1/15: Aviary Attorney (Steam)
1/16: Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star (Steam)
1/27: Sweet Fuse: At Your Side (PSP)
1/31: Harmonia (Steam)
2/21: Yakuza 0 (PS4) *NEW*
2/28: Cooking Mama: Cook Off (Wii) *NEW*Total: 6 games
I also beat
Breath of the Wild pretty recently, but
Yakuza 0 took a bit too much time to write so that will come later
Yakuza 0I really enjoy a lot of aspects of Japanese culture (both new and old), so it’s only natural that I would be drawn to the
Yakuza series. However, it wasn’t until
Yakuza 0 that I decided to try it out. I had heard it was a good introduction to the series and it was coming out on my birthday, so I figured that this was the perfect time to finally try it out. Luckily for me, this game is great!
The game stars Kazuma Kiryu, a newbie yakuza who’s being framed for murdering someone in an important piece of property called the “Empty Lot”, and Goro Majima, an exiled yakuza who is given a chance to get back into the clan if he commits an assassination. You switch back and forth between the two every few chapters, and each character has their own story that seems unrelated at first, but eventually comes together in the final few chapters. Both stories are mostly presented in really well put together cutscenes, with interesting characters and a lot of yakuza politics. It can sometimes be tough to follow with the number of character names being thrown around (partially because I’m bad at names), but even when I wasn’t quite sure who was being talked about, nearly all of the cutscenes were interesting to watch. The game has a few different cutscene styles though, which is a little odd. There’s the highly detailed and voiced ones (for those important story segments), the ones that use in-game assets and voiced, the ones that use in-game assets but are NOT voiced (mostly for side stories), and ones that use the use the in-game assets but have this weird yellow tint on them and aren’t animated much. I can at least understand having the first three types, as I imagine that voicing the entire game would be a bit much, but the yellow tinted ones are a bit weird.
In between story cutscenes, the main thing you’ll be doing is beating up people. Kiryu and Majima each have three very different styles (six total) that they can use; a slower, heavy hitting one, a quick but less powerful one, and one that lies in between the two. You can switch between the three any time you want in battle, and you can upgrade each of them by spending money on upgrades or new moves with the upgrades connecting together in a sort of skill tree of sorts. Thankfully all the styles are very different from each other, and I was able to find a useful situation to use most of them. The only styles that I didn’t like using were Kiryu’s and Majima’s heavy styles, but apparently a lot of people like Majima’s heavy style, so that might just be me not playing as a slower character. One of the big aspects of the battles is this “heat” meter, which fills up as you beat people up and not get hit yourself. It has three levels, and when you hit a certain level, you can pull off a “heat action”. These are really good to activate since you tend to do a lot of damage with them. I’m kind of bad at pulling off any of them other than the really basic ones, but I think someone who is more skilled with action games would have a much easier time with that than me haha. So overall the battles are quick, satisfying, and a lot of fun. The one of the only negative things I have to say about them is that sometimes I would run into a lot of the minor guys a little too often until I learned the skill to throw money at them (which distracts them for a bit). The other minor gripe is that when enemies have guns, they can be pretty difficult for me to dodge. Luckily guns aren’t present too often, so I rarely did not enjoy beating up people.
When you aren’t doing story things or beating people up, you’re exploring, doing side stories (side quests with often funny character interactions), and playing various mini-games. When playing as Kiryu, you’re exploring a representation of Kabukicho Shinjuku, Tokyo and as Majima you’re exploring a representation of Dotonbori, Osaka. While I really can’t say for sure how accurate each of these areas are presented, they both feel a lot like they could both came right out of Japan. Dotonbori especially felt well represented to me, as I remember exploring that area during my trip to Japan. It was a lot of fun to me just walking around, looking at all the various details that the developers put into the environment. The mini-games and a few other minor things really tie well into this as well. There are two bigger mini-games (real estate for Kiryu and hostess club for Majima), and plenty of much smaller side things which include karaoke, toy car racing, disco dancing, fishing, calling girls on a date, eating at various restaurants, mahjong, watching soft-core porn, and many others. I didn’t too far into the real estate or the hostess club, nor did I try everything out, but a lot of what I did try was enjoyable enough for me to want to do some in between the story. The only thing that I really did not like from what I tried was the disco dancing. It’s a sort of rhythm game which I’m normally fairly good at, but it’s VERY picky on what timing it considers to be correct and what’s wrong. Honestly it’s quite frustrating to me.
I’m probably not explaining everything very well and I’m probably missing a few things, but overall I greatly enjoyed my time with
Yakuza 0. It’s was such a fun time for me, with very few things that lessened my experience. When I finished it, I quickly put it on my list for potential game of the years. Unfortunately, then
Breath of the Wild came out, which probably tops it for me, but I still think it’s an excellent game. I think that you should definitely try out if you like good characters, Japan, and some good action-packed fun.
Cooking Mama: Cook OffWhile I was waiting for
Breath of the Wild to come out, I needed something short and simple to play. I remember having fun with this game, so that’s what I decided to play. Unfortunately, I think I originally played this with friends, as I don’t think it’s that great of a single player experience.
Basically, you make various dishes, which are splits up the steps into very short micro games. These vary from ones that are in a lot of recipes like cracking eggs or frying, to more food specific games like crushing ice for snow cones or twirling pizza dough around. These were mostly fun for me at first, but one of my problems with it is that some of the micro games get repeated a ton and get kind of old very quickly. You could probably solve that by just not playing them all in only a few sittings, but a bigger problem I had with it was that a few of the micro games had a hard time picking up the motion controls. I found that micro games which partially or wholly involved moving the Wiimote towards the screen, such as rolling dough or mixing a batter, were really frustrating at times since they wouldn’t always register correctly. Since this occurs in a lot of the micro games, it really didn’t make for a fun time to me.
So, I don’t particularly suggest playing this by yourself. You could have fun with friends if you like laughing at each others mistakes, but otherwise I’m not going to be playing this again.
