Yakuza 6: The Song of Life

Dragon engine combat is monumental ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Easily a downgrade compared to Y5 or Y0. Super heat mode removing the entire field of view is frustrating. Enemies blocking stops the entire flow of combat for no apparent reason (and yet people whine about Y3 for having blocking enemies but you can still chain after it in that game. Not here!). Changing Kiryu's entire moveset is inane and senseless. Different finishers seem to come out at complete random, so it's not like you really get to choose what move you're doing half the time. Tiger drop feels weak. No komaki counter. Parry block thing is complete lame cheese, while still being unfun to use. Actually most cool trained komaki moves just aren't there. Instead you're just supposed to bounding throw every single enemy in the game I guess and exploit the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ gmod ragdolls. By the way there's like 5 heat actions. I have no idea why there are just no heat actions in this game, I guess they decided they actually totally aren't awesome or cool or fun at all. Great decision. Lame, uninspired substories, and about 20 of them total. They are voice acted, but almost all of them are unenjoyable, not that there's many. The only ones that introduce something new, like the baseball manager or clan manager, just aren't fun to me at least, but I was already sick of majima construction anyways. Story wise, nothing here needed or should have happened. Enjoyable supporting characters but it just feels like redoing Y3 at times with them. Can safely just pretend this game didn't happen, which I will indeed do. Side note and I know it's a cultural thing I guess but I genuinely feel like Kiryu does not see himself as a father figure to his daughter, which is absolutely insane. Maybe it's something about how gruff kiryu shows affection but like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, [spoiler] just say Haruto is your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grandson man stop running around with a random child and then acting all flustered when people ask about it. You're like 40 grow the hell up. I chalked this up to "oh I guess maybe in Japan they just don't view adoptive relationships as valid as non adoptive ones" but no, they had to go and throw in "by the way Daigo is totally my son I love him like a father". ??????? And you don't love Haruto like a grandson, man??????? wtf is this game really. I don't care how many times I read uncle kaz, it's pretty apparent he's a father figure and not an uncle figure and he just doesn't show it or act like it and it's really bizarre particularly in this game, especially after Y5. Oh by the way most of the yakuza 'guy reveals his heart and gets shot by some other guy' is still here and really lame and boring. I thought we moved past that already but apparently we're still writing games like Yakuza 4. This series went from 0 to 6 by the way. People were genuinely surprised that Kiwami 3 was garbage, but this game was the writing on the wall. [/spoiler] In terms of rule of cool, or fun yakuza stuff, just isn't there. The downgrade is insane, and completely universal. The dynamic intros are lame, the music is lame, the cinematic moments are easily still lame compared to Y5 or Y0 but I guess that's an unfair comparison anyways. The bizarre ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Rizap ad substory felt sickeningly ass. Genuinely amazed not only that it was approved and that people thought "yea this is awesome" but that they bulldozed the bowling alley for it. Any thing in Y6 that appears to possibly be a cool minigame is shallow and unenjoyable, except for the batting alley they did actually improve on that. Good things about this game: Onomichi, jacketless kiryu, a lot of the face models (except akiyama, he looks weird), Today is a Diamond, and most importantly: this game being incredibly short and not content rich, unlike actually fun games like Y5 or Y0, which I really wish I were playing instead of this. Thanks for not wasting TOO much of my time RGG.