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All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-02-18

Right now it feels like the calm before the storm. This year's seen a lot of big games already, but the final day of February and the first week of March threatens to drown us all: Horizon: Zero Dawn, Torment: Tides of Numenera, the release of the Nintendo Switch and the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. On top of that, we'll have PAX East and all its shenanigans happening a few days later. I don't envy the Bomb Crew as they struggle to fit their schedule around all of the above.

I'll get around to this soon enough. At least I'm all caught up with Souls now.
I'll get around to this soon enough. At least I'm all caught up with Souls now.

My own schedule is a little more relaxed, of course, since I stopped buying games new many years ago. I'll have to go on spoiler avoidance duty for a while, especially as Mass Effect Andromeda and Persona 5 show up a few weeks from now, but the advantage of staying a few years behind the curve is that I always have plenty to catch up with. Despite picking up two major 2016 games towards the end of last year - Dishonored 2 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - I've spent most of this year playing Xenoblade Chronicles X (released 2015) and Indie games of various vintages instead. The game I started this week, Yakuza 4, was released in Europe back in 2011. There's always that minor compulsion to play new games as they hit the zeitgeist - I'm certainly looking forward to trying out Nioh and Yakuza 0 eventually from what I've been hearing - but it passes fairly quickly once people have moved onto the next big release, allowing me to enjoy those games in a soundproof bubble months later where I can better ratiocinate and articulate my opinions.

I've often considered what my gaming schedule would be like if it suddenly became my job to review games. On the one hand, that'd be awesome. It'd be a career that would combine my two favorite hobbies: playing games and writing about games. On the other, I'd have to make major adjustments to how I approach games on an individual and general basis. By which I mean, I tend to stack up huge backlogs of games I'm curious to play, and my nature as a completionist means I laser-focus on every one of them until they're 100% complete (or as close to 100% as my sanity allows) before moving to the next. "Curious to play" here comprises both old and new, as various games can generate positive word of mouth days, months and even years after release. I'd have to greatly decrease the number of non-contemporary games I'm playing to do my job effectively.

It's probably why I envy Giant Bomb's approach. They don't feel compelled to complete and review everything that drops on their desks; they usually play just enough to lend some authority to the Quick Looks they host, and then stick with whichever games they consider significant enough to review (or are enjoying the most). Sure, they'd need to complete a fair number of new games in a year to properly argue for them during the GOTY discussions, but the benefit of a personality-driven site means we can vicariously live through whatever they decide to play, whether that's @jeff's frequent dives into the dusty annals of his massive game collection or @drewbert making glacial progress in Final Fantasy 6, blinking in disbelief at its various twists and turns as the internet informs us he is wont to do. There's value in discussing games that have been out for a while, especially as they relate to new games or games yet to be released, and I can respect any outlet that gives a notable amount of its coverage to the games of yesteryear.

Speaking of old games, I don't believe I played anything more recent than 2015's Adventures of Pip this week. Here's a full round-up of my written content:

Project Eden? Surprisingly OK!
Project Eden? Surprisingly OK!
  • We get controversial with The Top Shelf this week, because you know how it is with us modern video game critics and our desire to shock the audience. I summarily dispatched Metal Gear Solid 2 and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 - two of the most beloved games from that generation - simply so I could get more clicks for that feature from angry commentators. All right, so it's actually more that this is an entirely subjective series intended to narrow down my favorite PS2 games from my collection and not simply listing the best PS2 games from some abstract objective standpoint, but still. Fake news, am I right? What kind of alternative fact world must I live in to not find Raiden cartwheeling off strut walkways constantly while arguing with his fiancĂ©e deeply irresistible? (Why do I sound so defensive all of a sudden...?)
  • The Indie Game of the Week is the aforementioned Adventures of Pip, a solid if unexciting platformer that I wish I could've found more to write about. What it is is a perfectly perfunctory example of its genre, the sort of game that eludes attention simply because it isn't great enough to shout from the rooftops about nor terrible enough to mock mercilessly. It left the door open for an expanded sequel, so I hope it saw enough goodwill and sales to make that happen. There's a good foundation here, a workable proof of concept to be taken even further, and thus it might take a more elaborate and confident sequel to fully capitalize on it. Wouldn't be the first Indie game to take that evolutionary route; Evoland and Legend of Grimrock are two series that come to mind that felt the temperature of the water with their first entries and nailed what they were aiming for with the follow-up.

Yakuza 4

No Caption Provided

I have to say I've been very impressed with what I've played of Yakuza 4 so far. Initially, I was a mite apprehensive about its new approach: instead of simply following the scowly underworld legend Kazuma Kiryu on another conspiracy-rich adventure of honor and humanity among the yakuza, the game splits its attention between him and three new protagonists.

The way the game does this is by presenting each character's tale consecutively. Rather than the same events being shown from four different angles, which usually tends to be the case with scenario-based games, each new character is thrust into Kamurocho after the events of the previous. In a sense the game has a larger story going on in the background which each character dips in and out of, but places their own personal struggles in the foreground. It's a way to convey the usual Yakuza story of a massive conspiracy that needs to be unwound piece by piece while also allowing for a lot of smaller, more intimate character studies. It's definitely working for me so far.

I've only played a significant amount of the first two characters as of writing. What's surprising is how different the two feel to play, how they approach problems and how the game is configured differently to accommodate them both:

Akiyama's a fun character. Self-assured and cool in a way that Kazuma's too noble to be.
Akiyama's a fun character. Self-assured and cool in a way that Kazuma's too noble to be.

The moneylender Shun Akiyama has a confident air that comes from losing it all, hitting rock bottom and then coming back from that precipice to the abyss with a small windfall that became a hard-earned undisclosed fortune. He uses that fortune to loan money to the desperate and needy with zero interest, but with the one proviso that they have to demonstrate how strong their conviction is with an elaborate test or two. Akiyama greatly respects anyone with the determination to pull themselves back from the brink as he did, and through that we discover his humanity beneath the well-tailored suits and cocky, laid-back bravado. As a combatant, Akiyama is deliberately beginner-friendly as the first protagonist you embody, with a fighting style that relies a lot on fast unstoppable combos and versatile Heat actions - the series mainstay that has you perform powerful context-sensitive attacks with whatever's handy, whether that's a nearby wall or a signpost you just picked up.

And I thought Kazuma was too scowly and quiet...
And I thought Kazuma was too scowly and quiet...

The escaped convict Taiga Saejima is a whole different beast, however. A yakuza who sacrificed his own future for the sake of elevating his boss and family, he acquires a legendary reputation for murdering eighteen rival yakuza in one night on his own, spending the next twenty-five years in prison on death row (that Japan has capital punishment was news to me, but they're apparently the only first-world country that still has it besides the States). Though taciturn and hard to warm to initially, small glimpses of his humanity slowly come through; he manages to earn the trust of the treacherous Go Hamazaki from Yakuza 3 during a botched jailbreak, and then Kiryu himself after he washes up on his Okinawan orphanage's beach. When forced to fight another man to the death in Kage's underground arena for some information on the whereabouts of his beloved yakuza boss, who had long since fallen out of grace after the events 25 years ago, he not only flat out refuses to end the other fighter's life but chastizes the audience for calling out for blood, emphasizing the trauma his murderous past has caused him with tears in his eyes. As a man who has been kept out of civilization since 1985, it's fun to walk around the Kamurocho of 2010 to see his reactions to various modern developments, getting into trouble with shady types for misunderstanding what digital media is or wondering why the local Club Sega is bright and cheerful and not the dark, moody arcades of his Hang-On and Space Harrier days. It's not quite full Shenmue, but he has some amusing thoughts as he approaches Kamurocho's many establishments from the perspective of a man out of time. Notably, he refuses to get involved with hostesses or karaoke. His combat style, meanwhile, incorporates a lot of charge attacks; in a sense, the game's going for the common fighter dynamic of quick, combo-heavy characters and slow, charge-heavy characters. It takes a while to adjust to his lack of speed after spending a number of hours with Akiyama, but once you get into the rhythm of hitting enemies so hard that they've barely recovered in the time it takes to charge another haymaker, Saejima's no slouch.

It's not simply enough that these two characters fight differently, have a whole different set of substories to follow and a different perspective on the world, but each has their own specific and in-depth mini-games to get lost in. The Yakuza series is renowned for its side-activities of course, and Yakuza 4 even brings back the Japanese-centric activities that were removed from the Yakuza 3 localization: hostess clubs, shogi and mahjong. 4 also introduces pachinko, which I'm not stoked about playing for the sake of a trophy after adding a seemingly endless procession of Super Famicom pachi games to the wiki, and keeps its various sporty mini-games like fishing, golf, bowling, darts, billiards and the batting cage. The UFO catchers, the tactical shoot 'em up Boxcelios, karaoke, the many dice and card gambling games and the arena make a return too, and the game's even added table tennis and a thirsty massage mini-game as well. Back to my original thought, each character also has two distinct mini-games of their own: with Akiyama, it's combat training with an ex-military nutcase that unlocks a number of extra abilities, and recruiting and training hostesses for his club, Elise. The latter is the most elaborate, with a whole system around developing stats such as "conversation" or "wit" and dressing each hostess up to maximize their appeal. It's a little creepy, as is anything involving hostesses, but I can't fault how elaborate it all is. Saejima has a fun little mini-game where he helps a fellow homeless person dig out tunnels to find treasure, as well as his own take on a character-raising game where he works with amateur arena fighters to turn them into martial art masters. Similarly, that involves a lot of increasing stats through rigorous training sessions balanced with letting the student rest and recuperate before they can burn out. In both cases, you get occasional cutscenes and dialogue that lets you understand the human beings behind the stats and regimens, and it's remarkable how much of the game's great writing and jokes are hidden in these optional activities. While I'm loath to tell anyone how to play a game "properly", if you're playing a Yakuza game and avoiding the substories and mini-game then I might suggest that you're playing them wrong. There's very few open-world games I can recall that present a similar argument for pursuing side stuff as rigorously as the main objectives; The Witcher 3 and possibly Saints Row 2 come to mind.

This guy's up next. Tanimura the cop. It'll be interesting to see Kamurocho from the
This guy's up next. Tanimura the cop. It'll be interesting to see Kamurocho from the "other side" for a change.

Anyway, this is a phenomenal game and a reminder of why I'm happy that the Yakuza series is finally gaining some wider acknowledgement through the critically-acclaimed Yakuza 0. They're not the kind of games you can play one after the other in quick succession - you'll get very sick of wandering through the nigh-identical versions of Kamurocho each game presents for that length of time - but it's a series I'm always happy to revisit every eighteen months or so. By the end of next week, I hope to see the other two protagonists - one of whom I'm very familiar with already - and be closer to a final appraisal for the game.

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