Exhumy Senpai is always recommending this game, so I picked it up a while back and finally decided to get to it now. It reminded me a lot of Binary Domain, to be honest. Kind of silly 3rd person shooter with heavy sci-fi elements and very pretty robots to kill. The story of Binary Domain is much more Yakuza in how dramatic it is, though. Vanquish's story is much more Metal Gear Revengence in how silly and parodist it felt. For reference, I played through on normal and it took me a little under 5 hours.
It's a cover shooter with some cool gimmicks. You can do different melees with different guns, you can boost around to get towards or away from an enemy quick, and you can also activate a bullet-time effect to get more accuracy and damage. The main problem is that these are all linked to the same rechargeable bar. This makes it fairly difficult to do anything super fancy without some advanced knowledge of what's coming, as you can't dash or bullet-time for very long before your meter runs out, and melee-ing an enemy completely depletes the bar. You also die pretty quick, so there's not a ton of room to experiment with that kind of nonsense. Dying also sucks a fair bit. There are a good few guns in the game, and if you pick up an upgrade or another of that gun while you have full ammo for it and it'll slowly upgrade into better versions of itself. More max ammo, more max magazine size, more damage, faster fire rate, etc. It varies depending on the specific level up and the specific gun. The reason dying sucks is that it can downgrade all of your current guns. Even your grenades can get downgraded (as they can be upgraded the same way). I never found an exact formula for how many times you could die and not lose upgrades, but it was still a really annoying penalty. That said, the game is super pretty, and the textures load right quick for a console game. There are several Platinum/Clover Studios references sprinkled throughout which made me giggle, like "whisky a go-go, baby!" . Lots of big bosses to fight as well that are a proper good challenge, even if the same one does get recycled quite a few times Verdict: Recommended. It's kinda campy and sci-fi and the guns feel good, but I still prefer Binary Domain. I can definitely see why this got a lot more shade when it came out at $60, this was a pretty darn short game for that price. It's much more pallatable at 10-ish, and same goes for Binary Domain at $5. Bottom line, if you don't like this, you just might like Binary Domain
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The other half of Ryuu Ga Gotoku 1&2 HD Edition, and holy shit was it ever worth it. Yakuza 2 is everything a sequel should strive to be. It makes everything better without making the formula unrecognizable: Bigger world, more sidequests, bigger story with tighter plotting and better pacing, music is more kick-ass, presentation is much more intuitive, and the combat is way more fluid. Also, found out that the Japanese title for Yakuza translates to "Like a Dragon," or "As Does a Dragon," which is very appropriately badass . For reference, I played through on hard mode, did 66% of the sidequests, and beat it in 36.5 hours.
The combat as been made much more fluid. Yakuza 1 compared to this game has a much heavier, weighty feel to it. Kiryuu moves much more quickly and snaps around to new enemies much more quickly than in the first game, allowing for a much greater nuance than in the first game. You keep a decent portion of the moves from the first game, but not all of them (and sadly not the recovery move from being knocked down, which is now a level 10 skill assigned to a different button ;_;). Finishers have also been improved immensely. Where the finishers you had to grab people for were very unclear where you could do them in the first game, now everywhere you can do them is highlighted on your radar, and holy shit is it worth it. They're crazy brutal looking, and the feedback on the controller vibrations really makes it even better. From back-dropping people onto the top of a park bench to launching them off of a bridge, finishers have never been so much fun. Combat is even better than the first one (somehow). Storytelling is also very much improved. The first Yakuza felt very much like it had a bunch of good ideas pushed into a kind of short story. It was very unfocused, and while I liked the main rival/villain, I never felt very committed to him. Yakuza 2 solves that problem with a solid A and B plotline structure. I had doubts about it at some points, but it handles it all very well by the end. The story also focuses on characters who the player really cares about. Haruka isn't in this too much, which I'm okay with because she was in the whole damn first game, but we even get a stronger female lead in the role of Sayama, which is a very nice change from the first game. We also get a lot more of Majima, whom is one of my favorites, and adds some much needed comic relief and zaniness to the otherwise quite serious story. I really don't wanna spoil much, but I will say that the plot this time around feels much more like a crime drama serial, where major plot twists and revelations are happening all the way up until the very end. The last few chapters are freaking crazy, but nothing was ever totally ripping through obvious plot holes. The presentation is much improved from the first game as well. You have a much larger pause menu from which you can check just about every collectible and markable thing you could possibly come across so far. You can't get super in-detail info about present quests you're on, but it gives you far better information in the blurb you get. There are no longer permanently miss-able locker keys anymore as well (mostly)! My only complaint is that one of the two very large cabaret club-related sidequests can be permanently fucked up if you don't know what you're doing, which can make you lose the last locker key, which is a bit of a ball-ache XP. Also, inventory management via item boxes is still awful and needs to be made more convenient. There are a few strange localization issues I've come across, in reading up about the games a little. For one, the orphanage Haruka (and for that matter Kazuma) grew up at is "Morning Glory" in the West, but it's Himawari (Sunflower) in the East. Another strange thing is that all of the big cat enemies have names in the Japanese version, but not in the West. Speaking of the big cats, holy shit are they crazy to fight. Not just from a perspective of it being silly, but how inhumanly strong it canonically makes Kiryuu. Assuming these tigers are adult Siberian tiger males, they're probably around 700 pounds. An adult tiger can run at speeds of up to 30 to 40 miles an hour. Kiryuu can not just stop one, but make it fly backwards with a punch when it leaps at him. That basically means that Kiryuu's punches can be the equivalent of being hit by a small car on the freeway . This game upped the silliness factor to almost Bond-movie-esque at times, and I loved every minute of it. Also, it's annoying as fuck that a lot of key locations have their names changed between regions. I read about these things like "Shangri La" or "The River Styx" and there are for certain nothing of those names in the Japanese games. Nevermind ridiculous name changes like how Sai the Hanaya is just totally renamed Kage until the 4th game. Verdict: Very Recommended. Even if Yakuza 1 wasn't really doing it for you, Yakuza 2 is a fantastic update which just might. It makes absolutely everything bigger and better designed, and is everything a sequel should strive to be. Yakuza 2 gave me a lot of vibes of "this is an entry that no sequel will be able to top," so we'll see if that holds up I suppose Now, there isn't ACTUALLY a game with this title, but it's the best way to describe the first game that got a Japanese-only rerelease (Ryuu Ga Gokuto 1 & 2 HD Edition) bundled with the second game on an HD collection (it's on Wii U too for some reason O.o ). This remake looks and plays great, and it really shows (mostly because the cutscenes are recorded from the PS2 version and look dramatically muddier than the in-game stuff ). I'd never played a Yakuza game before, but BOY should I have. I LOVE crazy 3D brawlers, and if I'd have known a Streets of Rage-ish RPG like this had existed for so long, I totally would've been all over it years ago. I played through on normal, beat 51 sidequests, got all but 2 locker keys, and got max level all in 23.5 hours (and very little guide usage).
The presentation is excellent. I don't know if the American releases have English voice acting, but god I hope they don't. The Japanese voice acting is excellent, and really gets across the emotion so well. The story isn't plotted quite as tightly as I'd like, with some characters really coming out of nowhere to have very profound impacts on the story, but the impact is always there. I even teared up a bit at the deaths near the end. The side quests range from equally serious to just silly and funny, and really break up the heat of the main story well if you choose to do so. Given how this game ended, I'm quite interested on how the second game tells its story, given as how this story wraps up nicely but very open for a sequel. The gameplay is such fun crazy brawling. It reminds me a lot of UPPERS, but with only one character. Slowly learning moves over time, especially the ones from the martial arts master, really gives the combat a great learning and difficulty curve outside of just the normal enemies becoming smarter. Stomping the crap out of people really never became boring, although it usually doesn't for me Verdict: Highly recommended. If you like mafia dramas and/or beat-'em-ups at all, you will likely love Yakuza to death. It's beautiful presentation, good story, and very satisfying combat make for a fantastic RPG that really doesn't play like any other game I can think of. I can't wait to start more of them . My only hesitation in recommending this remake or the original is there's a BETTER remake already out in Japan that has more content and story stuff. I'd say waiting until that is out is probably a better choice Someone else wanted to use the television I use for Yakuza, so I took the down time, instead of doing something productive, to finish the Virtual Boy game I bought special. It's not too long, especially compared to Wario Land on Gameboy, as it took me 2.5 hours with a fair bit of faffing around looking for secrets.
It's Wario Land! It's great, of course! An action game all about finding treasure, punching baddies, and looking for secrets to get more treasure! The controls take a little getting used to, as Wario walks by default and runs when you hold a shoulder button, but other than that it's standard Wario. Another odd difference is that pressing B doesn't make you punch-dash. Instead, it makes you enter a kind of punch-mode, and then by pressing right or left you will initiate a punch-dash in that direction. Again, not bad, just different. The level design in this one is a little strange, almost like they expect you to lose really, in a kind of Dead Rising-style (although I never ran out of lives to confirm this). The game has several stages, but no stage select. Instead, the game is essentially one looooong stage, where you can actually run back to the elevator at the beginning of a stage if for some reason you want to go back to a previous one: You just gotta run all the way back to it. Useful if you wanna run back for treasure you missed (and you're gonna want all of the special treasures (like they have in the Game Boy game) if you want the best ending!). There's also the Virtual Boy 3D-gimmick of this game, where you can hop into the background of a stage for more stage but with the same parallax scrolling. Verdict: Very Recommended. It's Wario Land, so of course it's great. The only real fault I can say is the old problem that IT'S ON VIRTUAL BOY. If it were on anything else, it'd be an absolute classic, but just getting a Virtual Boy and then using it for any period of time are just both such awful pains that it's still a fairly serious complain XP And so my trek back through nostalgia concludes by playing through my favorite-est 3D platformer ever. I'd never 100%'d it before, but gosh I did it this time. It was certainly FAR quicker and easier to do than doing DK64's would've been XP. I only had to use a guide for about 5 minor collectables as well (ones which I know I've found on previous playthroughs, but missed this time), so I found just about everything myself . Granted, this is like my fourth or fifth time through this game, but it took me about 13.5 hours. Judging from another save file on the cartridge that had about 18 for the minimum amount of jiggies to beat the game, I'd say I've gotten much faster :P
It's still Banjo-Tooie. Dripping with style, color, and silly dialogue, it's still the best the N64 ever had to offer in terms of 3D platforming. The bosses are also still fantastic as well. I certainly don't remember the final boss being as hard as it was, but all of them were certainly a blast (I even beat Weldar on the first try this time ). Being a Rare game, there are of course some technical issues in terms of framerate. Especially in world 7, the game experiences some really significant slowdown quite frequently. Nothing that ever made the game impossible to control, but definitely annoying now that I'm old enough to notice it. I'm fairly curious if the XBLA versions of the game fix that problem, tbh. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you like 3D platformers even a little, then this game should totally be a must-play. I know they're really not for everyone, but if you enjoy classic collectathons, there's really nothing better than this game. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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