Mike T.

In short, it’s a fantastic game. If you’re new to the Yakuza series, Like a dragon is a good place to start. (Yakuza 0 is also a good game to start.) I played the other Yakuza games including Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami. But I have to say, Yakuza Like a dragon is my favorite. This is my first time playing the game with English voice overs and I am thoroughly impressed with the voice acting. They are well-done with emotion and what really sells it is the lip-syncing on the characters are dead accurate. I was surprised that George Takei was voice acting in it too! His voice as a fatherly but powerful figure in the game was a good choice. At the heart of it, it's a turn-based JRPG with quick time event buttons for extra damage. There is a job system where each character can specialize in some type of damage or role. For example, one character can be a mage-type character with powerful magic spells, another with blade type damage, another with gun type damage, and another with absolutely powerful healing spells. The characters aren’t limited to one job and you can change them to have more than one type of damage because some of the moves stay with character no matter what job role they take. The cutscenes are really long. So long that my PC monitor has a power saving mode that kicks in a lot before a cutscene ends and the screen goes black momentarily before I have to de-activate it. The first few hours of the game is like a long movie with a few fights or walk to another location before another 15 minute or so cutscene starts. Because it introduces new settings and new characters, the game really tries hard to introduce them. Also, a lot of the cutscenes are your enemies explaining how they deviously created a secret plan and their motives in every detail you can imagine. Interesting stuff! No really. Since it’s a Japanese RPG, It’s a really long game. By the end of it, I was 85 hours in. I could do the secret dungeon but it required a very long grind to get my character parties up to max level which could take days or weeks. I could play some of the other mini games and unlock all their levels. There are really a ton of things to do post end game. Even a new game plus mode where most of your thing carries over to a new game but you start the story all over again.

This game is more of a puzzle - platformer game with elements of horror. Most of the level involves finding a lever to pull, finding a key and putting it in a lock, while sneaking around a giant monster behind their backs as they turn around. Sometimes you have to figure out interesting ways to climb to the top of the ceiling by trial and error. Gameplay wise, it’s really fun and it’s a little scary. For example, I was sweating bullets as I snuck around a giant scary looking chef chopping meat up. I didn’t know what to do in the level so I panicked and tried everything to figure out how to get out of the room. I was super relieved to figure out the solution on my own after dying a couple times from the ugly chef. Hint: Sometimes I overthink it so the solution is usually the easiest one! In the beginning of the game, there are no tutorials. Only if you get stuck for a while, the game hint pop up reminds you of a button you should press you’ll need to get around the level. I used an XBOX one controller and it worked great. I highly recommend using an XBOX controller for this game. There were no bugs I came across and it was smooth throughout. Being on ultra settings on my PC, graphics were super detailed and gave a perfectly spooky vibe throughout. Very dark rooms and disgusting looking textures everywhere. It is a really, really short game but a good one as it can easily beaten in around 3-4 hours. I wish it was longer! Story-wise, I don’t fully understand it but it gets dark very, very quickly. Avoiding spoilers, I was shocked at some of the things the main character did. I was shocked at some of the disgusting things that happened in this game. It is mildly depressing and it truly is a scary nightmare. But in the perspective of your main character, a young female child. The game does not have a narrator or text to tell the player what is going on in the story. It is all done through the gameplay and silent cutscenes. In fact, not a single word is spoken in this game. You’d have to come up with your own interpretation or look up online to find out what the story is about. There is some replicability in the game, there’s unlockables and lots of hidden items that will unlock concept art in the main menu. If you go out of the way, you might spot details you didn’t see before and find new areas with a hidden item. Overall, this game is totally worth playing. A shorty but a goody as it can easily be beaten in one day. I just wish it was a little longer! The developers also made a bunch of DLC, a mobile game, and another game called Little Nightmares 2. I look forward to playing them someday to find out more about this very interestingly dark story. An easy 5 stars

Let me start off with the best part of the game. I was pleasantly surprised how interesting the plotline was. It’s good enough to be its own movie! I was also pleasantly surprised by the personalities, excellent dialogue, the voice acting, and the character modeling was. There are even optional dialogs where you can go into each character’s personal stories. The storyline even had “heart”, where I found myself tearing up after characters were sharing deep issues like suicide or loss. I was laughing a lot when Rocket was making rants, Starlord making jokes, and lots of funny little incidents throughout my playthrough. There is a TON of dialogs in this game. As you move with your group of friends in the level, every 10-15 seconds they talked to each other with something interesting. They even gave the character that I controlled a chance to weigh in on my opinion. By the end of the game, I fell in love with ALL the characters and really cared for them. The graphics are very good. I was mesmerized by all the cool background landscapes of the first levels. It’s full of VERY imaginative levels. I was actually surprised how many configurations you can do in the settings. You can adjust so many things in the sound and display settings. There’s even accessibility settings to adjust the difficulty of quick time events, game hints, and much more. There are a few game breaking bugs that forced me to restart the last checkpoint. For example, sometimes my character would be stuck on a piece of geometry and I'm stuck in it forever. A quick load from the last checkpoint fixed this. There was another issue where nothing was selectable and the characters stopped talking, forcing me to restart. Sometimes the sounds would skip a little for a while when I restarted the game. The game also never saves your brightness settings after you close it so everytime you restart the game you have to change the brightness settings again. The gameplay was not great, but still very good. There is a really simple set of skills where you can pick which skill you’d like to get. I like the stagger mechanic, where you fill this meter up by doing stagger abilities so the enemy will take more damage and not attack for a while. I wish the skill tree had more skills in it and the game. Also, I found the fighting part of the game a little bit too easy towards the end of the game. I just do the same overpowered abilities and combine them and the enemies go down very easily. This was on normal difficulty. Luckily these fights don’t last too long. As you progress throughout the game, there is a journal that is filled out in Star Lord’s perspective with cute drawings and stickers and his personal opinions on things. It was a nice touch and a good way to summarize the story so far. Being a story-driven game, it is really linear. I couldn't pick whatever next level I wanted. The game just rewards you sometimes when you pick a “correct” conversation dialog option in the form of a shortcut, more money, or a special bonus cutscene. Of course, if you picked the other choice you still get an alternate scene caused by a different outcome from your choice. Overall, this game was fantastic despite a few minor flaws mentioned above. Kudos to the staff who wrote the storyline script and the dialog. If there ever was a sequel to this game, I’d be excited to play it.

I played the pc version remake of panzer dragoon on normal difficulty. The game does a very poor job of teaching the player how to control the game. For the first level, there were fire rocks hurled at me from behind and there was no way to hit them. Then i realized im missing something. I took a look at the control menus and saw that you have to pan the camera around by pressing an actual button. For the eniter first level, i thought i was stuck looking at the front of my dragon instead of 360 degrees. I also had no clue about the lock-on missile technique which is a HUGE part of the game until I looked at the controls in the menu. I didn’t even notice the radar at the top right until a few levels in which helped a lot after i used it to see enemies. The sounds of this game is very generic and boring. The exception is the end game credits have an interestingly cool sounding synth-rock music. Everytime your dragon gets hurt, it sounds like one of those generic bald eagle sounds you always hear in movies and games. The same battle theme music plays on a loop in every single level. The gameplay graphics are decent. Being a remake, you can see the upclose scaly skin of the dragons. The mechs and the lazers that shoot out of them look decent. I did like the different landscape of the levels from desert to forest to city to caves. One thing I hated is how when you finish a level with very low health, the next level you only are given half of your life back. There is no way to replenish your life besides dying, using one of your credits. Oh yeah, this game calls your lives credits for some reason. But I did like the game rewards you with lives the more guys you shoot down. With over 90% of things dead, you get 2 extra lives and with over 80% of things dead, you get an extra life. The biggest downfall of this game is how simple it is. Basically Shoot stuff down with your homing missles and dodge the things coming at you. Pan around the camera using you radar to see the enemies on your sides and behind. The levels are very short and the game only lasts 2-3 hours. The boss battles are by far the best part of the game. They have a ton of HP compared to normal enemies, they have interesting shapes, and they shoot you from around your dragon where you have to dodge missiles and lazers. Some of them are fast or have a little weak spot so you have to be careful. The boss battles were OK but not hard at all on normal difficulty. The story is very forgettable and too vague. You are raiding a desert with friends and suddenly you are attacked by a giant monster that suddenly dies from rocks. An alien with a dragon comes to you and dies and asks you to take over his dragon to shoot down a purple dragon. It’s trying to get to a temple. As you are chasing this another dragon, an army of aliens are trying to kill you with their mechs and air ships. You leave your friends behind in the desert because reasons. I don’t think i’ll ever play this game again. There’s not enough incentive to replay it because the gameplay is too simple to be interesting after you know the ending. And there’s nothing really to unlock besides getting a better accuracy score at the end of the level oif you care about that kind of stuff. Overall I give this game 3 out of 5 stars