Recent reviews by marionintendo6543deserteagle

i already have like 300 hours and the platinum for ps4
i have done
every goal
every stat point
on every level
for every skater
every gap
every speedrun
every secret
every trophy

i'm doing it again.

man what is going on anymore

♥♥♥♥ 4-2

shoutout to techland for making the most mediocre game conceivable
bonus points for everything feeling like pool noodles

tl;dr only buy if it's either on sale or you really like the other yakuza games.

Ishin Kiwami is a mixed bag of good and bad. It is obvious how much effort RGG put into this remake, however if anything, it feels more like an enhanced port, just on a new engine. Coming off the heels of Lost Judgment, Ishin Kiwami feels like a downgrade in almost every department.
While the visuals aren't terrible, at times they look rather disappointing, especially considering that this is the same studio that have made some beautiful looking games. There are times where the game can look rather sloppy, even on the highest graphics settings. At points i'd say it looks worse than Yakuza 0 or even Yakuza 5 During cutscenes the visuals are stellar, which only reinforces how disappointing the rest of the game can look.
The cutscenes look great, though they only run at 30fps, despite the fact they are not pre rendered. And even still, the beautiful cutscenes are not prone to problems. Sometimes there is stutter, frame drops or camera jittering, which really takes away from how polished they feel. Considering how the rest of the game runs at at a constant 120fps on the highest settings 1920x1080, I don't think the issues present during the cutscenes are an issue with my hardware. The 30fps cap is not limited to the cutscenes as it is also present in activities such as Karaoke, Buyo Dance and Cho-Han.
While visuals are a minor gripe, a much more prolific issue is the technical issues at play. There have been accounts of instability as there is a lack of shader compiling though I haven't experienced this all too much. (whether that be to hardware or having the game on an SSD) An issue I have experienced is very rarely, there are battles that have no music, which just feels really weird and uncomfortable.
Combat is refreshing, although a bit underwhelming at times. Gunman is a broken style that turns the game into Devil May Cry 2, even on legendary. Wild dancer is a fun style to use, though not as versatile as Swordsman which is clearly the main style that should be focused on. Brawler is really disappointing and underpowered (even with the loincloth that gives a 90% increase to brawler attacks). To coincide with brawler being a letdown, heat actions feel incredibly weak, weaker than they were in Yakuza 3. Not even from an aspect of damage, but visually, they look very underwhelming and do not pack any sort of punch, which even Yakuza 5 and 0 did, not to mention Kiwami 2 or Judgment. This was probably done to provide more emphasis on the new Trooper Card system.
The new Troopers that can be used in combat are a cool addition, if not a bit strange as even on Legendary, it makes boss fights seem pretty trivial (how this fairs on Ishin, I do not know.) It is cool to see some characters such as Ichiban, Nishitani and Makoto as well as the appearance of some guest characters and even animals from the series such as Nugget, Mame and Yama-Oroshi, though these cards can be disabled if one wishes to do so. It is unclear if RGG will keep this new feature in upcoming games or if it was just a one off thing specially made for Ishin Kiwami.
The substories are some of the weakest, or even, the worst, the series has seen, as a significant number of them end up being speaking to a person, giving them an item or doing something for them and then unlocking a "friendship" with them, akin to that seen in Judgment, however, unlike Judgment or Kiwami 2, these provide no benefits and only act as underwhelming filler, though not all substories are bad as in some of them we get to see some characters from other games such as Bacchus, Miss Tatsu and Shinji, but that still doesn't detract from how uninspired a portion of them tend to be.
Even with all these downsides, Ishin Kiwami is splendid and rather enjoyable, given you've played the other games in the series. The recasting done for Ishin Kiwami is great as well as the return of characters from the original Ishin as we get to see fan favourites such as Mine, Nishiki, Kuze and Ryuji (sans the best part of the shower scene) come back. The story is solid and a well done historical fiction from 1860s Japan with Yakuza characters portraying historical figures.
Finally seeing Ishin localised is great with a clear amount of high effort, however significant downsides that do detract from this being one of the better games in the franchise, and if this is a precedent of how Gaiden or Like a Dragon 8 will turn out to be, then I'd be rather worried. RGG's transition to the Unreal Engine has clearly not been smooth, and an important thing to note is that this is the first game without Toshihiro Nagoshi at the helm of the project. Hopefully this is only a small setback for the RGG team and future games will hopefully be stronger and more impressive than the preceding titles. Depending on the success of this game, RGG may hopefully decide to remake or port previous entires that are either region or console locked such as Kurohyou, Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise or even the infamous Dead Souls (I wouldn't get hopes up for Kenzan considering the nature of the content within.)
One day I plan to play the original Ishin to see how Kiwami stands up to it, even if it does have a language barrier to cross.

though i swear to god one of the videos for one of the karaoke songs is a jav video

baby football

tl;dr i mean at least it's cheaper than buying it on ps vita?

It pains me to give this game a negative review, but it has to be done nonetheless

I have a bit of history with this game, which only makes this port even more disappointing.
I originally played this on an emulator on an old laptop at school before picking it up again on PSVita and finishing it after 120 hours, so a port to modern systems as well as PC was a pleasant announcement I was eagerly awaiting. Unlike both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal, I picked this up day one on PC despite already playing it, which only makes it more upsetting to see the end result.
I already know that this isn't FES, so the lack of The Answer isn't a letdown or anything. While yes, FES would have been preferred over a port of Portable, I understand why ATLUS chose to port this instead. FES (as well as the original Persona 3) was made on renderware, which is an absolute mess of an engine, thus making porting the game a ridiculously huge task that is basically remaking the entire game from almost scratch.
This port to modern systems and PC includes the feature to quick save, which allows the player to suspend the game at any point (given they have access to the menu) and can resume the game when they next launch, rather than having to wait until they reach an area that allows them to save (such as the Dorm, Classroom or Floor 1 of Tartarus). This addition is quite neat however that is the only thing this port does well...
First major complaint is the artwork. The original PSP version looks great, and even slightly buffed up on the PSVita it still looks nice, however, boosting a 272p resolution game onto systems that output at 720p, 1080p and even 4k would look very poor, so instead ATLUS decided to AI upscale all the artwork in the game (characters, textures, backgrounds). While in theory this would be good, in reality it turns out to be an awful looking mess with everything just looking "off." At the very least ATLUS could have updated the background visuals to be on par with their PS2 counterparts but instead they took the lazy way out.
The next complaint is the sound effects during battles. During school events, free time and Tartarus exploration the sounds are fine. All voices, menus and music is perfect with no issues, however during combat and only combat, almost all the sounds are bit crushed. The music is still intact, but menus, voicelines, enemies, attacks and about everything else has such a low quality I can only hope that this was a mistake and they accidentally released a development build of the game. The original game on PSP has no issues in this department so why the 2023 port of a game that is made for a system over 15 years old has issues is befuddling.
The last main issue is the transitions being stuck at 30fps. This is especially jarring when playing the game at 120fps, seeing the game constantly go from being super smooth to 30fps is jarring and is just an annoying issue that really shouldn't be there. At least the original game was locked at 30fps so there wasn't a sudden change in the framerate, but here it's just ridiculous.
Hopefully ATLUS realise that these issues ruin this would be amazing game and release at least some sort of fix to this. At least include some sort of option to allow the original unscaled graphics, even if they would look worse, or even better, scale them properly (though the amount of effort required to do that is quite monumental).

but hey, the $30au pricetag is better than the $45au price on the psvita

it'd be great if i didn't have to read the words "among us" every 5 seconds.

jimmy fallon is forklift certified

After the loss of many lives, the Confederates successfully drove off the UNSC Spartans from Raid from Black Ops 2.