Glad to see cross code getting some more love, one of the best games I've played in years, going to miss Ben and his excellent taste in games, thanks for all the fun dude
third eye blind played a back to school thing at my college in 2009 and I got the crowd to chant "play jumper" an the lead singer flipped me off, it was a good time.
I really liked everything in Yakuza that wasn't the Dragon Quest-ass battle system, I've always disliked the squishy, vague style of Dragon Quest, so them adopting so much of it kinda bummed me out, plus like Ben mentioned, I don't just think they put a nasty grind at the end, it actually feels like the end of the game isn't balanced; some regular enemies who were no danger to my party have massive health pools, requiring me to do tens of thousands of damage to them while they do 5-6 to me.
Hard disagree about the story though, they somehow are able to constantly oneup the twisty melodrama from game to game to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the Tojo clan became like the Fast an Furious crew, running international spy missions, I love it
as someone whos still been traveling for work during all this lemme tell you, it varies wildly based on country. In the US its lawless (obviously) in Germany it's a check-in system, in Korea its a much stricter check-in, or if you work for the US gov't like I do you get quarantined in an army barracks for two weeks; it's kinda wild.
It's like the Zero Escape games but with cool tactical battles instead of frustrating puzzle rooms, it kicks ass, I was worried when I saw it wasn't going to be an action game but I should have trusted Vanillaware to make choosing 'missile' on a list feel as good as stabbing a dude in Muramasa.
Between watching this and playing through Andromeda finally I gotta say, maybe the writing in Mass Effect was never actually that good? on a re-watch 2 really fell flat for me, in this Shepard gets to neatly clean up basically every major lore moment from the series, and huge chunks of Andromeda just don't make sense on a technical level, also has some ROUGH colonial/savior shit.
Been alternating between Warframe and Atelier Ryza, there are 5? Atelier games on PS4 now, it's basically a JRPG where your main goal is to gather material and craft increasingly powerful gear; the crafting system is super granular (every item you gather has unique properties that can be transferred into your crafted stuff). My ultimate goal is, as with all Atelier games, to spend 60-80 hours designing a grenade that can one-shot whatever god is the optional endgame boss.
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