After a deeply unpleasant week for a number of reasons (some dental-related, some heat-related), I'm looking forward to some peace and quiet to push ahead with Yakuza 5 - which might take me the rest of the year at the pace I'm moving, let alone the rest of July - and catch up with a lot of other backlog items across various media during the drought each summer brings. I think that's going to be my intro this week; I'm really not feeling it this month.

All right, maybe I can indulge in some backlog retrospectives, since that's always a comfortable subject for me. Since I took the trouble of setting my PS3 back up to play Yakuza 5, I had a quick glance at all the other games sitting on the ol' XMB (that's the Xross Media Bar for all you post-post-millennials reading this) that remain unplayed. Many of these inevitably find their way onto my annual "Lists of Shame" with multiple consecutive appearances, though since buying the PS4 a few years back I've not been particularly assiduous in finishing my previous course before starting the next, so to speak.

What follows is a quick rundown of the unplayed PS3 games I own and my level of desire to complete them (in letter grade form) if I'm being brutally honest with myself:

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - I was supposed to start this one shortly after completing Metal Gear Solid V back in 2016, to finish a "Mento Reacts" series of MGS blogs (and so I can watch the Metal Gear Scanlon series without worrying about spoilers). Instead, I mostly forgot it existed, thanks in part to 2016 being the year I bought my PS4. As someone who primarily plays MGS for the spectacle and only secondarily for the actual gameplay, MGR would appear to deliver ample amounts of both, so it it's definitely one of the PS3 games I intend to complete. Eventually. (A-)
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Part of a not-inconsiderable list of JRPGs I've let pile up, Cold Steel is regularly given rave reviews by various people on my Twitter feed trying it out for the first time, and I always feel a slight pang of regret that they got around to it before I did despite owning the game for a couple of years now (and watching the sequel go on sale several times since, which I refuse to buy before playing the original). Trails of Cold Steel shares a lot of DNA with Trails in the Sky, a game I thoroughly enjoyed and has its own sequels I really need to check out. I feel like I did my due diligence to Falcom this year by playing Ys VIII (also incredible, provided you have a version that isn't completely busted) but there's always room for more of their RPGs. (A-)
• Steins;Gate - Probably my most recent PS3 purchase, bought because I've been interested in some of the better regarded visual novels out there in my ongoing probe into the many ways a video game can effectively tell a story that a movie or book could not. Visual novels are certainly more book-like than any other sub-genre of adventure game (I mean, it has "novel" right in the title), but the visual accompaniments and - for Steins;Gate especially - the amount of timeline deviations from player decisions elevates it to an extent. I am slightly intimidated by it still, if that's the right word, because of the amount of extra material there is out there in its franchise. If I let myself get sucked in, that could be another huge expansive fandom to draw away my attention. (B+)
• Tales of Graces F - Graces F by all accounts is one of the more middling Tales entries, and I've just relegated it to the backburner again by recently purchasing Tales of Berseria - a far better regarded entry. Yet, I'm someone who adores this franchise and regularly regrets that so few ever seem to get localized into English and sold somewhere accessible to Europeans. I've played nine of the sixteen core entries: the other seven include Tales of Destiny 2 and Tales of Rebirth (both Japan only), Tales of Legendia (Japan and North America only), Tales of Hearts (commercially available here but only for the Vita, a system I don't own), Tales of Xillia 2 (available, but I haven't bought it yet), and Tales of Graces and Tales of Berseria (the two I do own but have yet to play). There will come a time, soon I suspect, where I'll have run out of Tales again. If for no other reason, I bought Graces to ensure that doesn't happen. (B)
• The Last of Us - I'm really dragging my heels with this one. I know it's a well-made game - even if it wasn't by Naughty Dog, it's been hit with so many accolades regardless - but I'm not sure I have it in me to deal with how bleak and unpleasant the subject matter is supposed to be. Misery's sort of my default state, not to become too much of a downer, so I hardly need to invite more of it into my life. Yet, there are certain games that make all those "n Games to Play Before You Die" lists, and The Last of Us is regularly one of them. I sort of owe it to myself to see what the fuss is about, even if I eventually decide I can't finish it. Maybe when that sequel comes out. (B-)
• Catherine, Rage, Tokyo Jungle, Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement, Malicious, Atelier Rorona: Alchemist of Arland, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and several PS1 RPGs - At this point, I'm less inclined to make any big promises about completing these. Some, like Catherine and Atelier Rorona, have remastered versions if I'm really invested in playing them. Others, like Rage, Malicious and Vandal Hearts: FoJ, have such so-so reputations that I might be safe in skipping them, as much as I'd like to see what the original Rage is like before its sequel shows up. The one item on that list that makes me rueful are the PS1 games that - for some reason - have yet to be rereleased on PS4. They include some classic titles like The Legend of Dragoon, Threads of Fate and Wild ARMs 2 that have all aged a lot, but there are definitely times when I just want to sink my teeth into a PS1-era JRPG I've not seen before, as someone who grew up loving the things. It almost feels like there are new JRPGs coming out with that particular era in mind - most notably this year's Lost Sphear and Octopath Traveller. Since I'm so well-stocked for JRPGs right now it'll probably be several years before I run out again, and by then these games will be even older and more antiquated. I might be better off seeing what the nostalgia RPG industry of today has for me instead. (C-F)

Speaking of nostalgic RPGs, we have a double dose of exactly that with this week's blogging:

• The Indie Game of the Week was another self-inflicted disappointment with Kingsway, an RPG with a neat framing gimmick - literally, as it involves managing desktop windows - but hampered by roguelike mechanics I've long grown antipathetic towards. My eternal hope is that a game's strengths are enough to overcome my distaste for the endless cycle of rebirth that roguelikes are predicated on, but they're never sufficient. Fortunately, as already stated, I have plenty of regular RPGs to play elsewhere so I think I can stick to platformers, adventure games and other miscellany for this feature in the near future. (As for the game: I think it's great but for the roguelike elements. I'd happily play it to its conclusion if it was built for single one-and-done style runs.)
• It's another SNES week with the SNES Classic Mk. II and Episode XIV: Soul-fége (I did not get enough credit for that pun FYI) looks at a couple of games that this feature seems to see regularly: a Japanese-only cutesy platformer (which this time was Hudson's DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure, the sequel to Milon's Secret Castle for NES) as the Candidate and a much-loved JRPG from my back catalogue (Quintet's Soul Blazer, the first in a series of SNES RPGs that are very important to me) as the Nominee. In the midst of a hellish week, it was nice to shut myself inside my wheelhouse for a spell.

Addenda

TV: Black Lagoon (Season 1)

There are times when I might pluck something out of my enormous backlog on nothing but a whim, though I've noticed more frequently of late that those choices are less than random: for instance, I might grab a game off the shelf because the series it belongs to has suddenly re-entered the zeitgeist with news of a sequel or a remaster. I suppose there is an element of FOMO about it; I already get that a lot of that with brand new releases that I stubbornly refuse to shell out full price for, not until months later when it becomes part of a sale or otherwise depreciated in value and everyone's stopped talking about it.

Black Lagoon was an odd case like that - something that I'd added to a list of anime to check out back at the start of this year - but only became relevant suddenly in the past week because of its presence in Giant Bomb's Anime Expo panel, where Dan was immediately smitten by the audacity of a flying boat firing torpedoes at a helicopter. The actual series is marginally more serious than that, though it can still be silly and indulgent in the ways you'd expect (and hope). Based around the South China Sea, the crew of the Black Lagoon ship - otherwise known as the Lagoon Company - are either a group of pirates, smugglers or mercenaries depending on who is paying them for what job. We're introduced to the team - Dutch, the pragmatic leader; Benny, the chill tech guy who has long since acclimated to this life; and Revy, the gun-toting borderline psychopathic muscle of the team and easily the one who sees the most focus by the show, no doubt due to her being a half-dressed femme fatale - via the team's newest member, the quiet but hardly timid Japanese salaryman Rock.

The first season of twelve episodes are really a bunch of shaggy dog stories meant to introduce this setting, this mercenary team, and their various allies and enemies in the underworld of this corner of the planet. There's a definite Cowboy Bebop vibe to the composition of the team and to the way episodes tend to progress at various speeds depending on the emergency of the current situation. There'll be quiet (if suspenseful) dialogue scenes one moment, and fast-paced car chases and shoot-outs the next. It doesn't quite manage "cool" to the same degree as Cowboy Bebop (and, honestly, that'd be a difficult bar to pass) but it does its earnest best to be as entertaining as possible, while still finding room for a little character development and weaving longer story threads that may come to fruition far later on. It sounds like the second season intends to stick more to the episodic adventures rather than the character development, which is a shame in some ways but perhaps what its audience wanted most from the adaptation. At any rate, there's only one more season left (and a brief OVA series to follow) so I'll probably catch up with it all soon enough.

Movie: Westworld (1973)

I saw this movie for pretty much the same reason as Black Lagoon: the second season of the Westworld TV show has been in heavy discussion of late and it reminded me how much I've been meaning to finally watch the original movie source. It's also another on the "Simpsons reference" checklist, invoked notably Season 5's "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" (in which Bart is witness to a non-crime at Freddie Quimby's birthday party, but only after being chased by a robotic Principal Skinner across some incongruous desert wastelands just outside the town of Springfield) and Season 6's "Itchy & Scratchy Land" (where the android Itchys and Scratchys go insane in a futuristic theme park where nothing can "possib-lie go wrong" and start terrorizing the guests, specifically the Simpson family). I've been listening to the Talking Simpsons podcasts heavily of late, and I've found myself building a mental checklist of movie references to investigate later.

Westworld is what I would consider classic 70s sci-fi: take a great futuristic high-concept premise, in this case a theme park filled with realistic androids that let you act out your fantasies, and then expand that to a lean feature-length movie with plenty of suspense if not too much out-and-out action. Director and writer Michael Crichton, who would find even greater success taking the same idea and supplanting robots for dinosaurs with Jurassic Park twenty years later, does a great job in building the tension of what's going to happen, with more than half the movie simply setting the stage for what Westworld is (it's actually one of three "sets", along with Medievalworld and Romanworld, that comprise the high-price resort Delos) and the portentous mechanical problems the resort's higher-ups try to sweep under the rug. When the inevitable does happen, it's staged almost like a zombie movie: you see snippets of the immediate devastation of the malfunctioning robots turning on the guests, but it's over very quick and the rest of the movie is eerily silent as the last few survivors escape their pursuers.

Now, there was plenty I knew about the movie going in. I knew Yul Brynner, known only as "the Gunslinger", was the movie's chief antagonist who chases the main protagonist Peter Martin halfway across the park. I knew about James Brolin's role as Martin's friend John Blane, who had already been to the park once and was determined to show his buddy a good time and help him forget about his divorce. I knew about the high-tech (for the 70s, at least) underground of the park, and its network of stark white tunnels. Honestly, almost all of that came from the above Simpsons episodes, which were evidently Westworld references but not ones I immediately recognized without knowing the source material. However, there were a few surprises: I didn't know Dick Van Patten - a comedic actor who pops up in a lot of Mel Brooks movies, like the King of Druidia in Spaceballs, and has a similarly comic relief role here as a nebbish banker trying his best to be a Wild West badass - was in this movie, and I barely recognized a very young Majel Barrett as the sassy madame of Westworld's robot brothel. I didn't recognize Peter Martin's actor, Richard Benjamin, but he apparently became better known as a director after the 1970s.

Reading about the movie after having seen it revealed some fascinating details. Apparently Crichton was incredibly stressed about the success of the movie, re-editing large parts of it to make it less dull and tossing out an alternative ending where the Gunslinger is destroyed by a medieval torture rack. The heavily pixellated "robot vision" filter used to show us how the Gunslinger views the world with his infra-red eyesight employed a very primitive form of digital image processing, and was apparently the first film to do so, which I feel like is a precursor to the extraordinary effects employed on Jurassic Park - it's apparent to me now that any fan of Jurassic Park owes themselves a Westworld viewing as well, as there's plenty of connective tissue, right down to Crichton's underlying message that business executives will happily ignore any and all warning signs of an unpredictable new technology if it interferes with their bottom line (which was kinda the moral of Congo too, albeit with killer gorillas instead of dinos or robots). At any rate, I'm happy to have checked off another significant 1970s sci-fi movie from my To Watch list, and filled in another major missing cultural touchstone regularly invoked by classic The Simpsons.

Game: Yakuza 5 (2012/2015)

I really think I underestimated just how long one this particular Yakuza game was going to take me. With something like fifty legit hours on the clock (it's actually closer to 80 but I do leave this PS3 on a lot, which probably isn't recommended in this hot weather) I'm still on the second "part" of the game, of a total of five parts not including the finale. Each of these parts feels almost like a full game on their own so far; definitely the size and scale of a more compact open world game, like an InFamous Second Son.

I completed Kazuma Kiryu's part last week, and this week - whenever I've had the chance to play - has been Taiga Saejima's time to shine. In addition to another interminable prison sequence, Saejima's section of the game can be broken up into two sections: the time he spends with traditional mountain hunters, following a story related to a reclusive outsider and the "monster bear" Yama-oroshi, and then the time spent in Sapporo's fictional Tsukimino district chasing leads relating to a certain newsworthy event that was first mentioned at the end of Kiryu's chapter (which suggests that all these parts aren't necessarily happening concurrently). The city stuff is about what you'd expect: though there's only a few story-critical locations to check out, the tiger's share of Saejima's substories are found here along with a lot of other minor side-quest stuff like treasure map collectibles and mini-games. I appreciate that the cops, which made Saejima's chapter in Yakuza 4 a chore and a half, are far less ubiquitous here. Saejima just inconspicuously walks around them now, rather than being forced into a foot chase mini-game each time.

The hunter side-story was a lot more involved, however; like Kiryu's taxi-driving, it felt like an entirely different game bolted onto this one. Saejima's mountain hunting reminded me a lot of D2, the very strange Kenji Eno game that juggled a ridiculous story about genetic mutants with the more quotidian tasks of hunting for game in the setting's snowy wilderness and getting it back home before freezing to death. As you complete more objectives in Saejima's hunter mode - hunting specific creatures, rescuing other hunters, setting up traps and snares for smaller animals - you acquire better gear for tackling the harsh climate, allowing you to head out further from the starting location and eventually finding the lair of Yama-oroshi and finishing it off in a fist-fight. Until that point, though, Saejima was shooting the various deer and bears he came across, which relied on first-person aiming and stealth to properly maximize the hauls you were taking back to the village. It was definitely a departure from what I'm used to with Yakuza - there have been guns in the series' past, but they're used like any other street-fighting weapon and are fairly rare to boot - and might have been a holdover from the Yakuza game immediately before this one (from our perspective, at least): the zombie-killing non-canonical spin-off Yakuza: Dead Souls.

Still to come are the sections for Akiyama, the only other returning protagonist, and newcomers Haruka and Shinada. Haruka technically isn't new - she's Kiryu's adopted daughter, more or less, and has been in every game so far - but this is her playable debut. I'm really curious to see what her chapter is like, given most of what everyone else gets up to (street fights, seducing hostesses, drinking in bars) will no longer be applicable. Shinada's a complete wildcard who I know nothing about, beyond the synopsis breakdown of being a down-and-out former baseball star. I'm looking forward to playing all three for different reasons, even if I'm temporarily leaving the series' two biggest badasses behind for a while. All the same, I can't get too far ahead of myself: I've got about an hour left of Saejima's storyline to go (plus any last minute secondary stuff to sort out) before Yakuza 5 can introduce its next game-sized segment.