Hoo-boy, what a letdown this game was. The biggest selling point about Y6 was that it was to be the swan song of Kiryu. Well, was it? Obviously not as he's in at least 3 games after this one, two of which include him as a protagonist. When your whole selling point is moot, what exactly is left? Setting the meaningfulness of the ending aside, when you think "finale" you expect an epic conclusion, right? Things come together, mysteries unravel, huge climax at the end and so forth. One problem is that Yakuza games barely have any tying thread between them, most plot points, characters, etc. become irrelevant once you reach the next title. Characters seemed important are left in the dust and never seen again. So again, what can you expect from this? What you have left is a wholly separate and standalone story with a completely new cast of people, and an antagonist you won't even remember once the game is over. The antagonist is just that unremarkable. Heck, you'll be lucky to care about the friendly characters. I don't necessarily approve of all retcons and characters in Y0, but at least it's memorable. I played 0 at launch PS4, 6 after it was on game pass and I couldn't name a single character from 6, where I can still remember most from 0. Beyond the story, you would also expect this to be an improvement gameplaywise from 0 and Kiwami 1, the titles preceding this one. Well, no. The new Dragon Engine offers graphical fidelity and ragdolls, but little else. Kiryu controls like a slug until you improve his abilities by a lot and you're once again left with a single style instead of multiple styles. It's just a mediocre game all-in-all. All I can really say for positives are that, setting aside the monotonous gang mini-game, the new mini-games were actually mini instead of putting you through hours of repetition. And some of the cutscenes involving Takeshi Kitano were funny. Too bad the game didn't end like a Kitano movie.
I don't know what to say besides that it's a fantastic indie immersive sim, so I'll just talk about the main mechanic and gameplay which is what I'd consider its selling point. The main game mechanic of the game is being able to transfer your ego onto objects and other robots, leaving your "physical body" (=Bug 22, the main robot you control and upgrade throughout the game) behind. This way, you can bounce around numerous rooms just controlling select objects and progressing the game through a whole different perspective. Taking over hostile robots in this way does require you to spend EGO, the main "currency" of the game, which you obtain through scavenging containers, taking over friendly objects, or smashing bots to bits. The skills that you can obtain throughout the game vary from flying to, vacuum cleaner, grenade, shotgun, invisibility, generating objects to making hostile enemies and objects unstable, causing explosion on contact. True to immersive sims, there are multiple solutions to progressing throughout the game and death in general isn't really punishing so it's difficult to really get stuck. (If all else fails, upgrade vacuum cleaner skill). Anyway, it's a really fun game that I recommend fans of immersive sims to try out!
Crystal Project is a one man project that eclipses the products of, well, pretty much all of the big players in the genre today. It is light on story, focusing more on the adventure and exploration of the world (think SNES era JRPGs) with a class system that allows you to make ridiculously potent combos for your party members to defeat your enemies with so if you LOVE job/class systems in JRPGs, this is most definitely for you. I'd say that the exploration is THE feature of it. You can sequence break the game heavily if you explore a lot, obtaining things that you normally wouldn't quite early on; mounts, weapons, armour, classes. You can avoid the enemies on the world map, although some areas are more painful than others in that regard. The world has many secrets that you would only stumble upon by exploring heavily. There's plenty of platforming to be had, some say it's hard but I'd say it's pretty manageable if you take your time. It also got built in randomiser and such bonus features that help make the game more replayable after completing it, and one of the initial annoyances of no health restoration at save points was also added as an option to toggle on! To throw in a con of mine, the breeding of the ultimate mount is a painful, PAINFUL process (the quintar races are ridiculously hard) but not really required unless you aim for (easier) 100% completion. Also, there's one particular area that just sucked - but you can actually just come back later overpowered to complete it - Undercity. You'll likely know why when you reach that area. Ugh. But neither of these two things is enough to detract from how fantastic this game is.
