Sarah Baldwin

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The yakuza series scores again! I know a lot of people were mad when they announced this would be turn based. I think if you are not playing it simply for that reason, you are seriously limiting yourself. This is another yakuza title through and through. Lots of crazy ridiculousness packed tight within a serious crime drama. Multiple twists and turns to make your heart race and absolutely destroy you emotionally. Another target of criticism when this came out was that kiryu was no longer the MC. Well I'm happy to say that no one who thought that kiryu exiting the series would break it still thinks that. Ichiban is everything kiryu is not, and I'm a long time kiryu fan. Kiryu is stoic and proud, tough and fiercely loyal. Ichiban is full of personality, funny, relatable, and has the same heart of gold yakuza protagonists are famous for. He goes through the game collecting allies because he is a serious underdog that you can't help but root for. Having Nishiki's VA back to voice ichiban was a fantastic decision. And kaiji tang...I mean you really won't find a much better choice for the English version. Do yourself a favor and play this game, but if it's your first yakuza game do yourself an even bigger favor and start with yakuza 0. All the games are on gamepass now so there is no better time to become a fan. This series will change you in ways you never expected. I am envious of anyone playing for the first time.

This is a fantastic adaption! It does feel rushed in certain places and it feels like they time skip way more than the game. With a series I just don't think they have to do that. If it was a movie I could understand. Even so, Pedro Pascal is America's favorite TV dad right now for a reason. His masterful acting is what makes the show in my opinion. The same thing can be said for Bella Ramsey, she is an amazing Ellie in every way. The show also brought together and introduced certain aspects to make the story make a lot more sense, and does justice to the source material. HBO has done such a wonderful job with season one, and with every time they have deviated from the source material it feels like a reward. I have loved the changes they made, such as cordyceps being able to communicate (they really did a lot of research to get this just right, and it shows), to the lovely episode with the gay couple Bill and Frank. They were originally a hetero couple so I am loving the representation and that we actually get to know them and see what happened. The game also skips that but it is one of the most powerful scenes in the show. Ellie took Joel to a mall in the game, not a random house - which triggered the mall flashback with Riley. Storm is also a fantastic actress and she seriously played her heart out as Riley. Ok now I'm going to talk about spoilers so you should stop here if you don't want to know what happens. ***WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW*** Alright time for the elephant in the room. I am hoping that HBO dares to step away from source material for the second game. Everything about the second game was terrible, and every single thing they did was for shock value and fake woke culture. I say this as an LGBTQ person that leans politically left. So if they plan to follow Neil Druckman's lead on the next season, I will be out before they can introduce Abby. I will have to angrily come back to this review and change it to one star when they kill Joel. It completely defeats the purpose of character and relationship building to do so. It's really sad that such a great story with dynamic characters became such a heaping pile of garbage, but that's exactly what happened. Neil Druckman is the human embodiment virtue signaling. And for pete's sake, I refuse to watch that extremely uncomfortable intoxicated hate sex scene between abby and owen. Like why was that even necessary? But what it all comes back to for me is killing joel off. You have some rando person that he comes across and saves their life, and she turns around and kills him because he killed her dad when her dad tried to kill ellie? do you see what a cluster**** this is? And Joel, the badass dad who is constantly in these situations where it is him against literal armies of dead and living alike, survives a cross country trek, takes out an army of fireflies one handed BY HIMSELF while carrying ellie in the other hand. And not even that but he is with ellie who is the baddest chick around and has murdered dozens of people on her own, AND he's with Tommy! It makes absolutely no sense and was done specifically for shock value!!! I think druckman said he was trying to teach a lesson about forgiveness or something but nobody wants to learn lessons from playing games or watching their favorite characters be brutalized! it's just absolutely and utterly ridiculous to me and I can only hope HBO has the grit to not only step away from that, but run in the opposite direction as fast as possible. Anyway, I'll be back to change this review to one star after they kill off Joel for no reason.

This show really does justice to the victims of Purdue pharma's murderous greed. At this point, there is not a soul in Appalachia that hasn't been touched by drug addiction in one way or another. This show will make you angry, it will make you sad. But it's a story that needed to be told. The addiction epidemic started by the sacklers will likely continue for generations to come. These thugs in suits will never have to pay for what they did, and even if they did- it would never be enough to make up for the tremendous amount of pain and death they caused. Thank you for this show, and for shining a spotlight on the most evil family in America. Fight back against the sacklers. Fight back against addiction. Carry narcan, keep people alive. Never forget. Never forgive.