fans of classic Sega might want to check in for these highlights from the company's late-'90s "Dark Ages" period. (Seriously, when is Sega putting together a decent Saturn compilation to join the Genesis and Dreamcast ones already on Steam? I realise its reputation suggested otherwise, but it did have some games.)
When I played (and blogged) Valley some three years ago, I remarked that its fast-paced sections would make it ideal for speedrunning. There's a whole number of "runner" first-person 3D platformers, but the way Valley folds it into its ongoing narrative made those particular sequences exhilarating to play and I've no doubt a speedrunner could do some fascinating out-of-bounds business with that insane momentum. I'm glad that there's a community for it, and that a few more people might be tempted to try it out themselves after watching this run.
Sadly, there's going to be fewer races this year as I imagine it's harder to make those fair with remote streamers, but of the few we do have I'm probably looking forward to Hollow Knight's the most. I've no idea if there's a preferred path through the game or if the two streamers will break off to challenge more riskier paths for the sake of the race, but like the Souls games above I'm always a fan of watching people way better than I take on these already challenging games and just wreck fools - the same bosses that schooled my ass several times over - like they were nothing. And here's an opportunity to watch that happen in stereo!
The mind truly boggles at the myriad number of ways you could break Bloodstained apart with a speedrun, given the number of character development options at your disposal, though the runner has decided on a more "contemporary" approach with the recently released Zangetsu Mode. I've not seen this mode in action yet, so this stream will be a twofer of learning how the Bloodstained speedrun scene is progressing right now as well as a demonstration of what David Hayter's taciturn samurai is like in the field. Considering the estimate, he's a real zippy son of a bitch.
I love speedrun relay races, though I think this is more of a co-operative thing with its three runners taking turns to complete 16 courses each of the 48 available in the most recent (and most loved, it seems) Mario Kart game. I imagine that means they're doing single courses, unless they're only swapping between whole grands prix. Honestly, the logistics of this co-op set-up intrigue me more than the speedrun itself does.
This was one of the two gaps in our wiki I talked about earlier. Turns out we didn't have a page for this freeware, zero-budget "Mario Kart but with sushi" racer from Japan. Despite its lack of profile, it appears to have found an audience in the speedrunning community and it's not hard to see why: in addition to the absurdity of racing realistically-rendered pieces of sushi, it's extremely challenging with its combination of high velocity and zero track barriers. Imagine a nightmare 300cc version of Rainbow Road with a bunch of raw fish opponents and you have an idea of what to expect.
This might be the first ever Virtual Boy game at a GDQ? I think one of the upsides to this "digital" event is that runners are more inclined to bust out their more esoteric games and consoles, since they don't have to transport them halfway across the country (or world, in some cases) or hope that someone in the tech crew had the foresight to bring a working Virtual Boy. VB Wario Land is generally regarded as the best of an extremely small line-up of Virtual Boy bangers, so if you wanted to see Nintendo's black-and-red eye-searer in action this is probably the run for you. (If you're looking for more Virtual Boy content afterwards, Retronaut and former USGamer editor Jeremy Parish has a complete video series on the device over on his YouTube channel.)
I'd never heard of Pacify before pounding the cold, hard wiki streets for the sake of this event, and as far as I can tell it's a mid-budget multiplayer survival horror game that seems to have found a pretty big audience, possibly because survival horror seems to do well with the usual YouTube streamer crowd. Given the multiplayer focus, this is a two-person 100% run: I assume that means they're working together to complete the game quickly, maybe splitting up as they can do more damage that way. (Splitting up is usually not a great idea for horror, but speedrunners know what they're doing.)
Pringles: The Video Game
Type: All "A"s, solo.
When: Thursday 20th, 5:50AM BST (12:50AM EDT)
Estimate: 5 minutes.
Sadly, I couldn't build a page for "Pringles: The Video Game" because as far as I can tell this was never a real Genesis release. Unlike their rivals Doritos, I don't believe Pringles themselves ever made a video game (the closest they got was this ridiculous chip-feeder gamer headset) so I'm guessing this was spawned from some unholy corner of the 16-bit homebrew community. It doesn't look half bad, honestly, though I'm not sure the farty sound effects is doing the presentation (or my desire to eat more Pringles) any favors.
I only know about Wii game Ribbit King secondhand - it's a perennial favorite of those grumpy goofballs The Game Grumps - but it's something I'd like to see given a higher status, maybe to the extent of garnering a new Switch remake/sequel. Featuring the sport of Frolf (or frog golf), the goal is to bounce a frog into a target hole, hitting various score zones and power-ups along the way. It's as Japanese as games tend to ever get, and I'm wondering what type of tech speedrunners might employ to finish the game quickly. I mean, getting the frog into the hole with the minimal amount of strikes seems the most obvious route, but there are many directions that game can take a single drive or putt with the amount of chaos involved.
I guess someone decided to stream the Master System game ALF, based on the TV show ALF. I might only tune in for this to hear the streamer explain what the hell ALF is to an audience of mostly 20-somethings who only know him as that weird alien puppet that dissed Geoff Keighley that one time. Or maybe from this cursed video. Either way, there's a lotta history here.
I bounced off Warframe harder than a powerball loosed in a spring factory (I really need to start outsourcing my similes) so there's a huge swathe of the game's late-game content I never got to see. This Warframe run isn't so much speedrunning Warframe - that would take several months in real-time and/or hundreds of dollars' worth of premium currency - but a showcase of every boss fight in the game, completed as quickly as possible with what I imagine are boss-killing specialist warframes specced with maxed-out mods. It might be even be worth watching more for these crazy warframe builds than for the bosses themselves.
I don't think I've ever seen a Yakuza game at one of these events. Even skipping past every incidental piece of content, I can't imagine anyone beating a Yakuza game in around two hours (the projected estimate for this run). I've not played Kiwami 2 but I know the story well enough from playing the original Yakuza 2, and I've only just completed Yakuza 6 which has the same Dragon engine as Kiwami 2, so I have enough of a sense of this game to be curious to see how a speedrunner might break it wide open. I'm particularly interested to see how they'll finish all those boss fights and massive crowd melees in a matter of seconds. Will it be all Tiger Drops? Probably not, but a guy can dream at least.
Those that follow my prodigious amount of blogging might know that I recently took it upon myself to try the Ocarina of Time randomizer, with a few extra settings I would come to deeply regret activating. This two-person randomizer co-op is a little more gentle, and they'll be helping each other out frequently, though given the amount of techniques and general skill up the sleeves of these runners I can't imagine it'll be boring to watch. OoT is filled with exploitable speedrun glitches, and we only ever tend to see a portion of them in the usual any% categories - having critical items like the Bow or Hookshot spirited away to inconvenient locations means these players will have to bust out every trick in the book to maintain momentum.
Related: There's a few other Zelda runs, but coming in second after the above is a Zelda II: The Adventure of Link "Reverse Boss Order" run (Monday 17th, 3:30PM BST/10:30AM EDT). Most Zelda games let you delve into a dungeon far enough to get its item - usually needed to reach the next dungeon - so I imagine the runner will be bouncing in and out of temples until they fight Thunderbird (who I think is the last boss that won't just end the game like Shadow Link) and start working backwards. Very technical run, I imagine, and one that will demand some high level of skill to reach and complete the Great Temple with minimal stats. (There's also a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stream on Friday night that sounds interesting. What's an "All Dog Treasures" run?)
Like many last year, my bean was thoroughly freaked by the lateral thinking programming puzzles of Baba Is You, and so the appeal of this run is more about watching someone complete all the solutions very quickly and taking mental notes. I suspect we'll see a lot of non-developer-intended shortcut solutions too, and it should be a run that will keep a lot of us guessing throughout. I'm wondering how vindictive it sounds if I say that I'm only watching this stream to see Baba Is You get thoroughly destroyed as revenge for all the brain melting it caused?
Super Hark Bros
Type: 100% levels, 3-player race
When: Friday 21st, 3:40PM BST (10:40AM EDT)
Estimate: 25 minutes.
GDQ has many mainstays: Zelda games, Souls games, Sonic games, at least one outing for the TASBot, and last but not least, homebrew Super Mario kaizo hacks. At this point, most of the new kaizo Mario games are the same dozen or so profoundly good Mario speedrunners creating levels to challenge their equally talented peers, while the rest of us are left to scratch our heads wondering how completing any of these levels could be considered feasible. Three runners will be taking on this hack in a 100% levels race, and even though I'm sure they've all had plenty of practice it won't be an easy ride.
It also wouldn't be a GDQ without Metroid. This Metroid Fusion race seems the more interesting of the two Metroid streams (the other, of course, is Super Metroid, since we always need a "save/kill the animals" bid war) in part because both runners will be hamstrung by a 1% item limit. I believe that means they can only get the critical items needed to make progress or those that can't otherwise be avoided, and no other upgrades (including energy tanks). Seems like the kind of race that might unexpectedly end early for one or both of the runners, not that I enjoy the schadenfreude of everything going wrong during a marathon. Much.
Pump It Up, I'm told, is a Korean Dance Dance Revolution ersatz that increased the number of dancin' arrows from four to five. The streamer will be showing off their own PIU LX Model cabinet, presumably with some kind of challenge involved so it doesn't all come off like an episode of Cribs (seriously, who has the room for dance-off arcade machines in their own home? I just hope they don't live in an apartment complex above someone else).
The End!
Those are my picks, though I'm sure I've missed many other highlights to come. Please feel free to respond in the comments with whichever SGDQ speedruns and streams you're looking forward to most and why, or the great runs that have since aired since this was blog was published. I'll admit I'm not too familiar with the speedrunning community, so there might be a few great personalities or a lot of exciting new skips and glitches regarding some of the runs I'm less excited about - let us know about them here and elsewhere on the Giant Bomb forums.
Either way, I think we could all use this event to brighten our summers a little, so be sure to tune in for whatever happens to grab your fancy.
Another week of Indies, another occasion where I rushed to fill a void left by a game that was in no way optimized for weaker systems. Sorry to keep banging that drum, but it's astonishing that most Indies aren't looking any better but continue to require more and more horsepower to run with a framerate in the double digits. Not that it's a problem for this week's game, Forever Lost: Episode 1, which debuted in 2012 and mostly utilizes pre-rendered graphics and static environments.
Forever Lost is the archetypal "escape room" game: you wake up in an unfamiliar location, the walls are covered with graffiti both instructive and incidental, there's puzzles and key items and red herrings in every corner, and even after you emancipate yourself from the immediate vicinity there's simply more locked doors and puzzles to find beyond. None of this is a bad thing, of course: I have a lot of fondness for escape rooms, and their popularity with us feverish puzzle-solving types is what led to a minor cottage industry of real-life examples popping up in many major population centers. Forever Lost has a dorky sense of humor that I appreciate too, even if it often runs counter to the game's sinister tone and ambience.
I could see a puzzle like this annoying some players ("I play games to get AWAY from math!") but it's not too challenging and I appreciate the opportunity to take some long-forgotten piece of acquired learning out of mothballs.
The first Forever Lost - there are three episodes in total which tell a contiguous story, though they were all released multiple years apart so I'm treating them like sequels rather than Telltale-style installments - has the player trapped in what appears to be a psychiatric hospital with multiple patient rooms, a nursery and waiting area for guests, and some administrative offices. Of particular note is the library, which is hinted at several times as offering the only means of escape via a bookshelf puzzle. To leave, however, you need to learn which nine books of the twenty-plus on the shelves need to be depressed, and that creates a sort of overarching puzzle to the episode. There's at least five smaller instances that each provide a piece to this final puzzle - usually one or two of the book titles - and so while the game begins to spread out into many directions you could pursue concurrently if you're presently stymied by one area's brainteasers, it ultimately requires you solve everything for the information you need (or you can gather most of the clues and try to brute force the rest, but I've never been a fan of that approach).
To Forever Lost's credit, there's some variety in its puzzle design, though for the most part they rely on gathering information found elsewhere. A simple, four-note musical puzzle for instance requires that you fix a nearby radio, which broadcasts the tune you need to recreate on a xylophone to open a nearby drawer. Because written hints - book titles, hieroglyphs, symbols, passwords, etc. - are so integral to Forever Lost's puzzles, the game came up with an ingenious way for the player to keep track without copious manual note-taking: a photography feature. You can simply take a picture of what looks like an important clue or code, and then recall it through the photo album if you think you've found the puzzle to which it pertains. The album can become a mite cumbersome to navigate if you're not regularly deleting clues you no longer need, but it's more convenient than writing down these hints yourself and less revealing than if the game simply records anything relevant in a separate journal feature. I'm not sure if future episodes will use the same mechanic, but it's smartly done so I hope it will be the case.
The walls of a solitary confinement cell are filled with rants and silly non-sequiturs, but this "connect the dots" puzzle turns out to be vital. Thankfully, you can draw all over any photos you take.
Forever Lost does have a few issues though, largely concerning its UI and navigation. Everything seems to have a delay to it: moving between screens, opening and closing the inventory, opening and closing the photo album, and activating hotspots. If you get impatient and try to click through multiple navigation prompts, the game simply ignores you so it can progress at its own languid pace. This, combined with no fast travel system (the game world is small enough that it might not need one, but you can still spend several minutes getting from one end to the other) makes the game move glacially at times. The clunkiness of having to wait for a moment to see if the game acknowledged the correct key press can really grind puzzle solving progression down to a crawl also. There are weird little errors too, like how you can write on top of a photograph to make additional notes or to follow an outline, and then when you come back to that photo the player-written notes have been shifted to the wrong places. One time I picked up the duplicate of an item I'd already found and used, and then used it in the same place again to no ill effect. It definitely leaves the impression of a neophyte production, but I imagine later episodes will be much more polished.
Forever Lost is too plain to be considered remarkable, and too buggy and sluggish to be considered exceptional, but it's not the worst first outing for a series of escape room-type games if that subgenre happens to be something you're into. The camera as a means of note-taking is inspired, and while I wished the majority of puzzles offered more than simply needing to regurgitate solutions I found on walls or in notebooks elsewhere, there were a handful that required some lateral thinking. Trusting the player knows the old trick about drawing over a paper pad to make an indent appear, or that they can solve a basic Pythagorean theorem problem, suggests the developers at least have some faith in the player's perspicacity, which I usually appreciate up to the point where I'm required to recall middle-school era knowledge I no longer have (musical keys is usually this for me, which is why I was glad this game's musical puzzle was so mercifully short). It's another case where a first outing was rough, but sufficiently sold me on the idea that the developers know what they're doing that I'm inclined to give its sequels a shot.
It's been almost two weeks, let's talk about explormers again. Mini Ghost comes to us courtesy of Barcelonan developer Francisco "franfistro" Téllez de Meneses, whom I last encountered with 2012's UnEpic. Franfistro developed Mini Ghost to be the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon to Ghost 1.0's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. To clarify: Mini Ghost is an 8-bit, bite-sized aperitif to the much more graphically and mechanically elaborate Ghost 1.0, though in this case it was made afterwards as a cheap little quickie prequel to maybe inspire audiences to check out the main course.
Mini Ghost is a little on the primitive side as a result, though that's not to say it doesn't have much to offer in terms of innovation and fresh takes on the explormer genre, which has become so thoroughly, well, explored by this point. A mostly linear central map, which creates a big circle for players to move around, branches off into four smaller areas which represent the core progression areas: each has a boss that drops the keycard to the next. Most of the items you find are incidental: they're in the same random crates that more often drop energy cubes (currency) or nothing at all, though you can usually tell if there's something useful in one by how difficult it is to reach. Cubes, meanwhile, can buy a lot of gear from store, but a lot of this gear simply increases your currency limit - the best item in the game, the Twin Shot (which doubles your firepower), requires 200 of these energy cubes, which requires you buy every cube capacity upgrade first (the default is 40). Beyond that, the gameplay is chiefly gun-based, as you shoot enemies that adopt any number of behavior patterns from wasps that fly in close to trap-like turrets that pop out of the floor to spiders that hop between floors to ambush you. As well as your core weapon, you'll also be able to pick up and stack (up to three) special sub-weapons which are best saved for bosses.
There are a few items which you sorta need to move ahead, like the minesweeper that lets you know where these otherwise invisible mines are, as well as a light for dark areas. Speedrunners, or those going for a 0% items challenge, could still theoretically make it through these areas if they've memorized the layouts.
Beyond that core gameplay loop, which is solid enough, there's several things I both like and dislike about Mini Ghost's particular structure and presentation. I like the map system and how forthright it is about barriers you can't surpass yet. I dislike how there's almost no fast travel, and on a linear map that means having to take the same journey a few times as you'll need to backtrack occasionally to the start. I like that the "experience" system boils down to a small heal whenever you fill the bar, which leads to a neat little risk vs. reward system: when low on health, do you attack enemies more to fill the bar faster, or do try to stay out of their way in case you take even more damage? I dislike the achievements, which are mostly "don't play the game this way" or "don't take damage to this boss" and are therefore highly restrictive and easy to fail forever. I like that there was a surprisingly wide amount of variation with enemy types and their behavior. I dislike how there's no way to regain health besides filling the XP bar for a single point (initially, at least) unless you warp back to the start where there's a robodoctor.
Fair to say I was ambivalent about Mini Ghost for the most part, though I can't really say I didn't enjoy it overall. The gunplay and platforming recall the 8-bit era's purity, where it was more about getting some very basic controls feeling as right as possible than it was about giving you all manner of alternative modes or largely superfluous RPG progression mechanics to play around with. It has me curious enough to check out Ghost 1.0 one of these days, though I was probably going to play that anyway considering it's an Indie explormer and I have hell of impulse control problems.
The Yakuza games are huge. For a while, each new iteration was even larger than the last, and packed to the gills with side-content, minigames, and "substories": the Yakuza franchise's name for those silly little sidequests where the main character might dress like a mascot, get targeted by ineffectual con artists, date Lady Gaga, meet national sports celebrities and somehow beat them at their own professions, or befriend a Michael Jackson ersatz on the set of Not-Thriller. Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6 pulled back the reins a little by reducing the amount of content and playable characters, but even lowering the substory count from 100 to Yakuza 6's 50 still meant most players never saw all of the content of any given Yakuza game, which almost certainly meant they never met this guy:
Jo Amon, of the secretive Amon Clan of global assassins, is Kazuma "The Dragon of Dojima" Kiryu's self-appointed eternal rival. He might dress like an extra from The Matrix x Grease: You're The Neo That I Want, but he is not to be underestimated by any stretch. A man hardened by countless battles and hitman assignments, Jo Amon is equal to Kiryu's skill but far more ruthless and underhanded, and in every game is invariably the most dangerous foe Kiryu can face. To reach him almost always requires completing every substory, upon which you get the call to meet him in a special arena for a fight to the death to decide who is the strongest (to the latter's chagrin, Kiryu never actually deigns to finish off Jo Amon).
What each Jo Amon fight demands is not only full mastery over the game's combat engine, and ideally a Kiryu that has been upgraded to his maximum level and is stuffed with healing items, but a whole lot of patience to deal with what can only be described as "cheat engine bullshit." Amon is the only Yakuza character that can canonically command magical forces, for instance, and will not hesitate for a moment to sneak in military-grade technology or unexplained sci-fi nonsense to this "noble" duel if it'll help him destroy Kiryu once and for good. This also makes his fights, in addition to being a worthy challenge for any player looking for same, hilarious in hindsight due to the myriad ways Jo Amon (and the developers) can and will fuck with you.
Since so few Yakuza players ever do the legwork to reach Amon, I wanted to do a little rundown of all his encounters in the Yakuza series to give you all some idea of what I mean when I say Amon is cheap as hell and lives to troll you. He represents what I've always believed is the true reason superbosses exist: to give smartass players who have too much time on their hands a rude wake-up call with regards to their "mastery" of their beloved games. Why even become a video game designer if you can't code in a means to figuratively flip the bird to your more obsessive fans?
Warning: There are some non-story Yakuza spoilers here across the entire core franchise, as I go into each Amon fight in significant detail. If you'd rather go in blind, which I'd recommend if you're willing to do everything necessary to unlock them, feel free to skip parts or all of this week's blog. I'll have moved on from Yakuza by next week.
General Tactics
Though far from predictable, Jo Amon has a few characteristics and strategies that he carries with him into every fight. These are generally if not always applicable to any given Amon battle:
Health Bars Out the Wazoo: As brawlers, the Yakuza games are very fond of displaying full-length enemy health bars and then adding more bars on top, usually of different colors. It's a genre staple that goes as far back as Final Fight, if not even further. Amon frequently has way more health than any other opponent, and so you'll see several extra hues that don't appear anywhere else in those games. Even so, that might not always be the true extent of his HP - Jo Amon is very fond of rising back up once he appears to be finished.
Komaki Style: Among Amon's many talents, one is mimicry - the ability to copy the movesets of the enemies he faces. After being trashed by Kiryu in the first Yakuza, he returns in every subsequent game with the same fighting style that Kiryu himself possesses. This not only evens the playing field in terms of fighting prowess, but also means that Amon can use Tiger Drops just as effectively as Kiryu, and can occasionally block them as well. For those not acquainted with the Tiger Drop it's a frighteningly effective counter move when you have the timing down, capable of destroying most bosses in seconds. Still works well on Amon too, most of the time.
Heat Shield: An odd and very annoying trait Amon uses in many of his fights is an orange shield that appears around him when his health is critically low. This seems to diminish the attack strength of any move or weapon used against him by something like 80% - you're doing chip damage, at best, for the remainder of the fight once it appears. Worse, is that his hits seem to actively lower the player's heat gauge, making it harder to finish the fight with heat actions.
Hurricane Kick: Just run when he starts on his Tatsumaki Senpukyaku shit. It's a devastating and unstoppable move that can whittle your health to nothing in a blink of an eye, and is something of an Amon trademark. He'll only start busting it out once he's in critical Heat mode though.
I'm going release order here rather than in-game chronological order, since I want to chart the evolution of the Jo Amon fight. Since this is your first encounter, it's comparatively sedate, though still full of the typical bait and switches. For one, he pulls the fake death trick several times during the fight, each time popping back up with a new weapon: first a handgun, then grenades, then finally a tanto. It's really more of an endurance battle than anything else, and you only have nine inventory slots to work with in terms of accessories and health items.
One odd note with this encounter: most games give you a special accessory for defeating Amon, but this one just gives you ¥10,000,000. Hard to imagine what you might still need money for, beyond replacing everything you used up during the fight, but it doesn't hurt walking around with that much cash.
At first blush, this fight is even more straightforward than the last, with Amon using a mix of tanto, grenade, and handgun attacks from the outset. Besides some powerful charge specials, there's not a whole lot to the fight until you get his health down to about half, at which point the usual bullshit begins. This starts when he pulls a pair of 24th century Halo pistols out of nowhere and starts nailing you with gun kata. He's also more evasive at this stage, always creating space to pop you at a safe distance. This is then followed by a pair of orange lightsabers once he's close to death, which cannot be blocked as they stun upon hit (very easy to just get stun-locked to death here) though thankfully the fight is over as soon as you knock off the last health bar: no resurrecting mid-fight like the Undertaker.
Yakuza 2 is also where they start to establish just how single-minded Amon's quest for vengeance has become: he stole the Komaki Technique from Kiryu's teacher, Sotaro Komaki, in order to unlock its secrets to use against Kiryu. He'll also tell you how he "swam 10 laps around Iceland's frozen cliffs" to train for this fight. Definitely fleshed out his personality more this time around.
Yakuza 3's Amon immediately starts with the double lightsaber Star Wars cosplay, and like last time each hit is likely to stun you just long enough for the next hit to land. After that, he's back on gun kata and high evasion, though you thankfully don't have to go through several fake-out deaths before he gives up. The gun kata attacks can be really tough to avoid though, and tend to send you flying across the arena if you get caught in them. Real fan of Guile's Flash Kicks this time around also. Most dangerous of all is his occasional grenade toss (that look like spherical cartoon bombs) that scatters lots of explosive AoEs around the arena that can really rocket up the damage if you're caught in multiple instances at once: this explosive mine trick of his will continue be the worst part of most Amon fights moving forward, since it's very easy to lose track of what he's leaving around the arena while you're keeping your eyes on the target.
Yakuza 3 is also where the Amon meta story goes from good to great. To beat Kiryu, Amon commissions a Back to the Future Doc Brown lookalike to make a virtual reality video game machine that Amon can use to fight Kiryu as often as he likes until he's finally capable of defeating him. The good doctor eventually escapes after Amon kills an assistant, figuring his best chance at survival is to befriend the real Kiryu out in Kamurocho in the hopes that it'll deter Amon from chasing him down. That we now have futuristic sci-fi ridiculousness working in Amon's favor is where the legend of the frustrated assassin starts to really ramp up. The best part is that Amon admits Kiryu is the better warrior because of how well he can accumulate experience points, to which Kiryu has no response.
Yakuza 4's big new innovation involved Kiryu sharing the protagonist spotlight with three others: Akiyama, the smooth operator known for his sharp suits, fast kick-based martial arts, and effortlessly accruing large amounts of money; Saejima, a hulking yakuza jailbird with a fearsome reputation; and Tanimura, a mostly honest cop looking to do what's best for the maligned Chinese community in Kamurocho. Because there are four protagonists, there are four members of the Amon Clan to fight them: Akiyama takes on Kazuya Amon, who is equal to his speed; Saejima's foe is Jiro Amon, who is equal to his implacable bulk; and Tanimura fights Sango Amon, who is equal to his technical skills. It's also worth pointing out that each Amon "brother" looks like Jo Amon in a different wig/hat, so it might just be he cloned himself to boost his odds of winning. I wouldn't put it past him.
Kazuya is an evasion demon; he doesn't hit all that hard, but there comes a point in the fight where you'll simply whiff with every attack, including Akiyama's lightning fast Chun-Li kicks. Counters and Heat actions are generally the only ways to finish him off. Jiro's thing is that he has an enormous enchanted sledgehammer that hurts like hell if it connects, so you have to be a little more evasive with Saejima than you normally might and wait to pick the best moments to strike. Sango's whole deal is that he brings a SMG into the fight, which miraculously becomes two SMGs once he loses half his health. Tanimura's good at counters though, so his fight's probably easiest of these three.
The Jo Amon showdown with Kiryu is naturally the most challenging of the bunch. It starts with Jo attacking Kiryu with his own fighting style followed by the return of the fake out death, as he comes back with a second full bar of health upon defeat. After this, he'll randomly cycle through the attack patterns of his three brothers, while occasionally shooting black laser beams from space with his mobile phone which are close to insta-death attacks. I mean, if the Amon Clan can afford full body virtual reality machines, they've probably got the juice for an Akira-style orbital laser station.
Lore-wise, not much is new besides Jo Amon thinking he can win if he brings his brothers (or clones) along for a four-on-one fight. Kind of a wuss move if you ask me, but I guess he's getting desperate.
Like Yakuza 4, the Amon Clan takes into account the fifth game's multiple protagonists to present a suitable Amon opponent for each. Most notable of these is Noa Amon: the teenaged "archrival" of perennial abductee Haruka Sawamura and fellow musical performer. She takes on Haruka in the same manner Haruka fights all her aggressors: with a dance-off. Apparently, centuries of generational combat knowledge and harsh training regimens makes Noa the perfect pop idol as well as the perfect killing machine.
There are two things I love about Noa. The first is that she summons the same orbital laser that we saw in Yakuza 4, except it's only used here for pyrotechnics to throw Haruka off her routine. The second is that she, along with every other Amon Clan member, wears all black and has a pair of sunglasses, except hers are heart-shaped because even as a scion of an unstoppable family of assassins, she's adorable. Maybe she should think about joining Babymetal?
The Kiryu vs. Jo Amon fight is as cheap as ever, of course. His new gimmick this time is to turn golden (a version of Kiryu's "Dragon's Pride" mode, which is repurposed in later games as Extreme Heat mode) which makes him invincible (unless Kiryu has also activated his Dragon's Pride) and leaves trails of fire whenever he dashes around, which forces Kiryu to stop, drop, and roll to put it out. These power-up states are temporary, but seem to happen more frequently as Amon loses more health bars (I think he has like ten in this fight?). Closer to death, he'll start psychically throwing umbrellas at you, which after orbital lasers is kinda underwhelming but still well within the realm of fantasy, to put it mildly.
As Jo Amon will not canonically fight Kiryu for the first time until 2005, his fight in Yakuza 0 is against Goro Majima. Despite the new opponent, Jo Amon still fights in Kiryu's Komaki style. Of course, Kiryu has yet to learn the Komaki style by 1988, but then continuity isn't really something you need to worry about with Jo Amon, along with the laws of thermodynamics and the amount of damage a human body is theoretically able to withstand. Amon pulls out a tanto for the second part of the fight and adopts Majima's own Mad Dog of Shimano style, but getting into a knife fight with Majima is generally considered a bad idea. Hell, you're screwed even if you bring a gun to a knife fight with Majima.
It's advised to only use counters or heat actions in this fight. Why? Because Jo Amon has a counter to any normal attack where he hops back and appears to hit you with shuriken, but what he's actually doing is replacing the curatives in your inventory with pocket tissues and poison. Quaffing a "Staniman Spork," as opposed to the full-heal Staminan Spark, will drop Majima's HP to 1 and greatly reduce his heat gauge. It's a clever bluff: you're meant to think the pocket tissues are what he's replacing your inventory with, so you don't even notice that the near-identical poison potions are there too until you fall afoul of one. Drinking poison is bad enough without considering also that you've permanently lost a healing item with which to recover the damage.
However, if you think Jo Amon's inventory shenanigans is pure trolling, then nothing's going to prepare you for Kiryu's fight against the Amon Clan's patriarch So Amon. Not only does he walk into combat with an enormous cannon (weird coincidence that this and Bloodborne launched the same month) but he'll eventually summon a helicopter to drop patio furniture on you, and then psychically toss whichever chairs and tables missed you on the first sweep. The helicopter also drops bombs and invincibility pills for So, but you can get to the latter first to turn the tables, so to speak.
One little side-note here: the theme for the Amon fights in Yakuza 0 is Fiercest Warrior, which was introduced for the Amon fight in the jidaigeki spin-off game Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin. I guess because people liked it so much, it more or less became the Amon theme from that game onward (Yakuza 0 was the next to come along, but it also appears in Yakuza 6 and the two Kiwami games).
I was shocked to discover that not only were the Amon fight prerequisites greatly ameliorated - you only have to complete two specific substories instead of all of them - but Jo Amon showed up with only a single health bar. Of course, whatever false sense of security I had brewing was soon whipped away once I found out what Amon's new trick was for his Yakuza 6 appearance: drones and Roombas, each affixed with bombs and ready to get in your face or underfoot whenever you tried to close the distance for an attack.
In fact, the robot bombs do so much damage that they're pretty much insta-kills no matter which difficulty you're on. Only way to really survive them towards the end of the fight is to trigger your Extreme Heat mode, since you can't die while it's active. Beyond the explosive consumer electronics, this fight's about as normal as Jo Amon's been for a very long time. I guess it's true that some of the franchise's magic had worn away by this game, shark-punching aside.
Bonus note: Amon can be recruited for the game's Clan Creator system, where you fight little RTS battles on the streets of Kamurocho and the new setting Onomichi. Once you've completed the attached story to that mode, Amon shows up with his own armies as a series of ultra-tough bonus fights. Curiously, some of these fights even involve multiple Jo Amons. I guess he really did clone himself.
This is going to sound a little hypocritical, but since I've yet to play any of these games and may one day do so, I'm loath to look up what happens in their Amon fights. There are so few "oh what the hell is this garbage" moments in video games these days what with accessibility and quality-of-life features being so much more preponderant. I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing that designers are trolling their players less frequently but I'd like to hold onto the surprise of Amon's other nasty tricks a little while longer, especially since there are fewer equivalents willing to screw around with the player outside of the occasional Undertale. So, um, sorry for spoiling that same surprise about seven times over above? Uhhhhh... gotta go!
(By means of a send-off/apology, here's a medley of Amon themes from all his appearances. My favorite is probably the Kiwami 2 one. They really went all out with it.)
I'm sort of tying up a thread I began at the start of this month with the blog entry for Ara Fell (IGotW #177) where I ruefully reconsidered my stance on RPG Maker engine games and how I may have missed out by turning my nose up at them as a matter of course. The fodder of many a discount Indie bundle, most RPG Maker games are rudimentary facsimiles of JRPG classics back during the genre's 16-bit era heyday, with little narrative or mechanical innovation to call their own. However, that's not universally the case. I ruminated on this a little after writing about Ara Fell (originally made in RPG Maker 2003) and how there are so many other stand-outs I'd somehow forgotten about: weepy adventure games To the Moon and Rakuen, which used the top-down perspective to tell their stories without the engine's concomitant turn-based combat system; Yume Nikki and Corpse Party, which did something similar but with horror survival as the gameplay substitute; the exceptionally well-regarded LISA or Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, two RPGs I've not yet played but plan to; and this week's entry, SeaPhoenix's The Lost Art of Innkeeping, which also utilizes the engine of RPG Maker MV in a way its developers Enterbrain could not have foreseen.
As the name suggests, the goal of The Lost Art of Innkeeping isn't to plunder dungeons as a burly adventurer but to be the welcoming home-away-from-home for same, with protagonist Elinor fixing up and repurposing an old manor her eccentric Aunt Agatha left her, turning it into a hotel in order to pay off Agatha's immense debts. As with another anime business simulator, Recettear, the game recommends playing with a strict month-long time limit in which to pay off your balance due, forcing you to make smart and frugal choices to ensure maximum profits (though a "relaxed mode" alternative is also available). As guests show up, you need to modify your vacant rooms to best suit their requirements and preferences, and the game's complexity grows further with the amenities: these are fixed costs that apply to every room, like providing breakfasts or hiring help, that might lower your income for that day but could help to improve your inn's reputation and may even be cancelled out by the additional tips you receive. The game also continually provides tasks for you to do, from high priority missions like earning the next highest star rating to smaller, narrative-focused goals like chasing away a ghost or digging deeper into your aunt's affairs to find out what happened to her supposed fortune.
One of the oddest side-quests is a game-wide scavenger hunt for Dickens novels. Selling off the full collection is one of the ways you can pay off your debt sooner, though you could also choose to add them to the hotel's library to increase its appeal.
I'm not going to say it's an overly dense game: events tend to play out in a specific order along with unlocking new areas, facilities, or amenities, and appeasing your clientele is fairly straightforward once you get used to everybody's schedules and what they're looking for, and the game's "world" is only a handful of screens from the rooms of your hotel to the local village and its establishments. You start gaining more money towards the end of the game as your hotel improves in stature and renown, and there's many opportunities to make even more money if you keep your ear to the ground. The game's achievement system gives you some idea of what other possibilities exist, with a few extra guests and surprises for new game plus, so there's some degree of longevity even if you make your goal target and pay off the bank in time on your first run. Though I successfully completed the game it felt a little touch and go for a while, especially as I stubbornly felt the need to reach for the more challenging achievements regarding completion states (like never raising the prices of rooms, which definitely cut into my bottom line). There's also the fact that almost the entire game is built from third-party graphical and audio assets either included with RPG Maker MV or found freely online: this isn't so much a condemnation but an indication of the developers' level of budget. Considering the whole game is about the challenges of making ends meet, I found myself a bit more sympathetic about utilizing "programmer graphics" than usual.
On the left are optional triggers: each increases the happiness of the guests, and are sometimes required for the guest to stay at all. On the right are passives that are always in effect with no additional cost, and include decorations and facilities available in the nearby village. Early on there's also a few "negative amenities" that you really need to address quickly.
For all its budgetary flaws and shortcomings, The Lost Art of Innkeeping is capable of what life-sims like Stardew Valley do at their best: give you multiple reasons to get up in the morning. I'm speaking more figuratively, of course; there's plenty of little diversions beyond the gameplay core of arranging room furniture and wavering over hiring the chef and maid for the day despite the costs, and each fresh day tends to bring with it something new to check up on in the village, or a hint about a secret basement room, or the means to open up the entrance to a cave network behind the manor. New guests, though none are written particularly deeply, come with new recurring storylines and sets of variables to consider for their next visit, and spending money to make money is always a valid if worrisome consideration even if it's as minor as putting up curtains or giving the local baker cooking lessons. It's sweet, silly, only as stressful as the player wants to be, and full of enough ideas to fill its month-long calendar. I had a great time with it overall, and I could see it becoming a precursor to something much more in-depth and confidently built (with original assets, even) if it finds the support it deserves.
Everyone's naturally abuzz about the upcoming localization of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, otherwise known as Yakuza 7, but after starting 2018's Yakuza 6: The Song of Life over the weekend I've noticed that even prior to Like a Dragon's paradigm-shifting absence of the Dragon of Dojima and the introduction of a whole new turn-based structure to combat, the series had already been undergoing some major changes. Yakuza 6, which released between the Kiwamiremakes, feels considerably different to its more immediate predecessors in part because the developers wanted to tell a more intimate story about Kazuma Kiryu, his suddenly-comatose adopted daughter Haruka Sawamura, and her apparent infant child Haruto without losing focus with multiple character perspectives and the feature creep that continued to expand Yakuza's enormous catalog of incidental content from sequel to sequel.
As such, the game is streamlined in myriad ways, and I'm finding myself split between appreciating a condensed Yakuza experience that doesn't sacrifice that vital balance of serious drama and silly distractions, and missing a whole suite of side-activities and optional objectives that the developers deemed superfluous. That isn't to say that Yakuza 6 hasn't seen its fair shake of new improvements and features to compensate, just that a great culling has commenced; its victims, numerous and unexpected.
Gone, But Not (Yet) Forgotten
It occurred to me when building this list of activities that once graced every new entry but no longer is that I don't actually "miss" most of them in the conventional sense of being unhappy that they're absent. it's more to do with how I approached every Yakuza playthrough with the same mental checklist of goals to chase and "game completion" targets to hit, despite having little chance of ever reaching that coveted 100% for one obnoxiously grindy reason or another. The lack of each of the following carries with them a gap in that routine that I find myself a little further adrift, even if my actual mood when completing them in the past was often more obligatory than joyful.
In this era of open-world padding concerns, in which we commend each new genre entry that bucks the previous trends or attempts a more concise approach while in turn decrying to some degree "old souls" like Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima or any of Disgraced Developer™ Ubisoft's upcoming projects for steadfastly adhering to rote filler and map icon emesis, Yakuza 6 has definitely made smart downsizing choices here. Doesn't mean I can't call them out for trimming all that delicious, flavorsome fat regardless:
Phone Box Saving
A positive example of modernization finally hitting the Yakuza series. Y6 is, I believe, the first Yakuza game where all saving is done automatically on a regular basis. You can also make manual saves too, in case you need to go to the dark side and save-scum a situation, but the game lets you make these saves anywhere (provided you aren't in a fight or a mini-game). Definitely an appreciated change, and it's not like public phoneboxes make much sense in 2016. Likewise, there's no separate storage system: Kiryu now has pockets a mile deep.
Karaoke is still around, and I'm still a boss at it. Mostly unchanged, besides the way they display what icons are coming up, but a much-appreciated new feature is watching the movies separately: I'm usually too focused on the button prompts to see them.
UFO Catchers
I really wish the Yakuza games had found more to do with the UFO Catcher prizes besides letting them sit in your storage box once you'd caught one of everything. I would've enjoyed having somewhere to set up a little shrine of Sega-branded stuffed toys, even if it would be hard to imagine Kiryu putting any effort into something as cute as that (then again, he spends a lot of this game inside a mascot costume and playing with local cats, so you never know). Instead, since they serve no practical purpose and I guess the developers were sick of everyone complaining about the physics involved, they've been removed from all the Club Segas to make room for "Easy Mode" cabinets of Super Hang-On and OutRun. If I want my own Opa-Opa, I'll just have to play the Fantasy Zone machine like everyone else.
Pool
This one hurt. I love some video game pool, even if I'm terrible at it (pretty lifelike then), and knocking around balls in the mature smoky atmosphere of Yakuza's bars was a great means of slowing down a little and enjoying the nightlife of Kamurocho without having to punch out a dozen portly thugs in tracksuits every five minutes. I usually tried to complete most of the pool challenges in every game, and I particularly liked the "puzzles" where it set up a specific shot that you needed to figure out. The real salt in the wound is that they dropped pool but kept darts.
Cards/Gambling
This feels like a big absence because of the traditional portrayals of yakuza. My knowledge of old yakuza movies is somewhat limited, but there's a common romantic image of them spending their time gambling in seedy dens with hanafuda card games like Koi-Koi or dice games like Cee-Lo and Cho-Han. In fact, these den of iniquities usually played a major role in the Yakuza series, from The Florist's lavish underworld to the city's homeless putting together a multi-floor casino in an abandoned building they'd taken over, though the parlor games themselves were always incidental. I never did get a hang of how scoring works in Koi-Koi, though the dice games were simple/fun enough for a few minutes. (Could be they're just really well hidden in Yakuza 6...)
Shogi
Bye, Felicia. (Mahjong's still around, but at least I know the rules to that.)
Golf
Maybe it was unrealistic to expect Yakuza 6 to bring golf back since it was already relegated to a driving range in Yakuza 5, but Kiryu is old now and there are certain expectations for men his age. I guess they never really found a way to "Yakuza it up" like they did with cab driving or wild animal hunting. I'm not saying they should have Kiryu rework some punk's face with a 7 Iron in a bunker trap every other hole, but maybe a more exciting user interface could've done the trick.
Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey
Only around for one game and then gone forever. Your time came too soon, Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey.
One of the new mini-games to replace the old. This is... um. I don't know how to explain why this is in here.
Lockers
Well, sorta. They've been replaced with big safes that have nearby keys you have to find first. Same deal, but fewer in number and with way less running around involved. I can't tell you how many cumulative hours I've spent looking for tiny twinkles on the ground so I could roll the dice on some sweaty locker treasure. Going from something like 50 or 100 keys per game to just ten makes much more sense, and now the sparkly items I keep finding are these weird photographs of past Yakuza characters instead. It's a new mystery to solve, and honestly that was the best part of that sparkly scavenger hunt.
M Store
Looks like Poppo finally won the war of the conbinis in Kamurocho, because they have twice as many branches in Yakuza 6 and M Store has vanished. The only thing left of them is an empty storefront on Nakamichi Alley. At least there was a safe key in there: I like to think of it as a reward for all my years as a valued patron, for as much good as it did. (In gameplay terms this kinda sucks because the two stores had slightly different inventories, but that's been less of a concern in Y6 so far with its lack of inventory limits and more emphasis on vending machine drink buffs.)
Magazines at the Conbinis
Related to the above. The Yakuza games have always prided themselves on their verisimilitude to Japanese urban life, and one way it could inject some realism was with a rack of modern-day Japanese magazines for you to peruse in any of the game's convenience stores. They weren't magazines you could read: Kiryu (or whoever the protagonist was at the time) simply gave you a rundown of the type of content each periodical covered. Later Yakuza games even let you check out the smaller nearby rack of manga. Kinda fun, but if I was looking for places to cut content and didn't want to jump through the usual hoops to ask a bunch of publishers for permission, I guess this would be an immediate consideration for some spring-cleaning.
La Marche
Haughty, up-market luxury goods store La Marche has long been a staple on the lengthy Showa Street that makes up the bottom edge of the Kamurocho map. I believe this is the first game where they've become inaccessible. They've revamped the hostess system so that gifts aren't a concern, so there's no reason to pop into La Marche any more for Italian handbags and French perfume, but I miss just going in there to loiter and make the cashiers nervous about the big unfashionable yakuza dude in their midst.
Another mini-game: Don't shake the baby. Unless he asks for it.
Champion District
The lack of La Marche, M Store, and Ryugujo (The Dragon Palace, aka the homeless-run casino) is bad enough but they even had to take out the entire Champion District. This cramped labyrinth was home to several bars and a common place to find substory triggers and collectibles in previous games, so I'd always make it a priority to sweep it whenever I was passing by. It never really served any purpose you couldn't get from Bantam and Kamurocho's other bars, but I liked the vibe of those tiny hole-in-the-wall drinking establishments. Apparently the whole district is being "renovated" during Y6, so I'd be curious to see if it shows up looking completely different in Judgment. Or if it's just a parking lot.
Coliseum
There's no Underworld that I'm aware of, so that means there's no underground arena either. A major timesink in any Yakuza game, the goal here is to beat each tournament to get the best rewards and truly test your fighting prowess if you're at the point where you're stomping all the games' bosses (unlikely, but you might just be that good). The real reason you're there is to take on every one of the randomly-determined rogue's gallery of underworld fighters and weirdos, which often included American boxers, hulking Muay Thai warriors, luchadors and pro-wrestlers, nerds with laser swords and grenades, clowns, serial killers, an actual fucking bear, and legendary Konami composer Akira Yamaoka in Michael Jackson cosplay. I'll miss getting to fight that crazy bunch again.
Still Around, But Different
These mini-games have been significantly reworked, to the extent that they're hardly recognizable any more. This is another part of Yakuza 6's process to streamline and modernize a lot of the content it has hauled over from sequel to sequel, though I'm here to weigh in on how much more improved these activities have become.
Darts
All right, so I may have intimated earlier that I've never really cared for darts either in or outside of video games, but the analog stick finesse that so often buried any chance I had of improving at this mini-game has now been replaced with a more accessible timing gauge. All you have to do is hold the cursor in place - there's a small amount of drift, so you can't just wait for the timing slider to line up forever without readjusting the aim - and then let it fly once the timing gauge is dead center. Not nearly as tough as it looks, though it's rare that I get all three shots where they're supposed to be. It's tolerable, which I'm thankful for because Y6 has a few darts-related substories.
Fishing
The Yakuza fishing mini-games have always resembled those in other JRPGs: you cast a line, wait for a bite, and then reel it in while adjusting for the fish's behavior. Final Fantasy XV is probably the apex of this particular type of mini-game - I can only assume the devs spent so long tweaking it that they forgot to write half the story - but Yakuza's version was always decent enough. Y6's is very different, however: Onomichi's spearfishing is a first-person, on-rails shooter set underwater against many aquatic opponents that I've taken to calling "Panzer Lagoon." It's way more intense now, though it's easy to get bored of the same three levels. Still, you can make a huge amount of cash with the right gear and money is always vital in the Yakuza series.
Fishing got weird.
Hostesses
Y6 has done something interesting with the old hostess mini-game, which relied a lot - to my chagrin - on your social and conversational prowess. This effectively boiled down to a lot of multiple choice prompts in the middle of dialogues, the outcome of which either involved you getting closer to your partner or her calling the cops. In Y6, you have a selection of dialogue prompts that you play like cards, switching out your hand whenever you find yourself with useless options. Some of these dialogue cards still lead to multiple choice scenarios, but for the most part you're actually working with stacking bonuses: each card is either plainly conversational, stylishly "dapper," playfully sexy, or has a goofy party vibe. Huh, pretty much exactly like the four Ninja Turtles even.
The End!
I'll spare you from going through every Yakuza 6 side-activity, but suffice it to say there's a lot that's been tossed out or reworked. It all ultimately works in Yakuza 6's favor however, keeping itself a more tightly-paced experience, as does the Yakuza team getting over the idea that everything must carry from game to game in case there's some really annoying fan out there who'd be mad if you took anything out (I realize the irony of that statement, trust me). After the bloatedness of Yakuza 5, though, Yakuza's been trying to find the right balance to keep the series' reputation as a prime screwing around simulator without spending an obscene amount of time and resources revamping all these legacy mini-games for each new console generation (Yakuza 6 being the first PS4-exclusive). If a Yakuza game only takes me 50 hours instead of 100, that's probably for the best. I tend to get carried away.
In conclusion, Yakuza 6 is pretty awesome and I'm not at all mad that they took out pool, even though I really liked the pool. Totally not mad. At all.
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