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nyxqueenofshadows · 2 days

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alright, i'm done done now. 99 hrs (according to steam) and 51% completion. didn't attempt the amon boss fight cos it means doing one as akiyama and i'd die immediately i'm a coward but maybe another game

can see the faults people have with it (the enemy encounters oh god) and there's just some bizarre choices made but it has dreams heart and idk, i had fun. shinada is there. haruka hit a dude with a fan. it's a huge turning point for kiryu's character. saejima can dress up santa. good enough for me

longer thoughts below the cut, roughly 4k words (tho i trimmed it down, believe it or not). mostly in chronological order and written as i was playing

nakajima i would die for you

throwing maths questions at me as part of a substory what is this, do i look like i can do ratios??? no! << hi me from the end of the game, then there’s shinada’s substory where it makes you calculate change, and then the academic course at the batting centre in kamurocho. rgg are you secretly trying to turn this into a maths edutainment game

nagasugai’s nice, kinda chill while still being busy if that makes sense

there’s A Lot that the game throws at you at once, huh. training with sousuke, two separate taxi driving minigames, tatsuya the chef, then all the stuff with aizawa and morinaga, it’s busy! so don’t mind me i’m just gonna avoid the main plot for a while and go headfirst into the side content asdfghjkl. fuck pedestrians tho

really like the scene with haruka and kiryu on the beach.

every time the plot means i have to go over even vaguely in the direction of nagasu taxi, or i’m doing training with sousuke, i get stuck doing the taxi minigame for like 45 minutes cos even tho i think it could be better it’s weirdly moreish. i can’t explain it

taxi minigame gets a thumbs up from me. bits of it are kind of poorly designed and the spread of talking and driving events could be more balanced imo (maybe i just did them in a weird order) but the story and development of nagasu taxi during the devil killers plotline is great, 10/10 would do again. like the hug, between nakajima and his rival? fantastic moment. plus taxi customisation with appropriately awful options! nakajima hope you’re doing well, sorry i’m gonna abandon you in half a chapter (that scene’s so sad).

wish the sousuke training plotline was a bit beefier (even including the bit in kamurocho at the end) but i like the kid so idk

second health bar???? okaaaaay aasdfghjkl (tho why is this locked behind the tatsuya chef thingy, like i get they want you to go off and do all the side content but they couldn’t have let you do an example with him first? so you know what kind of benefits you get from him and whether he’s worth it? same with revelations, obvs i know what they are cos i played the previous two but they’re explained very badly)

kiryu just straight up socking yuya in the jaw during that one substory will never not be funny to me, it’s so out of the blue

last little bit of the kiryu chapter was really good, kiryu vs an army was occasionally kind of annoying cos it’s easy to get swarmed and the lock-on is inconsistent af, but cos all those guys are basically made of tissue paper you can just fly through them like it’s nothing. really satsifying. same for the cutscenes, i feel like they lay the groundwork for stuff that’s coming later well (kurosawa being manipulative af as per) and establish how kiryu’s character has shifted in this one (beyond the rest of the chapter). also watase!!!! can see why they brought him back in later games, it’d be such a waste to leave him

onto saejima!

ahh, the famous tripe scene. 10/10 for majima(‘s facial expressions)

during kiryu’s bit i had the bit of gear that makes it so you can avoid encounters, i don’t have that here so i’m just inundated with encounters, it’s killing me and i know it’s not gonna get better asdfghjkl <<< me from the end of the game again, every time i had to swap characters you best believe i was moving those beads between everybody like they were a hot potato. makes walking around town soooo much more bearable.

still not sure whether majima faked missing that ball or not. the mix of truth and lie in that scene is interesting (or at least it is when it gets recontextualised at the end) but that’s the one bit i’m unsure on.

going into the prison section with the knowledge that baba is lying is great, i’m seeing stuff i missed first time round. let saejima’s ‘healing via kyoudai-ification’ begin!

all the prison guys are fun and great, connection really is a big theme with this one huh.

so like, the ghostly mind palace thing asdfghjkl i get that it’s to get around the issue that came up in 4 (and is more pronounced here cos you spend more time there) of having fuck all to do in prison except walk from person to person and waiting for all the dialogue to go through, but it’s so weird! having to do a hostess session (and optionally? karaoke) as part of the main story is such a bold decision. having said that cos the game is already kinda blurry, the massive violet and white filter over everything plus the short draw distance makes it very difficult to see and kinda uncomfortable to look at for extended periods of time. shame, ghostly himura looks great.

BUT saejima’s interjections for rouge of love are fucking great

the snowmobile section was better than the boat one from 4! but not by much tbh, feels vaguely comparable to that one speed racer mission on endor in lego star wars but less punishing if (when) you hit a tree.

that bear is fucking HUGE looking forward to unravelling the mysteries behind the village and okadera tho

the hunting minigame doesn’t feel so bad for now, but i imagine it might get kinda boring down the line. we’ll see

update on the hunting minigame, got two main quests left and it’s actually been pretty easy to get into. kind of time consuming and, like the darts minigame, sometimes you miss when you absolutely should’ve hit, but the story is interesting and it’s weirdly relaxing. maybe cos it’s so quiet. not sure how i feel about the side missions yet cos i’ve not done many cos it needs me to get martens and i have piss poor luck so i haven’t found any <<< me from the end of the game, uh, they were fine? the only one i really remember is the woman who asks you for a hare to feed to her mother-in-law cos she said she hates them but then the mother-in-law comes to you and is like thanks i love hare, she’s so easily manipulated haw di haw. weird.

still got piss poor luck on the martens but! finished the main plotline of the hunting minigame and ahhhh really liked it. dunno if the parallels with baba are intentional but they’re there imo. interesting reveal (it all comes at once, but the clues were mostly there), nice emotional payoff, good time all round. accidentally sold all my meat before doing the final boss so had to do the yama-oroshi fight on a hope and a prayer but i managed it! some fucking bizarre translation decisions (why are you writing full sentences when characters are just making hmm noises, or even being silent! what is this!) that feel more prominent here than elsewhere but difficult to tell.

on the translation, i just, idk. if i didn’t know any japanese would i be bothered about it? probably not, but i’d definitely notice, and i feel like you don't want that as a translator?

10/10 for the substory where you have to do a chase mission dressed as santa to get away from a bunch of kids while jingle bells plays in the background

the pacing in saejima’s section is so weird, cos you get loads of time to yourself, then it speeds through two days in the space of maybe ten minutes, and then it’s basically nonstop from there. having said that i don’t hate it? it gives you time to explore if you want, i just don’t space out my substories very well.

baba’s twinky as fuck turtleneck is so distracting asdfghjkl

i really like baba and saejima’s thing they have going on, their relationship (bond, ig) and how it affects baba going forward is really compelling to me.

oh god tho between that and the massive amounts of cutscene it puts you through at the end of saejima’s and the beginning of haruka’s bit, it’s killer.

mirei’s gonna need her own section in these notes huh.

so i left the above note when i was actually at her section in the game, and then i didn’t put anything in here until i was finished with the thing as a whole, cos i have such complicated feelings on her. i wish she’d been in the game more, i wish she wasn’t trauma-dumping in every scene she’s in but if she doesn’t do that in the short time frame she has then her character arc (and haruka’s emotional one) doesn’t make sense, i wish she didn’t die off-screen with all of her motivations explained by other, male, characters.

but then she (intentionally or not) shows the inheritance cycle of abuse well, and her relationship with haruka is compelling partly cos of haruka’s side of ‘she’s never really had a mother anymore how does that make her feel’ but also cos i don’t know whether she’s genuinely attached or is being manipulative for the sake of having haruka fulfill her own lost dream. idk, she got shafted by the narrative in some ways but i think about her fairly often and i think that says smth about her.

ANYWAY

why is haruka’s text sort of pink and literally no one else’s except the hostesses in the flirty sections. what’s with that. is it cos the guys’ is a darker blue/grey and they wanted hers to not be that

quickfire, opinions on haruka’s various minigame things:

dance battle (and solo) - dull on lower level difficulties, engaging enough on the higher ones. doing them outside of the main plot (and the side story plot) is kinda pointless tho, the difficulty scaling on this entire bit is so bad, i was op after one chapter

performance (princess league etc) - again, too easy on low level, sort of engaging on higher ones. songs are great tho so it’s fine

comedy duo - very good fun, wish it was longer. watching haruka smack people (with a fan!) and speak kansai-ben is great.

interviews/dialogue choice ones - mixed bag. one with the morning glory kids was great tho

talk show with the comedian - eh. never really had a sense of when i was succeeding or failing

quiz game show - not bad! not great either!

running girl - nope. is this a parody of smth specific, it has to be, it’s so bad, so uncomfortable.

minigames (refuse to lose, fishin, etc. but on TV! so it’s different!) - the minigames are good, so this is fun. also like how they introduce different girls and the interactions haruka has with them, made them more interesting than i was expecting. very funny to me that a good chunk take place outside sotenbori including in bee in nagusagai! like!!!

the story ones (the ones that are jus text, no gameplay) - like these. the one where the producer tries to force haruka to have sex with him is a bit ehhhhh (i get what they’re going for, i’m just not sure they entirely land it) but the other ones are nice enough. more kamiya dolce is always good

HANA!!!!! why doesn’t she have a character portrait, is this like a nishida in kiwami situation or does she have a model once we get to kamurocho or what << she does not. boo.

also saigo, my man, very glad to see him back and batshit as ever, his training was very fun. machine gun still annoying af tho

haruka’s little 決めちゃうぞ before certain minigames (i’ve had it before bowling and darts) is the cutest thing, i heard it and was like that one hold on i need a minute meme. she must’ve picked that up from kiryu, surely

i thought this the first time i watched the plot through, but is akiyama not noticeably more bloodthirsty in this one than the last one? yeah he’s still the same old akiyama but he’s saying lines like ‘no complaints if you die’ and shit which seems kinda...idk. harsh. nvm when he leaves ogita with a crushed arm and waits for him to explain everything before trying to move him.

yamori backstory! info-dump-y but great to see!!! << shame this is like the only bit of character development akiyama really gets in the whole game. it’s probably not a huge deal, but considering how everyone else gets a significant chunk of time devoted to them and their arc it really stands out that he doesn’t get that.

also very much here for the yoko/uda background semi-romance thing going on in haruka’s training segments, it’s a fun time. gonna miss you yoko

here, in last chapter of haruka and akiyama’s bit, basically after katsuya gets introduced is where the plot starts losing me (and then in completely loses me in shinada’s section). there’s so fucking many moving pieces, keeping track of them all to a meaningful degree just isn’t possible, and i’m not entirely sure some of them make sense.

also how the everloving fuck is kurosawa just like, teleporting from city to city to be Manipulative and Mysterious, there’s overlap to everyone’s bits before they arrive in kamurocho, right? kiryu’s and haruka’s bits take place over the same few days, and i assume saejima’s does too, but kurosawa always shows up towards the end of everyone’s bits. so did he talk to kiryu in nagusagai, sprint all the way to sotenbori to hit up akiyama, sprint all the way *back* to nagusagai to talk to kiryu again, and then go alll the way up to tsukimino to grab saejima???? what’s the timing on all these???

katsuya’s interesting. wish there was more of him. kanai can go suck a dick tho

shinatatsuuuuuuuu

his sections are really, really heavy on the cutscene huh. weirdly i’m okay with it tho? maybe it’s cos i’m more than used to the yakuza style of cutscene by now but they’re really engaging and fun to watch, they rarely feel like as long as they have been. thinking about the scene where takasugi is like you can lose your fingers or take this job from daigo’s perspective is hilarious to me like was he just watching that in stoic silence the entire time asdfghjkl