Mister Jack

Has there been any official statement saying it's a small scale spin off? Because the rumors I've heard are claiming it's a full fledged game. I don't know what to believe.

Yakuza 6: Song of Life The final chapter in Kiryu's story is a controversial one, and I sorta understand why. After Yakuza 5 expanded everything with more characters, more side activities, bigger stakes, and pretty much just more everything, Yakuza 6 scales it back quite a bit. You only play as Kiryu again and instead of five cities you have two now: Kamurocho and Hiroshima. The plot is also far more personal to Kiryu now and the Tojo clan itself actually plays a fairly minor role in this story. Kiryu is no longer concerned about the Tojo clan whatsoever and all he cares about anymore is protecting his family. While I can sympathize with people who may have been disappointed by this because they wanted a big, explosive grand finale, I actually don't mind a smaller, more intimate storyline and think it's rather appropriate. Kiryu is getting on in years by now and he can't keep doing this forever. He's tired of being pulled back into the yakuza life and he just wants to put it all behind him and retire with his kids, but his shady past has come back to haunt him by directly putting his loved ones in the crosshairs and he's forced to take care of business one last time. While this entry still has plenty of humor and silliness, you get a real sense of fatigue from Kiryu. He's just so done with this shit. On a side note, Beat Takeshi of all people plays a major role in this game. You know, that guy who designed one of the most frustrating video games of all time because he hates video games and wanted to give a middle finger to the people who play them. I dunno how Sega got him to agree to this, but he does a pretty great job. The gameplay hasn't changed all that much, but the biggest addition seems to be a new RTS style minigame based around building up your own clan and pitting them against other clans. I only did a few of these matches myself so I don't have a lot to say about it. It's there if you want something to kill time with, I suppose, and I think it also can be played online so that's cool, but I was never really big on the RTS genre. It's kind of bittersweet to say goodbye to Kiryu. This entry definitively closes the book on his saga, but I think that's fine. Some people are pissed that the next game switches protagonists and has changed to an RPG, but Kiryu has suffered enough. If he came back as the protagonist it would be a total copout after the way they wrapped up this game. After playing 7 brawler games I'm also not opposed to the Yakuza team trying a new genre either. What I've seen of Yakuza 7 so far looks pretty cool and I'm looking forward to revisiting this franchise in Ichiban's shoes.

Bleach is doing the same thing and I have similar feelings. The original manga ending was rushed and half assed because Kubo's publisher only gave him 5 chapters to wrap it up. I hope the upcoming anime adaptation diverges from that.

One concern I have is that built in controller microphone. I really hope you can turn that crap off or at least limit it to a push-to-talk functionality. I don't want it picking up everything I'm saying at all times, nor would I want it picking up ambient noise.

Interesting conference. I can't help but notice that there's still no price. Neither Microsoft or Sony seem to want to be the first one to fire that bullet for obvious reasons. Actually getting to finally see the console was nice, although I wish they'd gone into detail about the hardware and the OS a little more. They sure showed a lot of games, and while only a handful of them personally interest me there's still more good stuff than you usually get during a launch window. I told myself I was going to wait on the PS5 until there were five games I want to play on it but they already revealed three or four so good job, Sony. It was certainly better than the Xbox reveal earlier this year so I'll give them a solid B.

This whole "defund the police" movement is not going to pick up steam the way BLM did simply because it's so ill-defined. Everyone seems to have their own idea of what defunding the police actually means and both presidential candidates have already come out against the idea, which makes the whole thing moot. Abolishing the police system entirely and leaving law enforcement to some kind of wild west community system—which some people are absolutely supporting—is a ludicrous fantasy that shouldn't even be acknowledged. "Defund the police" is also a terrible slogan that is red meat for conservatives to tear apart during an election year specifically because it sounds so extreme to the average layman. They really should have gone with something else to put on their signs. If you always have to explain and clarify that it doesn't actually mean what it sounds like it means then it's a bad slogan. On a side note, domestic violence calls are one of the deadliest and most volatile emergency calls in the country. Like it or not, you need to keep police on those. Maybe if we didn't have a second amendment it would be different but it is what it is. In fact, our gun culture in general is gonna be a pretty big obstacle to any movement to scale back the police system in the US. I think at best we'll be able to dismantle especially problematic departments and hire new ones and maybe establish some kind of federal police oversight bureau. I sure would love it if the for-profit prison system could also go fuck itself but that seems even less likely to happen from where I'm standing.

Does that bundle only include stuff that's in it at the time you buy it or do you get to keep the new games they add? Because if it's the former I might as well wait until the last day.

If they do P3 it needs to be more than a mere port. Portable, despite the downgrade, still ended up being the best version to play just because your can actually control your damn party members. We can't go back to the days of MARIN FUCKING KARIN in 2020.

Come ooon Persona 4 Golden port! @TheMightyEthan There's no way they're announcing Persona 6 this early. They just put out P5R a little while ago and these games take yeeeeears to come out.

Let's do this, Kiryu. One last ride.

Yakuza 5 I'd say this one is probably the best game in the remastered collection and I can see why this was the only one to get a special PS3 case. There are now five playable characters, although one of them doesn't do any actual fighting and is instead used for an idol based rhythm game. You may ask what japanese idols have to do with the yakuza, but that all gets explained. Actually, this game probably has the most complicated plot in the series. In addition to having more playable characters than ever there are also five cities this time around scattered all over Japan and all of them have their own side plot but are also relevant to the larger plot overall. It's a lot to swallow and if you haven't kept up with all the previous entries you'll probably get hopelessly lost. This is not a series where you can just skip entries and expect to keep up. Story aside, this entry has by far the most amount of side content to amuse yourself with, including activities that aren't available in any other Yakuza game. If you want a Yakuza game chock full of stuff to do, this is the one for you. Still, while this is the best of the remastered collection I would probably still put it below the Kiwami style games, which just feel better to play. Like I said before, this collection is not a series of remakes. They're simply remasters, which means they don't have all the gameplay improvements of the Kiwami games. For 20 dollars per game, however, you really can't complain too much. I'm glad I played these and I enjoyed experiencing the missing chapters in the Kiryu saga, even if they got completely bonkers at some points.

I've actually heard the same thing about Drake but it was so long ago I couldn't give you a source on that anymore.

I think you mean Horizon: One Fine Afternoon

Oh yeah, I'm keeping an eye on this one. I haven't watched the Lodoss anime since high school but I'm much more interested in how closely they're adhering to the style of Symphony of the Night, which is my favorite game of all time. Even if you wanna accuse it of being a copycat, my only big complaint about Symphony is that there isn't more of it so this will be right up my alley.

I kinda feel where you're coming from. I switched to console gaming exclusively a while back because my PC was having heating issues every time I tried to play on it and I was sick of paying for repairs so I told myself I'd save up for a new one later on. PC prices just keep going up, though, and I have to ask myself if I really miss it that badly. I'm sure I'll probably get a new PC eventually, but I'll probably be good with PS5/Switch for a good while. Any PC exclusive I'm interested in right now is already an indie game that will play on a potato and as much as I like 60+ frames on my games I am pretty reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices that are out there right now to achieve it.

I doubt Trump has even heard of Posse Comitatus until today, and even if he has I bet he cares even less about adhering to it. I expect nothing to change unless Trump gets voted out in November. I'm not really a Biden guy—although he's certainly better than the alternative—but at least he's pledged to establish a police oversight board if he's elected. Whether that would work or not is anyone's guess but at least it's an attempt to fix this situation.

Yakuza 4 This one was better than Yakuza 3. The plot has better pacing, but it ties all the way back to Yakuza 0 so if you're not paying attention it can be easy to get lost. There are also some retcons in here that not everyone is going to like but that's a matter of opinion. Regardless, you don't spend 33% of the game at an orphanage. In fact, in addition to Kiryu you are now also playing as three other characters. There's Akiyama the loan shark, Saejima the convict, and Tanimura the cop. They all have different fighting styles and storylines that eventually intertwine near the end, and just as you start to get tired of playing one character it switches you to another. Some people might not like having to play as people besides Kiryu but I found these characters to be likable and well-written. Tanimura is maybe the weakest of the four, but not by a huge margin and only because cop stories aren't as interesting as Yakuza stories to me. The gameplay outside of that hasn't changed a whole lot so I don't have much else to say about it. I'd rank it above 3 but maybe not quite up there with Kiwami.

Hope you guys have been enjoying covid-19 because all of this is definitely going to ensure that it's with us for a long, long time.

The Irishman Let's just address the elephant in the room right off the bat. This movie is really long. Three and a half hours long! I watched it all in one sitting and I'm telling you now that it did not have to be that long. The last half hour, maybe even 45 minutes could have been chopped off or at least condensed and the movie wouldn't suffer from it. I get what Scorsese was going for but he could have made the point more succinctly. I watched this all in one sitting and by the end I was anxious for it to just get it over with. If you decide to watch it, I'd recommend doing it in two sittings so you won't lose patience like I did. Length aside, this is an interesting story about the life of mobster Frank Sheeran and his friendship with Jimmy Hoffa, along with the complications that entails since anyone who has ever picked up a history book knows that things don't end well for Jimmy Hoffa. Everyone gives solid performances, though Al Pacino as Hoffa is especially good, and the digital deaging technology used on De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino is surprisingly convincing. I personally never found it distracting, at any rate. If I have to criticize the script for something it's that sometimes it feels a little unfocused. It starts off as a biography of how Frank gets into the mob life, then it becomes all about Hoffa, but in between all of this there are these Forrest Gumpesque vignettes about historical events like the Bay of Pigs or the Kennedy assassination and how those things affected the mob. To be fair, these events aren't just there for little cameos like in Gump and the historical events in question have direct repercussions for the A-plot, but I still think some of that stuff ended up distracting from the more interesting Hoffa drama. There's also very little of that black comic relief you get in other Scorsese films like Wolf of Wall Street or Goodfellas. This is a serious drama through and through, but if you're down for that then it's a pretty good mafia film.

It'll be a while before I get to this one probably but it was at a good price and I didn't want to miss out.

I think Nintendo said recently not to expect a direct any time soon but instead they'll randomly be dropping trailers like they did for Paper Mario.

A dataminer has FINALLY figured out what determines if villagers move out or not.

Start with 0. It's the best in the series and also the first chronological chapter. Even if you decide not to continue after you finish it, it's still a great game all on its own.

Yakuza 3 So the first to get out of the way is to point out that this is NOT a Kiwami style remake. This is pretty much the original game as it was released except with updated textures and a new localization. As such, well, there's just no way around it. The gameplay is outdated. Really outdated. Only one martial arts style that feels pretty limited, unskippable cutscenes that you can't even pause unless you hit the PS button, an inferior hostess club side quest, a lack of interesting games to play at Club Sega, and on top of all that there isn't even a run button this time around. You get a second city to play around in with Okinawa in addition to Kamurocho, but the truth is that Okinawa just isn't all that interesting. There's a lot working against this game in 2020. Thankfully, this is a game that's salvaged by its story. The crime drama that's at play here, while not as compelling as 0, Kiwami, or Kiwami 2 in my personal opinion, is still interesting enough that I wanted to keep going to the end. Even a lesser Yakuza plot is still going to be about ten times better than the plot of most games out there. However, I do take issue with the pacing. While the yakuza drama is good once it gets going, it takes its sweet time getting there. Kiryu spends roughly a third of the game just dicking about at an orphanage in Okinawa with very little actual yakuza stuff involved. You're mostly taking care of these orphans and helping them with their problems, and while I do see the appeal in showing Kiryu's softer side and the importance of fleshing out his family I still feel like a little too much time was spent on these kids. Fortunately, the backwater yakuza family in Okinawa happens to be pretty likable and I think they were pretty good additions to the franchise. I'm not gonna lie, I doubt I'll go back to this one anytime soon. I didn't hate it but out of all the Yakuza games I've played so far this one is easily the weakest entry. Maybe that's unfair to say when the other games I've played were made with modern design sensibilities in mind, but it is what it is. Still, I bought the remastered trilogy as a bundle so I figured I might as well play through all of them. Even if you plan on buying them digitally, I still don't know that I would recommend skipping this one because then you'll be missing a huge chunk of the overall plot. If you want to play the complete Kiryu saga then I would say just go ahead and get this one and blaze through the main story missions quickly before moving on to Yakuza 4.

Final Fantasy VII Remake This was pretty great...for the most part. First and foremost, it's kind of surreal that I actually played a Final Fantasy VII remake in the first place. It's like catching a unicorn. Anyway, the new combat system is one of the best in the franchise and I mostly enjoyed the expanded story content they did. Characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie who were pretty minor before have been greatly expanded upon among others and for the most part it works. There are also some new characters who can be kind of hit or miss, but I didn't hate any of them. I think the new stuff is mostly fine except for two things. The first issue is that there's a little too much padding. The side quests are almost all a "go here and kill this" or "go collect these" affair, which isn't very thrilling but you still want to do them for the rewards and extra exp. As for the second issue... Still a pretty great and challenging game and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. Maybe I'll go back later to replay optional stuff I didn't get around to, but for now I'm moving on to Yakuza 3.