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Yakuza 4 Remastered I put this one off for like a year because of how utterly miserable of an experience Yakuza 3 was but that turned out to be a mistake. This one is actually pretty great! I played on hard again, because I don't learn from my mistakes. Fortunately for me, the combat in this one is nowhere near as obnoxious as in Yakuza 3. There's still some bullshit with boss enemies attacking or blocking in the middle of your combo string, which might be deliberate but seems fucking insane to me. And some large groups of enemies in some chapters will sometimes decide to all try to hit you at once and you end up getting stun-locked for a solid minute, which seems like incredibly sloppy combat design to me but what do I know? Anyway, the game overall was super fun so unlike the miserable slog that was Yakuza 3, here it's a minor complaint. The story is actually pretty good. At its best moments I was reminded of Yakuza 0, which is basically the highest praise I can give to one of these games. And at one point Majima referenced something that happened to him in the 80s and I got really excited that the game would have some kind of retroactive tie-in with 0 but it turned out to be some other event that happened 2 years before 0. I went into the game fully prepared to complain that there wasn't enough Kiryu (and he does play a disappointingly minor role in the game) but I ended up loving the new characters way more than I expected, so it turned out to not be such a huge deal. Akiyama is just a great character and Saejima is a fucking badass brick shithouse of a man that lifts dudes over his head and throws them into walls. What's not to love? That being said, most of the combat issues I described happened with the other characters. Once I finally got to play as Kiryu, it was like turning the game's difficulty down. I guess normal people just can't compare to the Dragon of Dojima. I was kinda meh on Tanimura as a character but apparently he doesn't come back in future games because his voice actor quit or something. The best part of his section was the gameplay because it kinda felt like proto-Judgment but we have Judgment now and Yagami is a much better character, so I guess that worked out in the end. Speaking of Judgment, maybe it's because it's the last one I played before this but I kinda felt the game's age while playing Yakuza 4. The textures on non-main characters are just a blurry mess and Kamurocho feels way more artificial by comparison. It's really tempting to jump right into Yakuza 5 so I can get the PS3 games out of the way and only have the more modern Dragon Engine games left but I'm worried about getting burned out on the series. Think I'll probably give it a month or so to play something else and come back to it in the near future.

Seed of the Dead Man this is a thing. I like the concept, more shooters (FPS or TPS) with an anime art style would be most excellent, however, in this case, the execution is a mess. Not to mention the healing gimmick and some of the more... questionable content it has. Gameplay is pretty janky, most guns feel useless, any of the auto rifles are so inaccurate the safest place during combat is standing right in front of them, trying to aim down sight doesn't really help either. The only cool weapon that actually sorta does work is the non-copyright infringing lightsaber. One of the biggest issues is that this game is mostly made up of assets, nothing against assets, but the devs didn't bother to try and find stuff that worked well together, or that even made sense, so you'll go from a neon-lit city stage, to a hospital that looks right out of Outlast, to a "laboratory" that for some reason has demonic statues with fire coming out of them, it's all just a mishmash of different art styles, settings, textures, etc. This extends to enemies and the main characters, there's a limited amount of monsters, including one enemy that's a giant dickhead (literally and metaphorically ), the main enemies are zombies, or zombie as it were, as there's only one model, enemy variety is practically nonexistent. The main characters meanwhile, stick out like a sore thumb, the art for them is kinda nice, their models, not so much, animations are also pretty awkward. Then there's the healing gimmick, instead of using health kits or whatever, characters here take this song very literally: Yes, the way you heal during combat is This is a rhythm mini-game, and completing it heals both characters and gives you a shield. The length of this and the awkward animations make this quite the annoying mechanic. So yeah, this was a thing, don't recommend, can't recommend, even for me, this was a bit much lol. That said, I've been playing the sequel, and that one is quite the improvement in every category, though it also has a bunch of issues. I hope Snowbreak is good, after Hoyoverse cancelled the TPS they were working on, I want more and better shooters with an anime art style, this, most certainly, is not it. TL;DR: Not good, avoid, stay away, menu screen art is the only good thing about this game. Grade: F (0/10) Daemon X Machina This one was pretty good. Basically, this is to Armored Core what Code Vein was to Dark Souls, in short, this is anime Armored Core, cheesy melodramatic story included. Gameplay was pretty neat, close to AC4/ACFA in terms of speed, with some enemies just zipping around the battlefield at Mach 666. You can equip three weapons, two in each arm and one shoulder weapon, there's also pylon weapons, you can swap between your currently equipped arm weapons and weapons stored in your pylons whenever, which gives you some freedom in terms of strategy and equipment. You also have support weapons, this range from extra boosters, to grenades and healing items. The main thing here is Femto energy, you can use this for a couple of different things, normally it acts as a bit of a shield, but you can also choose to redirect it to increase boost speed, or weapon damage. The damage boost is super useful and was my most used ability. Weapon variety is nice, there's a lot of weapons that are just upgrades of basic ones (so assault rifle, assault rifle 2, assault rifle 3 etc.) but there's still a bunch of stuff to choose from, including variations of some weapons that have an autofire mode, which means they will automatically fire on any enemy in range. Not really useful as they don't deal as much damage as manual weapons but it's neat that they're there. Enemy variety is somewhat limited, but for a game like this it doesn't really bother me, the fights against the other characters were the highlight, much more fun and challenging than just wiping out normal enemies. Boss fights on the other hand can be a bit annoying, specially the first one, since you won't have weapons that are strong enough by the time you face it, so it's just firing at a bullet sponge, occasionally going after the weaker enemies that spawn and that are there to help you recover ammo and energy. I did have a couple of issues while playing though, during one mission, enemies bugged out and became immortal, I was sure I was doing something wrong and there was some strategy to dealing with them until I looked up a guide and realized it wasn't supposed to be like that. During another mission and enemy glitched through the ground, making it impossible to deal with them, which meant that I had to restart the mission. There was also an unwinnable mission that I restarted a couple of times before realizing you're not supposed to win, learned this after reducing the enemy's health to about 20% and then noticing that no matter how many times I hit them, their health didn't go down any further. Finally, the last boss was the biggest annoyance. A long level where you have to fight two of the strongest enemies, followed by a really annoying boss that's incredibly hard to hit as it doesn't zip around so much as it just teleports around the arena. Then finally the actual last boss, which is the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges, insane resistance to all attack types, some really annoying attacks, including one that just outright steals your weapons from you and an arena that isn't really suited for that kind of fight. Thankfully you don't have to go through the whole thing when retrying, otherwise I doubt I'd have bothered to finish the game. Story was kinda cool though, although the silent protagonist thing doesn't work here. Characters will talk to you: "We need you in the briefing, we could use your opinion" "What do you think about this?" "What is your answer?" "Are you ready?" And other stuff, and yet your character never responds, not even in text, even during cutscenes, your actual character (outside of your mech) only shows up a couple of times. This leads to some rather awkward moments were certain characters might as well be talking to themselves. All in all, I'd highly recommend it if you're interested in this kind of game, specially with AC VI coming out soon, bonus, if you've been claiming the free games on the Epic store, chances are, you already have it. TL;DR: Anime armored core, really cool, annoying last boss, but overall, highly recommended. Grade: B+