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July update: 35/52
Oh no, I'm so behind on these updates...
31. July 9th | A Space for the Unbound | Nintendo Switch | 11h 46m | ☆☆☆½(/5)
Probably the first Indonesia game I've ever played, but most importantly a very interesting, but unfortunately also a very frustrating, game. For those not in the know, A Space for the Unbound is a very story focused adventure game (which is a very nebulous genre name, but just think of it in this case as a point & click game, but without pointing & clicking) about Atma, a teenage boy who seemingly drowns when trying to save a friend, and is then woken up in school by his girlfriend Raya, whom Atma doesn't seem to remember at all and who seems to have magical powers.
What this premise sets up is a nice slice of life story, combined with a mystery of what's going on, and why. Or rather, that's probably what it should be, because the game honestly abandons the slice of life aspects very early on, and the mystery almost takes over completely by the second chapter as the world plunges down into more and more chaos as the plot goes along, and a lot of the emotional core of the game suffers for it. It's a great mystery with some really surprising and well written twists, but it throws too much at the player to quickly instead of just gradually throwing everything into chaos, which I personally at least feel hurts the overall narrative. The slower pace of the early game is great for getting to know this small town and its colorful cast of inhabitants, but about as soon as you find your bearings, there's a magic storm and people die left and right, when there really needed to be more time to get to know them, and especially to deepen some relationships that are, sadly, very underdeveloped by the end of the game when it becomes more and more clear just how important they actually are to what's going on. Characters also sort of lose their humanity and instead become plot points, making it more difficult to really feel much about their fates, and also their deeper roles as pseudo-catalyzers for the story.
Gameplay is also... I don't know, I do like the item collecting and puzzling, both never being particularly difficult at all, but at least requiring some thought and giving at least a bit of challenge to the game and are pretty clever in what they want you to do and leading you down the right path with pretty good subtlety (though sometimes also saying outright what you need to do; those puzzles are pretty bad, admittedly.) My issue here, though, have to do with how they work narratively, or rather how they just don't. See, Atma has this red book he can use to dive into people's minds and sort of reprogram them by either giving them items or solving some abstract puzzle to change their id, or whatever it's meant to be, and that's a pretty cool concept, but there are two main issues I have with this, one just being how you're this nice guy, but also someone who has no issues to change someone's personality (usually in positive ways, but still without their consent) to, like, get a cake or some other minor thing, and even when it's brought up that this might not be the best thing to do, Atma keeps on doing it, even when seeing how it has negative effects on folks later in the game. It's a moral dilemma that's never adressed in a satisfying way, and unlike a game like Persona 5 where you change the hearts of people that are cartoonishly evil, this is usually just done to ordinary people, and that psychic assault is something that I'm just not comfortable with, personally.
There also just aren't any clear rules to how this red book works. It's just magic, and it just leads to very video game-y puzzles inside people that vary a whole lot in how they're supposed to be solved (go into the right doors, get the right items, say the right things, do an Ace Attorney-styled trial (though very much not of Ace Attorney quality) etc.), and it is probably nitpicky, but in such a narrative focused game, this inconsistency just to make gameplay feel more varied takes me out of it whenever I dive into to someone. It stops being a story, and instead becomes pure video game, instead of combining the two, as it does so well in the real world of the game. Sort of makes me think of Psychonauts which does similar things, but while people's minds are different, which makes sense, it still remains within the platformer genre and there is a consistency to how you complete the levels, even if the objectives can be similar, and it ties into that game's story. There're also QTE parts to this game whenever Atma gets into a fight, by the way. They work well enough, being neither particularly good nor bad, so not much to say about those.
What really saves A Space for the Unbound, though, is the relationship between Atma and Raya, which is absolutely fantastic, and the core of which combined with the mystery of the entire thing leads to what honestly might be this entire year's strongest final act (outside of Tears of the Kingdom, obviously.) It does certainly move away from mostly logical (or at least trying to be) writing of earlier parts of the game to becoming more of a Makoto Shinkai movie (i.e. it speaks to the heart rather than the mind), but it works in this case since these two characters have become so well known to the player throughout the game, and are also so well written that I care for them enough, and the predicament they're both in is so good, that I buy what's going on because I care so much by this point that I want to buy it, even if a lot of it doesn't really make sense if you think about it too much. It's about 200% pathos, and it works flawlessly, right up until the bittersweet ending that I absolutely loved. For all the flaws I had with some of the writing up until this point, it must be said that only pretty masterful storytelling could make this work, and maybe some sacrifices had to be made in other departments to make Atma and Raya such fantastic characters that they could carry the climax in a such a strong way.
It's still really annoying that some parts of A Space for the Unbound just don't work for me, though because I really want to love the whole thing, but the annoyances are just to frequent for a the vast majority of the game. I still greatly enjoyed my time with it overall, but I'm stopped from really putting it up there as some classic indie game. Which is fine, of course. Not every game has to be this great masterpiece, but it's just that it's so close to greatness, but trips over itself time and time again during most of the game. The final act is probably a 5/5 to me, but the road there is just too bumpy for A Space for the Unbound to overall reach that 4/5 (though if I didn't use decimals in my grades, it would certainly be more 4 than 3).
Beautiful pixel art throughout by the way, but anyone with eyes can see that without me telling them.
Soundtrack highlight:
Within the Dream
32. July 20th | Twisted Metal | Playstation 5 | 6h | ☆☆
This is garbage.
Soundtrack highlight:
Rooftop Battle
33. July 23rd | Street Fighter 6 | Playstation 5 | 55h | ☆☆☆☆½
Almost feels like cheating including this in my July completions, because I'm counting World Tour here for completion (though the playtime counts for all playmodes in SF6; I think WT took about 20 hours, maybe?), and I did almost all of it in June, so literally all I did this month was winning the final tournament and defeating the final boss.
Anyway, this is maybe the best fighting game I've ever played, and by far the most time I've spent on one not with the words Super, Smash, or Bros. in its name. It's accessible, but deep, it controls extremely well, the new drive mechanics are such clever things to be used both by high-level players, but they can also be used by extreme rookies like myself to even the odds a bit when needed since they really don't require any skill to actually pull off other than knowing what button on the controller does what. Overall gamefeel is actually very good, with controls feeling extremely smooth (though in Street Fighter tradition, pulling of cancels and doing combos require some extremely tight timing), character animations giving real flair to the action, and feedback on succesful hits to the opponent is extremely satisfying. Like, you really feel it when an attack connects, and that's super impressive considering how fast paced fights still are.
The main mode I've been playing is probably Battle Hub, one of the most fun times I've had, like, ever with an online mode in a game, and even though I've spent most of my time there losing to people far above my skills, it's still so nice and casual that it doesn't really matter that much and I'm still having a great time learning and facing people in a casual matter (except for a few people who can't stand losing and have to be, uh, not very nice in the open chat, but that'll always be the case no matter the game.) Even when I feel like I've had enough of that, I can just go to one of the arcade machines to play some of Capcom's classic arcade games which are, to be completely honest, more often than not complete garbage games, but it's still so fun that they're there, and since there's a pool of games that get switched out between each other, I still did have good days where I could play games like Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Final Fight (which is a very good game, though one I'm very bad at.) Avatar and extreme battles are fun as well, though maybe better in concept than execution since they're both pretty dead most of the time, unfortunately, and the only avatars open to battle are usually people at, like, level 99 so it's usually not worth even trying for me.
Fighting Ground is a little bit of everything. Arcade mode, training, character guides, combo trials ranked; the basics of a modern fighting game, I guess. Arcade mode is pretty fun, though it feels a bit barebones storywise. I've beaten it with Cammy, Marisa, Juri and Manon, and 1CC'd hard mode with Cammy which honestly felt easier than normal in SF4, so maybe it could be tuned up a bit, but it's really not the main single player attraction any more, so I get why it feels a bit less substantial and challenging than before (or maybe I'm just... better than before? Probably a combination of both tbh.) Training mode isn't really for me since I historically always get bored with it, which is probably also why I've never gotten particularly good at any fighting game, but the character guides are extremely good for those who really want a deep dive into a character, as are the combo trials. I guess I've enjoyed my time ranking up my Cammy (I chose her because new design is really cool. I'm extremely basic when choosing a main in a fighting game, okay?) in ranked battles as well, but I'm not really that interested in the competetive aspect of video games, so it's not really for me. Nothing wrong with it as far as I can tell, though!
World Tour is... well, it's a good idea, I guess, and it starts out a lot of fun, but it's just too long. Creating an avatar in the surprisingly deep character creator is a lot of fun (even if I mainly created a monster with my Micolash (who is, of course, named after the Host of the Nightmare himself, and what I usually name my avatars, for some reason)), and getting to know the different Street Fighters is an absolute joy throughout, but the constant fighting just starts taking a toll after a while, and the story is complete garbage that there's way too much of. I don't even think it works all that well as a tutorial since even though it does try to teach you the game's different mechanics and how to fight different types of fighter, you can usually just brute force everything if you want to through level grinding or using stat enhancing items (or even healing yourself mid-battle.) I don't hate World Tour, most of it I don't even dislike, but it is very clearly the weakest part of an otherwise GOTY quality package. Also super weird how it seemingly doesn't have an ending? I don't know, maybe there's more story after the credits, but if not, they almost cut to black mid-scene after the final boss is defeated. Even as a hater of the story, I sort of hope something more gets added in the future.
Just so as to not end on a downer on this game: I love Street Fighter 6. I'm not going to be playing it every day for the next couple of years, but it is one of those games that I'm not going to delete from my PS5 either, because I know that I will get that desire to jump into it again occasionally to experience the greatness that is its gameplay and maybe try out other characters that look like fun (spoiler alert: everyone who's not a charge character is fun.) I have never before in my life paid full price for a fighting game before SF6 and I don't know what other would make me do so in the future, but in no way do I regret my decision here. Just a masterclass in fighting game design.
Oh, and I should also put the soundtrack discourse to rest once and for all. It's actually extremely good and fits the game perfectly, and everyone who says otherwise is either a) boring, or b) can't stand any piece of music that isn't super melodic, which is just not a good way to live life to its fullest. These are not my opinions, by the way, but objective facts, so you can try to argue it as much as you'd like against it, but that'd be like saying 1+1 does not =2, and that's just foolish.
Soundtrack highlight:
Overtrip
34. July 25th | Lost Judgment + The Kaito Files | Playstation 5 | 95h | ☆☆☆☆
I keep going through the RGG games, hoping I will one day actually be up do date with their releases. I began in January of 2018 with 0, and even though I do get closer, it feels like I'll alway be a bit behind. Just this year we've gotten Ishiin, and in November Gaiden, with Y8 releasing next year, and I still haven't even played 7 yet!!! If that wasn't enough, Kurohyou on the PSP just got a complete English fan translation, so I'm going to have to play that one as well! I love these games, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty insane how many there are, and the sheer amount of content that's in all of them (though I can really only blame my own sick mind for going for 100% in all of them.)
Anyway, Lost judgment. I replayed Judgment last year and found myself a bit disappointed by it. Its main story is still fantastic, but there's too many mandatory side cases sprinkled throughout, the combat really doesn't feel particularly good (and the crane style is actually useless), the detective mechanics are not very interesting, and the Keihin gang is maybe the worst gameplay mechaninc this godforsaken studio have ever put in one of their games, and that's coming from me, someone who's gotten all the completion points for both cat fights in 0, and the, uh, sexy bug fights (or whatever the name of that mini-game was) in Kiwami.
Right off the bat, Lost Judgment just plays so much better than its predecessor. Yagami feels so much more fluid in his movements, and all the styles you get are actually useful and serve a purpose depending on the fight (even crane this time, which honestly borders on broken with how you can speed up Yagami's attacks simply by dodging enemies, and the effect lasts for a good while, even when switching to a different style), but they're also just so much fun that all of them can work whenever if you want to. Like, I mostly used crane and DLC style, boxing (which is almost criminally fun to use, though with an extremely short range), but I never had a bad time when switching to Tiger or the new Snake style either. They all bring something to the table and their own little gimmicks which keeps the very frequent fighting from ever getting stale, because you can just switch it up with new attacks whenever you feel like one style has run its course for a while. Honestly, it's not just an improvement over Judgment, but just plain the best and most fun battles I've had in any of the Yakuza games, even 0 and Kiwami that also had instant style switching.
The story is certainly not as well paced as the previous game's, but that's mostly because it reveals all of its cards way too early, so the final handful chapters are mostly about running in circles, taking a very slow route to the finale that is in many ways strangely similar to Judgments in a lot of ways, which does make it a bit less interesting despite a lot of very cool shit happening, and maybe the longest long fight RGG studio has ever made (though I do want to say Kiryu's in 4 is very long as well, but it's been a while since I played that.) It definitely has the most enemies to fight, at least.
Up until everything is revealed, I do really enjoy Lost Judgment's case, and it's fun to have a victim that seems to have been hated by basically everyone, so the murderer really could be any of the game's cast (though also obviously can't, since this is an RGG game, which means it's someone the player believably has to have a tough fight against), and at least from the start, new hints and details unfold at a good pace. Unlike the first game, the murderer's identity feels like it works and is very much baked into the whole plo, while the character themself is also well written and not just a complete madman. Very much an improvement over the first game where it felt more like the developers ran out of characters that could possibly be the murderer and just put names in a hat to choose who it'd be, and the chosen character is extremely bland. There're also a lot of good misdirections here, but also misdirections on top of other misdirections, really keeping me on my toes to really keep up with everything and all the different characters agendas and how they all connect (though it's not at all confusing, unlike, say, what Yakuza 5 becomes by the end).
Characters, by the way, that I really enjoyed! I mean, I usually like most of these games' characters, and they certainly do what the came to do: to have a lot of strong emotions about things, do cool shit, and occasionally be surprisingly funny. It is sort of a shame that some of the characters from Judgment are barely in this, and Mafuyu, who was one of the main characters in that game, has barely any screentime this time. The new characters are really compelling, though, and even unapologetically evil characters like Soma do have their interesting quirks that make them memorable outside of just having good fights, and the allies all get super fun interactions with Yagami (massive shout-out to Higashi). Speaking of good fights, though, some of the entire franchise's best boss fights are found within these games, thanks to not only Yagami's great moveset, but theirs as well. Their high quality is also not hurt at all by how
EXTREMELY good the different boss themes are, by the way. Really impressive how varied the themes are, too, and how well they fit their characters, like
K.O.G and
Viper.
Though, like I said, the mystery is completely solved with maybe four, or maybe even more, chapters left of the game, and that is a pretty big knock against Lost Judgment, especially since the core mystery actually is very good until it unravels, and not in a particularly satisfying way, but more in a "wow, Yagami really guessed his way to the correct answer, and this murder feels a bit sloppy in execution", at the same time as characters act a bit out of, well, character, and seem extremely easily persuaded. The journey there was fun, but the destination leaves a whole lot to be desired.
Lucky, then, that the main side content in this game is the better story, and is absolutely massive in content as well. You see, Yagami becomes advisor to a school's mystery club, but their investigation into an online criminal calling themselves the Professor leads to him joining so many different clubs, and they don't all just have their own mini-game (most of them also surprisingly in-depth mini-games), but every club has its own littel story, and they're almost all extremely funny. Comedy in games is maybe the hardest thing to pull off, and every game, except for maybe Yakuza 1 (more on that game in the August update!), have some really good comedy writing in some side missions, but this is such a high volume of jokes throughout, and still with such a high rate of hits that I can just sit here impressed by what's been done. There are serious moments here as well, and they're good, as is the overarching Professor story, but not quite AS good as the humor. Yagami also gets a detective dog during his time as advisor, which is just great.
As for the mini-games you play in these different clubs, they're mostly fine. Of course, there's boring garbage like the motorcycling races that should just have been a reskin of Yakuza 5's taxi races instead, but also the dancing mini-game that I would not complain if it got its own spin-off, but the other ones are mostly just there, neither good nor bad. It's mostly the writing that carries the experience with them, and it usually worked really well for me, but I certainly can't guarantee that it does for others, so your mileage may vary here, since it can certainly be pretty Anime™. One man's treasure is another's man's trash, as they say.
Anyway, a fine game and I really hope we'll get a Judgment 3 one day. The detective mechanics still aren't good, by the way, though luckily pretty rare this time around.
Soundtrack highlight:
Dig in Your Heels
Oh right, I played through the Kaito Files as well.
I don't have much to say about this, to be honest. It's short, it's pretty fun, Kaito was fun character in the base game and he is here as well, showing that he can definitely carry his own story. Still, this does have quite a few flaws despite being a good time. Kaito's battle styles, that are basically Kiryu's Brawler and Beast, are decent, but don't really come close to the fun I had with Yagami's styles, and the mystery is basically explained through two extremely long exposition dumps (think that entire, awful chapter with the senator in Yakuza 3, but slightly better handled and more than once), and the main villain turns out to be not only "Soma, but much less hot", but he's also so 11/10 evil that it's impossible to take him seriously in any way (though he does get some cool villain moments), which is strange since his main lackey, Kenmochi, is a layered and really interesting character whose archetype has never been seen in any RGG game as far as I can remember. Also really unfortunate that the final boss ends up being so dumb, and basically an incel power fantasy, but it is what it is.
So yeah, it's certainly not fantastic, but also don't think that it's really bad just because I spent an entire paragraph complaining about. It's got a nice, short length with a story that suits the runtime, and has some very good moments and a couple of fun new characters (that may stick around for future games even!). I also do want to stress that Kaito not being as fun to play as Yagami does not mean his combat is bad or even boring. It's just a bit more basic and to the point. Anyway, I bought the season pass, which includes the Kaito Files, for LJ because of a super deep discount back in February (which is actually when I also started playing the game. It took me a while to beat it, I guess), and it was certainly worth it at that very cheap price for the boxing style and Kaito files alone, but at full price? I probably wouldn't recommend it then.
Oh yeah, I also have to mention that I bought a German copy of Lost Judgment by accident. The game itself is still in English so not really a big deal and it was very cheap, but it's insane how much space the German ratings board's rating for the game takes up on the cover! Also bizarre that both it AND the PEGI rating are slapped on there. Feels like one or the other should be enough, especially since they have different ratings for the game (PEGI 18 and USK 16, surprisingly enough.)
Soundtrack highlight:
Behind the Scheme
35. July 30th | Metroid: Samus Returns | Nintendo 3DS | 9h 42m | ☆☆☆
Forgive me lord, for I think I might have written a way too long July update, but we are here at the final game at last, and it's Metroid: Samus Returns! I bought a lot of physical 3DS games last year ahead of the Eshop shutting down and probably hiking up the prices a whole lot (which hasn't really happened yet, but it's most certainly coming eventually). Not so I could sell them later down the road, of course, but because I wanted to own them and not have to pay a criminal amount of money for them. Samus Returns was, obviously, one of these games.
Now, I haven't played Metroid: Other M or beaten Fusion, but of the 2d Metroid games, Metroid II: Return of Samus is by far my least favorite, and probably the only one I wouldn't classify as at least "good", with its corridors that all look exactly the same on the monochrome game boy, and gameplay loop that just revolves around finding Metroid and fight the same fight against them over and over again until you can arbitrarily move on down to the next area that usually looks about the same as the previous one. I know the game has its fans, but I'm certainly not one of them and having replayed a bit of it after beating Samus Returns, I'm pretty sure I never will be.
Samus Returns is obviously a remake of Metroid II, and it does certainly improve on things. Maybe it loses a bit in atmosphere since the planet here feels a lot more alive and less claustrophobic, but everything else is just a complete upgrade to me. Not that it suddenly becomes something great still, but good enough to be a mostly fun time. I still don't like the gameplay loop, and in some ways it's gotten even more annoying, with one type of Metroid having a bad habit of escaping into other rooms mid-fight (and I know they can be killed before that, but it's very difficult on a first playthrough), but the fights themselves are at least a bit more exciting than on the game boy and require a bit more from the player since Samus is kind of a glass cannon in this game.
I also like how much more of a unique identity every zone now has, but the map layout (which I'd assume is about 90% original, but I honestly don't have any idea) isn't the most interesting, with a lot of large rooms with not much in them, and fast travel teleports are often placed in really annoying locations. Still, I enjoy all the puzzles for power-ups spread throughout, and really like the MercurySteam approach of not making them hard to find like in a lot of previous games where it was a lot of just shooting at random blocks, but instead showing the items clearly and making the puzzle of actually getting to them the real challenge. They certainly did it better in Dread (though they did everything better in Dread tbf), but it's still a lot of fun here. Not a big fan of the game keeping the spider boost a secret mechanic, though.
Anything else to say about Metroid Returns? Not really. I guess I like the new bosses, but just like the puzzles, they are somewhat diminished by Dread just doing boss fights better, and a little less trial and error than they can feel like here. I really like the final boss, though. It is kind of a Necron (of Final Fantasy IX fame) moment, but still a lot of fun, and really demands that the player has understood everything the game has taught them up to this point. The Metroid Queen was less annoying in the original game, but the fight is certainly more interesting here, so I don't really know which one I prefer, and I also don't really know why I'm even mentioning it here.
The music is fine. The 3D effects are underwhelming (though to be fair, that's the case in most 3DS games, unfortunately). I guess that's all?
Soundtrack highlight:
The Surface of SR388
Currently playing:
Sea of Stars (PS5)
(Very soon starting) Baldur's Gate 3 (PS5)
