The Best Of Yours & The Worst Of Mine: A Yugistream Thread

[Dogs231]

Garfield Kart Furious Racing (in addition to the previously-nominated Garfield Kart)

[Deblod100]

Please play Beholder 1 and 2. They are good dystopian games to play.

[MurderWeasel]

I would like to nominate Braid. I think it'd make for an interesting time.

[almostinhuman]

Gonna toss out a nomination for Iji by Daniel Remar.

[Applesintime]

Return of the Obra Dinn

[Catche Jagger]

Lockheart Indigo

[DerArknight]

Typing of the Dead: Overkill

[Wham Yubeesling]

I beat Dark Souls! Specifically, I beat A Very Special Run Of Dark Souls where every item and every enemy was randomized from its original position. I had… quite a lot of fun, despite some frustrations, but ultimately… I don’t really think a review is in order? I don’t exactly think that the randomizer is exactly emblematic of what Dark Souls is as an experience (even if it did show off some fun things with area and boss design), and I feel like a lot of the things I would say about Dark Souls The Vanilla Experience would just be repeats of what someone much more knowledgeable than me would’ve said, like, eight years ago.

I’ll probably do an IOU review of a non-obligation game at some point later to make up for it, but in the meantime, we then went on to play:

Bad Mojo: Redux (1996, 2004):

Developed by: Pulse Entertainment, Nightdive Studios
Nominated by: Jilly
Original Position: 12/25
Played Before? No.

God I love 90s jank. There’s a tendency for games made in this era to be on the cusp of some genuinely fascinating ideas and go for them with all they’ve got… only for the technology of the time to not quite be enough to fully realize the ambition that went into it. This can result in… rough experiences, yeah, but oftentimes it’s a fun experience looking at them from a game design perspective and figuring out what exactly the developers were going for, even if they don’t quite add up in the end. This… type of experience went away around the mid to late 2000s — as indie games began to take prominence in the marketplace — but from the 90s to before then if you look hard enough you’ll find a full-on trove of games made my smaller studios which did their best to reach for the stars, no matter how limited their tools happened to be. And Bad Mojo — the sole game made by Pulse Entertainment before they moved on to more tech-related ventures — in particular, stands out as a pretty solid example of some of the creativity that came with FMV and adventure games during this time period.

You play as Roger, an entomologist planning on embezzling research money, ditching the city, and running off to Mexico to get bitches. On the night before his escape, however, Roger picks up an amulet which all of a sudden hits him with magic power and transplants his soul into the body of a cockroach. Now trapped in the basement of his apartment building, Roger must navigate his way back to his room, keep away from everything in the house that’s now capable of killing him, and uncovering… a way more complex plot than I was expecting for a game which premise is “you have become Gregor Samsa wdyd?” Like, it’s goofy and maybe a bit overcomplicated (like a lot of games of its ilk), but for a premise that can be a plot all on its own it’s… surprisingly psychological, and surprisingly dedicated to exploring and expositing on its characters. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece of narrative, or something I’d specifically recommend the game for, but it’s certainly an interesting facet, and definitely something that helps contribute to this game’s charm.

What I’m most fond of, I think, is how novel the gameplay feels. You, in your roach form, use the arrow keys to navigate the apartment complex, and it… almost feels more like some kind of top-down platformer than an adventure game. You’re given rather large areas in which you’re encouraged to explore, and oftentimes your biggest challenge, more than anything, is to figure out where exactly you need to go, and in turn how you can get there. Your roach legs can get you anywhere so long as you can reach it, and most puzzles revolve around getting past a barrier or figuring out how to progress through a specific zone. I’m also a fan of how you, as a cockroach, interact with the environment. Liquids, such as oil or water, and slippery surfaces are potential death traps if you’re not careful enough with your movement, but should you stop moving, think about the situation, and refrain from panicking, you can often get back to a safe spot and avoid losing one of your lives. Creatures such as rats, cats, and spiders are enemies you have no meaningful defence against, and it’s either a matter of turning something in the environment against them or carefully maneuvering through an area to avoid them. There are also other details that are really cute: how often you can see other cockroaches scurrying to the place you’re coincidentally meant to go, or how often the 3D objects you climb up always seem to be on some sort of axis, meaning you never tend to go in a straight line, often twisting and turning around the shape as you scuttle up the table leg or bedframe. A lot of the focus of the gameplay is about really making you feel like Spider-Man a cockroach, and to that extent… it succeeds, and does kind of feel like nothing else I’ve particularly played.

I’m also really into the way the game blends CG and FMV, and how… seamless the overall artstyle feels. While there’s generally a split — gameplay segments being CG while story segments are FMV — it’s generally cool how elements from one can blend into the other, such as ‘real’ objects that do things in game when you interact with them, or greenscreening real actors into CG backgrounds. It’s not exactly something unique to this game — adventure games like Harvester or Darkseed had you play as FMV actors in a CG world — but this feels so much more seamless than the contemporaries I’ve seen: it never feels like the two separate artstyles are in conflict, and a lot of the transition shots between gameplay and story feel super clean. Beyond that, I’m just mostly a fan of the environmental design. The game just really captures the aesthetic of a run-down bar, from how all the clutter constantly lining the floor feels absolutely huge from the perspective of a cockroach, in addition to having some imagery which feels genuinely striking in just how yucky it feels, from all the corpses and the general super sorry state everything just seems to be in. There were points where I was kind of excited to see what exactly was placed on the next screen, whether it be a broken mirror, a... lovingly depicted rat corpse, or the messiest kitchen top I've ever seen. It's a real 'damn bitch, you live like this?' kind of experience, and the game nails that feeling perfectly.

I do think, however, that some of its aspects often come at the expense of each other. While the FMV backgrounds do look great, and aesthetically do a great job at showing off how awful it is, it sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the exact borderlines between surfaces are, often causing movement to feel like you’re getting stuck on nothing, or brute forcing against a surface until the game arbitrarily lets you through. Pushing things around with my head — the only way you can really interact with the world as a cockroach — always felt finicky, sometimes causing me to spend too much time trying to find the arbitrarily correct spot so that I could do what I was meant to do, or often making stuff like the fight with the spider (where you have to rotate a cigarette butt in a specific direction) much trickier than it was intended to be. You have tank controls, which… only exacerbated a lot of the above problems, often making getting a specific angle of direction much harder than it needed to be or often making me mess up when my goal was to rotate something. Even with the cockroaches (and cutscenes) guiding me vaguely in the direction I needed to go, the game… suffers from the same issues a lot of early adventure games do where it’s often not clear what you can or need to do, which can result in moments where without a walkthrough you just feel kind of aimless on where to go.

And those problems… definitely do suck, especially since a lot of these just feel like limitations of the time rather than legitimate oversights, and with something with this much passion and ambition behind it it does feel lame that it ultimately gets let down by itself, but even then, there’s plenty to at least recommend this game for. With a gameplay conceit that feels super unique, even today, and an artstyle that really seamlessly blends together two different graphical style — in addition to providing a striking and fitting aesthetic — Bad Mojo is a game unlike… a lot of others, and uses its abnormalities to stand out for the better. 7/10.

---

Didn't roll the wheel for this, but next up we're going to try and finish up Yakuza Kiwami 2, and get as close as we feel like to 100%ing it along the way! Come watch me battle my addiction to throwing people into the river! It'll be fun!

[Jilly]

gonna get back in line with Suzuki Bakuhatsu, it's fairly short though so you might be able to get it done in only one stream, maybe two if you try to see all the puzzles (it's also Japanese only, but the only real text is some puzzle hints that sometimes come up but tbh it's more than easy enough to just trial-and-error through and also probably is a better experience not knowing wtf is going on either)

[Wham Yubeesling]

okay so I'm doing this thing with my other online friend group where we all nominate each other games to play based on certain hour ranges and I was like 'hmm, y'know what, I think if I'm doing this for other people then they potentially deserve more than just liveblog messages in the discord server so I decided actually I'd also write reviews for them and also that I might as well share them here

so anyway


OneShot (2016):

Developed by: Future Cat LLC
Played Before? No.

For a game titled after this very mechanic, it’s interesting how minor the fact that you can (theoretically) only play through OneShot the one time before it’s contents become permanently inaccessible feels, in the grand scheme of the entire experience. Perhaps it’s a leftover from its initial freeware release where merely closing the game would mean you’d (theoretically) never be able to play it again, but the two other games I know that share this idea often have it as the forefront mechanic, and one that goes line in line with the themes the game is trying to convey. While Awkwardsilencegame’s One Chance uses this core idea as a way to paint choice as irreversible and death as final, while Marcus Richert’s You Only Live Once mostly wants to poke fun and look at what would happen if platform game mechanics were applied to the real world, OneShot’s rendition of this mechanic… doesn’t even feel primary compared to the many different things it’s trying to do, and thematically… feels far more subtle about what it’s going for than other games of its ilk.

It’s… a bit difficult to talk about this game without delving into spoiler territory, but I’ll try my best. You play Niko, a cat creature who wakes up in a world far, far away from where they came from. They soon come to learn that the world they’re in has long past ended, and that they’re the only one who can hope to bring it back — sending Niko on a journey from the outer edge to the centre of the world, carrying the sun itself with them to try and fix what once was broken. Gameplay… feels typical for an RPGMaker adventure game: explore areas, solve puzzles, interact with a cast of quirky characters, but from the start it’s apparent that you’re dealing with something much more than what’s been placed in front of you, and the realms of narrative and ludonarrative aren’t so much layered but one and the same.

And it’s this level of ludonarrative — and how the game makes the player interact with the fourth wall — that provides this game with its defining strength. A lot of the stuff this game manages to pull off is unreal — especially for what’s ostensibly an RPGMaker game — and it’s super neat how these elements interact with the gameplay just as much as it does the story. Puzzles make you interact with things outside the game window just as much as within it, and there’s a real thrill to figuring out just what precisely the game is expecting you to do. It never feels gimmicky or unjustified by the narrative, either: near every time it happens it’s congruent with what’s going on in the story, and there’s a thematic throughline throughout which… I think seeks to examine the relationship between player and player character, and questioning where exactly the line between the two lies. It’s low-key, but it’s an interesting thing to think about, and even if I probably would’ve been into the meta elements regardless of how they intertwined with what was going on — mostly given how impressive it is that the game can do what it does — but having that extra layer where it almost parallels the diegetic narrative really does turn what… could’ve ended up being just a gimmick into a legitimate and strong part of the experience.

But the meta elements wouldn’t be as effective, I feel, if the writing and diegetic narrative weren’t. Luckily, they are! I’m especially fond of the character writing, and how that works in conjunction with what… honestly feels like a road trip plot in ways. Your quest is to head to the tower in the centre of the world, exploring and puzzling through each of the 3-5 major areas (depending on how you count them), and each one is filled with a bevy of fun, distinct characters that you get to interact with. You never see them again once you move on to the next area (with some exceptions), and there are generally no storylines or major arcs attached to them, but this works in the game’s favour: having people you meet, have fun with, get a little attached to, then never see again works well with this type of story and… actually kind of fits in with how you can only play the game once: you’re never going to be able to see these people again after leaving them behind just like how you (theoretically) can’t play the game again once you complete it. It’s neat, and once again even beyond anything thematic the writing works in its own right: it’s fun and the characters are distinct and likable and it does a lot to sell all the other elements of the game.

(As a sidenote to the above: I also really love Niko! There’s not much to exposit beyond how they’re super cute and how they’re really good at interfacing with the more complex elements of the plot and its themes but I think they’re one of the strongest parts of the game’s writing and I think it would be a mistake to not mention them in this review, so, like, yeah. Niko great.)

If there’s a thing I do have an issue with, it’s mostly the map design and how that interfaces with the non-meta puzzles. Unlike games of OneShot’s ilk like Ib or The Witch’s House, which typically keep to small rooms and areas — and where everything you need to get to the next room or area is right in the room you’re in — OneShot’s map is expansive, boasting large areas with landmarks far apart which you kind of need the fast-travel function if you wanna get from one end of the map to the other anytime soon. It’s a worthy experiment, and an interesting point of comparison, but in practice I feel it mostly proves why these sorts of games tend to keep things small. Areas are large enough that it’s easy to miss what you’re meant to find, and there are enough things and items to interact with located far apart that oftentimes it can be unclear what you can and are supposed to do. Maybe the problem is potentially me just being bad at adventure game puzzles but even then, I often felt like I had more of a clue on what I was doing whenever the puzzles were localized to a single room or left the game window. While it is cool, again, to see a more open world in an RPGMaker game, and while it’s cool to see conventions of genres played with or experimented on, the world exploration itself and how it futzes with the puzzle-solving aspect was one idea, in particular, I think didn’t really work in the game’s favour.

Though aside from that, I had a fun time! Again, it’s difficult to go into specific detail about what exact cool things this game does, but if you’re willing to take the game at its word you get something that… between the way its meta elements (which are super creative and fun even on their own) interface with a well written, fun diegetic narrative, you’re going to get something that sticks with you, even after everything’s done and gone. 8/10.

[Wham Yubeesling]

Virtua Fighter 2 (1994):

Developed by: Sega AM2
Original Position: N/A
Played Before? No.

Fighting games, for me, are sort of an all-in-or-nothing situation. If I’m in the right frame of mind to get into them, then I get into them — all their systems and depths, everything I could potentially know in the hopes of maybe getting good at the one character I arbitrarily decided to main — but that requires me to play it at the right time, for me to have already bought into it a little bit, and for me to like what I’m seeing and want to see more of it. If I do so, on my own terms, and find something that really manages to suck me in, then… I get sucked in, and they become a bit of an obsession for a time. If I play them out of some sort of obligation, or if I don’t really see anything I’m into, then… generally I don’t really get that much of an impression on the game at all, and don’t generally tend to remember them that much after the fact.

And when you play said fighting game right in the middle of an entirely different game, only have access to the arcade mode, and then accidentally stumble onto a move the AI can’t really do anything about… yeah, I might have beat Virtua Fighter 2, but I can’t really say I got the chance to know the game at all. I’ve heard it did a good amount for fighting games, and stands out as one of the games from the time — it’s one of the few games that got a 39/40 from Famitsu, for example — but playing it nowadays, in the format that I did… yeah, there wasn’t really anything to latch onto, and the fact that there’s only Versus and (a very barebones) Arcade Mode did it no favours. Maybe there’s a future where I’m able to check out the game in full and see what it does, but right now… yeah, sorry. I didn’t get much of an impression of this.

---

Cyber Troopers Virtual-On (1996):

Developed by: Sega AM3
Original Position: 24/26
Played Before? No.

…Though at least I could tell that Virtua Fighter 2, for as little an impression I got, is head and shoulders above this game. God this was a slog. There’s an interesting idea in there of, like, a movement based 3D (and, like, actually 3D, not like Tekken where the core does very much feel 2D) mech fighter — and given that the sequel after this got the Famitsu Perfect Score that VF2 just missed out on, I can imagine that the potential in this was realized pretty soon after — but the way it works out is just so, so rough to play. Your mech moves fast, your attacks are slow enough that by the time they reach your opponent they’ll be gone, and your dash means neither you or your opponent are ever going to be hit. Every time I tried to close the gap and use some of the melee options I got no-sold then immediately shredded by my opponent. It’s wayyyy too easy, instead, to play defensively, and rounds and matches to me always came down to ‘okay, I got a lucky hit and am now slightly ahead of my opponent, oh, whoops, I’m definitely not going to KO him in time, time to just run down the timer and hope I don’t get hit.’

Repeat for ten matches. Ones where the AI all play the exact same turtley playstyle where you can’t hit them but they can’t hit you. Play the same match over and over until you finally eek out the two wins you need to move on and wow is it not fun. Like I was kind of vibing with it during the first two matches but then the third match hits, your opponent can do a third of your health with one attack and constantly runs into cover, and the endless turtling begins. I’d… honestly be interested in seeing where this series actually goes — especially given that the second game seems fairly highly regarded — because that core of rushing around the arena throwing your mech at the other mech absolutely has an appeal, but… here it feels more clunky than clean, and far more frustrating than fun. 3/10.

---

Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017):

Developed by: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Original Position: 7/27
Played Before? No.

So I’ve been working through the Yakuza series over the past couple years, and despite what my… rather slow pace (one game a year, so far) would tell you, I’ve been enjoying my time with them! As a whole, the series has… a pretty undeniable formula attached to it, but one that’s so effective it’s hard to really knock the games down for it: the hybrid beat-em-up with RPG elements makes it really addictive to just style and totally not kill all the thugs that come your way, and the open world cities you get to explore are so expansive, with oodles of sidequests and new game modes and minigames you can discover so long as you’re willing to take the scenic route. Yakuza 0, of the three I’ve played so far, has pretty easily been the highlight so far: with a plot that makes the most of its two protagonists and cities to intertwine into something that I was super invested in by the end, with just an insane amount of content that the 72 hours I played only felt like it was scratching the surface. Yakuza Kiwami, on the other hand, felt like a downgrade. It was still fun to play, but a lot of it just felt… honestly like a way stripped-down version of 0, in terms of the places you could go and the things you could do, and the few iterations that were there felt like straight downgrades. However, when I started playing Kiwami 2, I felt an immediate, immense improvement, and as I continued going through the game, and continued to have… quite a lot more fun than I did with Kiwami 1, I figured ‘hey, I like this series, enough to consider getting 100% for at least one of them, why not this one? It might be fun.’

It wasn’t!

It was kind of a pain, actually!

Like, I’m not one to try and get 100% for games usually, mostly because it’s just not my vibe or the way I play games, but here in particular… getting 100% was kind of rough. The appeal of games as vast as this to me is that you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do: if you find a side thing that’s super addictive, you can pursue it to your heart's content — I can attest to getting obsessed and completing an entire six-hour side-mode in the space of, like, a single night. If there’s something you don’t vibe with, well, then, you don’t have to! You can just ignore it, choose something else, and never have to deal with it… unless you have to for 100%. Anything you only gave a surface-level glance at because you weren’t really into it is now something you have to go into in-depth, and any issues that might have been dealbreakers are now things you have no choice but to deal with in your chest to get that completion list checked off. I wouldn’t really say it made a notable impact on my enjoyment of my overall product — I can recognize that doing this was my mistake and not necessarily an indictment on the game — but… I’d be lying if I said that going for full-game completion made me more aware of things I would’ve been willing to ignore before, and made things that were little problems… quite a bit more pleasant.

The game follows the continued adventures of ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, who… okay I know this review has started out notably negative for something I gave an 8/10 but I could barely follow what was going on this time around. I could kind of get what was going on until chapter 5 or so, but then it just feels like everything gets sidetracked in the midst of exploring the mythology and interfacing with oodles of characters who… precede to either bite it or just never appear beyond this game. It all coalesces into something simple that can essentially be boiled down to ‘these are the bad guys, beat them up,’ but in the midst of everything the billed main antagonist, and the supposed rival Dragon to Kiryu… honestly feels sidelined in his own game, only popping up occasionally to establish that he is, in fact, the antagonist and rival, and that he and Kiryu are finally going to have that showdown even- whoops actually this is all about the Korean mafia actually time to focus on them. Kiwami had similar problems, but I felt like it managed to sidestep them — for as much as it does feel derivative gameplay-wise of 0, having many of the same characters appear in the prequel does give them more of an impact here, and Kiryu’s relationship with many of the major figures (especially with his goddaughter, Haruka, or with his rivalry with Majima) provided a throughline that… even when things felt confusing or convoluted, I still felt connected. Here, there were moments I enjoyed, but as a whole, I tended to put the story on hold because going to do it often felt like I was pulled away from the things I liked just so I could watch cutscenes for half an hour.

At least when I was finally free to explore the city and just do what I want, or when the cutscenes end and I’m allowed to actually do stuff, the gameplay really kicks in. Enemy encounters are simple, but addictive. It’s like a 3D beat-em-up — you’re surrounded by dudes, usually five to one, but those dudes are usually always much weaker than you, and combat often comes down to how much you just want to style on them. You can buy or pick up different weapons which change up your moveset, and should you hit your opponents enough time your heat gauge fills up, allowing you, amongst other options, to perform one of many context-based super moves on your opponent, often just absolutely fucking them up in a way that makes you question if they’re actually able to get up again afterwards. Power — and the vast gulf between Kiryu and the random thugs who fight him on the street — is kind of the name of the game. There are just so many options for items you can get or things you can do to your opponents, like stealing their weapons from them, getting one of your friends or allies to do something nasty to them, or, my favourite: doing a grab on them, and then trying to aim so that when you throw them they sail over a railing, off a bridge, and into the river below. There are a lot of options in just how you can demolish encounters, and part of the appeal is just seeing what you can do.

It’s not all a cakewalk, though, and when you’re up against somebody a bit closer to your level, they let you know. There’s a surprising amount of depth in your defensive options, between your parry and your guard and your quickstep, and while I was… a bit too button mashy of a gamer to really focus on those as opposed to tunnel-visioning on heat moves, it’s nice that they’re there and that they’re things that get used when the game requires you to get good. Boss encounters, in particular, are where the combat of this game can be at its best, and while they can be easy to breeze past with boosted stats if you did a lot of side stuff like I did there’s still a lot to enjoy: the spectacle, the varied movesets the player can try to learn, and all the different arenas that both you and the enemy can use against each other. I especially love the way Kiwami 2 utilizes the heat mechanic in boss battles: when a boss is on their last health bar, the fight stops, and you have to rapidly press a button to gather heat and unleash it: should you do so, you enter a quick time event that allows you to potentially instantly (and brutally) end a fight. It’s an improvement over Kiwami’s attempt at the same system (one where the boss will just rapidly regenerate their health unless you use one of the same three heat moves on them), and it’s a great way of ending a fight and ensuring your victory, bringing your opponent down to the same level as all the common thugs around the city.

But really the appeal to this game is the wealth of things you can do on the side. While Yakuza 1 (and Kiwami) mostly played its interactions with the Japanese underworld straight, 2 finds room instead to get a little more adventurous with things, and it stands out all the more for it. So many of the substories just go in wild directions and it's so entertaining to see Kiryu be the straight man in all these wacky scenarios. I appreciate, also, how much of a period piece this feels. I don’t know whether this was stuff originally in Yakuza 2, or whether Kiwami 2 added this stuff in hindsight, but I love how what was initially intended as a picture of modern-day Japan instead became a period piece, featuring all the innovations of the era that are so obviously outdated today. The sidemodes, too, profess some fairly fun writing: the stories themselves are fairly simple, which allows them to lean fairly hard on their cast of fun and quirky characters, all of which you can spend time with via hangouts and sometimes even sidequests attached to these specific characters. While there were definitely moments I enjoyed during the main story, I think it’s when I trod off the beaten path and explored the side content that I most enjoyed the game’s writing.

Of course, even then, the side content wouldn’t have measured up if it weren’t at least fun to go through, which, luckily, a good portion of it was! I mentioned above in my preamble that one of the benefits of games like these where there’s just a lot of stuff to do is that you can pick and choose what you actually want to go through, and while going for 100% meant I had to do stuff I also thought was kinda lame, I can’t deny that I still really enjoyed a lot of the side content here. Two favourites, in particular, were karaoke and the Cabaret Club Czar, the former being a series staple I frequently returned to even after I’d done everything I needed to do there because I liked trying to get a perfect score and also wanted to see all the special animations with the people you can take there, and the latter, a return from Yakuza 0 (being the minigame mentioned above where I just hyperfocused it over the course of an entire weekend), now considerably less grindy and with little iterations that make the whole experience feel better. While going for 100% does kind of expose you to the… less than stellar bits of side content, it also makes you take a look at stuff you might have overlooked before, and give you a chance to experience and change your mind about it. I’d never gone to the colosseum of bonus bosses in either of the two Yakuza games beforehand (mostly because I think when I unlocked it in 0 I was at the point where I was powering forward to finish the game), but doing it for the first time for 100% this game… actually proved fun, even despite me being a good bit over-levelled for it. There are things here I’d definitely do if I ever see them again in a future game, and I guess I should thank the 100% run for exposing me to it.

One last note, and one maybe less relevant to this game than to the series as a whole: I often feel like these games are low-key really bad at trying to teach the player its concepts? Maybe it’s just due to the way my brain is wired, but oftentimes instead of actually demonstrating or showing how to do something it’ll instead display a giant wall of text and hope the player retains all the things they need to know, no matter how simple or complex the mechanic is. And unless you’re able to retain everything you need to know — or so long as you’re okay with looking it up again and again — you’re just going to approach certain parts of, say, a minigame, and have no clue what to do. And that’s if the manual itself teaches you what you need to know: the tutorial for mahjong, on the last page, goes ‘oh by the way you could have a valid winning deck but it won’t actually count unless it’s yaku’ without ever explaining what yaku is. I had to google it just so I could know what that meant and nothing I found really gave me a conclusive answer. Again, not as bad here as it is in say, 0, but given that this is the third Yakuza game in a row that seems to think that drowning them in text is equal to being able to teach them how to play it… my impression is that this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed anytime soon.

But as a whole, and despite how negative parts of this review may seem, I enjoyed my experience with Kiwami 2! I won’t lie in that 100%ing it was kind of a pain, and… definitely not something I’m going to make the mistake of doing again, but between the combat, and the very fun side content, it’s not a decision I think I really minded in the end, and if I’m held at gunpoint and told to 100% another Yakuza game… I don’t think I’d end up having too much of a bad time. 8/10.

---

Our next game:

[Wham Yubeesling]

Disney's Po(ahontas (1996):

Developed by: Disney Interactive
Original Position: 17/28
Played Before? No.

So I’ve… never actually watched Pocahontas. I’m not really sure if that’s a shock or a surprise or whatever — most of my formative kids films were ones released in the early 2000s — though from what I’ve heard I didn’t particularly miss much. I could be wrong (I don’t like making value judgements on things I haven’t fully experienced) but most criticisms seem to centre around how it both-sides the colonization and genocide of the native people by simplifying the entire conflict into 'we should learn to get along despite our differences'. While I can’t claim to know much about the history of America’s colonization, being Australian, I do happen to know what the settlers did to our indigenous people, and… yeah, no, simplifying invasion and genocide like that is… at best irresponsible — this is history, and to provide a (literally) whitewashed and distorted view of it for public consumption erases the narrative of what really happened all in favour of commodifying and appropriating it in a way that lets anyone who benefited by the suffering of the Indigenous people ignore the implications of what provided the building blocks of where they live.

But I guess, ultimately, I’m actually talking about the video game adaptation, and while its attempt to communicate and rush through the movie’s plot provides a hilarious attempt at trying to convey the same themes, this is still a game that’s more about how it plays than what it’s about.

You play both as Pocahontas and her raccoon friend Meeko, who must use each other’s special abilities in order to navigate their way through the level. It feels… mostly like a puzzle platformer at times, and while you have to fight enemies and make precise jumps, emphasis is placed more on figuring out how you’re meant to get forward over either of the other two things. Across the game’s four levels are animals that want Pocahontas to help or challenge them, and through taking them on you’re able to gain abilities that upgrade your capabilities — letting you swim, run faster, shoot a projectile, etc. — which then allow you to pass obstacles you previously couldn’t break through. Along the way the game tries to explain the plot of the movie through text dumps and cutscenes, even doing its best to recreate what I presume to be sequences from the movie, which is… valiant, but rather clunky in execution, coming off as goofy imitations more than really recreating… whatever the original scene was meant to get across.

Still, as a puzzle platformer, it’s mostly solid, and there are sections that I positively vibed with — the puzzles are simple, but fun to solve, and the last level is one where you use all your abilities in a mad dash to beat a time limit which… mostly works as a platform challenge and works to bring the game full circle. I like the way the game uses Meeko to illustrate your capabilities: initially, without any of your animal abilities, you’re reliant on Meeko to clear a path for you, and Meeko is reliant on you to get him to where he can’t quite jump. As the game progresses, and you get more abilities, the balance shifts where you primarily have to get Meeko around, to where Meeko is only used for extra little challenges for collectables, to the point where in the final level you don’t control Meeko at all, which is a neat way to communicate Pocahontas’s growth. Sadly, though, the game controls… rather clunkily. Everything feels so rigid. Jumping is kind of delicate and it’s easy to over or undershoot given how jump length is tied to how fast you’re running beforehand. Death from either a bottomless pit or an enemy is instant and with no opportunity to get out of it, and it’s entirely possible to jump, fall, and when you land find out that there’s a settler right in front of you and you’re close enough to the point where the game locks you out of doing anything about it. I also felt left in the dark regarding mechanics and how certain things worked, but I’m assuming that’s more on the method I played it — presumably there was an instruction manual with this game originally that I can’t access playing it emulated.

Still, it’s decent. Nothing particularly to write home about, but it was an okay way to spend a couple hours, and while some of the platforming hasn’t aged well the artstyle has — with some insanely detailed sprites and backgrounds and some rather pretty environments. Ultimately… I won’t lie, I’m probably going to forget I played this game after a couple of months, aside from its connection to the work it’s adapted from, but for a licensed game you could certainly do much worse. 6/10.

[Wham Yubeesling]

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux (2009, 2017):

Developed by: Atlus, Lancarse
Played Before? No.

The tagline for Ridley Scott’s Alien, ‘In space, no one can hear you scream,’ beyond being an indicator of what the movie is about (it’s a horror movie! in space!), also works as an ethos statement for the general genre of sci-fi horror. Having gone through… quite a bit of works in that vein over the past few months, a lot of what the genre tries to evoke is a sense of… wonder fueled by human technological advancement versus a fear of the unknown: humanity breaking through the frontier into a brave new world, only to find something far, far beyond comprehension on the other side — with themes of trying to understand the core of humanity as it faces against an existential threat. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is an ode to the sci-fi horror films of the 80s, particularly the works of John Carpenter, and… while it does harken to a lot of familiar tropes from its parent series — the end of the world, the fabled war between the forces of God against their demonic brethren, and a featureless player-insert choosing just how humanity continues on — blends these ideas with those proliferated in sci-fi horror in a way that feels… honestly seamless in how it’s portrayed, a change in tone and presentation that doesn’t sacrifice any of the core ideals that define what Shin Megami Tensei is about.

The story is set in some approximation of the present or the near future. Humanity is booming with unchecked prosperity when one day, a black-hole-esque growth comes out of the south pole and starts rapidly spreading across the surface of the Earth. With all attempts to research or halt it failing, the United Nations decides that they’re actually going to do something about the apocalyptic threat (the most sci-fi thing about this tbh) and send four teams into what they dub ‘The Schwarzwelt,’ each equipped with the most advanced technology humanity can offer. What they find, upon delving in, is a world of demons based on mythology, built off of humanity’s failings and fashioned after their sins. Three of the four teams are annihilated upon attempting to enter. The last — a ship called the Red Sprite — now faces impossible odds, having to push further and further into the Schwarzwelt, commune and battle with the angels and demons inside, and hope, maybe, that there’s a chance for humanity lying at the end of it.

It’s… a simple plot — one that almost feels episodic, in ways, as you solve problems, then find more problems to solve, then solve them, then find more problems — but it works, which is a lot of the game’s ethos with its writing. The crewmates of the Red Sprite… are mostly just one or two personality traits given a face and a name, but they’re written pretty well for that: they’re fun and likable and I always made sure to talk to all of them while I was on the ship just to see if their dialogue updated. What happens outside of the ship… the game doesn’t really hold back. It conveys the feeling of fighting the hopeless fight really well. Every single mission is this relentless push deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, with no guarantee that you’ll reach your goal or make it back. A good amount of the strike team with you are basically red shirts — even if they get names there’s no guarantee whether they’ll make it through or become a demonstration for how dangerous the next area is. A good amount of the time you don’t even get the privilege of trying to advance your goals: some unprecedented disaster will happen to the crew and it’s up to you to prevent total wipeout. There are characters you meet who pretty obviously don’t have your best interests at heart, but you’ve got no option but to go along with them because you don’t have other options to go with. Throughout the game, you don’t even know whether going through the Schwarzwelt will actually save the Earth — your only choice is to try to progress and persevere and try and see if there truly is a way out. It’s simple (and this writeup excises some of the more spoilery things that happen) but it’s effective, and really works to make you feel the odds you’re going against on this mission.

Gameplay is kind of like… the edgy adult Pokemon game all those nerds on Reddit could only dream of. At its core, it's a monster collection RPG: the demons you fight are also the party members you recruit, whether you get them from a conversation minigame or by fusing other demons together. Unlike Pokemon, however, you can’t keep the same team through the whole game — demons can’t learn skills bar certain circumstances, and the exp requirements often make trying to level up your demons seriously grindy past their first few, requiring you to constantly iterate and fuse new demons to keep up with the arms race of the level curve. Shaking up your team is made more worth it by D-Sources — items you get via using a demon enough that lets you add its skills to any one demon you fuse in the future. There are also special fusions you can perform to get bosses or powerful demons unavailable regularly, which creates a fun, if sometimes drudgey hunt for whatever ingredients you need, made worth it by how strong and customisable these demons tend to be at the time you get them.

Team composition is consistently important, if less because of how specific encounters require specific strategies and more because of the game’s type chart. Each demon has its own elemental weaknesses and resistances, and in addition has its own alignment, one out of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Should you find out what the given weakness of a demon is, and hit it, all demons matching your alignment will also strike it for more damage than they’d all do individually. This creates a challenge in team-building: both to create a crew that covers all elemental bases, but also to keep in mind alignments so that every demon on your team can take advantage of these co-op attacks. It’s simple — and from what I understand a lot more so than most other SMT games — but it's the right kind of grindy: addictive, but with enough depth and requirement for thought that it doesn’t feel shallow at all.

I also loved exploring the Schwarzwelt. It’s a first-person, grid-based set of dungeons, and ones that just seem to get larger and larger the more you explore them. By exploring — whether by progressing the story or by collecting materials off the ground — you gain these little ingredient materials called forma, and with forma you gain Sub-Apps, passive upgrades to yourself, little ways to alter your party, and, most importantly, ways to open gates, get past barriers, and allow you to explore even more of the Schwarzwelt. It almost feels like a metroidvania, in ways — upgrades you get allow you to access hidden parts of earlier areas, often containing their own challenges and giving rewards that… are either obsolete (whoops, should’ve come back here earlier) or give you something absolutely worth coming back for. Across the world, also, are sidequests you can seek out, encouraging you to explore more or do battle — either with tough opponents or tough restrictions. Your rewards are often material, and worth doing the quest for, but a lot of the virtue for me in doing them was just to enjoy the snippets of writing that go along with them — isolated episodes unrelated to the greater plot which often give the game an excuse to have some fun with its regular enemies and one-shot characters, in turn making the world of the Schwarzwelt feel so much more full.

I’d also like to shout out the way this rerelease handles its extra content. Oftentimes, when Atlus ports or updates one of their games, whatever new content is added is usually… contentious — Persona 4 Golden and Catherine Full Body, in particular, getting scrutiny for the way the new content and characters mesh/get in the way of the original narrative. Strange Journey, from what I understand, got that same criticism from gamers (for… some reason), which kind of surprises me because honestly the inclusion of a new dungeon in the Womb of Grief and the new endings felt totally smooth, mostly because of how it… doesn’t really overwrite the original game at all. The new dungeon, and the story content associated with it, is completely optional aside from when it’s initially shown to you (to the point where you can just ignore it and complete the game without touching it), but even beyond that… I honestly liked going through the new content?

Specifically, I kinda like how they used it as a way to iterate and address issues with the original 2009 release. I’m aware that there was pretty major criticism of the way the original release handled your alignment, and I like how the game addressed that with the new endings, both functioning as a continuation of the original game within the rerelease, and as a way to go for Law or Chaos without explicitly getting a bad ending. In addition, a lot of the extra sub-apps that you get from this dungeon seem to be quality-of-life improvements meant to help out with annoyances present in the original game: finding invisible floors or pitfalls, being able to find hidden doors without looking directly at them, etc. I… don’t think these should have been relegated to the bonus content — as that means someone who elects to skip it has a much rougher time with the main game — but it’s neat how this bonus content has been used to help address both story and gameplay concessions. Beyond that, though, even if you’ve never played the original, I still really enjoyed going through the Womb of Grief as a gameplay experience. It’s a dungeon that effectively expands with each new gadget you get in the main story and is host to some fun characters and some fairly tough challenges. I do question how much doing the Womb broke the balance of the main game — it seemed once I started I definitely stayed ahead of the curve level wise — buuuuuut that wasn’t particularly a dealbreaker for me, and I still felt the challenge was pretty appropriate even with the extra content added.

I do have complaints. While I was… surprisingly okay with how mean the game could get with its dungeon design I do wish it varied up in method more: the first teleporter maze was fun and cheeky, but I really started to get annoyed (and not in the intended way) when they appeared in basically every dungeon and eventually every dungeon floor afterwards. For as much emphasis as the game puts on mapping the Schwarzwelt the touchscreen features felt lacking compared to, say, Persona Q: I would’ve liked to draw my own map, especially when certain rooms made the auto-map not work. The previous two problems kind of get combined with some of the metroidvania elements — sometimes you’ll get an upgrade that solves a navigational issue but then… run into that exact same navigational issue and be told you need a better version of the upgrade you just got to get through this particular edition of the problem. Some of the final bosses straight up read your inputs in a way to limit your options and make entirely valid strategies arbitrarily invalid: I noticed one of them liked to open with a full-party magic blast, so I bred up something fast with a magic reflecting spell to get some extra damage in… and then every time I tried the boss decided that actually, they’d just use a different move (or even later, where I got hit with an immediate unavoidable OHKO move for daring to fight the boss a different way). I… okay maybe this one goes under ‘skill issue’ or ‘me problem’ but I also wish the game had an autosave? At multiple points I’d get unlucky, die… and then because I forgot to save manually I lost literal hours of progress in either sidequests or the main story, with getting back to the original point feeling like an utter slog. I get that this is a rerelease of a game in a particular design era for RPGs where autosave isn’t common, but… for a series like SMT where high difficulty and a low tolerance for mistakes, I do feel like actually dying should be more of a slap on the wrist than a major setback.

Other than that, though, I really enjoyed my time with Strange Journey! From a story that manages to blend the tropes of it's parent series with that of a completely different genre, and with gameplay that’s… super addictive in how simple yet complex it is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey really does a lot with a little, and, with the new content added in the Redux version, does a lot to improve upon the interesting, but flawed game it used to be. 8/10.

[Wham Yubeesling]

So, to the minute, it's been a year since I put up the thread and I've (mostly) actually been able to keep up with it! There's some WIP reviews I'll complete... hopefully soonish, and I'll probably reformat the OP to make it less tl;dr and make it look neater and better and stuff, but for the moment, everybody who's submitted a nomination is now free to put another one in. Here's to the next year, maybe.

[Deblod100]

May I recommend playing the Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered?