KPWHYS

I haven't played anything in the Yakuza series since Y2, but Y:LAD appeared on PS+ as a free game so I quickly downloaded it as the series has come up a bit since the early days. Some of what I think are my more interesting thoughts: 1. The JRPG fantasy integration is creative The realistic Yakuza aesthetic doesn't lend itself well to the variety of enemies you encounter in a traditional JRPG so the developers made some interesting transitions to accommodate for fantastical human enemies. When encountering fantastical human enemies, your characters move around the world and these human enemies initially appear like normal persons but when combat is triggered, there's a transitional outright  transformation  scene where they become.. more . These normal appearing people have a bright pillar of light engulf them and they become men wearing trashbags, heavily armored Samurai, giant sailors with pirate hats.. the list goes on.  Not every enemy is fantastical. Particularly, ma...

First game I bought after getting a PS5 after a near two-year wait was Deathloop. I finished it in a couple of weeks back in June, and looking back, some thoughts on things that stood out to me. 1. Amazing use of limited assets The developers created a story using 4 maps in 4 time segments that you replay over and over again, in the style of Groundhog Day, peeling away the game like an onion.  The map geometry is reused, and the level design and scripting per map & time never really changes, with a lot of the peel-away constrained by content locking mechanisms like a code or puzzle of some sort, uniquely generated per player and run instance. Even with the repeated plays, if you're uncovering new story clues in a reasonable way, there's enough new map discovered, new critical story bit revealed and/or new arsenal the next time you revisit a zone that it doesn't feel boring. If you do run into a bug or fail to push the story fast enough, it does start to feel repetitive,...