I would like to play a full-length Yakuza business simulator, please
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Look, while we’re throwing out the playbook and applying whatever genres we’d like to Sega’s dedicatedly weird Yakuza series—which just had its seventh main-game installment released, re-casting the long-running franchise of brawlers as a turn-based RPG that references Dragon Quest by name—can we please take things a little further? After all, Like A Dragon—and yes, we just got that that title refers at least in part to the game’s DQ DNA—isn’t just an RPG. It’s also a rhythm game, a kart racer (yes, really), and (this is the important part to us) a pretty shockingly fun business simulator. See, your main character, Ichiban Kasuga, gets roped early on into running a struggling cracker company as part of his ongoing emotional entanglements with a dead brothel operator. (Don’t ask.) Suddenly, instead of pummeling the shit out of homeless people and lube-covered men (don’t ask), you’re balancing investments, hiring folks to stock your stores, and (because this is Yakuza) engaging in shareholder meetings that play out like fast-paced, over-the-top boss battles that sometimes involve a chicken. (Feel free to ask about that part.)
And it’s all great! The simulation elements aren’t terribly robust—hire good people, put them in the right positions, upgrade your properties when they make financial sense—but the feeling of navigating your way up the Yokohama business community is pronounced, and the various weirdos you can recruit off the street add a ton of character to the simulation elements. (One of my company’s many senior directors was the aforementioned chicken, whose promotional instincts could always be trusted.) There’s even a reasonably compelling storyline that runs through the whole thing, as Kasuga faces off with all the usual rivals trying to keep Ichiban Holdings from achieving maximum market share in a spirit of community and togetherness. (Also, money: Although you can’t directly dip into the corporate piggy banks, your regular bonuses basically solve any economic problems you might have outside the boardroom for the rest of the game.)
It’s not like the other aspects of Yakuza: Like A Dragon are bad. (Well, okay, some parts of them are bad—having an enemy type named “Hungry Hungry Homeless” is awful enough, but giving one of your characters homelessness as a class, complete with stinky breath that reduces enemy defense, is really going too far.) The kart racer is pretty robust, and while the RPG combat won’t win any awards in a genre that’s mostly evolved past its “take turns slugging it out” concept, the bright, weird colors take a lot of the edge off. But I’d love to see Sega tackle this business simulator stuff with full enthusiasm, bending the entire game around it the way everything in Like A Dragon feeds into the RPG elements. I want my equipment to contribute to my deal-making skills, I want to face off against dead-eyed crime boss landlords across the business table, I want to still get to race go-karts some times. (But with a corporate sponsorship, natch!) Like A Dragon proves that Yakuza as a tone can persist perfectly well without needing to have series stalwart Kiryu out there beating seven kinds of shit out of people in Kamurocho for the millionth time. Let’s bring that same energy into the boardroom. We’re calling it now: Yakuza: Like A Succession Character, on consoles next year.
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I finished up Jenny Le Clue, Detectivu! It’s really good overall, there’s a lot of variety with the puzzles and while nothing’s too in-depth, it has a satisfying level of challenge and there’s some deduction involved, as well as some good metafiction. Ends on a cliffhanger, though, so hopefully another installment is forthcoming. Dipped into Yakuza 0 to mess around with some of the minigames, I unlocked the “hostess management” sim and it’s pretty crazy- not as crazy as what I’ve seen of 7’s business sim, though. Not sure when I’ll get to the new one but I’m glad Sega’s keeping up its tradition of insanely detailed minigames. Also I think I may be starting to understand mahjong. I have no idea how people play it without computer assistance, but there’s something compelling about it.
Ends on a cliffhanger, though, Ok. Thanks for the warning.Not doing these anymore. Not after Undying, XIII, Manhunter:SF, etc. No patience for “we’ll resolve our story in the next imminent game, we swear”.
I mean the mystery that the game is about gets solved, it’s just that there’s a bigger mystery going on.
After finishing everything but the grind in One Deck Dungeon last week, I poked around for a while in the King Knight campaign of Shovel Knight, clearing out everything on the first map screen and dipping my toes into the levels on the second screen, but wasn’t feeling the absolute obsession I did for the previous three campaigns. Maybe the controls don’t jive as well with me. Maybe Joustus isn’t doing it for me. Maybe it’ll grow on me later, and this just wasn’t the mood I was looking for this week.The other genre I’d had in mind was farming/crafting, and after staring at my three choices indecisively, I loaded up My Time at Portia, dumping whatever save file I made over a year ago to start fresh and learn the flow of the game from scratch.This is 100% the pace of game I was looking for. It starts out very focused on a very limited number of quests, but the main story quests slowly push you to create more crafting stations with your crafting station that crafts crafting stations, and before long you’ve got this gigantic multi-step engine where some items have to go through four levels’ worth of processing before they get placed in your assembly station for… more fuckin’ crafting stations.I’m just trying to make sure all of my stations are running at all times so I’ve got a good stock of mid- and higher-level materials ready to go for more complicated requests from townspeople, or so I can sell things for a good chunk of money to buy upgrades. I’m still tempted to call my workshop a farm, and I just realized why that is. This feels like a Harvest Moon game played as one of the other townspeople. HM games always have the love interest who’s a tinkerer, and that is me. There is a farmer, one of several dozen characters who may need me to build tools to help them upgrade their own business, and you could easily imagine that they have 2 1/2 years to make their farm profitable before the ghost of their grandfather comes back from the dead to judge them harshly.Even putting a good amount of work in for the lion’s share of a week, I’m still unlocking new areas and features pretty regularly. I’m one floor away from clearing a major dungeon, which I’m assuming will unlock new things for me. I’ve got a bus line set up for fast travel, I’ve got a lift for easier access to one of the more remote corners of the map’s high ground, and the map still stretches further back. Either they’ve done a good job of making the invisible walls surrounding the game area feel like natural barriers, or this game is gonna get huge. It already feels plenty big, but it keeps expanding, and it still doesn’t feel like too much.This is such a good 2020 game.Meanwhile, I’m trying to organize my Shivers speed running community to do a race for a marathon another of my Twitch communities is putting on in a few weeks. It’s an obscure game, but we’ve got enough talent, and the people who run it go with different enough strategies, that I think it’d be interesting to put on a 4-player race, where I’d just be able to run commentary and explain the game mechanics and who’s (probably) ahead. It’s a game that takes a lot of focus, and it’s not always easy to explain what you’re doing while also trying to figure out what route you’re going to take through the back half of the game to get all the items where they need to go, so an undistracted commentator would probably make the game much more accessible to watch. And I’ve never tried my hand at commentary. I think it’ll be fun.The end of the day at work today marks the beginning of a week-long vacation. I’m sitting on 105 hours of vacation time, so I’m way overdue. I’ve got no shortage of video games and board games to fill the week with, even as local COVID numbers are spoiling my plans to travel slightly outside of my area to spend a couple days in a sleepy beach town. Ultimately, even if video games take over what was going to be a more active vacation, I just need the mental break from being responsible for other people’s lives.Looking forward to 9 days of crafting tools, solving puzzles, platforming, and saving princesses, with maybe a bit of Dance Dance Revolution and a call or two to Mom mixed in. And sleep. Oh god, the sleep.
I grabbed Persona 5 Royal on sale last week. I’m only about ten hours in but I’m loving it so far. It’s written much better than the previous games and the menu design is insanely good. The story is barely off the ground at this point, but I’m excited to see how this thing turns out.
It’s probably my favorite game of all time. You’re in for a treat.I will offer one tip I give to all new players. What makes Royal really special is that it extends the campaign past its original December endpoint into mid-February. However, to unlock the “third semester” (as it’s called), you are required to do something the game never makes clear to you. To get that extra chunk, make sure to get the Councillor social link to rank 9 before 11/17. Otherwise, it’ll end in December (where the original, non-Royal game ended) and you’ll miss out on an extra two months of gameplay.
Good to know. I haven’t even met him yet but I’ll be sure focus on that down the line. I feel like there are a ton of characters I haven’t even met yet
As to what I’ve been playing this week, the answer is inevitable: still Star Wars: The Old Republic. My Jedi Knight is still on the prison planet of Belsavis trying to stop the Sith Emperor from blowing it up to fuel some kind of immortality ritual. Last time out I had discovered an Imperial commander Rayfel who was using imprisoned scientists as energy batteries. Rayfel got diplomatically decapitated by lightsaber..
Now I had to rescue a human doctor named Gantrell from Esh-Ka and a weird Sith creature called a terantatek. This done, I sealed Gantrell inside a maximum security chamber for his own safety. Now I have to delve into a prison section known as The Tomb, which doesn’t sound ominous at all… On tabletop, this past Monday, I played my first ever game of Call of Cthulhu, it was supposed to be a one shot, and was streamed by our Keeper at . It was set on a cruise ship, and almost nothing spooky happened, the ship did get hit by a tentacle creature of some kind, but there was no visible damage and almost none of the Investigators noticed. The scenario was originally going to be set in the present day, but a last minute decision moved it to the 1920s, so my tourist/social media mogul character became a radio mogul, and an absolute raging dickbag. I’ve been playing him as an asshole because you want at least one unsympathetic victim in a good horror story.
Tuesday, we resumed our Dungeons & Dragons Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, in a session that was mostly downtime and research. We did begin to try and track down a hag who has stolen the Prism of Selune. We’d made our way from Bryn Shander to Easthaven when we encountered a group of bandits. They wouldn’t allow us to de-escalate the situation and we tore through them in a single round of combat, although the one our wizard killed with chill touch rose as some kind of zombie, which I promptly rekilled via Barbarian warhammer to the top of the skull.
Once we collected a small reward in Easthaven, we went out to follow the hag’s trail and made camp. On my Barbarian’s watch at the end of the session, he’s been lured out of the tent by a large group of Harpys and the rest of the party don’t yet know he’s no longer watching and is about to encounter some nastiness at least 3 movement turns away from them….
I’m in Chapter 10 of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and so far it’s delightful, a few massive difficulty spikes aside. The substories seem even more substantial than in series entries past, and the plot is a little more grounded as compared to, say, Yakuza 4 or 5. What isn’t grounded, though, is the kind of gear and weaponry you can use. Here’s a screenshot:
I’m also playing playing Halo 4, which just got released on PC. It’s a strange beast. The gunplay is a little different from previous Halos: the human weaponry feels like classic Halo, but the Covenant weapons now have more heft, as if they’re shooting bullets instead of beams of energy. I don’t really like this change. The other change I don’t like is that grenades are a lot less powerful, so there’s less incentive to use them. The new Promethean weaponry is great, though; it’s very Tron, just like the aesthetic of the game’s indoor environments.
I finally started Breath of the Wild this week, and oh my god it really does deliver on all the hype. Following a friend’s advice, I turned off the HUD and am just wandering around checking out as much as I can. The cooking and the photo hunting could be games all on their own, but the combat is SURPRISINGLY tight (like a really really pared down and low stakes Dark Souls), the weapons breaking doesn’t bug me nearly as much as I thought it would, and everything is such a joy to just . . . move around in. I’m probably 10 hours in (so, barely scratching the surface) and it’s already probably the best game of all time. What a stunning fucking achievement for the Nintendo devs.Anyway, I’m hoping my friends and I FINALLY wrap up our long-running Divinity 2 game, and I cannot fucking wait. The story in that game is nonsense, and the combat’s rock-paper-scissors approach w/r/t elements and physical vs magic damage is extremely well done, but I think it says something that you basically have to cheese terrain and the item system to do well at higher difficulties. Also, the combo co-op (my 2 friends online, gf and I on the couch) is INCREDIBLY frail, prone to booting the online people at odd times, and ALWAYS when The Kraken comes onscreen. This necessitates some workarounds, but they’re awkward and necessarily sap the game of dramatic tension. It seems like the only people excited about Larian taking Baldur’s Gate are people who played singleplayer, because the co-op is a fucking mess on console (though it’s worth noting that Larian has long implicitly declared themselves above us console peasants). Once we wrap that up, hopefully we’ll pop tabs and play Killer Queen for a little while
Still enjoying Battletech a lot. I may have over-grinded the beginning a bit, and may be over-powered at this point of the campaign, but overall I find it offers a magnificent balance between tension and relaxation. It’s also quite exhilarating because big machines metal boom. It’s a genuine good surprise.I’ve also been toying with the lovely Empire of the Undergrowth, a nice ant-scale dungeon master rts which takes its science seriously enough to be a nice informal sequel to Sim Ants and a cool companion to Bernard Werber’s almost-only-good-novel-ever, The Ants. A tad more stressful than Battletech, as ant life really looks dangerous and fragile so far.Also, installed and tried out the Lego Digital Designer, with hilarious results. Too cumbersome to become a hobby, still, managed to make myself laugh stupidly with my first attempt at a lego dracula, and, yeah, not asking for much more.