Known as Fortune Street in America (or Boom Street in Europe), Itadaki Street is a board game by Enix (now Square Enix) that has been around for over 30 years (the 30th anniversary game coming out on PS4 a few years ago). Itadaki Street Special was the first game in the series published by Square Enix after their merger, and it's the first one to start featuring their licensed characters. It's a game I've had my eye on for a long time but never had an opportunity to buy for cheap until recently. After a week of a lot of playing (I'd say at least 40 hours), I finally finished the last of the normal tournament mode. There's still more to do, technically, but I've beaten every map on single player mode and seen the credits, so I'm calling this game finished. It's begun to show its age a bit, but it's definitely still a really fun entry in the series.
Itadaki Street is a variation to the popular game Monopoly. It's the same sort of idea, going around a board trying to get properties in a set to gain a monopoly there all in an effort to earn more money than your opponents, but Itadaki Street adds some very significant changes beyond the fan service to really make it a far more compelling board game. Firstly, there are many maps with different shop values and gimmicks in each. Some maps are more circuit-like, but many have multiple paths, meaning that there is often some element of player choice in how to best utilize their die rolls. You also don't just need to get back to GO (in this case, the bank) in order to get your free payday, and instead must collect 4 playing card suits from around the board, and knowing when trying to get your paydays isn't worth it can be a really big deciding factor in your victories. Another big change is how districts don't increase in value as you go around the board, with shops instead having varying values within each district that can go from 80 gold to 800 gold for the base market price. These spaces can even be outright taken (at great cost) with a hostile takeover after you land on them, at least if you're wiling to pay five times the current market price of the property. There are also casino spaces where you can play little minigames (sometimes alone, sometimes with the other players) for a little boost of extra quick cash. The most significant change, though, is how Itadaki Street has a stock exchange system. You can only buy stocks at the bank, but you can sell them anywhere. Factor that in with how you can invest in a property even if you only own a single property in that district (think like building houses in Monopoly) and how you can buy stocks in ANY district, not just your own, and there is a LOT of strategy on when and how to invest your money. There is even a good strategy on when to divest yourself, as slowly selling off stocks in the district of a player ahead of you (something my friends and I call "investment bullying") to make their more numerous stocks lose value, meaning they'll take longer to hit the target goal of net worth they need to win the game. There is still a lot of luck in this game, don't get me wrong. Landing on the space a suit sits on will get you a chance card, and some chance cards are so good they can easily turn the tide of the game (or at least give you a very healthy lead quite early on if it's something like a free payday from the bank). Then there are special "empty plot" property spaces, where you can build special buildings that have different effects depending on the type you build and what you do with it. These spaces are incredibly overpowered, and those who control them often control the game (with some buildings like the temple making the player that lands on them lose 10% of their NET WORTH to the player who owns it). You can absolutely get hecked over by bad luck in this game, but it's still possible to play from behind and come out in second or even end up winning if you play your investments right in most games. After finishing the main single-player mode, you unlock another tournament set of the same boards but with "Sphere Mode" rules. Sphere Mode introduces a lot more opportunity for calculated risk, as it gives each player a Sphere Die to roll after they've done their normal move. You can find certain spheres as you play the maps to slot into your Sphere Die, and rolling it gives you the benefit of that sphere whether you like it or not (you may not always want to roll again immediately, for example). It's a neat idea, but it added a bit too much randomness for me to want to engage with after having just beaten all of those maps, even if half of the unlockable characters in the game are locked behind winning that second set of tournaments. The appeal of this particular entry, at least historically, is that it was not only the first game where four players could play together, but it was the first one to have licensed characters in it. Flexing their Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy franchises, the game has 20 playable characters with another 16 unlockable ones. The characters don't have any differences between them other than aesthetics (although I think they do have different mechanics on the Sphere Mode boards), at least for player characters. Different characters have different levels of AI difficulty inherent to their characters instead of the AI being able to be assigned manually. The AI also isn't super amazing even on S Rank difficulties, and I've seen some of the AI do massively foolish things even at that high difficulty. It's not dead easy by any means, but it can really surprise with how foolish it is as times regardless. The series representation is both very good and quite disappointing. For Dragon Quest, it has a really good variety from DQ1 all the way to DQ8 and even Terry from DQ Monsters. From Final Fantasy, however, there isn't a single character from before FF7, and there are even TWO Yunas in the game (FFX-2 Yuna and FFX Yuna). It's not a super big deal, but for a game where the fan service is so fun with how much silly personality the characters have to them when they do their lines as NPCs, it's disappointing to see how heavily stacked the newer games are all for the effort of promoting Squenix's newer games (like FFXII, which wouldn't even be out for another year and a half). Verdict: Highly Recommended. I really loved my time with this game. It's got silly and fun writing, good mechanics, and tons of boards and characters to play with. While it's a bit hard to recommend this particular version to anyone who can't speak Japanese, the Wii game is well worth tracking down if the mechanics of this sound appealing to you. Enix hit a good formula here, and it's good to see Square Enix not seriously messing with something that was never broken.
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My Ratchet & Clank kinda-marathon continues with the first game I've actually bought off of Yahoo Auctions! I'd heard this title was a bit weird among R&C games and divisive among fans, and those impressions are what I walked away from it with as well. It took me a little under 8 hours (and an hour of that was grinding for the final boss) to beat the Japanese version of the game.
Ratchet: Deadlocked pics up where 3 left off, with Ratchet & Clank a part of Q-Force, when they're suddenly kidnapped by an intergalactic TV producer for Vox entertainment. He wants them to compete in his death battles among heroes, and Ratchet goes on a mission to both compete for his life and try and find a way to shut down Vox once and for all. That's right, just Ratchet. There's a reason Clank isn't even in the English title for the game, and that's because he's barely in it, and he never fights with you. Clank is your radio operator, effectively, telling you mission instructions which I never got most of because this game has virtually no subtitles (for some reason when the last two games got subtitles perfect), and the objectives are often self-explanatory enough that it didn't matter (expect for the times when they weren't very self-explanatory XP). Compared to even Ratchet & Clank 1, this game is pretty darn light on story, and feels almost unfinished in that regard. Apparently they were going for something a little more serious/edgy to compete with things like Halo that were getting popular at the time, but that was a serious swing and a miss here. The gameplay of this entry is also really different from the previous games. It's more like if they made an entire game around the arena missions and ranger missions from the past two games. The game has a small hub area in the Vox station, but outside of that it's almost entirely menus picking different missions from menus that are usually vehicle trials, combat trials, or small platforming missions with lots of combat. All the platforming and paying for upgrades forward from previous games is totally gone, and there are a lot less overall weapons in this game as well. A lot of the weapons are also just not very fun or just boring, and that hour of grinding I needed to do at the end of the game was to get the rocket launcher and a few other guns to a level good enough that I could use them to beat the final boss with. The default rifle-esque gun you start the game with is so good and upgrades so well, I just used that for almost the entire game. You have a couple of "battle bots" that flank you and will attack targets around you, but you have very limited control over them, they're sorta ham-fisted solutions for puzzles quite often (which just amounts to pressing a button on the D-pad to order them to do the thing), and they don't add much to the game at all. They seem more like a concession that there's too often too much going on to really pay attention to, so they're there to keep you from getting totally ganked by something outside of your line of sight (since you can die REALLY fast in this game if you aren't careful). This game overall feels like a real step back in the gameplay department from the design to the mechanics themselves. Ratchet feels noticeably stiffer to move than in R&C3, and a bit slower too. And despite that, this game still has some pretty severe framerate issues. The vehicle sections are also absolutely dire to control and are all awful. That is especially weird after R&C3 had great vehicle sections, but this game manages to make everything past games' vehicle sections have done well worse in just about every regard. The one gold star I can award to this game is that they have finally gotten the auto-aim down right. It works great and it makes combat way way easier. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Some people really do like the arena challenges in this game, and the game for the most part does play quite well, particularly in the combat sections, so I can't give it an outright "not recommended". That said, I think this is an even more skip-worthy entry than the first Ratchet & Clank, and most people would be better served these days just skipping right from R&C3 to R&C Future 1, because story-wise and mechanically you are barely missing anything with Ratchet: Deadlocked. This game's existence just seems to imply that Insomniac had no idea what made the first 3 games popular, or were just so self conscious about continuing to do what had worked so well that they made this weird footnote of a mainline R&C game. I absolutely adored the original Nier when I played it around 5 years ago (right before I joined this site, as coincidence has it), and I was really excited when I heard they were making a successor game to it. It then took me like years to buy Nier Automata, and over another 3 years to actually play the thing, but here I am. A little over 40 hours later (and a lot of contemplative writing on my own dissecting its themes), I got all of the main endings and did almost all of the quests (all but the most labor intensive ones).
Nier: Automata is the story of 2B and her partner 9S, two androids in the YoRHa project, a fighting force operated out of an orbital bunker that is trying to take back the Earth from invading aliens. The aliens invaded thousands of years ago with an army of constantly learning and adapting machines, and its these machines that YoRHa fight against while trying to find the aliens behind it all to end the war once and for all. Nier: Automata is a game much more about its themes rather than the overall narrative, but the overall narrative that is there is solid. It's also a game that is more in the same universe as the original Nier, rather than a direct sequel in the traditional sense. Like 2018's God of War, while there are elements in this game that have meaningful callbacks to past entries, this game stands very well on its own, and playing the previous game(s) in the series is by no means required to get something really meaningful out of the story. Where the original Nier asked questions about what it means to be alive, and what humanity really is, Automata takes that one step further. Okay, we're here, now what? What do we do since we're alive, and why should we? It's a very good companion piece to Nier 1, but I would say Automata on the whole does its storytelling in a bit of a better way than the original game does. While there are a lot of more obvious elements to the storytelling, there was a lot I didn't realize until I'd really sat down with it and thought about it for a while. Automata is a really well crafted piece of fiction, especially for a video game, that does something really interesting with the concept of replaying through a story (much like the original Nier did). That said, Automata has a lot less outright replaying of content than the first Nier did. It has 5 main endings, but really 3 main routes. Route A, Route B, and Routes C and D are more or less different sides of the same route, with Route E being the final ending after completing C and D. Thinking about it like an old PS1 game, Route A is disc 1, Route B is disc 1.5, and Routes C, D, and E are disc 2. It is absolutely intended that you play through all the routes, especially since Route C/D is just the second half of the game with no repeated content of any kind. This confusing approach to endings is a deliberate choice, but one I think this game handles clumsier than Nier 1 does it (where they're just straightforward replays of content), and it's really my only meaningful complaint with how the game's narrative is constructed. Nier: Automata doesn't really present in an obvious enough way that the "new playthroughs" are quite as dramatically different to one another as they imply. The gameplay loop of Automata is quite close to the first Nier, in that it's an open-ish world action RPG, but it's on a bigger scale with more to do and more quality of life improvements. Platinum handled the development of this game, and it really shows with JUST how much better the combat is in Automata than Nier 1 had (which was something much more simple like a Zelda game). In addition to the melee combat, there are also several shmup sections as well as a hacking minigame (which are really just more shmup-like sections). They vary up the gameplay in a fun way, and the tons of different weapons you can get really do vary up the combat as well. There's still a lot of walking around and talking to people, exploring for resources for quests, and upgrading weapons, sure, but it is all around a significant improvement on the first Nier. Great writing aside, I have no trouble saying that Nier: Automata is a game that is simply much more fun to play than the first Nier. The art style for the game is also very pretty. I imagine it looks even better on PC, but on the base-model PS4 I played it on, Nier: Automata is still quite a lovely looking game with really cool looking enemies. The music, like Nier 1, is also fantastic, and does a fantastic job of setting scenes and creating atmosphere. The songs which evolve out of dialogue (such as "This Cannot Continue") are particularly fantastic. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Nier: Automata is not only a worthy successor to Nier, but succeeds on its own merits on being a fantastic video game and piece of writing. It is easily one of the best games I've played this year, and one of my new favorite games I've played. Yoko Taro outdid himself yet again and made a really fun game to play to boot, and it's absolutely a game worth checking out if you dig open world games and love a good story in your games. And so comes to a close the last R&C game I own (for now). I had always heard that only the first three games were really worth playing (up until the newest one), but a friend of mine who is a fan informs me that is not the case (and I have more R&C on the way in the mail). Regardless, I can see why that may've been the talk around these games, because R&C 3 is a damn fine improvement over 2 to the point where I can see why the series started to deviate from this formula after this point. It took me around 16 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with only light searching for collectibles.
Just as R&C 2 did, R&C 3 picks up right where the previous game left off, with Ratchet & Clank chilling in the capital of the main city from R&C 2. They suddenly see a news report on TV about their home galaxy being attacked by the evil Dr. Nefarious. Losing no time, Ratchet finishes installing the galactic warp capabilities in his ship and the duo return to defend their home galaxy! After a mission to help rescue the missing Captain Quark, the two are roped into his Q-Force to try and stop Dr. Nefarious and save the galaxy! The writing is head-and-shoulders above the past two games, easily. Characters recur throughout the story, they have conversations, they grow a report with one another. It's hardly a masterpiece of literature, but it's a far more coherent and realized story than the past two games. It also really gives elements aside from Ratchet & Clank themselves time to shine narratively, with the other members of Q-Force being entertaining and fun, as well as Dr. Nefarious being so delightfully extra and silly that he gives Captain Quark a run for his money. It's not hard for me to see why Sony likes him so much that they brought him back for later games in the series. The gameplay is still the same overall platforming and action segments as the prior two games, but tightened up and refined even past where R&C 2 brought the series to. Ratchet & Clank control better than ever, and the gunplay is more solid than ever with some of the most fun guns in the series yet (the black hole gun and lava spitting gun are both SO MUCH FUN). Also gone are all of the dreadful mini-games that plagued the even R&C 2, and in their places are a more infrequent hacking mini-game as well as ranger mission segments, where you assist the Galactic Rangers in missions that involve going around a map to attack points, defending a single point, riding around in a Halo Warthog-style jeep, and flying around in a hovercraft to destroy targets. There are even 2D platforming/semi-run and gun segments where you play as Captain Quark. The only tiny complaint I have is that I wish your auto-lock-on were a litttle more accurate, or that you had a fire button mapped to a shoulder button so you could look, move, and fire all at the same time. It's all great fun, and there wasn't a single point where I thought "well this game was great right up until HERE." The difficulty is also way better tuned than the previous two games, settling in at a nice place between R&C 1's often unfair-feeling challenge and R&C 2's too frequent ease, all leading up to a really satisfyingly challenging final boss fight (although hoo boy is that final level hard). This is also the first R&C game I'd say has actually good music. The music in the previous games is at best appropriately atmospheric, but this game manages to actually have some nice tunes in it. It's also once again a very pretty-looking game, flexing a good art style and well-designed characters. Although it does encounter some framerate issues from time to time, like Ape Escape 3 (another first party Sony game released around the same time) these are never problems that seriously impact gameplay. The Japanese version of each of the first 3 R&C games is more or less identical to the international version with a couple notable (and infamous) exceptions. Ratchet has his infamous large, black eyebrows that make no sense with the rest of his fur coloring. His head is also slightly larger, and that all adds up to what I suppose is to make his face somewhat more visibly expressive? I'm not positive on the rationale behind it. The localization otherwise is really good, and I actually prefer it to the English original in many ways. I think the relationship between Ratchet & Clank suffers a bit, as Clank comes off as similarly silly and quippy to Ratchet in many ways compared to how well-spoken he is in English, but their buddy dynamic is still very fun despite Ratchet's more kid-like voice. The voice cast on the whole feels like they're hamming it up more than the English VAs, and that overall makes for a much more fun time for characters like Dr. Nefarious and Captain Quark. The Japanese VA threw me off pretty bad at first, but it's something I've really grown to love in a way I didn't expect myself to. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is up there with Ape Escape 3 as one of my favorite games on PS2. It plays so well, the writing is so fun, and it all stays varied enough to keep you interested with the new story beats and new guns you find that it's just a big fun time until it's all over. I'd say you should probably at least play R&C 2 before you play this one, but if you only play one of the original 3 games, this is easily the top of the pile in terms of its overall quality. The R&C train continues as I move right onto the sequel. It's still a very recognizable game from the first, but this game has a TON of small but super significant improvements over the original, so I was pretty immediately drawn in. It took me around 12 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game while only getting a couple collectibles.
In this game, Ratchet & Clank find themselves where they ended the first game: watching TV at home. When suddenly, an eccentric inventor from another galaxy transports them to his location and tells them he needs their help to recover his stolen Protopet! After 2 weeks of commando training (off screen), Ratchet and Clank set off to save this missing Protopet and figure out just who the real bad guys may be. The story is certainly better and more involved than the first, but its overall presentation is still pretty similar. Most characters just amount to being little more than quirky item vendors you meet only one time, but it's still entertaining, and the overall resolution to the story is fun. Ratchet & Clank's banter is still fun as ever and it's a pleasing overlay to the platforming action of the main gameplay. The main gameplay is very similar to the first game, but with many improvements. It's still a series of planets with a few branching paths in each. You kill enemies to get money to buy weapons to keep going through those planets to find more tools and guns and navigation data to new levels. Just how much better this game plays than the first game cannot be overstated, though. You can FINALLY strafe! In a third-person shooting game, this helps the combat out MASSIVELY, as you can probably easily imagine. On top of that, Ratchet also moves way less clumsily than he does in the first game, and his jumping and walking are tighter overall. Checkpoints are more frequent as well as actually being told to you when they happen, there are far less annoying and awful minigames (although there are still a couple), and ammo boxes actually respawn now between deaths so ammo is far less of a worry. The guns are also better across the board, with nearly all of them being far more generally useful rather than the more circumstantial-to-useless feeling so many guns in the first game had. They also level up as you use them, going from normal to upgraded, and helping your favorite guns stay more relevant through more of the game. Ratchet himself also has an XP bar of sorts now, as killing more enemies will eventually trigger you to gain a new quarter of a life container (they're basically like hearts in Zelda), so you end up dying a LOT less even though the game's enemies do hit harder as you progress through the story. This game, like the first, still has an issue with some super weapons and armor (which reduces the amount of damage you take across the board by a percentage) being HORRIFICALLY expensive and requiring hours and hours of grinding for cash to acquire. A lot of the normal guns and armor are also quite prohibitively expensive, but the game really doesn't expect you to collect them all on your first playthrough (given that the game has a new game+ mode of sorts). Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a radical improvement from the first game in just about every way. It plays so much better I was actually happy to chase some of the more silly in-game side quests, like collecting every crystal and moon stone, simply because I was having so much fun with the combat. It's not quite perfect, but it's held up damn well and is still very worth playing so many years after its release. This is a series I've neglected for a long long time, and I saw the original PS2 games for 300 yen a piece a month or so ago and thought it was a fine time to finally pick 'em up. I've still got the itch for 3D platformers in me after finishing Mario Sunshine and such, so this seemed like a perfect time to give Insomniac's PS2 hit a try. It took me around 11 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game, and I did not go and hunt for more collectibles.
Ratchet & Clank is the story of Ratchet, a wannabe hero who teams up with Clank, a robot on a mission to stop the evil Chairman Drek. Drek is a Blarg, and the Blarg's homeworld was overpolluted and overpopulated, so they need a new homeworld. Drek is harvesting chunks of other planets, destroying them in the process, and using the pieces to make a new homeworld for the Blarg. Clank and Ratchet set out to stop Drek's evil scheme, one step at a time, by collecting infobots slowly revealing where the evil chairman himself is hiding. It's a lighthearted and fairly simple story, but it's packed with lively characters and pretty locations. It's a bit odd hearing the quite iconic voice cast (which I was familiar with despite not having played the games much at all before) in Japanese rather than English (especially Captain Qwark), but it really grew on me after a while, and the dub is well done, as is the localization. Lots of important signs re textured to be in Japanese rather than English, good voice talent, good lip syncing. I admit I didn't get a lot of the story, both because I was often talking with friends onilne while I was playing, and also because the game has pretty crappy subtitles (granted the subs are only in Japanese, of course). For the first part, it hides the option for them fairly well, by not having them in the main menu's option menu, but only accessible from the in-game option menu (for whatever reason), and even then, that's only subtitles for in-game dialogue. Pre-rendered cutscenes never have any subtitles, and that really sucks as far as accessibility options go. The gameplay is a more linear action platformer, but with some adventure game elements. You travel to over a dozen worlds, each having several paths through them that lead to either optional or required items you'll need to progress. All the while you'll be collecting bolts (money) that you'll use to both buy more guns and ammo at the various store around the game, but you'll also need them to buy those required items at the ends of each of those paths (this IS from the Spyro the Dragon devs, after all XD). The levels are mechanically largely the same, but there's usually at least one gimmick in each to make it feel different than the last (including some levels where you play as either just Ratchet or just Clank). The game's combat uses Ratchet's wrench as your default melee attack, but before long you'll get scads of guns to use to blow opponents away. There are some 18 guns in the game (with some quite well hidden super versions of some), and those that use ammo each have their own ammo requirement. You have everything from a flamethrower to a camera-guided missile launcher to a laser that turns your opponents into chickens, and it's good fun smashing stuff and blasting things away. The game can get quite mean with withholding ammo from you, particularly if you die, as enemies rarely (if ever?) drop ammo and ammo crates don't respawn between deaths. This was quite a surprisingly challenging game. You can eventually upgrade your life meter about 2/3rds of the way in through the game, but you spend most of the game with only 4 hits between you and death, and the game is pretty stingy with handing out more health. it's also pretty darn mean with checkpoints and bottomless pits (especially on the magnet boot sections). Tie that all in with how this is a 3rd person shooting game with no strafing mechanic and the fact that Ratchet is pretty slow and has a big turning circle, and you're probably gonna die quite a bit. The game is pretty merciful in that there's no extra life mechanic, but the game has a lot of sections that didn't feel totally fair, and that I had to try over and over to see the best way of not getting overwhelmed by the hordes of enemies. Those enemy horde rooms are just one of the frequent "ugh" aspects this game has to it. A lot of later game enemies both fly, shoot guns, and take several melee hits. Ratchet also has only a couple guns that have any meaningful range to them. I spent most of the game using only a small handful of weapons since your hotbar only holds 8 tools + weapons (and you have 6 tools + those 18 weapons), and only a few weapons seemed all that meaningfully effective. Running out of ammo in the later game is a real death sentence, and it made the action get more often frustrating than tense. Then there's the aforementioned tightrope wakling magnet boot sections, the awful hoverboard races, the turret and ship-flying sections. The game has a lot of rough aspects to its design that make for a game that is just as often fun as it is annoying. For presentation, the game is fairly pretty graphically for a 2002 PS2 game. It's hardly the prettiest thing in the world, but the world has a colorful, fun style to it, and it really helps bring the zany, loud characters to life with how cartoony their designs are. The music is pretty darn forgettable though, and is very much "atmospheric" more than anything else. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is on the higher end of my hesitantly recommended list, but I really didn't feel comfortable giving this a recommended. It's not often I'm just "done" enough with a game to not even try to get the collectibles in it, but that was very much the case with this game. I'd say it's worth a shot if you can find it for cheap, but the overall product is such an "early 2000's platformer" for better and for worse that it very well might be more frustration than it's worth for a lot of people. Wandersong is a cute little game I had recommended to me ages ago, but I can't really remember the why or how of that happening. All I know is that at some point I bought it for my Switch, tried it out for a few hours, and then bounced off of it. It's been languishing up until now, and I finally finished it yesterday. It took me about 8 hours to complete the English version of the game all in one sitting.
Wandersong is a story about a bard. You have a dream one night about being tested as the hero who will save the world... and fail. You fail horribly, and the guardian spirit of the world informs you in no uncertain terms of this. The world has a destined hero, and it is soooo not you. However, the bard does learn of something called the Earthsong, something that could theoretically save the world, but it's never been successfully done. Undeterred, the bard sets out on a quest with his new companion Miriam the witch to try and save the world in a universe that is DEFINITELY about to end. You travel to all sorts of different locales: an archipelago full of singing and coffee-loving pirates, a city under the thumb of an oppressive toy factory, and a freezing mountain on the edge of the world. All while reality slowly begins to crumble around you and the actual destined hero harries you at every turn, given that you're on two conflicting quests. Wandersong is a story about hope and the relationships between people. The story takes a while to get going, but once it does it really had me hooked (I'd say it starts getting good a couple hours in at Act 3). The dialogue is silly, but balances seriousness with that well. It eases you into the characters of Miriam and the bard with the silliness, and gets to how they function as people beyond that. I was delightfully surprised by the writing in this game, and it at times feels like a VN despite being more a puzzle platformer with a large focus on its story. The actual gameplay loop of Wandersong is a puzzle platformer, but ultimately not a terribly challenging one, although it certainly has more tricky parts that I would've predicted it had. You can walk around and jump, but what the game really flexes its puzzles with is your ability to sing (you ARE a bard, after all). By pushing the right stick in the 8 cardinal directions, each one sings a different note, and the game uses this mechanic for all manner of puzzles. Puzzles rarely repeat outside of the singing parts, and the game does a great job at pacing puzzles so they go on long enough to feel satisfying but not so long that they feel overly repetitive. They're a great framework for the story to take place in, and they add a lot of character to the bard, as you can basically sing whenever you want, and you also choose dialogue options in conversations by selecting a direction on the little color wheel that appears to help you select notes. You can even hold L to start dancing whenever you want. It has no bearing on the gameplay, but there's a secret new dance to discover in each area of the game, and it's good silly fun to just start dabbing during a cutscene X3 The presentation of the game is super fun. It almost has a paper-craft style to it with how everything is constructed out of shapes. The world is bright, colorful, and full of personality, from the backgrounds to even side characters. The music is also really good, often reacting dynamically to how you're playing the game or what your bard is singing. Nothing particularly MP3-worthy, but it does a great job at making the overall theme of music come alive as well as setting the mood for scenes very well, especially the bard's singing parts. Verdict: Highly Recommended. There are a lot of indie puzzle platformers out there, I won't deny that, but this is easily one of the most memorable I've ever played. With a strong presentation and a solid story, it's definitely one of my favorite games I've played this year. Last year, a friend offered to buy me a copy of Shenmue 3 after I mentioned that it was something that I might enjoy but didn't want to pay money for. He did indeed buy me a copy and sent it to my mom's place in America. I picked it up when I visited the States back in December, and have been waiting for the inspiration to strike since then. Last week, it finally felt like the right time to play through Shenmue 3, and four days and 25-ish hours (I think) of playtime later, I've finished it on my PS4 Slim. While I'm certainly far from a converted fan, I do wanna open this review by clarifying that while I have never played Shenmue 1 or 2 to any significant extent, I never really hated my time with this game, and I enjoyed my time with it well enough that it wasn't ever a slog to get through it. As one last warning, I do get into some light spoiler talk here about certain characters who appear as well as things to do with the pacing.
Shenmue 3 picks up right where Shenmue 2 left off with Ryo and Shenhua entering the cave with the big mirrors and the prophecy in it. Shenmue 3 follows Ryo's story in his quest for revenge another couple of steps through Bailu Village and the port city of Niaowu. While Shenmue does have combat in it, it is far more an adventure game that happens to have combat rather than more of an brawler-RPG like Yakuza is. That being the case, I weigh the story in the game pretty heavily as an aspect of recommending it, and it doesn't hold up very well there. Shenmue 3, being a larger part in a story (that is allegedly still not even close to being finished) only encompass a small section of Ryo's overall quest for revenge. However, rather than feeling like a self-contained episode that is narratively satisfying in and of itself, Shenmue 3 feels more like a section cut out of a larger story with little care given to pacing or payoff. While I do understand that Shenmue is a series far more about the journey than the destination, compared to most other games, this still leaves Shenmue 3 feeling like an unsatisfying and shallow adventure. Characters have interesting aspects to them, and some very interesting themes (like a father's relationship to their child, how a single-minded quest for revenge can affect a person's worldview and behavior, the dangers of cycles of violence) are present and interesting, they're never meaningfully commented on or evolved. Most characters in the street you talk to (especially in Bailu Village) are boring and dull, and the best most characters ever get are "entertainingly weird". Even that "entertainingly weird" nature can still leave many characters (some very tertiary, some very well established) falling into some harmful and outdated stereotypes. As a result, it's somewhat of a blessing in disguise that characters like Chai have such small roles in the narrative. The most entertaining characters (for me, Ren and Mr. Hsu) are largely so interesting in no small part because of how good their voice acting is. I played the first few hours of the game with the English voice track on, and then switched it to Japanese for the rest of my playthrough. It is no secret that Shenmue 3 has an embarrassingly poor localization for a game released in 2019. Nonsensical conversations and flat, unemotional delivery are as iconic as Ryo in his forklift. This can be slightly remedied by turning the voice lines to the Japanese voice track, but you're still left with the awkward and poorly done subtitles of the English voice track. The almost non-existent marketing aside, the awful localization is the #1 thing I chalk the commercial under-performance of this game up to. To the uninitiated, Shenmue 3 looks more like a bad joke than a genuine attempt at a sincere story. And even then, the Japanese voice track isn't terribly good either. Most characters still have fairly flat delivery and uninteresting dialogue with only a few exceptions. At most, the Japanese VA provides a story that at least makes better grammatical sense for players who can understand Japanese. Regardless, even the best VA in the world would have a hard time making up for the too often poorly written dialogue and missteps in setup and payoff in the story's general construction. The fact that the climaxes of both sections of the game revolve around earning a ton of money to get a nearly identical move needed to progress the story makes for a very underwhelming end to the arc in Niaowu. Not to mention that those giant piles of money you need offer nothing but massive roadblocks to the pacing even if (like me) you were enjoying the smaller mysteries outside of the larger revenge plot. I'm really glad that I went into the game knowing that I'd need 2000 and then 5000 yuan, because if I didn't those would've been some awfully demoralizing progress stoppages. On the topic of money, lets move on from the story and onto the main gameplay loop. Shenmue 3 is still as Shenmue as ever in most regards there. Ryo needs information, and people have information. A lot of the game is going around asking the same question to everyone you meet, trying to get an idea of where to go. This is the bread and butter of Shenmue, and it's hard to fault the game for it given that it's such a staple of the game. It's an adventure game, not an action RPG, so most of the game is talking to people. That said, a lot of the people you talk to are really boring and have little interesting to say (especially in Bailu Village), so this can get a bit dull after a while. Thankfully, you can press square to hurry through dialogue a bit if you're fine just reading the subtitles. Everything outside of the talking comes back to making money though. In a change from prior Shenmue games, Ryo has a health bar that's also his stamina meter, and you need to eat food to keep it higher so you can run instead of walk (although walking is fast enough that I found myself doing it a lot of the game anyhow), and you'll also wanna have it at least a little high so you can survive a fight should you get into one. To keep that stamina up, you'll need to buy food, and that costs money. In another change from prior Shenmue games, you don't just get better at fighting in a Virtua Fighter-style. Ryo has attack and HP stats that will go up as he masters different martial arts moves and does simple endurance mini-games respectively. Being at high health means these things level up faster, and (as we'll get to later) the combat isn't technical enough for you to simply win most story fights with technique rather than stats. As a result, there is a lot of actual grinding these mini-games and martial arts moves (just repeating them over and over during sparing) to get past a fight you simply aren't strong enough to beat. However, you can't get new martial arts moves to master just out of thin air: you need skill books. You get skill books by trading items (especially capsule toys) for them at pawn shops or outright buying them at martial arts stores, and that'll cost a lot of money as well. All this adds up to a gameplay loop that means that if you're not talking to people to solve the mystery, you're grinding out cash to get your stats up so you can win a fight to progress the story (or buy the super item you need to progress the story, as mentioned previously). This wouldn't all be so bad if the combat were actually good, but it is not good at all. The biggest change from the prior Shenmue games is that you no longer have that Virtua Fighter-lite style of fighting. In an attempt to open up the game to more players, Yu Suzuki has opted to change the combat to no longer use directional inputs at all, and all moves are now on the four face buttons of circle, triangle, X, and square. By inputting sequences of 2-5 buttons, you'll pull off a special move. While I believe it is possible to execute a move you don't have the skill book for, you can't level up that move outside of sparing, so you do need those skill books to increase your attack power if you wanna survive the later fights in the game. Where this really becomes a problem is how the button combo presses are just a sequence of buttons, and because there are only four buttons, the game doesn't know if you're only inputting two buttons, or if you simply haven't finished a four-button move set. This makes it almost impossible to react to opponents moves through anything outside of using the control stick to dodge, because there is a massive lag between your inputs and Ryo's attacks as he "waits" to see if you're done inputting a move or not. This makes the combat very frustrating and unrewarding to try and get good at, although it does mean that the combat itself being more about stats than technique is a small but welcome mercy. The ways you earn money in the first place can be quite entertaining though. I mostly earned my fortune going around and collecting herbs that I'd then sell, but I also did a button pressing mini-game to earn money chopping wood quite often. Aside from that, you can gamble on all sorts of games of chance to earn money, as well as perform the iconic forklifting job once you get to Niaowu (which I'll admit I never had the patience to try). Earning money through gambling is fairly annoying, as you can't gamble directly for cash. You first need to buy tokens, then gamble (in quite small amounts) for more tokens, and you then exchange those tokens for prizes which you can THEN sell at a pawn shop for actual money. Given that you could apparently just gamble for money in Shenmue 2, this is mechanically a really annoying step back, and I was super excited when I realized that I basically never needed to gamble and could just collect herbs to get past those money-based progress barriers. The final part of the gameplay that I think annoyed me more than anything were the quick time events. I know this is Shenmue and QTEs are a fairly iconic part of it, but they're not fun in 2019 and they frankly never were (and I'm really glad that the industry as a whole is moving away from them). If you fail a QTE, the cutscene immediately replays and you get another chance to hit the exact same button. The only actual penalty for missing a QTE is the time you lose watching the cutscene again, some of these cutscenes are really long (one near the end of the game is easily over a minute long and has only two button presses in it). I would've much rather they had no QTEs at all, or at least done what a lot of games have done recently and given you the option to turn them off. Shenmue is a very slow series to begin with, but the QTEs more than anything feel outright disrespectful of the player's time. The last thing we'll talk about is the presentation. For reference, I played this on a PS4 Slim, so this is the base PS4 experience of the game. One of the best things the game has going for it is that it's quite pretty if you stand still and look around, particularly at the environments. Some of the NPCs look a bit uncanny valley in just how stylized they are compared to a lot of the main characters like Ryo and Shenhua, and they can also look pretty creepy when they open their mouths to talk, but it's far from a deal breaker and the game overall holds up visually just fine. The game also has some quite nice music, especially during the final battle and the chicken catching game. It's not without its odd performance issues though. If you run around an area, NPCs take quite a few seconds to load in, although they still exist, meaning Ryo will just be bumping into air until the NPC loads in and you can interact with them. There are also many areas in Naiowu where you are forced to walk through an area to let the area ahead of you load, and this can get annoying given how often you need to run from one end of the city to the other. There are also a lot of (admittedly quite fast) loading times within cutscenes, and some of them are just these weird fades to black that happen constantly in longer cutscenes. They make for very jarring dialogue exchanges where you keep thinking the scene has ended, but in fact it's just a fade to black that could've been a quick cut, and that's a problem that the whole game is plagued with from the word 'go'. Verdict: Not Recommended. Though I did not hate my time with Shenmue 3, and actually quite enjoyed most of it, it is not a game that I could actually recommend in good faith to anyone who doesn't already like it. The main reason I enjoyed Shenmue 3 was just down to it being an open world game, and having the same "number go up" dopamine hits of progression that any open world game has. Everything Shenmue 3 does ranges from mediocre at best to outright bad. Shenmue 3 didn't have to feel like a poor man's Yakuza, but the production decisions made along the way make it feel like precisely that. Shenmue as a series has very different goals narratively and mechanically from Yakuza, so steps could've been taken to lean into the mundanity and slow pace to bring Shenmue into the 8th generation of gaming, but that is not what YsNet did. Shenmue 3 is a game that turns its nose up at the decade and a half of innovation in the open world genre since Shenmue 2's release and the start of Shenmue 3's development. It not only refuses to imagine that Shenmue could be anything more than what it always was, but when it does try to change it's actively taking steps backwards. Shenmue 3 had the potential to be an interesting niche entry to an ever expanding genre, and is instead a nostalgia piece that simply can't imagine a world beyond itself. This is a game I technically beat before I even started Mario Sunshine, but I wanted to wait until I was properly done playing with it to write a review for it. That time was when I finished playing it on stream (again) yesterday, so now's the time to put it back on the shelf and write my review for it. I got 68 out or 180 emblems, and played the Japanese version of the game for about 20 hours.
Sonic Adventure 2 is the followup to the first Sonic Adventure, and it follows Sonic & co as they try to stop Eggman from blowing up the world with the power of the Chaos Emeralds. But that's only the Hero story mode. There's also the Dark story mode, where you play as Eggman & co trying to end the world with the power of the Chaos Emeralds. It's a neat gimmick where you see both sides of a story that plays out more or less the same either way, as there's a "LAST" story mode you unlock after completing the other two that ties them together and gives a conclusion to everyone's stories. It's ultimately a fairly campy and silly story (that introduces characters such as Shadow the Hedgehog and Rogue the Bat), but it does have some nice moments. It's serviceable and entertaining for what it is, and that's all it needs to be. I'd actually never realized that apparently this game just has a language select feature, and you can switch between several languages' subtitles as well as the Japanese or English voice tracks in any version of the game! As a result, the Japanese version of the game's only actual difference (so far as I can tell) is that the main title screen is in Japanese (changing the language doesn't affect that, so far as I know). The Japanese voice track is much better voice acted than the English in many places, but I will say that I definitely prefer the English voice for Eggman over the Japanese one. And the infamously awful sound balancing this game has, where music in cutscenes is often far too loud compared to the dialogue, is also consistent across both languages, sadly XP There are six playable characters, but they're basically light and dark copies of each other. There are upgrades to find for each character individually, but for the most part each character plays identically to their counterpart. Sonic and Shadow both have very speed-focused stages where you jump around, platform, and homing attack enemies. Rogue and Knuckles both have more open stages where there isn't a goal to get to, and instead you're using computer terminals scattered around the level to get hints to where the hidden master emerald pieces are. Last, you have Tails and Eggman, who each have linear levels where they stomp around in big mechs, using homing shots to blast everything in their paths. Sonic/Shadow stages and Tails/Eggman stages all work pretty soundly and are good fun to go through. This was originally designed for the Dreamcast, and this is a pretty dead-on port job, so the C-stick does nothing and instead the camera is controlled by holding R and L respectively. This is usually something you don't need to worry about, as the game does a pretty good job following you with its auto camera, but it's often not an issue outside of a few boss fights. Where it is constantly a problem is in Rogue/Knuckles stages. They're so open that the auto-camera often doesn't really know what to do, and the levels eventually become so large and annoying to navigate (one of them even has a 5 minute time limit), and they're by far the least fun parts of the game. There are 31 levels in the game not counting boss fights and including two racing time trial levels, but once you beat a story mode you unlock those levels to play in level select mode. In level select mode, you can play through each of that stage's five missions, and each of those missions has its own emblem associated with it. There are also hidden powerups you can only find upon returning to a previous level with a later level's powerup. It adds a LOT of playtime to the game if you're going for 100%, but this is easily one of the hardest/time consuming games in this fashion I've played in that regard from this time period. Even completing all the missions in a certain stage (which range from collecting 100 rings to finding a hidden Chao to completing a much harder version of the level) is a challenge in and of itself, but there is also an emblem for each character that you get when getting an A rank on every single one of their missions. You get a rank from A to E when finishing a mission, and that's dependent on your point total at the end (and the point total associated with each rank is never told to the player). Points are gotten by chaining together enemy kills and finishing the level quickly, so in order to get A ranks on EVERY mission, it means replaying them a LOT to get really good at finishing them very quickly and with as many good enemy kills as you can. It's a time commitment I can't really justify for how much I enjoy the gameplay loop, so it's not something I think I'll ever do (and it's the reason I stopped at a little over 60 emblems when I was too demoralized to continue getting them XP). Outside of all of that, in each level, you can also find boxes with Chaos on them, and breaking one reveals a Chao key which takes you to the Chao garden afterwards. Around levels and from defeated enemies, you'll pick up power cores and small animals, and you can take these back to your Chao garden to allow your Chaos to absorb the power from them (but not kill them) and level up. Chaos who absorb energy from animals will even take on features from that animal (like bunny ears, dragon wings, etc). Chaos age as real time passes, and they can eventually turn into a Hero or Dark Chao depending on what alliance of character has given them the most affection. One of the most significant changes from the Dreamcast version to the GC port is actually that the time for a Chao aging one year has gone from 1 real time hour to 3 freakin' real time hours. Thankfully about a minute gets shaved off of that time each time a Chao eats a piece of fruit, but it still takes an annoying amount of time. You can enter your Chao in races and karate competitions, which is why you need their stats raised. Completing a karate tournament or winning a series of races will earn you an emblem, and you need at least two (one hero and one dark) Chaos who are very good at racing in order to get all the emblems associated with the Chao garden. That requires a LOT of animals and power cores to get them that high, so ultimately the huge amount of time you'll spend replaying levels to try and get A ranks will feed into how much time you'll have to sink into raising two racing-ready Chao. Raising Chao is a simple but fun addition to the overall experience of going through levels and even just to the normal story mode. Chao have cute little idle animations, and you can even take them to Chao school to have them learn new animations to do (like playing with a tambourine). It's a weirdly engrossing part of the game, and raising my little Horatio and playing around with him is one of the things that kept me playing so far after I beat the game's main story. Verdict: Recommended. This game won't be for everyone, but if there are any good purely 3D Sonic games, this is definitely among them. It's got a campy, fun story, reasonable gameplay, and a decent amount of extra content if you really wanna sink your teeth into it. It's a childhood favorite of mine, and it was really fun to go through it again after all these years ^w^ |
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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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