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,...

  My philosophical musing about the RNG and multiverse for rogue likes didn’t stop me from attempting more runs and burning more hours. Had an incredible run with The Defect, won’t try Asc20 with the remaining two. Game done!

Any one playing any roguelike at a high level knows the RNG is critical to it. For certain designs like Slay The Spire, you end runs prematurely if the dice is stacked against you early game, because you need a certain number of positive rolls early on to accumulate an advantage or profile for later on.  I've started to feel like starting a new run is like instantiating a different path in the multiverse. It's simply "another me", that "could have happened".  Delving further deeper into it, I start to feel like the RNG itself becomes everything, because if things don't fall my way I just restart into a new run. And the primary difference in that new run is RNG. And it's almost like, why does it even matter at that point, because I'm not stopping a run because of more or less skill -- though to be fair, as you play more, the depth to which you understand turns, cards, choices and meta-decision dynamics in the campaign tree continue to deepen. It d...

It took me a week to get through all the Ascension levels and it was my first run on Ascension 20. I have a confession. I didn’t beat the 4th secret chapter but only because I forgot to claim the Blue shard. No one will believe me. But I’m speaking to the dozens of us, dozens!! Who know what beating Ascension 20 means. There goes my street cred for not beating Act IV at Ascension 20. I could've, I was OP as heck. I have no insight here for this post. I'm sad. Update: Turns out I don’t need excuses, I just needed time to play more. Now all I need is to figure out how to play Elden Ring while on a plane.

I first completed a run on Darkest Dungeon on Darkest difficulty sometime in 2020, 4 years after buying it sometime in 2016. I had attempted more than a dozen runs over the years with maybe up to 100 hours but couldn’t complete it until recently. DD is an interesting game where unless you played it as designed on an important dimension, it’s hard to actually complete a run. And the design being to treat the heroes as a commodity that you let die — just recruit more from the cart! (You can revive heroes at lower difficulty levels but at a high cost and infrequently.) This may be a slightly unfair thing to say about DD as my winning run had the lowest number of dead heroes; I just did more math in fights and played much more conservatively by exiting dungeons mid-instance when it started to look sideways. Even so a few of my starting heroes definitely went to the grave and I just had to trudge on with “the bigger plan”. It felt unnatural to an RPG player like me because in the genre perm...

The biggest RPGs on the mobile market like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, Marvel Strike Force and AFK Arena are all games that monetize on progression & collection. Power progression is fairly linear with little variance, with perhaps Summoner's War having the most diverse endgame through extensive customization through their Runes system. It is then surprising that another genre I love, rogue-likes, have found a home in many of these RPGs.  The essence of a rogue-like is its instance-based gameplay. This is why most advanced conversation around rogue-likes center around individual, independent "runs" with specific builds. One can complete a Watcher character run in Slay The Spire with a Pressure Points build, or an FTL run with a Crystal ship using the Flak Cannon. Rogue-likes often have a clear beginning and an end, and most of the time if you make it to the end you'd have managed to assemble a pretty impressive build. Apart from the difference in progression stru...