Recent reviews by Woodaba

Raziel is trapped - ensnared by history - and so too is the player.

Initial impressions leave Soul Reaver 2 somewhat wanting compared to its predecessor. Gone are the block puzzles - which some will be delighted to hear, but personally I enjoyed them a lot and missed their absence - the open level design that encouraged player-led backtracking and exploration with your expanding powers, and even the PS1 title's dour and moody atmosphere. Instead, Soul Reaver 2 is a trek up and down the same linear path again and again without deviation or exploration, engaging in cursory combat and occasionally solving a reasonably clever puzzle.

As a traditionally satisfying GamingTM experience, it's terribly wanting, and I suspect that few will have kind words for it once the remaster comes out. As an exploration of a narrative that sees Raziel continually believing that he has escaped his fate only to find himself deeper into the trap of destiny, it is shockingly effective and delightfully paced.

Soul Reaver 2 draws attention to its limitations, its artifice, again and again to underscore not just the futility of Raziel's quest, but also of a style of game that the developers have clearly grown tired of. By the time the "final boss" arrives, there is no challenge, no possibility of defeat. But of course there wasn't. You've always been immortal, this experience has always been authored so that no matter how many times you fail, you will always succeed. The battle is perfunctory, the outcome preordained. As it always has been. As it always will be.

Metal Gear Solid 2 - which released right around the same time - will inevitably take up a lot of the air in the room when it comes to video games of 2001 that tackle structural critique through the lens of self-reflective video game commentary, but Soul Reaver 2 acquits itself admirably even in the face of one of the greatest games ever made, largely thanks to the excellent voice cast and the deeply compelling love/hate dynamic shared between Kain and Raziel, who drape the whole thing in queer overtones that keep things personal even with timelines and worlds at stake. I cannot recommend playing these games with vampires as a metaphor for queerness in mind highly enough: the ending is already a knockout, but the relationship dynamics it suggests...♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dude...

Delightfully morose, deliciously cynical, and an absolute banquet for anyone with Fujoshi Brain Poisoning...while Soul Reaver 1, with it's gorgeous presentation and unbearable sadness, has my heart, Soul Reaver 2 has my head. And both are still excellent.

Can't wait for all the reviews coming out in a month and change declaring them both outdated trash that need a remake.

I'm writing this partially as a message to my future self, because I am rapidly becoming a huge fan of this game, however, I have seen what huge fans of this game look like, and they don't seem happy, either with Creative Assembly as a whole or how they've handled this specific game. So, in case that happens, and I become someone furious at the lack of a Northern expansion or the balance of the indigenous southern factions, let me just say that I love this game. I've played 30 hours, I've finished a campaign, and it's the most fun I've had with any Total War game. For the first time, Total War is about people more than armies, and anchoring this game around the magnetic personalities of the cast of Romance of the Three Kingdoms gives this game an astonishing amount of character and life that colours so much of the experience, with unique mechanics that reflect Cao Cao's scheming or Liu Bei's bonds of brotherhood. Placing the human faces of one of the most popular and influential works of fiction in human history on Total War mechanics does so much to enliven them, especially when they do superhuman feats of taking on entire regiments by themselves, or seeing an ocean of armies part to allow two master swordsmen to duel for the fate of all China.

It has a lot of the same problems and limitations as most Total War games, but there are a lot of mechanical changes that I do like. Total Warhammer 2 had even more asymmetrical factions but I found in my brief time with it that I was often frustrated at how often fights between individual units would drag on, where it seemed like however I positioned my units, however deftly I tried to flank, or how many gaps I would leave in my lines, the statistically better unit would win time after time, and it eventually led to play where I would just line up my armies, march them forward, and let them fight it out in a big line, because I felt so little effect from any attempts at ambush or cleverness. Here, it feels like positioning and tactical play matters so much more. I've won battles handily that the AI insisted I had absolutely no chance of winning through careful positioning of missiles, spearmen, and a lot of running horsemen around to charge into people from the back with my bro, my homie, my absolute Guy, Xiaohou Dun. I've gotten cocky and turned convincing routs into embarrassing skirmishes that would force me to pull back and reinforce. At least on Normal difficulty, this was not a game about composing the perfectly balanced army, it was a game about being clever in the moment, about the kind of tactical moves and big plays that someone like Cao Cao would pull off in the novel.

It's a game about making you feel like a mastermind just like him, about feeling like these larger-than-life figures, and also, the quiet sadness of these people dying and falling out of history, replaced by people you don't recognise, of the emptiness that comes when you defeat your most bitter enemy. It is the game that, for me, has come the absolute closest to fulfilling the intoxicating promise of Total War.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe in like 5 campaigns time, I'll see through the lines of code and into the artifice that underpins all of these kinds of games. Maybe the majesty and the fantasy will be gone by then. But that's why this message exists, future me. That even though you may not be loving the game now the way you did back then, the love that exists now burns so, so bright, and I don't want you to forget it.

As someone who loves shmups as aesthetic objects but often struggles with their difficulty, Cycle Chaser H5 is a revelation. Incredibly smart design decisions bridge the gap towards neophytes like myself whilst creating greater heights for the masters to reach towards combines with a gorgeous aesthetic blending 2000s-era flash sensibilities with the burning screeching passion of the Sega Mega Drive makes this that rare game that lights an enthusiasm for an entire genre in me. It is The ♥♥♥♥.

This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a ♥♥♥♥-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a ♥♥♥♥-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowledging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-♥♥♥♥ sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make ♥♥♥♥♥♥ jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.

Daniil Dankovsky and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: HD Edition

yeah it's alright