#Kiwami 2? I don't know. I genuinely don't fucking know at this point.

[ayakashibackstreet]

I swear to God, these games want me fucking dead

[nyxqueenofshadows]

well here i am with notes like a week after i finished it asdfghjkl

overall notes: i think this is the game i came away from with the most gripes. other games have charm in their faults, this one just has disappointments, which makes me kinda sad.

literally mid, that’s my only short coherent thought. :( i don't think there was anything i genuinely loved in this one, compared to previous ones, but i still don't think it's a bad game. least favourite so far tho (unfortunately)

please take this very funny ghost picture i took and full notes under the cut

dragon engine akiyama (and haruka tbh) was initially kind of jarring but i’m used to them now. i think it’s akiyama’s hair that looks weird, it’s difficult to pin down... especially cos you see them immediately after the replay of the last moments of 5, so you have a direct comparison. <<< jumping in from endgame times but i think it’s cos he wasn't built from the ground up to be in this engine, but rather modified to fit it. it’s most obvious when there’s the ‘it’s the yakuza 6’ walking shot before the millenium tower long battle, and everyone else looks great (matsunaga especially looks fantastic) and then there’s akiyama asdfghjkl

so mad that majima and saejima and daigo are all right fucking there, and now i’m not gonna see them again until the last 10 minutes of the game. they deserved better. even a flashback scene somewhere, i’d take that! over nothing!

the prison scene is so interesting to me cos you can see that one, haruka’s putting on a front, and two, that kiryu just doesn’t get it. the game spends so much time setting up that the choice he’s making here is the wrong one (especially with the beach scene, where haruka’s so lost and he’s not fucking there), that leaving his family behind left them with no protection, no safety, and no family. haruka’s entire motivation for doing what she did was because she wanted to be with kiryu, and him putting that off/denying her that is misguided and cruel and i absolutely love it as a decision for him cos it feels completely in character. it’s also possible 3 years really does feel like nothing to him, cos he’s already done ten and also he’s an adult, where haruka is still a teenager where three years is a significant chunk of her life and about half of the time she’s known kiryu.

this is gonna come up again in these notes again later but i appreciate they show kiryu being emotional in both positive and negative moments. idk, it’s nice to see.

knowing where all this is going and then seeing the scene where kiryu leaves morning glory i teared up. i’m such a sap.

the troublr missions are kind of annoying for me, cos i’m the kind of person where if it pops up, i have to do it that second or i’ll forget about it? especially with the kinda messy layout it has. so i just did those one after the other for a while and i don’t think that’s how they’re intended to be done. << me from later on, i found them a lot better once they'd calmed down later on

also this game is so much more jank than kiwami 2 asdfghjkl i kinda knew that going in but it’s so different to actually sit down and play it yourself and you punch an enemy and he rolls up into a ball and spins rapidly in space like he’s trying to morph into sonic asdfghjkl

the fight with akiyama.... on a basic level, it kinda works to show how kiryu isn’t quite in his right mind but is dedicated to the point of causing harm to friends if it’s (in his mind) the best course of action, and how akiyama wants to help but can’t, and how he can’t bring himself to go all out against kiryu. BUT it also kind of falls apart cos he probably knows that going in, right? so would he not just step aside? probably not, he has his own principles, but it does kind of feel like that fight’s there cos the developers wanted an akiyama fight (but not enough to give him his own theme...)

someyaaaaaa i have sort of mixed feelings on him (cos of the kiyomi stuff later) but idk, i can’t hate the guy. him being performed well and compellingly helps, too.

onomichi’s so pretty

gonna get this out of the way now but i don’t like nagumo. i think he’s annoying and unlikeable so if he comes up later in these notes, bear that in mind for anything i say about him. also kiyomi tbh? her performance is doing her no favours

these soothe haruto missions are gonna haunt my nightmares. oh god. please let them only be in this section, i can’t take a full game of these every time haruto so much as breathes (okay i think we’re good)

fishing, not bad! wasn’t expecting it to be a rail shooter but not complaining (and the boss fight with bloody shark is great 10/10 fight intro)

baseball minigame! oh god there’s stats oh no it’s a mini sim ahhhhhhh help also this would’ve been the perfect place to put shinada in as a little cameo, ig no one considered it or his VA was busy. also wish there was more explanation of how it worked? i feel like i’m fumbling around here not really knowing what i’m doing << number up = good, there done

what’s with the high-key magic energy in onomichi asdfghjkl the girl who (probably?) leapt through time, the two people who (don’t) soul swap (had kimi no na wa just come out), the ghosts in the cemetery, where did this come from

CATS that’s it that’s the note. wish it was clearer where cats were (like you hear them meow and they'll be three blocks over) and also that there were more options for cat food in onomichi but whatever

are the poem stones replicas of actual poem stones in onomichi? if so that’s neat (they are!)

pocket circuit fighter! i knew he was in it but cos it’s been what, 8 months and 4/5 games since i last saw him i was genuinely really happy to see him again.

having said that this really feels like a fan service game in ways other ones haven’t? cos there’s fighter-kun, munancho, the various times kiryu will say/paraphrase lines from earlier in the series (pretty sure there’s one in the onomichio substory), it’s weird. not bad, i don’t think, just maybe they’re exploiting the fact that 0/kiwami came out like the year before, and that the game is full-voiced. same for the wrestlers and them saying their catchphrase every two lines, like it doesn't time to get to breathe as its own thing it's just a vehicle for these other things. same for rizap.

i have so few thoughts on the plot. oops.

sometimes i look at the scene below stardust, designed purely for the entertainment of bloodthirsty horny women, and wonder what rgg think of their female fans asdfghjkl like it’s kinda funny, cos it’s so exaggerated, but idk i’ve spent time on pixiv and tumblr and ao3, they’re not *wrong*. (tbc about fictional men, i imagine the average female fan wouldn’t jump at the chance to see actual men duking it out to the death in a non-fabricated setting e.g. wrestling etc).

ALSO yeah it’s han joon-gi, he’s got the kind of magnetic energy that someya does and that iwami bocchan is lacking.

i keep being distracted by hearing the guy who voices fighter in other places, like he’s in the kabedon substory, the one where date’s account gets hacked, he does other background fight noises, why is he everywhere in kamurocho asdfghjkl (note: the same noises have made it into judgment, help)

what’s with the hostess minigame, why is it like that??? idk if i like that << i do not

the game really wants you to like someya, or at least feel some sort of attachment to him as an antagonist and find him sympathetic, ig, and i see it, i do. but, and this is a big but, i feel like it doesn’t fully understand the implications of what it introduces between him and kiyomi? he kisses her without her permission and pulls her back in when she pulls away (which the game frames as being romantic), he was keeping her in the house (at least a little), had her brought home when she tried to leave and instead of talking about it beat her a bunch... this isn’t making me feel sympathetic and anything that comes later doesn’t absolve this.

also i forgot about the large age difference there, assuming he’s 18 when they meet she says she’s already in her 30s... i mean if there’s love there whatever but that’s still quite the gap.

possibly the longest night in an rgg game, jesus. so it’s fight through shangri-la, fight someya there, leave and run back to onomichi, fight through onomichi, run around finding hirose, fight the bald guy in red (wow his name didn’t stick), looong exposition convo about all the shit, fight the jingweon and han joon-gi, some exposition-y plot stuff, then fight the jingweon and han joon-gi *again*, and then you’re done. do you guys ever sleep????

joon-gi’s boss theme is a banger tho, very glad we get to hear it three times (more, ig, if you count 7 but i’m not there yet).

my one sort of plot hole? ig, is like, why didn’t joon-gi take haruto when haruka was in the car accident. he was there when it happened, all he wanted was the baby, so why didn’t he just grab him and run? did he see the accident and go nah fam not for me??? he says that she was holding on tightly and never let go, so he clearly saw/heard enough that he had a fairly detailed picture of what went down (maybe heard from tatsukawa now that i’m thinking about it) but i can’t work it out. did the truck that tatsukawa hit call the cops or smth and that’s why they bailed?

...i lost...to saigo.......

i think it’s interesting that the things kiryu is pissed off at yuta for when he goes to collect him from little asia are exactly what he’ll do in the future (and kind of did when he went to prison, tho to a less extreme extent). he thinks this is the only route he has left to protect his child, that dying is a valid solution to his problems, that he can leave a child without a father, like it’s all the same. i assume later games are gonna come back to this (cos the game absolutely frames this as The Wrong Decision, in both cases) but kiryu!! come on man!!!

(i do like playing as a fuck-up tho. it’s nice)

i feel like my main gripe with the game can be summed up in the cutscene where hirose dies. like, it’s deliberately giving parallels to kiryu’s own situation with kazama, the scene gets a lot of build-up and explanation (one might say too much all at once but hey ho), and i just don’t *care*. it’s a huge moment for both nagumo and matsunaga and i just can’t bring myself to be emotional about it because i have no attachment to these characters even if kiryu does. and tagashira is just *there* poor guy has no plot importance at all despite doing a whole bunch of work in the long battle before hirose throws a kitchen knife at him. also no one seems bothered about this even afterwards but WHATEVER i’ll be the only who cares about tagashira, it’s okay

anyway

where 6 falls down is smth i think 3 did pretty well, where when you’re getting to know the ryudo family, you actually get to know them. you have a full establishing of their relationship in the plot, then you get substories each with mikio and rikiya, plus you spend a fair amount of time with nakahara in the plot helping him out. it’s not just kiryu who’s befriending them it’s *me* the player too. so when nakahara is in trouble, when mikio puts his life on the line, when rikiya dies, those moments have emotional weight for me because i’ve been given chance to care about these characters and their lives.

and also these characters actually have lives! you genuinely get the sense that they existed with their own shit before kiryu arrived and will continue to exist after him too (even if they don't appear again...).

6 doesn’t give you that. these characters don't exist on their own ground, they're there for kiryu and solely him, to further his story and character development, and to have deliberate similarities to him. there really should’ve been substories for each of the members of the hirose family (maybe not patriarch but he could turn up! or smth!), something where i, the player, could learn about who they are as people beyond these otherwise very shallow characters. yuta and nagumo are sort of exceptions, but nagumo isn’t likeable, and yuta...maybe needed smth to justify how he ends up nearly burning down a building with him and his dad in it. that’s a fairly drastic decision to make and we’ve seen nothing that really suggests it’d be smth he’d do until it’s happening.

*sigh* i dunno, man. it’s frustrating playing 6 because there’s good things there! but it also feels weighed down by its need to be referential (0, kiwami), to fit in sponsorships (rizap, the wrestlers for clan creator), and to fit so many different kinds of things in that the individual activities don’t get much development or depth.

the baseball minigame clearly was made with a lot of love, especially down to the UI, the movements, even the logos of the teams (kanamizawa gorgeous logo my beloved), but as an actual gameplay experience (for someone not into baseball) it’s kind of mid? same for the fishing minigame, it could’ve done with being longer and more fleshed out. i like what’s there but maybe one more level would’ve helped? and bar chat, hoo boy bar chat. the substories once you get there are okay, and the chats themselves are fine, but having played the ones in kiwami 2, it’s just a let-down.

which is kind of the vibe of a lot of the gameplay, tbh. because i’ve played kiwami 2, i can just see where these things would be improved, not work with what i’m given. i didn’t even have this problem with 3, cos in some ways that felt like a challenge to overcome. there were workarounds, there were things i could do to make the experience better for myself. i just feel stifled in 6.

hostess minigame bad. i feel set up to fail, constantly.

oh and the rizap one is bad too, have i mentioned that yet? well, have now

BUT as much as i don’t like like a butterfly, saki killed it!

i wonder when specifically kiryu decided he was going to die. like, he writes the letter (to daigo) in the hospital room with haruka and yuta and haruto chilling on the other side (which is a special brand of fucked up but i digress), and had clearly decided he was going to commit murder a little before that, so when? when he saw haruka in the hospital bed? when the yomei alliance came to attack the hirose family and booted them out of their own home, endangering their lives and loves, and he viewed it as all his fault? even earlier than that?

haruka knows, too. she knows he’s lying when he says he’ll come home, or at least she suspects it. she always knows

someya should’ve been the final boss. i get why he isn’t, cos making all that work when iwami jr and sugai are still around would be kind of awkward, but come onnnnnnn his fight is so much cooler and he’s a little like ryuji in that you spend more time with him earlier in the plot and appears frequently, he’d be great to have as a full circle kind of final boss. ah well

does nagumo have a character arc or does he just have a bunch of different emotions over the course of the story? i’m tempted to say the latter. like, when someya dies in his arms like ‘promise me you’ll protect my daughter’ that’s a nice moment (if you ignore how it completely removes kiyomi from this decision and gives her no agency but WHATEVER) but that’s like, the only interaction they have all game??? oh wait no i think nagumo yells him at once in new serena. but that’s it! i’m not saying they need to have a heart to heart about kiyomi (it being implicit in someya’s death scene is part of what makes it work) but just smth so someya sounds less desperate for whoever happened to be there to do it (cos otherwise why wouldn’t he ask kiryu, y’know?). i think one more scene/conversation somewhere, either with someya and kiyomi, and nagumo and someya, would have improved this massively.

anyway to my actual gripe with that scene, why didn’t they translate イカれちまった??? so when kiryu asks someya what the hell happened, he says that and the team translated it as ‘you’ll find out in the afterlife!’ which feels so out of place in the scene and that’s an odd decision to me?? cos (unless i’m missing smth, which is possible) that means smth like ’i got outclassed’ (or smth similar but better) which has a very different vibe and fits in with his character arc and the delivery of the line much better. he’s someone who’s been manouevering himself to the top and is willing to do anything to get there and believes wholeheartedly that one, he belongs there, and two, he *will* get there. so when he’s so easily out-manouevered by sugai, and when he acknowledges that, that’s a big deal! and it’s just...not in the english. am i wrong???? is there a reason they made this decision that i’m missing?

also when he’s like ‘i didn’t hit hiromi, not once’ like buddy that’s not an achievement that’s the baseline asdfghjkl (unless he's saying he learned and got better but it's one line idk) i still like him tho, i can’t help it. i’m a nishiki simp ofc i have a soft spot for this guy

OH and akiyama pinpointing that kiryu went up there to kill iwami jr and sugai, and then basically saying that he would kill for kiryu if he had to/was asked. OKAY then again ig he did semi-canonically kill somebody in dead souls so there is that. akiyama’s whole view of kiryu to me is fascinating, i gotta write a fic for them at some point

is the thingy of kiryu getting in the way of yuta who’s getting in the way of haruka (and haruto) when sugai is about to shoot them a deliberate reference to the end of kiwami, when it’s kiryu, haruka and yumi? it looks like one. also the line where haruka is like 諦めるな (don’t give up) isn’t that what kiryu says to her at the end of 5, before the concert? and it’s the only real interaction they have all game?

iwami is such a meh boss fight. it took me a second to realise why (beyond the obvious) but he...doesn’t have a QTE??? even koshimizu gets a mid-fight cutscene to split it in two, but iwami doesn’t get one? that’s kind of funny but also not great design? he reminds me of munakata from 4 in a way, cos you can’t not have him as a boss on a purely story level, but he’s also the least interesting boss and character in the room, y’know? he shouldn’t’ve been last imho. 5 gets around it by not having kurosawa as a boss, but he’s replaced by majima so it’s all good, there’s no real replacement here

also nagumo gets stabbed like three times *and* shot and the game only really remembers that last one

for the karaoke, i like that you get to do hands in full, it really does the song justice and yeah it takes twice as long as the others (and is the only one like that in the series as far as i know) but it’s absolutely worth it. also really like the addition of harmonising on some of the hostess songs, like brand new stage and fork in the road. would love if they did more of that, it was great in raindrops and pure love in kamurocho and works here too.

the quickest i've finished a yakuza game in a while, just got the hostesses and a couple of other bits left to do (about a third of clan creator, and maybe the amon fight?)

[thebuttsmcgee]