No intro this week, because I accidentally wrote too many words for this week's Addenda section. My bad. I should really look into ways to keep this blog shorter, as it ends up eating most of my Saturday the way it is now. Still, I refuse to make my Yakuza 5 breakdowns any less expansive than the game itself, and I don't think separate TV/Movie review blogs will necessarily play (so to speak) on a video game forum, so this format is something I'm going to have to carefully consider moving forward.

Conversely, here are some blogs that weren't carefully considered much at all:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, DONTNOD's brief, free precursor to Life is Strange 2 which is due to start releasing episodes as soon as autumn rolls around (due to it being a more melancholy season). Captain Spirit's a taste of what's to come, with some evident refinements in the mechanics and UI from Life is Strange 1 but an otherwise straightforward father-son relationship story that'll probably be elaborated upon further by the core game. What's curious is that the game's main story thread is just a few cutscenes long, but you can expand your time with the game by completing a set of optional superhero-related objectives or taking the time to explore the game's setting of a modest Oregonian household. Some world-building effort is definitely on display here, which bodes well for the finished product.
• This fortnight is a SNES fortnight, and so we have SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XV making its debut. The two games covered by this entry include KSS's Majyuuou (a.k.a. King of Demons), a serviceable Castlevania/Contra hybrid with some grim overtones and some nice pixel artwork. I particularly liked the variety of its boss fights, though there's a handful of design flaws that only slightly mars the experience. The other game is the special SNES port of SimCity, which Nintendo themselves helped to bring into being. It's one of the few PC to SNES ports that has been specifically worked on to be more console-friendly, rather than compromised in various ways to fit onto the smaller cartridge, and even includes a few new features that later PC SimCity games would implement.
• I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Trailer Blazer: E3 2018 (Part Two) is complete: a full guide to every game that saw a trailer during this year's E3 season. Coupled with Part One, that's 173 individual games that between them saw 200 trailers, because the site's resident E3 expert Marino was just that thorough.

Addenda

TV: Twin Peaks: The Return

Ooh boy, this has been a trip. Twin Peaks: The Return is the number one reason why I made this resolution to watch more TV this year, having watched the original two seasons somewhat recently (say, around five years ago) and was psyched to hear that more were on the way, even if David Lynch's level of involvement got muddier at various points during production. The new Twin Peaks is... a considerable departure from the original show, but in a way that sort of makes sense if you recontextualize what the show is about.

The story of the original Twin Peaks can be boiled down to this: nigh-perfect FBI Agent Dale Cooper comes to the small Washingtonian town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer. The entire show was built around this central mystery, with each episode following Cooper's unorthodox investigation style (and his frequent audio recordings to "Diane", a person we're never quite sure exists) and how that caused friction between him and the more by-the-book Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Meanwhile, Lynch and the show's co-creator Mark Frost would regularly spend time with some of the other folk of Twin Peaks, including: Norma Jennings in the Double R Diner and her criminal husband Hank; Double R Diner waitress Shelly Johnson who has a similarly problematic home life; rich hotelier Ben Horne and his bored adult daughter Audrey Horne; the prophetic "Log Lady"; Laura's highschool friends Donna, Bobby and James; the other employees of the Police Department like the ditzy Lucy, the dim but well-meaning Andy, and Truman's second-in-command Hawk; and Laura's family of father Leland and mother Sarah. The time spent with these side characters occasionally had some relevance to the investigation, but more often allowed the showrunners to just explore and expand on the titular town and its stranger fringes.

What Twin Peaks focused on more in the second season than the first was the supernatural mysteries that surrounded the town for an unknown amount of time. The Black and White Lodges, where various entities existed and occasionally helped Cooper with his investigation with cryptic dreams, and the introduction of characters like MIKE and BOB, both of whom had adopted human forms in the real world. Twin Peaks The Return has, so far, been far more interested in expanding that aspect of the show than spending too much time with the population of Twin Peaks, expanding the show's purview to locations in South Dakota and New York City. We also spend a lot of time with the "evil" Dale Cooper, who is a version of Cooper possessed by BOB (the evil spirit that once possessed Leland Palmer) who has spent the subsequent 25 years being this sinister criminal mastermind combining Cooper's resourcefulness and perspicacity with BOB's psychopathy.

But I think the true goal of the show is to celebrate both the original Twin Peaks and David Lynch's entire film career. The show regularly sees ringers coming in, such as Naomi Watts (who became acquainted with Lynch with Mulholland Drive and was also very indirectly involved in the video game Twin Peaks homage Deadly Premonition), Robert Forster, Matthew Lillard, Laura Dern, Amanda Seyfried, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Harry Dean Stanton, Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper who were all either previous Lynch collaborators or, I would guess, very interested in taking part in a Twin Peaks reboot. The show isn't lacking for new characters, and to the writers' credit they all feel like a part of this world twenty-five years later. I have my favorite characters, and a few I could do with seeing a lot less, in pretty much the same ratio that it was with the original show.

The Return is also way gorier, scarier and more disquieting than the show ever was, but to the approximate extent that Lynch's other horror-themed works have been, like Eraserhead and Lost Highway. I'm not an expert on Lynch's movies by a long shot - I've seen perhaps half of the major ones, if that - but I know enough to recognize his style and the more inexplicable episodes so far have definitely been more in reverence to those movies than to the significantly more "TV Friendly" Twin Peaks of 1989. One particularly memorable sequence during the double-length introductory episode sees a glass box experiment go horribly awry with a screaming ghost that eviscerates a pair of lovebirds in one of the most chilling sequences I've seen on TV (though I don't watch a whole lot of horror shows, it should be said). Then there's Episode 8, which was so weird that I'm at a loss to even summarize it beyond it offering a possible origin point for the Black Lodge's toxic instigator BOB.

All that said, I'm finding the show a little enervating to watch, and I'm only actually halfway through the season so far as a result. Each episode is an hour long, and much of that can be charitably called "dead air", either spending time with uninteresting side-plots, making many scenes take way longer than they need to, handing over several minutes to a musical number usually at the end of the show, or - in one notorious case - a fixed shot of someone sweeping a bar floor for what felt like an hour (but was probably more like five minutes). The Black Lodge sequences, as curious as they are, can often move interminably slowly also. I don't really care for Dale Cooper's (the good one, that is) role in the show either, as he's currently in a semi-catatonic state after re-emerging in the real world after a quarter of a century spent trapped in the Black Lodge. It's supposed to be a comedic turn for Kyle MacLachlan, who's having the time of his life as both a goofy walking coma victim and incredibly sinister villain, but I'm hoping for the sake of the original character that he can snap awake and take charge of the show again.

It's a fascinating show, but sometimes it feels like... well, let me give you a tortured analogy. Imagine you have one of those "magic eye" autostereogram books with the 3D images in patterns that you have to squint the right way to see. Then imagine the creator only put hidden images in a certain number of pages, and the rest were just meaningless patterns. If you bought that book knowing nothing about it, would you go crazy trying to find the pictures in those pages without them, because you'd already seen a hidden image in a few of them already? That's sometimes what it's like watching this show; you can't be sure which vignettes have meaning and which don't, and whether future episodes will build on what you've seen or if they're just meant to sit alone as world-building exercises. Will you eventually get answers for some of the mysteries it raises, or will the show leave them open for the sake of mystique? To an extent you should know what you're in for with a Lynch creation, so it's not quite as frustrating as something like Lost where they make it up as they go along, but there's so many plot threads to follow and only so many that will amount to something. Perhaps binging on the show was a mistake in this case, despite the serial nature, because I probably needed more time to absorb what I'd just seen. I'll keep on watching it though, because I'll take any answers it can provide (and I'm really enjoying the procession of big names passing through so far).

Movie: Sword of the Stranger (2007)

Less complicated is Sword of the Stranger, a classic Sengoku-era samurai anime film with a semi-predictable plot but some fine animation work and a really attractive setting. It's the work of Bones, one of the biggest animation studios in Japan and was responsible for - among many others - the anime adaptations of Mob Psycho 100 and My Hero Academia, both of which I've covered in previous Saturday Summaries. Sword of the Stranger is an original work as far as I can tell, and features a young boy named Kotaro and his faithful pet Shiba Inu Tobimaru as they escape pursuers from Ming Dynasty China, who have plans to ritually sacrifice him to create a special elixir of immortality for their aging Emperor. The boy meets a nameless ronin and impulsively hires him to be his bodyguard until they can get to a Buddhist temple where he can be protected. However, the Ming agents and the Akaike samurai clan they've allied with are hot on their trail and eager to recover the boy before a set date when the ritual is to take place.

It might as well be the plot to a video game - the Ming agents each have their own special weapons, the final location for the ritual is this huge, ominous wooden tower, the ronin hero is troubled by his past but eventually discovers his sense of honor and morality at a critical moment, and the final antagonist of the film isn't the mastermind of the ritual but an extremely skilled western swordsman who only took up the job to find someone in Japan that could be a worthy opponent in what might as well amount to a final boss fight. Even if the paper-thin plot only acts to frame the battles, it's worth it for just how well those fights are done. The movie has a certain electrifying pace that nonetheless has a firm logical reality to it, and nothing like outlandish endurance or acrobatics that might otherwise beggar belief. The Chinese agents all have special medicine that dulls pain and sharpens the senses, mind, but this only allows them to fight past their limits to an extent.

Not to denigrate it too much, but Sword of the Stranger was just the sort of uncomplicated tonic I needed after the mentally draining Twin Peaks: The Return and a thoroughly enjoyable film I only really pencilled in on my list of movies to watch this year after seeing a YouTube clip of the final fight between the ronin and the western swordsman, which almost required a second viewing to follow due its speed. A beautiful movie too, and a fine precursor to the many exceptional action anime shows that the studio would go on to create.

Game: Yakuza 5 (2012/2015)

At this point I've almost exhausted all I can talk about with regards to Yakuza 5, its new additions, the new character arcs, and the absurd size of this particular entry and its celebration of five major corners - Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, Nagoya, and Fukuoka - of the nation of Japan. I could talk more about Shinada's chapter in particular, since I wrote last week's summary only a few hours into his portion of the game, but I think this tweet should probably suffice:

Shinada's major "Side-Story" mission-chain concerns his time in the local batting cage reliving his glory days as a professional batter, which involves a much more elaborate home run derby mini-game than the Yakuza batting cage has offered in the past due to the extra layers of strategy and skill that pro players are operating on. Beyond that and his significantly goofier substories, there's not much more to say about Shinada. Like Tanimura from Yakuza 4 (whose likeness, I recently discovered, is based on his voice actor who was also Phoenix Wright in that live-action Ace Attorney movie), he feels like the least significant protagonist in terms of relevance to the overall plot and I don't think his fighting style - which is mostly focused on grapples and weapon attacks - is as much of a significant departure to Kiryu's classic style than either Akiyama's speed or Saejima's brawn. I like the character, but I could understand if - like Tanimura - he never shows up in the series again (I guess I'll find out if that's true when I eventually play Yakuza 6).

Instead, and this is a callback to when I did something similar for Yakuzas 2 and 3, I wanted to properly elucidate on what you need to do to accomplish "100% completion" on the in-game tracker. There's a LOT to do here, and is probably why 100% completion is just a single trophy - the rest are more like samplers in comparison, like playing Air Hockey (a new mini-game) three times or eating at every restaurant just once.

• Complete all substories: This one I just do out of habit, because the substories are frequently the best part of Yakuza. The game tells you where new substories are to be found, so it's hard to miss any unless you're not checking the map frequently. The one big roadblock here is completing the final substory, which involves taking on the Amon family - the most difficult fights in the game.
• Complete all side-stories: These are the special character-specific gameplay modes, like Shinada's batting or Saejima's mountain hunting or Haruka's idol career. Like the substories, they comprise a major amount of the game's worthwhile side content, so while they take some time to complete it doesn't feel like time wasted: the various story threads and the novelty of each mode are worth the investment. Well, for most of the side-stories at least.
• Master every mini-game: This has always been my white whale for as long as the series has been running. It's not so much that you have to play them all, but to master them involves beating every difficulty or passing a certain threshold before you can call yourself an expert. I straight up suck at a lot of them (like Air Hockey), or I don't understand them enough to succeed at them (shogi and pachinko), or the requirement for passing is based on sheer luck (any of the gambling mini-games).
• Eat/drink every menu item at every restaurant and bar: This one's just time-consuming, and the way hunger works in this game is that it recovers health you've lost from fighting. That means you literally have to work up an appetite to clear out each eatery, though Yakuza 5 does introduce a type of "appetite restoration" consumable that lowers health for the sake of refilling it with food. There's also one for reducing your drunk level, which is required because bars will stop serving you alcohol if you're far too sloshed. What sucks about this category for Yakuza 5 in particular is that it stopped doubling up on menu items available in different locations: a lot of bars serve Laphroaig 10-Year Whiskey for instance, but you have to drink it in every establishment for it to count.
• Max affection level with every hostess: Hostesses have been a staple of Yakuza for a while, where you pay an exorbitant amount of money to socialize with a professional... uh, "non-sexual escort", I guess would be the way to put it. These play out like traditional Japanese dating sims, where responses, conversation topics and gifts result in different boosts (or penalties) to the woman's affection for you. Yakuza 5 mercifully cuts down its number of hostesses to five - two for Kiryu, one for everyone else, and zero for Haruka for obvious reasons (I doubt she'd be allowed in, even if she did swing that way) - but it's still a lot of work to impress them and say the right things. Also kinda weird, honestly, but then it's all part of the glamorous Yakuza lifestyle.
• Full city exploration: This amounts to collectible quests like the ever-present locker keys of Kamurocho. Sotenbori, the Osakan district where Akiyama and Haruka have their portions of the game, also has its own set of locker keys to find. The locker key detector makes this slightly easier, but it can still be a pain locating the last few keys if you don't break down and just google their locations. Kiryu has a trash collecting mini-game similar to the one in Yakuza 4 but simplified, Saejima can find map pieces in his city district of Tsukimino, Sapporo that leads to NPCs holding rewards, and Shinada's looking for raffle tickets to play a tombola. It all basically amounts to looking for shiny objects on the floor when you're running around, and not too challenging a prospect comparing to some other things on this list.
• Activate all Heat Actions: This one I like doing just because I enjoy watching all the heat actions play out, which are those brutal finishing moves available whenever your heat gauge is sufficiently built up. It's sort of like when you had access to a home version of Mortal Kombat for the first time and a big list of fatalties you found in a magazine or off the internet, and just went through them all so you could laugh at how vicious they were (or maybe that was just me). The heat actions are one of the big draws of the game's combat system, but some are far harder to find naturally than others and the game gives you no hints as to what you need to do to acquire the missing ones. Still, I make it a habit to try as many things in fights as possible until I get to the end and look up a list for whatever's remaining - usually those involving exotic weapons like tonfas and kali sticks, since the combat's not so difficult that you ever need them.
• Build all weapons and armor at Kamiyama Works: Another time-consuming one, and also very expensive. Kamiyama Works allows you to build some seriously powerful gear, but you usually need to donate a lot of items and money to make it happen. Yakuza 5's new system is that you "invest" these items directly to unlock new weapons, and then pay for the weapons through a standard shop interface. You can also invest money to improve the shop's inventory. Some of these unique weapons, like the laser swords, are a lot of fun and worth the financial loss. There's really not much else to spend that money on anyway - it's not like Yakuza 0 where money is directly pumped into character development.
• Complete all lessons with every trainer: This one's just a sensible idea, because each lesson gives you a new passive upgrade or combat skill. Some trainers are more challenging than others, like Kiryu fighting his old teacher's grandson or Shinada taking on the eccentric weapons master Leo Ayanokoji, but it's worth learning all you can to maximize that character's combat potential.
• Fight every competition in the arena: This one's a massive timesink, but it's not as bad as the old completion objective which was to defeat every opponent. You can't always guarantee who you'll face in each arena battle and you'll need to complete most of the tiers to reach the highest level opponents in this part of the game anyway, so having the goal simply be to conquer every competition is way quicker. Or, at least, it would be, except you have to defeat every contest with all four characters. You really need to be an expert at the game's combat here, because this is where the next-most challenging combatants in the game are to be found (after the Amons, who are straight up OP cheaters). Still, the rewards are often worth it, as is the experience if you've yet to max out your level.

I try and do as much of the above as possible, but I usually bounce when it comes to mastering those mini-games or the more pointless busywork like the restaurants and hostesses. My goal with Yakuza 5, since I'm already starting to burn out on it, is to complete the tasks associated with other non-100% trophies and not bother with the rest. Guys, I hate to say it, but this game might have too much game in it.