The better version of the best Kiryu game.

RGG support sex pests now and haven't made a good game since Lost Judgment, they will be bankrupt in a few years.

I discovered 20XX quite a few years back when it was given away for free on a rival digital storefront that we will not speak of. I grew up playing a lot of Mega Man, though my only experience with the Mega Man X series was the first game, and I wasn't particularly ever good enough at it to make it past Chill Penguin more than once or twice, meanwhile I was regularly tearing through the entirety of Mega Man 1, 2, and 3 with my eyes closed. So when I found out that 20XX was a "randomly-generated" Mega Man X-like, I couldn't resist. To my surprise, I found it much more palatable than the actual Mega Man X which continues to elude me even to this day. I spent a lot of time playing 20XX during those quarantine days, quickly becoming a favorite of mine. The only thing I wished was that it had a slightly more appealing art style, though looking back, not only did the monkey's paw curl, but I actually think there is a huge nostalgic appeal to the "DeviantArt/Newgrounds" art style of 20XX that's missing from the unfortunately sloppy 16bit-throwback art style of its sequel.

So when I heard they were already working on a sequel, I couldn't resist.

As much as I like the improvements they've made to 30XX since I last played back in early access in like 2022, 20XX still wipes the floor with it I fear. It's just a better-feeling game, the levels were more interesting even if there were less, the overall flow just "flowed" better, the powerups were easier to understand and read (they just throw random terms at you and expect you to know what they mean in 30XX). Sure it's nice that 30XX has more content, I think adding Dally as a playable characters is super cute and fun, but it honestly feels a bit bloated and makes me wish they focused less on adding tons and tons of content and instead of focused more on Quality Of Life.

The hub area in particular is just confusingly large for no good reason. Like yeah dude, it should absolutely take me a full 30 seconds to go from character select to the shop and another 30 seconds to even remember where the area that I can start a run from is, and oh wait I forgot to change my outfit, so let me take another 15 seconds to remember where that is and run back to it.

There was also something really satisfying just about the clarity of options in 20XX. I remember it giving you like a really neatly-presented selection of where you'll go next, what type of boss it would be, blah blah blah. 30XX runs feel overly-long by comparison, full of too many randomly-generated enemy placements and tilesets that feel too samey, and leave you going "oh my god, can we get to the end of the level already?" by the time you're only halfway through. There's halfway bosses too which are annoying because they just make me think "okay so is this the halfway boss or is it the real boss?". It's just...messy.

But the biggest thing is that despite 30XX theoretically having a "less ugly" art style, 20XX's "ugly" art style made it easier to actually tell wtf is going on. Even with all of the accessibility options added in 30XX, background, foreground, and center elements just blend together and you can't actually tell what's what. I've missed so many jumps because my legally blind ass can straight up not tell the difference between certain environmental objects. It might look more pleasing, but when you actually put it into practice in-game, it's just a complete nightmare to parse through; you have to pay so close attention to what's what that it's literally headache inducing and rather inaccessible to the visually impaired.

I dumped probably about 50-60 hours into 20XX and had an incredible time from minute 1, but I find it hard to even break the 5 hour mark on 30XX, there's just no motivation to continue because of what an inaccessible, confusing, jumbled, bloated mess it can be.

30XX is a decent game, and I can see the appeal, but as a visually impaired person who enjoyed 20XX's simplicity much more, it just doesn't seem like it's gonna be for me in the long run.

After around 50 hours of pure unenjoyment, I wish I could say I liked Silksong more, especially after the wait. I really wish Team Cherry would have just kept their promise and finished the Hornet DLC for the original game before finishing this. There are just so many baffling design decisions here on top of a massive downgrade in the world design.

Let's get the big thing out of the way first: yes, it's beautiful, the music and art design is great.
But the game design is rough.

There are a lot of people who were so overly hyped for this, so young and unjaded that nearly any criticism brought up will be deflected by their hype, their naïveté, their recency bias. A lot of people who will surely spend points to post a Jester Award on this review criticizing their new favorite game that they haven't even played yet. I hope the honeymoon for Silksong doesn't last long and people start addressing points of contention in a way that Team Cherry will see as meaningful critique, and either work on fixing in post-launch updates.

The world's lack of smart interconnectivity is a huge problem, at least so far. It feels very horizontally oriented, with almost no areas that cleverly loop back to one another in ways that give you that "Aha! that's the shortcut! Oh, that's what that was!" feeling the best games in this genre do.

The change from the "pogo" bouncing of HK1 is awkward and inconsistent. Rather than a downward attack, it's now a diagonal attack by default; brilliant change on paper, but in execution it's inconsistent at best and doesn't work at worst, mostly the former. The Crest system does not make up for it and feels tacked-on. Just re-adding the direct downward attack in addition to the diagonal one would go a long way. When it works, it feels nice; when it cheats you, you feel cheated and is no longer fun. Gameplay is supposed to be fun, it is not supposed to make you feel bad because it feels bad.

Visual accessibility is a big issue here: there are traps just littered around the game, just waiting for you to step over their hidden pressure plate or trip their rope that blends too much into the other similar looking objects in foreground/background, sending a massive blade into your character, dealing 2 points of damage and knocking you back into a pit of spikes that deals another 2 points of damage, with a black screen that resets you on the nearest solid ground, likely with an enemy spawning right on top of where it places you to deal that final 1 point of damage to send you back to the most recent bench you rested at 25 minutes ago. I'm legally blind. This feels insulting.

Very strange to me is the occasional effect when an enemy parries your attacks (particularly in the first boss fight with Lace) where the parry is indicated by a huge flash of light, but the entire game - particle effects, background, everything - all just freeze, as if the game has a massive Unreal Engine 5-style framerate stutter. I'm not saying that's what it is, it's not. It's very clear that this was an intentional effect and it consistently happens during things like parries and stuns. I just don't understand why. The flash of light and the sound effect are more than enough to indicate "you have been parried". Why freeze my entire screen in a way that looks like the game just dropped to 0 frames per second for a moment? Every time it happens, I have the kneejerk reaction to look up at my framerate counting overlay just to see what happened, how many frames dropped, as I'm very used to doing that when that exact effect happens in other poorly-optimized modern games.

And that leads me to another bit I loathe about Silksong. I don't recall many enemies in the first game dealing more than 1 point of damage per hit; I believe there were a few endgame outliers, but you could more or less keep track of your health without even looking. "Ok, I have 6 masks of health, I got hit 4 times, which means I for sure have 2 masks of health left." Now, the game has inconsistent damage values. Some things hit you for 1 mask, some things hit you for 2. There's no more keeping track in your head. Instead, there's a level of random math you would have to do, keeping track of what things deal what value of damage. At that point, why even keep the mask HP system in the first place as opposed to just a regular HP bar? It's just baffling, not necessarily game ruining on its own, but a small piece that adds up to a larger, more frustrating whole. And the healing. Why do I have to have a full meter to heal now when in the first game I didn't? And it lets you WASTE that meter if you accidentally press the heal button at full health.

So many enemies are a trade: you go in, hit it once, avoid its attack, do it again. This style of combat is what ruined FromSoft's souls games in recent entries too. What's the point of having combos and cool tools if you don't get to use them?

Silksong feels designed with a specific type of Gamer™ in mind, and that's one of the singular worst ways to develop a game these days. I very much look forward to the end of this trend in the likely near-future. I just think discourse and criticism around game design has been completely ruined thanks to this level of "you can't criticize the game!!! You have to respect the developer's perfect creative vision!!!" fandom around them. I don't have to respect the developer's creative vision, it is not immune to criticism solely because it is a creative vision. Kanye made Vultures, I don't have to respect his creative vision because his creative vision on that album sucked. Similarly, I don't have to respect Team Cherry's creative vision here because their creative vision on this game is inherently flawed.

Another gripe is the baffling choice to add benches you have to pay to unlock in a game where the currency is already so scarce; a game where they place currency (which has physics) near pits of spikes, sending half of the currency flying into the spikes, unable to be claimed. Not only that, but those paid benches are in the exact places where you don't need them. When you actually do need a bench, there won't be one. I'm looking at you, Hunter's March. And that area really sums up my disdain with this game. It takes all of the worst aspects concentrated into one area; boring world connectivity, forgettable backgrounds, traps that have very little visual queue that are just there for the sake of being punishing, and of course an over reliance on the awful new pogo platforming.

Taking the cake however is the return of Hollow Knight's worst mechanic: maps. I don't understand how we're still messing this up 30 years after the genre's namesake perfected it in the early 90s. It is completely anti-fun and anti-exploration to have to seek out the cartographer every time you enter a new area. It is so much more rewarding and memorable to just have a map that fills out as you travel automatically. And we have to use the scarce currency to buy every individual component of the map yet again: the maps themselves, the marker that shows you where you are, markers for merchants, for save points, for travel points, even individually-placed markers. What were they thinking?

I just hope that next game doesn't take another decade of complete radio silence, especially if they were to cancel a DLC promised to Kickstarter backers who donated extra for the sole purpose of reaching that stretch goal, only to have it cancelled and not get even a single "We're still working hard on it" update for over half a decade . I just hope that next game doesn't take another decade. I just hope that next game actually looks past the Yes Man-ing and the unconditional can't-do-wrong praise to see what's actually worth improving upon.

I just hope the next game isn't as disappointing and forgettable as this.

It's fine. It's a lot of great potential squandered by an awful revive mechanic. There's no amount of "getting good" that I can do that will affect how my dumb teammates play. Even with friends, people make mistakes, but it often feels that if even one person dies during a boss, the run is basically over as the boss AI very clearly camps around said fallen teammate and gets even more aggressive.

This game also suffers from Elden Ring's biggest flaw, the over-reliance on "learning" rather than "reacting". It was at least excusable in Elden Ring where you'd have a site of grace right next to the boss door, so you could just run right back into the boss room to try again immediately and start to pick up on its tells, its patterns, its combos, and all that. However, if you want to run a boss again in Nightreign, then you have to subject yourself to another 40 minute run that you might not even make it the full way through if you get paired up with random teammates who have apparently undergone and survived from a lobotomy procedure. This is the case far more often than not. Deeply unfun.

Game is also as poorly optimized as the original Elden Ring, if not worse. Takes a solid 5 minutes to load into Roundtable Hold for the first time, every time, even on an SSD. I'm sure it's a problem with my aging computer, sure, but it's still unacceptably bad. Sometimes runs 60fps, other times dips into the low 30s, just like the original game.

The character design is wonderful, and I actually find the moment-to-moment gameplay somehow far more fun and engaging than base Elden Ring, streamlining the experience and essentially forcing you into trying things you wouldn't normally try in the original game only to find out "woah, whips are actually really fun, why didn't I try this sooner?" and that sort of thing.

There's a lot of really bad balance between characters. Recluse's magic cocktail spells especially feel useless and inconsistent, especially considering how some of those spells will melt a boss's health bar only for it to do absolutely nothing when it makes contact with the revive bar on a teammate. Again, adding weight to how abysmally bad that revive mechanic is.

Pretty embarrassing too how the Shifting Earth, one of the only really cool mechanics they added to the game, is almost nowhere to be found. I've experienced it twice in my entire time playing this game, the first of which was when it first unlocked. After accidentally sleeping at the bed, I never saw another Shifting Earth event again in my almost 40 hours with the game. Great stuff, new guy.

Also how the hell is there no duo play? Modders figured that out in less than a week, but the new blood at FromSoft is gonna act like it was too daunting of a task and not in high enough demand to prioritize. But honestly, thinking about it now, it actually kind of makes sense, considering how much of a mess the rest of the game is. Surely they were busy prioritizing making that stuff less messy than it somehow ended up, so I can't blame them.

Overall hard to recommend due to a lack of content, poor balance, and baffling design choices. Put another coin in the "FromSoft forgot what made them special" jar. At least we got to take a coin out of the jar with peak Armored Core 6 being a return to form back in 2023, but aside from that, FromSoft's future is looking more dire by the day. But surely Bloodborne: Nightreing, coming soon exclusively to the Nintendo Switch Entertainment System 2 won't be another poorly tuned multiplayer mess, right? If you're gonna give us a new multiplayer-only game, make it Chromehounds 2 or don't bother. On second though, a second Chromehounds would never be as special as the original was considering how insufferable and unlikable the modern FromSoft fanbase is. It'll never be the same, never be even close.

A fall from grace for the ages.

Everything I could have ever wanted from a sequel. As one of the 4 people who played and adored the original Fantasy Life on the 3DS, I am absolutely delighted at the quality of life improvements in this game, most namely the ability to quickly switch Life on the fly rather than having to haul it back to the Guild Hall every single time I want to swap from Miner to Blacksmith just to refine some ore I mined up, for example.

Now, I can just stroll into a dangerous mine shaft, fight my way to the good stuff as my Combat Life of choice, walk up to the ore vein, and simply interacting with it changes me from Mercenary to Miner. Then, simply pressing the attack button changes me back to Mercenary instantly to fight my way back out. On the way back to town, maybe I spot another ore deposit and get a few more. When I arrive back in town, I'm still a Miner. I walk into the Blacksmith Guild (or any Guild, because you can now also craft anything from any crafting table and it will automatically teleport you to the nearest corresponding Life's work station) and am automatically switched to the corresponding Crafting Life once I select the recipe.

The game also runs fantastically for how good it looks. Smooth 60fps even on my slightly aging upper-mid-range rig from 2020. No stutters, just a buttery smooth 60fps at max settings. The best part? No DLSS upscaling slop. Just pure graphics, the way God Herself intended.

And oh my god, the open world. Don't even get me start on the open world. The moment I got to Ginormosia, I opened the map and my jaw dropped as I panned through and it just kept going and going and going in every direction. I'm gonna have an amazing time exploring this world. I really loved how whimsical the original was, and I'm happy to report this game is just as lighthearted and silly, if not even more-so. Not to give too much away, but there's a side-activity where you have to find various collectibles that are actually just people who have been turned into inanimate objects, complete with silly anime faces and all; the first one you find is a wardrobe/drawer with moeblob anime eyes and hair, and it's absolutely hilarious - the whole goal with these things is finding them, and returning them to their human form once more.

My only complaints are minor details:
- Only 3 new Lives, 2 if you don't count the starter Life. Would have been great to at least get one new combat Life
- The sprint button no longer auto-runs you, you have to hold down the stick in tandem with it, otherwise it does nothing
- I wish I could bring the camera down a bit more, though I assume it has something to do with both LOD and maybe even the fact that it may show empty/black skyboxes in certain places like Mysteria
- I'm not a big fan of the new crafting system having randomized input requirements. In the original game, you knew exactly what each crafting station required you to press and it put you in an almost zenlike flow; using Blacksmith as an example, you knew every time that the crafting timeline showed you an anvil that you were gonna have to mash the A button, every time it showed you the water station, you had to hold the A button. Now it's entirely random. Sometimes the water makes you mash, sometimes it's a single press. Fine for boss fights, but for casual crafting it's a bit too much of a hurdle.
- Multiplayer is super limited. I just want to play the entire story of the game co-op with my friends.
- Easy Anti-Cheat. Entirely unneeded considering how limited the multiplayer is. This is a literal baby game for babies with hardly any multiplayer functionality, who cares if someone cheats. Take it out. Now.

Even with these minor gripes, the game is still fantastic and delivers on almost everything I wanted from a sequel. it's very clearly that this game was made by fans of the original game who clearly wanted to just make the same game with all the improvements any fan would have wanted back then. Sometimes, you don't need much more than that. Just a great foundational experience, improved upon.

Still coping in hops of a Dragon Quest 9 remake/remaster/port/anything? Fantasy Life is the closest we're gonna get while still also being its own thing entirely. But the vibes? Oh, the vibes are all there, baby.

This game is healing my soul.

Not sure why I haven't dropped a review for this, but I guess I should.

Armored Core 6 is FromSoft's legacy continued, perfected. A decade of nothing but Souls torture later, and they somehow pick right back up where they left off without missing a beat. As someone who's been playing this series since Another Age, it fills my heart with joy to say they did it. Not only have they done it, but they may have even surpassed all but the highest points of the old games. Don't get it twisted: Armored Core 6 is excellent, the best game in FromSoft's catalog since Bloodborne, better than the first two generations and the previous generation of the series, but it's still not quite to the heights of Silent Line, For Answer, or even Chromehounds (btw FromSoft, y'all see how big Helldivers 2 is right? Y'all did that, that's your legacy. Make Chromehounds 2, the people yearn for it).

That being said, it's by far the most cinematic, dramatic, and over the top that the series has ever been. All the things you remember about classic Armored Core: head, core, arms, generator, FCS, booster, and all of the leg types you remember: tank, quad, reverse joint. Is it simplified from the older games? Sure, a little. But the depth is still there, and it's still far more satisfyingly complex than what the Souls games allow for. Just like the old games, every single part combination has a different feel to them, and the levels still practically require you to experiment with different builds to overcome their challenges. Oh my god, there's even boss fights...oh, the boss fights. Remember how sick it was finding that Spider or the Massive MT in AC3, or like...all of the massive bosses in For Answer? We got even more. The classic Armored Core style missions, topped off with boss fights. And these aren't lazy copy-pasted boss fights like Elden Ring or Just Another Dude Like You Except He Kills You In 2 Hits And You Kill Him In 5000 Hits like Sekiro. No, these are well-designed, unique, and - I hate using this word unironically, but - epic boss fights.

They cooked, it's peak, one of the best in the franchise, and maybe - just maybe, it means the real FromSoft that those of us who grew up with them know is back.

One of the worst in the series. A mess of retcons and full of busy work, a combat system regressed so tragically far from the peak of Lost Judgment's combat, and a lazy incoherent story that only exists to make the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ story of Infinite Wealth make more sense but ultimately ends up making it worse. Fine I'll just outright spoil it, the new side character that this game makes you care about gets unceremoniously shot in Infinite Wealth and then they never mention him again; hell they don't even mention his death as a big deal in the scene where it actually happens. Not that he was a good character anyway, I'm in fact opposed to his existence in the series because this entire "backstory" for why Kiryu showed up in Yakuza 7 is entirely unneeded. Sometimes things are best left unsaid.

How the mighty have fallen. Nagoshi's absence is felt.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that part too. When the first Judgment game came out, Nagoshi said he wanted to keep the series' separate despite being in the same world, specifically mentioning how he did not want ANY characters to make a cameo appearance. So what does Yokoyama do in the very first game he made without Nagoshi's supervision? Why, he threw Kaito from Judgment in it, of course. And instead of Kaito being...y'know, Kaito, he's some clumsy, arrogant, weak loser who needs Kiryu to save him. Y'know, instead of any of the nuance that he had from not just Judgment and Lost Judgment, but also The Kaito Files expansion that came out only a year prior and gave that much extra detail to an already fantastic characters that they just completely shat all over with this stupid cameo that went against the creator's wishes.

Welcome, new Yakuza fan. Did you have a nice time playing 1-7? Well, here's where the series goes to absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I recommend you just stop playing here, be satisfied with the closure Kiryu got in Yakuza 6 (that IS closure by the way, that's called closure and it was good, you're a dumb baby who only eats chicken nuggets if you didn't like Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2), and go play the Judgment and Kurohyou games if you actually want more Yakuza. I'm sure the Yakuza Pirates In Hawaii or whatever it's called game is gonna be total slop too seeing as even in its premise it completely flanderizes not just a beloved character like Majima down to one single trait, but the entire series down to the single trait of "Haha yeah! It's Yakuza, the only emotions this series has is "sad" and "cool" and "funny", right? There's no nuance at all to it haha hell yeah, let's go Yakuza!"

The only upside to this game is that it has First Summer Uika from BiS in it as a main character, even if her role in the actual gameplay loop is awful.

But hey, don't worry! Maybe Yakuza 9 will also end with a cutscene of Kiryu ALMOST meeting Haruka again. Surely that'll be enough to make our gullible fans cry and think our game is deep for the 4th game in a row that we've done that...right?

Far and away the peak of the series. I don't have too much to say - especially having beaten this nearly 4 years ago - when I really only have positive things to say, but by my standards, I'd consider this to be the best game in the entire Yakuza franchise and one of the best JRPGs ever made.

Ichiban is such a deeply endearing character, as is the rest of the gang, particularly Saeko and Nanba. Saeko really stands out as the first time the series has attempted to give us something resembling a strong female protagonist. It's a shame they kind of threw that out the window (as well as flanderizing Ichiban) in Infinite Wealth because there was so much more they could have done with Saeko in future games.

The only real flaw Like A Dragon has is that the combat could have had the type of limited-free-movement that they finally added in Infinite Wealth, but even then the combat is still excellent, exactly what you'd expect from a modern JRPG. The Persona 5 comparisons are deeply tired but this game really does drip with the same swag juice that Persona 5 does; "It's like Persona 5 for adults" but like kind of unironically it really is.

Screw the haters, this is one of the best games in the series. I feel like I have more negative things to say, and while reflecting in my recent negative review of Infinite Wealth, all I could think about was how much I love the rest of this series, including Ishin. The combat is the most diverse it's been since Yakuza 0, the story is excellent, it's just a great time all around.

I know a lot of people don't like this one and I honestly think they're delusional.

Let me be to the point because I've complained about this game for the last 8 months and just can't even muster up the strength anymore. I'm hoping I can just leave it here and call it a day, never have to think about this game ever again:

There is a deep irony in a game where the main character learns to respect the little time we all have with our precious lives on this earth while simultaneously as a game trying its best to waste as much of your time as it possibly can.

Infinite Wealth is easily the worst game in the series. I wish they would straight de-canonize it. It's rushed, the Yakuza 7 characters are flanderized and the older characters are forced back into the spotlight for almost no good reason besides "we think if we retire Kiryu our game won't sell as well", the new city is far too big for how little there is to do (I've always flaunted that in a market oversaturated with overly-large open world slop, the Yakuza series is a fresh take on the open world formula by making them microscopically small but dense with things to do), the pacing in terms of both presentation/gameplay and story is awful, the story itself is abysmally written, the dubbing in both English and Japanese (and the overlap between the two) is really spotty, the sidequests are tragically boring for a series that's so well-respected for its sidequests, it's just a massive slog of a game overall. The only nice things I have to say about it is that some of the minigames are great and the turn-based combat makes well-needed improvements over Yakuza 7's. That's it. Everything else about Infinite Wealth ranges from mid at best to downright terrible at worst. Oh did I mention that the strong female protagonist from Yakuza 7 is whittled down to nothing but a love interest for Ichiban to drive the exposition of this game's barely coherent story? Yeah, that happens. Deeply deeply deeply sexist, RGG. Way to regress.

The biggest red flag is how RGG is finally spending that "we're popular in the west now" money by getting Hollywood actors to cameo in and advertising their game. Great idea getting notoriously uncontroversial figures like Druski to advertise this game, surely he won't be involved in the historically disgusting Diddy case less than a year later, right? Right? So what do they do with that Danny Trejo cameo, then? Why, they got someone else to voice his English lines of course! You heard that right! In the Japanese dub of the game, despite the fact that his character speaks English for about 95% of his screen time, they get some random guy to voice him instead. Great idea, RGG! Money well-spent! No, I'm being sarcastic. Terrible idea. This all happens in Chapter 4 out of 14; it was the second time I had uninstalled the game up to that point. I uninstalled it twice again after that point, with the final straw being around Chapter 7 or 8. I just couldn't put up with it anymore, every second of this game feels like a complete waste of my time.

I think that egregious dubbing sin however is tied by the scene in the game where (in the Japanese dub, mind you) you encounter a group of Japanese guys robbing a store while speaking in perfect fluent English, but they're stopped by a white American guy who speaks broken English in a Japanese accent, in such a way that you can tell that his English voice lines were voiced by his Japanese voice actor who clearly does not actually know how to speak English and was likely just reading katakana transliterations off the script. It's just...jarringly, baffingly bad. It's not even fun in the way that the "Can you tell me how to get to the station?" sidequest was in Yakuza 7. That kind of bad voice acting is just hamfisted into the main story of this game and it expects you to take it seriously.

I just can't anymore, man. I'm praying that this game is just some kind of crazy fluke that the heads at Sega forced out the door or something. Like I just can't fathom how this happened after Lost Judgment only two years prior stands as one of the best games RGG has ever made. How did we go from possibly their best game to possibly their worst game in such little time? Please be a fluke, because I don't think my heart can take Judgment 3 or Yakuza 9 being this terrible.