started playing Yakuza Zero

yet another game proving that GIGANTIC TEXT makes literally anything cooler

I didn't get a screenshot but like the second fight in the entire game is some random drunks and you just get this screen-filling text overlay that says 𝐃𝐑𝐔𝐍𝐊𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐒 while Hidenori Shoji screaming guitar riffs kick in

it occurs to me that there are like a dozen Yakuza games and only like one and a half F-Zero GX games and thus Hidenori Shoji might actually be more widely known as the Yakuza composer than as the F-Zero GX composer

yakuza translates a japanese guy trying to speak english by essentially faking unicode fullwidth chars

absolute triumph of localization

this game has a lot of rhythm minigames and I have bluetooth headphones

question for yakuza fans what the fuck am I supposed to do about this bullshit

lmaoooo this was it

item description reads like flavor text, or like it maybe increases the number of enemy encounters, but apparently what it ACTUALLY does is turn SOME FRACTION of the encounters into hyper-aggressive stunlock gods

oh no

absolutely identical energy

I appreciate this game's complete lack of chill

(notably no one ever dies from these attacks lol; it always shows them kneeling down looking winded afterwards like it's a jackie chan movie or something)

yes this is what 24-year-old men look like

really fascinated by this game being a Period Piece set in Japanese cities in the 80s

aside from technology and *occasional* fashion/hairstyle cues, none of it feels familiar because I wasn't around for the 80s and I didn't grow up with japanese 80s pop-culture stuff

like if I watch western movies made in the 80s, or modern media that's intended as period pieces or pastiche, there's like a whole raft of cultural connotations and context that I just Get, without having to think about it

I'm missing pretty much all of that here

it's really fascinating because it's not like it feels particularly alien or "foreign" or whatever, it's just that... I'm acutely aware that there's a whole Mood that's SUPPOSED to be conjured by the setting, which I cannot access

it is extremely funny how this game's setting is constantly dealing with like strip clubs and sleazy organized crime stuff but Kiryu just... has never seen a girl before and does not know what they are

like half the dialog is villains monologuing incredibly slowly while refusing to ever get to the point, in order to self-confidently flex on the protagonists' perceived powerlessness

this works in gangster movies bc you do it in like two scenes but videogames are 40 hours long

do you think game developers will ever find out about pacing

do you think it's physically possible for an american to learn to roll their Rs like the stereotypical Japanese Tough Guy Voice

how do you even do this lmao it's magnificent

this guy has a jacket with a scorpion on the back that says 𝕾𝖈𝖔𝖗𝖕𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝕭𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍

karaoke minigame soflan hell

at no point do the writers of this game betray even the barest hint of chill

Kiryu gets shot twice and then a few hours later he's back getting into fistfights on the street because they only shot the unnecessary parts of his body

humans evolved the scapula as a "decoy bone"; if it gets hit with a bullet it just sort of explodes and then you're fine, like how lizards can jettison their tails

sega please stop making me fight kuze

it was a terrible boss fight the first time and doing it four times is not improving the situation

this plot is so complicated and involves so many characters that a really significant proportion of the dialogue is characters trying to explain the plot to each other

sure let's fight kuze a fifth time why not

I appreciate this game's utter commitment to the idea that the way you open doors is by kicking dudes through them

this writing makes a bizarrely big deal out of the importance of never killing anyone, given that the protagonists are all devoted members of an organized crime ring that deals primarily in extortion and human trafficking