In true fashion, it's been (a little over) a month since the last thing I wrote here. What can I say, it took me a long time to beat Yakuza 5, and the other things I'm here to write about were only in the last couple weeks. I have also started Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but given my penchant for ignoring the story and spending hours playing side quests, I'm still too early to write anything substantial about that game. I am enjoying it, though.

Yakuza 5.

My first experience with the Yakuza franchise was with the third one, I think somewhere around 2011. I do remember picking it up in a bargain bin at a K Mart, and didn't really know much about it, aside from it being set in Japan and you beat up lots of dudes. I ended up a big fan of the game, and I liked Yakuza 4 even more when I played that, the year after, I think. Then, when Yakuza 5 was finally released in the West last year, I decided to wait on it. Either for there to be a port to PS4, or for it to be free on PS+. One of those happened, and I've spent the last month (71 hours in game time) playing the game.

And, as much as I think Yakuza 5 is a bigger, more ambitious game than 3 or 4, and as much as I do like about it, it's also disappointing in a lot of ways. It tries to do a lot of things the other games hadn't done, and for whatever reason, the game can't really pull most of the new things off. But before I get to that, I'll go over the stuff I like about the game.

The combat, for the most part, is still a lot of fun, and has a lot of impact. Well, at least the hits in the fights have a lot of impact. Between the great, super over the top animations, and smashing sound design (for the hits at least), it really feels like the legions of thugs beaten up over the course of the game got the living hell beaten out of them. Yeah, the combat is repetitive, but, like in 4, a lot of that is alleviated by the game switching characters as you progress through the story. Granted, three of the four (combative) characters in 5 were also in 4, and the last one here isn't as fun to play as, but he's not terrible. Most of the "strategy" in the fights is in how you manage your heat meter, which dictates use of special modes, and can have passive effects as well. But, honestly, the story doesn't get even remotely difficult until the final stretch of fights, so you can just mash your way through most of the game. But some of the late game side stuff is SUBSTANTIALLY more difficult, though not necessarily in a fun way.

The game still has the same general flow as the other ones. You explore fictional districts of real Japanese cities, do (often bizarre) side quests, and get jumped frequently by random thugs. You get items, weapons, and XP from fights, and you level up, acquire new skills, etc. There's a lengthy, and mostly enjoyable (the ending is bad) story, of course. The biggest change to the presentation here is that there's WAY more voice acting than the previous games had. In 3 and 4, it felt like the only times there was ever voice acting was during the pre-rendered cutscenes. There were numerous instances where, mid-cutscene, the game would switch between pre-rendered, and in game, whilst dropping the voice acting. And, frankly, it made the entire thing seem super cheap.

Thankfully, 5 has voice acting for basically all of the story stuff. There's very little of it in the side quests, and still the occasional thing you have to do for the story that isn't voiced, but almost all of it is voiced. Now, I know what you're thinking: It's all in Japanese, what difference does it make to someone who doesn't speak Japanese? Well, the difference is that, in a game with a ton of story, having to button through tons of dialog with little audio beyond a little "text" noise (I have no idea how to describe it, other than "video game text box noise") just makes the whole thing seem chintzy. And, hey, even if I don't understand the vast majority of what they say (I can pick up the odd English word, or names of characters/places), I can still enjoy listening to middle aged Japanese men yell at each other.

The other big addition is that four of the five playable characters (poor Akiyama, my favorite, gets left out because he shares his section of the game with Haruka) have a substantial "Side Story." These involve doing some "activities" that the other characters don't have access to. Series stalwart Kazuma Kiryu, for example, has taxi missions that he does for his day job as a taxi driver. These range from driving people around town (whilst obeying traffic laws), talking to them to sort out their problems, and driving against the local street racer gang on the highway.

The street racing, aside from perhaps the worst rubber banding I've ever seen in a game, is pretty fun. There's upgrades to be had, you can do it whilst listening to that Daytona song, and certain parts of the highway allow for secret moves like "Explosive Acceleration" and "Fiery Drift." But the regular taxi missions? While I admire that the game makes you adhere to traffic laws, I don't think the game's controls are up to it. For example, the customers get upset if you accelerate too suddenly, but no matter what I did, I could not accelerate lightly enough to satisfy them. Maybe that was something with my controller (I did play with a PS4 controller), but I didn't have control issues with any other part of the game. More of an issue is that the taxi feels like its brakes are one stop away from breaking (ha). What I mean is that it takes FOREVER to come to a complete stop, no matter how hard, or often I jammed on that trigger. Of course, you only ever have to do it once to complete the story, so I didn't have to do all of them. Which I did.

Then there's the hunting missions with Taiga Saejima. If you listen to (er, read) what the characters say in the game, they make it sound like you're deep in the wilderness, during a winter so cold, and bitter that your health will constantly drain just by being out there. They'll go into great detail about how you need to be careful not to startle what you hunt, and make sure to wait until you have the perfect shot. And they're not wrong. Just exaggerating.

The area you hunt in is, frankly, tiny. It never feels like you're so far away from the settlement that you're deep in the woods, or that getting back might be a challenge. Yes, your health depletes constantly, but Saejima has so much health it's not a concern, never mind all the healing items you can find, and the hunting shacks you can repair and then rest at. And it depletes very slowly. It feels like they had grand plans for this, but could only hobble together something that vaguely resembles actual hunting. But, I still did all the hunting stuff, because that storyline ends with Saejima in a fistfight against a giant, bullet-proof, and possibly demonic bear.

That's the thing, while the game has a lot of frustrating aspects, and minigames that aren't great, it has so, so so so much heart. I may have only done a third or so of Haruka's dancing related missions, and basically none of Shinada's baseball ones (the baseball minigame is bad), but the game does manage to maintain that heart almost all the way to the end.

I think the story starts to get too convoluted for its own good, and collapse under its own weight by the time you get to Shinada (the fifth playable character). His subplot about being drummed out of baseball fifteen years ago after playing in literally one pro game (where he scored the game winning run in the bottom of the ninth), doesn't really add much to the actual story. Not only that, but it kills basically all of the momentum the game had. It definitely picks up again by the time you get to the end, but, honestly, I didn't like the ending of the game at all. Or a few other things, to be honest.

I guess I'll write about that, but be warned, this'll be spoilers. A lot of it also won't make a ton of sense without the full context of the game, to be clear.

SPOILERS!

So, I guess my biggest issue is with the game treats women. Now, Yakuza has always been a series about middle aged dudes beating up other dudes, and that's fine. Obviously I like it when things star women, but I really enjoyed the story stuff in 3 and 4. Not saying it was high art, but I had fun with it. But in 5, one of the playable characters is Haruka, a teenage girl training to be a pop star. And for the most part, that stuff is fine. The dancing minigames aren't great, but they're fine.

The problem is more with the owner of the company Haruka works for, Mirei Park. She ends up getting fridged midway into Part 3 of the game (around the time that Akiyama shows up). And, honestly, I think it's a huge bummer that one of the three named women in the game that are actually important to the story (the others being Haruka and her voice coach, Yamaura) gets killed off solely to drive the story forward. I mean, plenty of other characters in the game merely get hospitalized, or beaten up without actually being killed. They could have, and I think should have handled that stuff differently.

The other big issue I have with the story is how Haruka's arc ends. After finally getting her big concert (by teaming up with her rivals), she suddenly decides that, no, the life of a star isn't for her, instead she just wants to go back home and be with her family. It feels like that thing that happens at the end of every episode of The Simpsons where everything goes back to the way it was, and they never mention it again. Except there it was always a joke Ultimately her story was just there so they could have some dancing minigames, and so there could be a big event at the end of the game around which the final fights happen. And so there would be a possible assassination for one of the characters to stop.

I mean, the entire game is about fulfilling one's dreams, and the dreams of those you care about, but then at the end she just throws away her dreams because? I dunno, it seemed bad, and out of nowhere to me. Wasn't a fan.

Actually, perhaps the most disappointing part of the story is that, despite being set in December, and around Christmas, that has basically nothing to do with the actual story. And I don't mean that in a "Shane Black" way where Die Hard is set on Christmas, because this game doesn't even do the "big climactic thing on Christmas" thing. It's just set that time of year so it can be cold. Of course, I'm joking when I say that's the most disappointing thing, but I like a good "story that doesn't really have that much to do with Christmas but is set on Christmas anyway."

But, even if I ran out of steam during the last however many hours, I still enjoyed most of my time with Yakuza 5. If you still have a PS3 hooked up, have PS+, and have around 50 GB of free space to download and install Yakuza 5, I'd still recommend it. Just, maybe don't try to do all the side stuff like I did. You'll probably burn out like I did, and end up not finishing it all anyway.

Also: Maybe my favorite thing in the entire game is the attack you can do where Saejima rolls up an enemy into a giant snowball, which he uses to make a snowman. You can then use the pieces of the snowman as weapons. The best parts of this game are amazing and I wish the rest of the game was as good.

Nioh Beta Demo.

You may remember, way back in May, I wrote about the Nioh Alpha Demo. I went and re-read what I wrote then, to refresh myself. I wasn't super hot on the game. If anything, I disliked more about it than I liked. And has this new one improved upon that one? Yes, substantially.

I'd say that I like this newer version of Nioh quite a lot. I'm now looking forward to the full game, and hopeful that it will be a really good, possibly even great game. I'm also super impressed at how much a handful of seemingly small changes improved the game. The combat feels way better, and no longer having to worry about durability is a literal game changer. Now I can just focus on engaging the enemies, and, crucially, it feels like the encounters are tough but fair, instead of tough but cheap like they did before. And I'm pretty sure, at least in the first mission, the enemies are all in the same places, so if anything was changed for them, it was probably stuff like damage, I dunno.

I'm not actually sure about everything they did change. The most noticeable change in the combat is that locking on now faces Anime Geralt (who I've since learned is apparently based on a real dude) toward the enemy at all times, like Dark Souls. In a game where getting hit in the back does extra damage, this is a great change. It also means you no longer have to reorient yourself every time you walk backwards. You can still hold X to sprint whilst locking on, and that'll turn you around, but letting go faces him back toward the enemy.

The game feels like it runs better (in Action Mode anyway, still haven't tried Movie Mode, but it defaults to Action Mode now) than it did in the previous demo. I mean, I'm still no frame counter, so I can't say for sure, but anecdotally, it feels like a smoother running game than what I remember. And because the game runs and "feels" better than it did before, I ended up spending a lot more time with this one than I did the original. This time I actually got a handle on the stance switching, and the active reloading for the stamina (er, ki) meter. I forget what that system is actually called, but now that I know how to use it, I like it.

Related to the ki, another crucial change is how that "out of breath" state works. Before, if you ran out of ki, you ran out of breath, and had to stand there for a second or two to catch your breath, with no way to defend yourself. Now, you can only go into that state if an enemy breaks your guard. I think, I know at least that you can't go into it just by dashing or attacking too rapidly. I still wouldn't recommend doing that, because the game is still a good challenge, but it's a fairer challenge.

That's really what I like about this version of the Nioh demo that I like most. It took a game that previously felt pretty unfair, and makes it feel fair. Like in that Dark Souls way, it'll keep knocking you down, but only so you can...Well, you know the rest of the line. And I kept at it this time, to the point where I actually beat both of the main missions in the beta. Last time I didn't get anywhere near the end of the first one, and just gave up.

Meaning that, this time, I actually got to fight some Yokai. No relation to the watch, these are just demons. They're fun to fight, and often cast circles around themselves that make your ki recharge more slowly. It's an interesting thing to have to deal with mid fight in a game like this. Most of the bigger Yokai I encountered didn't respawn after dying/praying at a shrine, but some of them in the second mission did. So, I'm not exactly sure how the game is going to handle enemy respawns as a whole. The ones that didn't weren't wandering around when I found them, they were in little smoky areas and appeared when I got close. Maybe that's the difference? We'll have to wait for the final game to see.

I also summoned someone to help me with the boss at the end of the second mission, and that was fun. Also a good look into just how different equipment and stuff can be, because they were very differently equipped than I was. Seemed like it worked well enough, so I could see this being a good co-op game if you want to go that route. Not sure what the game has for playing with people you know, though. This seemed very Dark Souls-y, in that I set it to search for someone, and then waited until it matched me up. I didn't see anything like an invasion system during my time with the demo, so that's good. Let's hope that's not something they're holding back for the final game. Not being able to pause is bad enough, I don't want to have to deal with invasions in this game too!

Again, really looking forward to Nioh now. It's different enough from Dark Souls to feel fresh, but scratches the same itches well enough. I hope it ends up being good.

Titanfall 2 Tech Test.

Before I get into this, I should state that I only played during the second weekend of the test, after they updated it, and changed some things. I will also say that since I have neither an Xbox One or a decent PC, I've had very little experience playing the first Titanfall. I went over to my cousins' once, and played it for an hour and a half or so. It seemed fine, but nowhere good enough to buy an Xbox One for.

I was initially kind of cold on this one. It was a lot like the first one, where I felt like it was fine, but not really anything special. I was also put off by some of the things around the core game. Like, by default it put you into a "room" with other people (all members of the same, I forget the word, but group or whatever (I joined the Giant Bomb one)), and there's no way to set voice chat to always be off. That also means making sure I mute people at the start of every match, which is a hassle. And, in 2016, I shouldn't have to do that. There should be something in the settings that I can select to never have to hear other people talk. If I want to do that, I'll party up with people I know, and talk with them.

The other thing I didn't care for was the lack of character customization. Now, I know, it's a tech test, not the final version of the game, so who knows what will and won't be in the final game. But, what's in here is a thing that determines your character's physical appearance based on what ability you pick. I have a few problems with that. The first is that, this isn't Overwatch, and the differences in the abilities aren't nearly enough to warrant making you play with a specific appearance. It works in Overwatch because the characters all play dramatically differently from each other, and they're all characters. I had the same problem with the Blops III beta last year too. They think that one little thing is enough to warrant locking you out from any sort of meaningful character customization. I get trying to ape games with unique characters, but if they're just going to half-ass it, I'd rather they didn't.

I think more customization is better. I want to be able to play as a lady (or a lady robot) with a grappling hook, but I can't. I hope they change that, but I doubt they will. The other problem with it is that it ends up with almost everyone looking exactly the same because they all pick the grappling hook robot. I ended up using the stim robot a lot, both because the stim is good, and also because it's a lady robot. Not even joking, she has a lady voice, unlike the grappling hook one, which has a dude voice.

I didn't let that stuff sway me, though, so I kept playing. And after I had gotten a handle on it, I was having a lot of fun. Much like Nioh, I'm hopeful this game will be good, and am looking forward to it. Of course, I was already because this game looked rad at E3, but never mind that. It's fun. I hope the final game has more than one mode with the AI, though. As with most games, I'm much better at fighting AI than I am other humans, and I think having AI to fight gives this game a different feel than most games. I mean, the mechs help with that too, and I quite like lumbering around in a mech.

Actually, I think the interplay between the pilots and the titans is really cool. This is a game that alternate between being very light, small, and speedy, and being huge, lumbering, and not so speedy. They play radically differently from each other, but both are still a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. I never managed to pull off any spectacular stunts, but even just at low level play like I was, hopping in and out of the mech mid firefight, jumping around, and doing all sorts of crazy stuff is thrilling. Especially when there's other people doing the same thing on both your team, and the enemy team. For all the ways that this game does feel like other shooters (it's still "left trigger right trigger," after all), it also feels different in a way that I really like. Let's just hope the final game is good!

That's about all I have to say. I'll save further critiques for when I play the actual game.

Overwatch Update.

I feel like I came close to burning myself out on Overwatch. How? Well, you know that Summer Games fake Olympics (or, Fauxlympics) event with all the skins and stuff? Well, with about a week left in that, I suddenly became obsessed with trying to get the American McCree skin, and found myself playing much more of the game every day than I usually did. My hope was that if I leveled more, I'd get it. I was trying to prestige again in time to get that early level boost, but didn't get it in time. Nor did I get the skin, which ended up making me quite disgruntled.

But you know what? Overwatch is still rad. Also rad is the ability to play a handful of matches a day, go, "that was fun," and not feel compelled to keep playing because of a stupid obsession over a skin for a character I don't even play that much. I still wish I had been able to get that skin, but whatever. It's not going to kill me, for better or worse.

Anything else?

I did play some Tricky Towers, but not enough to write about it. Seemed fun, but I don't have anyone to play with. I'll write something about the new Deus Ex when I'm finished with that, and who knows from there! I'd like to try No Man's Sky at some point, but not until that game gets closer to the $30-$35 range. Maybe $40 if they update the game with some new content by the time it hits that price. Maybe. I had been thinking about replaying MGSV, given that we're now at the one year anniversary of its release. But given that I'm in the middle of another stealth game starring a bearded cyborg, I figure that should wait for another time.

I'm not really sure what I'll be getting for new games this fall. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything in September I'm looking forward to. I know Mafia III (a maybe right now) and Titanfall 2 are October. I think Watch_Dogs 2 is November? That's a probably for me. You can pet actual doggies in that game now. Oh, once that Tomb Raider is finally released on PS4, I'd like to play that. These year long exclusivity deals are kind of a bummer when you don't have the money for a decent PC.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read what I write. I know I don't write as frequently as I used to, and I certainly didn't increase the quality to make up for the lack of quantity, but I appreciate the people still reading this after all these years. And the newer ones too, of course. See ya next time.