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Game Ramblings #212 – Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Steam

Even for Yakuza side games this is a wild one. I can ignore all of the action melee combat parts of the game that were done just as well as the last time they had a side story and I’m still left with an entire new game of pirate shenanigans. This is just another entry in what has been a remarkably consistent series over the past couple decades, and one that seems to be able to just keep pulling new things out of its hat.

The nice thing about this being another melee-focused side entry is I can just skip all of that stuff for rambling. Read the combat ramblings on Like a Dragon Gaiden and you will know my thoughts there. Instead, I’m just going to talk about being a pirate. This game just does it so well. The thing that I want out of a pirate experience is basically two things – I want to fight things in a boat and I want to plunder treasure, and this game does it in spades. The basic combat loop of any pirate encounter is that you first engage in ship to ship combat, then after you defeat the boss ship you go crew vs crew. Now, I would never say that either of those phases is done at a particularly AAA quality level but the feeling of it is there.

On the ship side of things, you’re looking at a quick paced combat with three sets of weapons – a machine gun, left cannons, and right cannons. Each can be upgraded separately, allowing for things like freeze cannons on one side and poison cannons on the other with machine gun damage out of the front. The ships defense can be upgraded, which for me generally meant that I could do increasingly stupid things ramming into enemy ships. The ship’s ability to heal and boost (yes there’s a jet engine boost, complete with ship drifting capabilities – this isn’t realistic) can be upgraded to allow for more aggressive maneuvering.

As simple as it is, the chess game of this portion of the game is just incredibly tight. You’re basically using the boost and drift to avoid enemy fire while putting yourself into an advantageous position to fire back. You can certainly play in different ways – if you want to be defensive, you can stay at range and poke down weaker ships before focusing on the boss, or if you’re like me you will boost straight at the boss, ram it, and eat damage to nuke down the boss all at once – and they’re all kind of going to be equally the right way to play, besides situations where time is important. Importantly though, it’s not drawn out so it is always quick, full of action, and fun.

The crew fights are then about as chaotic as possible. If the normal combat gameplay is the tight Yakuza experience, this goes in the complete opposite direction. Crew fights are pure chaos. You don’t really need to play carefully. You don’t really need to focus on specific targets. You don’t really need to aim at anything. You just run in with your people, spam attacks, and watch pure chaos unfold. As a pure pirate fantasy it nails a lot of what I want in terms of building a crew and going in on anything as a whole.

Outside of combat this is then backed by your ability to interact with individuals to build the crew. A lot of the crew throughout my course of the game was built from people that I helped in side quests in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth so there’s an immediate sense of familiarity there. They then are recruited and end up on the ship while I’m out and about, allowing me to go around chatting with them. They are there during things like karaoke events on the ship or parties that I can throw as the captain reinforcing the whole idea of this being a crew supporting each other. It’s a lot of surface level stuff, but it’s effective at continuing to sell the feeling of this as a pirate game.

The rest of this is then all the normal trappings of a Yakuza title. There’s side quests all over that you can go after, most of which are absurd things like fighting zoo animals or robot vaccums. There’s activities ranging from karaoke to darts to Mario Kart-style go karting. Based on the location, there’s the return of some stuff from Infinite Wealth like photo locations. There’s sports like the golf driving range and explosives-based batting cages. There’s completely absurd things like a dating sim that you run for one of the members of your crew, complete with the live-action filmed segments that have somehow continued to end up in the series. There’s an entire series of arena-focused combat around pirate ships. It’s all there, but wrapped in some pirate clothing.

I’m not surprised that I enjoyed this game. I’m not surprised that it’s a good game. I’m not surprised that the melee combat was tight and a lot of fun. I’m more than 10 games into this series at this point, so this is all expected stuff. What I’m happy about is that for a series that has always turned the ridiculousness to 11, they’ve somehow been able to turn that dial even higher and yet it still doesn’t feel like they’ve hit a point where it’s all too much. It’s just worth playing.

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Game Ramblings #211 – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, PS4, Xbox Series, Steam

This game is the very definition of low friction. It has a ton of systems for crafting, a ton of systems for combat, a ton of systems for collecting, systems for building, and systems for customizing. From a high level view it looks like absolute chaos, but they all work together and they all work similarly so doing any particular thing constantly feels familiar. In building out the game this way they’ve created something that feels like Animal Crossing through the lens of RPGs and it just becomes an absolute joy to sit down and play.

If I look at the individual systems in place and tried to pull them out into its own game, it’s pretty clear that you’d have a series of pretty shallow games. Combat is fairly effective, but it’s clearly simple. You can do a set of different melee types and a couple of ranged types, but they generally play similar enough to be a preference selection. They have a handful of attack types for variety but largely play the same. The crafting side of the game is similar. Each crafting life has a whole huge list of recipes but they are all crafted the same way so 1:1 against each other it’s pretty irrelevant. Ultimately what really makes the game work is the loop tying everything together and how seamlessly you transition between the various lives.

To me the story is largely irrelevant. It’s something to push you forward into higher level zones – which has its use – but it’s not what had me playing the game. The Animal Crossing portion of this is really what did it for me. Like Animal Crossing, you’re essentially building a customizable town and recruiting people in it, but with more direct control over the things that you place. Rather than props coming up in the shop, you have to make them. If you want that fancy new staircase type to pull off a new block of housing? Go build it. You want that cool new wall art for your personal house? Go make it. What comes out of that is that each decision on what you’re adding to the town has a lot more impact than Animal Crossing. It’s a series of checklists to get to it. Do you have the recipe? Do you then have the materials? Do you then have the skill level to create it? If not, do you have a townsperson with the matching skill to assist you in creating it? That is where the simplicity ends up shining.

The individual lives that you work through to create a single thing don’t need complexity when the game loop is short. Recipes generally come out of quests of some sort, so completion of them is generally a small amount of item creation or enemy kills to complete. It doesn’t try to bog you down in a large grind. Each recipe has some handful of required items – maybe it’s some ore or some fish or some flowers or some wood, or some other craftable subitem like paints or boards or metal ingots. Rather than making that process slow and plodding, getting those items is relatively quick. Yes there’s leveling, but crafts or kills at the same relative level as you provide a ton of experience, so you aren’t grinding to earn new things. Each little piece of a whole item is its own couple minute game loop that is fast and fun enough without providing unnecessary friction to the player. At the end, you create your item, put it where you want, and move on to the next thing.

It is then helped that in the process of completing these mini game loops you’re also just generally grabbing other items as you go. On the way to some specific ore there’s probably some monsters or trees or any number of other things that you quickly dispatch to get more stuff that you can use later. It’s then easy to transition between all this because the fundamental controls are the same across the board. Each gathering life type has the same type of setup where there are weakpoints you can scan for and hit to more quickly dispatch the item. They all have the same setup of a critical finishing blow to gain more items. This extends to combat where the combat controls similarly have charge attacks on the same buttons for more damage to keep a similar sort of rhythmic flow to combat and gathering. On the crafting side, the setups are the same picture matching with the same clicks, hold, and button spam types so transitioning between woodworking and blacksmithing and cooking is all seamless.

This is ultimately what I mean by everything being low friction. The entire game is a series of small systems that are good enough on their own to be fun enough. They wouldn’t stand well over time isolated in their own game, but as the sum of parts to create a more advanced Animal Crossing experience they just all enhance each other. The systems have a short loop to keep you going to the next part of your checklist in a way that reminds me a lot of DS/3DS era games where everything was really tuned down to a 5 minute game loop that you can pick up and put down at any time, but can also just be played in hours long sessions because they are so smooth to get through. Creating your town is easy and fun but still requires enough effort to complete that it doesn’t feel trivial. It all just ends up working well in a way that makes this an easy recommendation for anyone looking for that Animal Crossing fix.

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Game Ramblings #210 – Donkey Kong Bananza

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch 2

What a treat.

I know I’m a bit late on this one, but I finally got a Switch 2 so I had to hop on this immediately. As more information was revealed it became clear that this wasn’t just a Donkey Kong title, but instead a prequel to and continuation of the ideas originating in Super Mario Odyssey. In practice, it absolutely feels like that, but given some iteration to really solidify the core meta loop that solved a lot of what I felt was unnecessary grinding in the original.

I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Odyssey but I didn’t really enjoy that everything was so heavily gated to collecting large amounts of inconsequential moons all over the place. I simply don’t play games to that level of care for completion anymore. Going into this I dreaded having to find 40 shines hidden in spots for the hell of it to get to the next area. Lucky for me, that is all gone. There is now such an obvious distinction between main path collecting needs and collecting for the sake of it. The main path has goal locations and you happen to collect things between those locations, and maybe the main location has a goal to collect a specific banana or a piece of a record during it, but they are goals and you beeline straight to them and you move on with your life, and if you happen to collect things on the way then that’s generally fun and cool. What I’m not doing is what felt like grinding out a counter to move on.

And I’m very serious about beelining. The fundamental mechanic that the game is built around is the ability to just dig through the environment and make your own path. That is generally what solved my collection dislikes about Odyssey. In this case, most things that you can collect have a clever solution and a chaotic solution. There’s tons of clues all over the place about places to explore – changes in the ground texture showing possible caves, people standing around talking about the possible location of bananas, suspiciously placed objects that seem like they can only hide something. If you’re paying attention you will simply find a lot of things, and that isn’t different from how it worked in Odyssey.

However, there is now also the dumb ape solution. Your goal is 300m in a direction and there’s a town, cliff wall, and a bunch of people in your way? Punch in a straight line! I cannot tell you how many times I would be bashing my way through a cliff only to find that I ended up in a cave that done “correctly” would have required me to search out something like an explosive to blast through a metal wall blocking entrance to the cave. In those cases, being a dumb ape going “lol punch everything” got me a faster reward than playing correctly, and I loved the fact that game is literally built to allow this style of gameplay.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t require me to actually pay attention, because there are certainly core story segments that do require some care. Bosses generally required me to pay attention to specific mechanics and execute them well. Story-specific bananas generally required me to execute mechanics well. Optional challenge rooms (of which there are a lot) generally required me to carefully get through them. However, the balance of gameplay felt a lot more tuned to where I am in life now. There are a lot of moments where I can just shut off my brain, be a dumb ape punching things, and have fun. I can then save those moments of paying attention for specific times where the situation required it. If I compare this to my memory of Mario Odyssey, I feel like I had more relaxed downtime and better specific periods of excitement in a way that struck a better balance for post-work post-kids bed time sitting in a chair and playing.

The weird thing to me is that that change in how I was playing the game changed what to me was a negative about Odyssey – the sheer amount of collection – into something that I largely think is a positive here. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to collect a lot of things, here I simply happened to collect a lot of things. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to weave around and explore everything to collect what I needed, here I collected enough simply being a dumb ape and barreling through the environment. Ultimately the change is that instead of feeling forced to explore, I simply was exploring for the fun of it.

This is very much a classic Nintendo first party title. It’s relatively easy in the mainline path, has plenty of challenge when you go off of that, and concludes in a place that left me wanting more. They took what was already a solid foundation and passed it through iteration of core mechanics and adaptation to another part of the Mario IP. What came out of that is a game that is surprising in how well it worked and is almost certainly going to be seen as a much higher point than Donkey Kong 64 in terms of pulling this part of the universe into 3D. I don’t know if I could recommend buying an entire new console to play this game, but if you’re going to buy a Switch 2 anyway this is where you should absolutely start.