Some thoughts about... Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (Patreon)

Some thoughts about... Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

LaDGTMWEHN!

Yakuza 6.5?

Or just how about... That New Yakuza Game

It's back to the brawly Yakuza type games! LaD1 had its RPG fun and I absolutely hated the Judgment games, so it's good to be back in Kiryu's shoes! ...Because I've totally forgotten all the bad and frustrating parts of the brawler games and Gaiden is very happy to reintroduce me to them.

The game's beginning has a good sense of mystery for who the new characters are, but before the end of the first chapter, you'll find out where in the franchise story this game is taking place and you'll immediately know where it's all heading and everything kind of falls apart. Just about everything could have been avoided if Kiryu and Bad Guy 1 just stopped trying to out-aggressive each other. There's a scene where they sit down and talk to each other and you as a Like A Dragon player know what both sides want, but they're both acting like jerks so everything falls apart. Kiryu's being aggressive and not listening to the bad guy and the bad guy is being super aggressive and not explaining his plan. And that's a large chunk of this game's story. Characters being cryptic, not listening to each other, or testing each other for kind of no reason outside of generating fake drama for end of chapter cliffhangers.

The ending of 6 was pointless. Everybody immediately knows who Kiryu is and that the story of his death was bunk. And I mean just about everybody. Kiryu doesn't use a disguise, change his hair, anything. He's hilariously bad at playing dead. The only person that doesn't know Kiryu is still alive? Daigo. Because Daigo remains the absolute dumbest and most useless mob boss ever. With Kiryu gone, how has somebody not just walked up to Daigo's HQ, laid out a trail of candy leading to a box, and trapped Daigo in said box?!

Our new tale start off in Yokohama, parallel to Ichiban's story in Like a Dragon. They straight up put Kiryu next to Nanba and Ichiban's tent with them inside but prevent you from interacting. They have a cheesy reason why the owner of the Survive bar isn't around that day so Kiryu can't recognize him. But none of it feels natural or adds anything to Kiryu or Ichiban's stories. Outside of getting Kiryu to LaD's big reveal moment, which was covered sufficiently in LaD, nothing here expands on LaD's story, provides new revelations, or reframes what you've already seen. You now know where Watase got his suit he was wearing during the big speech. Exciting?

Gaiden also has probably the least interesting "main" villain the series has ever had. He has no personality other than "he's evil", he barely has any connection to Kiryu and what connection he does have is a pointless reference, and he's barely involved with any of the game until a flourish of action at the end and even then he's mostly sitting back and sending minions after you. This series is usually so good about making its antagonists interesting. You have people with deep connections to Kiryu in Yakuza 1, people that are dark mirrors of Kiryu in Yakuza 2, or just world class jerks that you love to hate in Yakuza 0. Then there's this guy and... I kind of forgot he existed for half the game. The second "main" bad guy at least has some personality and an attempt at a motivation, but I likewise felt very little about having to face off against him or his reveals.

But I will hand it to the game, "Continue the Debauchery" is probably one of the greatest missions prompts I've ever been given. The series is always at its funniest when it takes these yakuza bad asses and makes them the most lovable losers, like weeping over being given a halfway decent meal.

Complaints about the story, yes, but The Ending! We'll talk about that later in a non-spoilery way, but man... The Ending...

Despite being a shorter game, Gaiden really delays the exploration. Every time you think you'll be able to explore, they lock the streets down and take you to a new place automatically. You think you're ready to start engaging with the main secondary gameplay loops, well too bad! Go back to the main location because we said so.

There are lots more enemies in combat this time around. It's pretty danged impressive they got so many active characters on screen for a PS4 game without any performance issues. I had resigned myself to expecting that this was really just a PS5 game that would chug along on my base level PS4, but this thing runs great. But gameplay-wise, the extra enemies ares bad. The prior gameplay was already bad about trying to get Kiryu to focus on a single enemy and now there are more of them. Good luck trying to pick up weapons on the ground or focus on a particular high threat target because Kiryu will zip around the field to grapple with an enemy you can't grapple instead of picking up something at his feet or fly past everybody to attack nothing rather than the enemy in front of him or you'll burn a Heat move on a mook enemy instead of the guy aiming a gun at you.

The camera is in really close so you wind up getting hit from behind a lot, and you'll have to spend a lot of time in fights fiddling with the camera trying to keep everybody on screen.

There are really twitchy physics in fights now. It doesn't really affect gameplay, but expect a lot of terrible ragdolling, enemies stuck in objects, trying to pick up a big weapon (like a potted plant) and that sending Kiryu spinning around, or just Kiryu popping up into the air a bit because he touched something on the ground.

Kiryu can't block for nuthin' any more. Every other enemy attack breaks his block and enemy attacks seem to magnetize to you, so even if you dodge them, they still hit. This led to me ignoring a lot of features with new moves and equipment to focus on the few things I knew usually worked. In Yakuza fighting style, just use the charged light punch; it gives you a bit of super armor and breaks enemy blocks. In Agent style, just use the grappling wire and punch people on the ground or use the running punch. Use Heat moves on bosses. That solves the vast, vast majority of fights in this game.

Gadgets in Agent style should have been the big change to combat but they're kind of useless for the majority of the game. With how long it takes to activate the gadgets, their limited use versus just punching a dude makes them a waste of time. Sometimes they just don't activate. Am I not holding the button down long enough or are they not working?  They only seem to work if you're standing totally still. You know standing still, the thing you're usually doing in a fight, right? You can't string them together or do fun combos with them because of that. In cutscenes, Kiryu does all kinds of fun things with the grappling wire, but in combat it can only toss grunt enemies or grab items (when the game feels like it and probably not the item you intended to grab; sure I was aiming at that sword on the ground but grab that traffic cone instead, thanks).

Your inventory changed again too. You can't carry weapons around anymore. It's purely down to whatever is on the ground or an enemy drops. Instead of having a total item count limit, you're limited on how many of each specific item you can hold. No more stocking up on an inventory full of the best energy drink, but now you can have dozens of lesser energy drinks and food. It doesn't seem to matter in the end from a balance perspective because there are so many different kinds of food items that you can still just gluttony your way to victory, so it's a weird change. 

I steadfastly refuse to accept the idea that Kiryu would drink Mountain Dew. Product placement has gone too far!

The Cabaret is back, but it's not the fun one from Yakuza 0 where you're running the business as the manager, it's the lame one where you go on fake dates as a customer. Only now they're live action scenes with bad audio so it's extra creepy. The only draw to the mode seems to be that they hired a famous Vtuber as one of the models, but other than her mentioning she does streaming on the side and her slipping into the voice a few times, I'd have never known that was Coco as the actress. But I don't follow any Vtubers so I'm guessing I'm not the target demographic here?

And again, I steadfastly refuse to accept the idea that Kiryu understands what streaming is. Product placement has gone too far!

Being a small game, Gaiden pads out its run time by forcing you to do side stuff to progress in the story. The Coliseum is mandatory and you have to do side stories to raise your Akame Network rank in the main city. It just features pointless padding to artificially extend the length of the game. The grind is on the slow side and not particularly fun because the things you have to do to raise your rank are mostly fetch quests with lousy rewards. Money and Network points are real slow to gain and upgrades are expensive so you stay weak for a long time. Getting enough Network points to buy enough stat and gadget upgrades takes longer than the game's actual storyline. If the whole point of this is to be a small side story to link 6 and 7, why force the grind by padding your numbers out? You'll be stuck doing the same Coliseum battle over and over just to make money if you want to see all the fighters you can hire, try the different costumes, upgrade all your gadgets, or upgrade all your stats.

Some example numbers. The highest paying short and repeatable Coliseum fight pays out 3 million yen. The highest tier of health upgrades totals 30 million yen. The highest tier of attack upgrades totals another 30 million yen. It costs 30-40 million to hire all the fighters you don't get from substories. The best piece of equipment costs around 50 million yen. You're required to spend a million yen each just to complete some of the basic quests. And that's ignoring all the other dozens of upgrades you can buy, dozens of other pieces of gear or cosmetics, and dozens of lower tier fighters. So yeah, not a great grind. For the activity log, the numbers are super padded out. Take 100 photos, but you only need to actually do maybe 10 for the story and quests, so you have to waste another 90 pictures. Win 30 Tournament class fights in the Coliseum, but there are only 12 different fights so you're going to repeat them multiple times.

Substories are super verbose and not really funny. There are a few fun ones, but they mainly just go on for too long for too little payoff. Kiryu does finally have a bit of genre awareness about his quests now. He's been through this enough times that when a lady invites him up to a hotel room, he now knows it's a scam from the start. Still hasn't learned to chase down a villain slowly hobbling away from the scene, but Kiryu's getting there.

Stroll N Patrol tasks for your basic missions are very fetch quest-y. Usually, you have to run to a point, take a picture, and then run back to the person that gave you a quest. Or, the person wants a specific kind of food so you have to go to shops until you find it and then run back to the person. A person wants to see you wear a specific outfit, so you run to a taxi, load into the second city, run to the Boutique, change your clothes, run back to the helicopter, load to the first city, run back to the mission giver, collect your paltry payout, run back to the taxi, load back to second city, run to the Boutique, change out of the awful oufit and back to your normal one, run back to the helicopter, and load back to the first city (there are multiple quests that require this process and the Boutique in the second city is the only place you can change Kiryu's outfit despite having two bases in the first city). The sort of filler thing that pads out the game but doesn't do anything meaningful. The payouts are usually bad too. You'll do a task for somebody and get paid less for the quest than what you earned from winning one of the four street fights you got into along the way. Or you get paid less than it cost to complete the quest. A person wanted to see a particular outfit, that outfit costs 1 million yen, and your reward for completing the quest... 75K yen.

You can get requests before you're actually able to finish them. Some of them are kind of vague so you don't know if you're not figuring out the request properly or if that thing just isn't available yet or you're locked out of because the story has restricted you to a specific time of day/location.

Karaoke is weirdly hard in this one. I was getting 95s and 99s in Like a Dragon and here I'm struggling to hit 90 for the quests. The controls for Pool are still garbage. Trying to identify pieces in Shogi still requires digging through menus. The casino games still beg the question of why you're playing casino games in a non-casino game game.

Pocket Circuit's back though. The core gameplay is the same but the shop is a pain now. Instead of buying parts with money, everything costs a unique currency you can only get by winning races. So if you buy the wrong parts and need to respec your car, you might not be able to even afford the parts you need to win the next race to get points. You can't sort the shop and all the parts are jumbled together, so it's frustrating to try to compare similar parts because they're spread out in the store. You can't check what you own in the parts store or buy parts from the car customization screen, so you need to walk back and forth between the race lady and the parts guy to check things out. It was so much easier when parts just cost money because you came back at the end of the game, bought everything in one purchase, and then the customization menu is grouped by part type. You knew you owned everything and like parts were grouped so they were easy to compare. Is your car falling off the track because your build is bad or just because RNG is screwing with you, well now it's hard to experiment so it's going to be that much worse.

LaDGTMWEHN isn't a bad game, it's just feels... unnecessary? Unfulfilling? If you're just a fan of the RPG style of LaD and you're thinking of trying this one because it ties into Ichiban's story, I'd probably say to ignore it. This is for people that played Yakuza 0-6 and just want one more brawler out of Kiryu. It's not Yakuza 5 levels of bad, but I'd place it around the "worse than Yakuza 2/around the level of Yakuza 3" level on my grand scale of things. Middling main story, middling substories, and worse combat, plus slow progression from padded upgrade/inventory costs. If you wait for a deep sale and go into it expecting nothing more than nostalgia/fan service for the franchise, you're in the right headspace for it. If you go in expecting more, you're going to be disappointed.

But the ending! The writing, the animation. Just absolutely knocked it out of the park. Between this ending and LaD's, they are nailing these dramatic endings full of the best animated ugly crying you have seen. To put Kiryu in a situation that is both so kind and so emotionally devastating and to see that man just break down. You are a monster if you don't tear up at the end.

Some bonus thoughts on... Infinite Wealth demo

The story hook is okay but not particularly exciting. Ichi is looking for his mom, who we were already told was dead in the first game, but now she's not. Kind of retroactively makes her story from the first game less interesting. And seeing that Kiryu is stuck just doing another mission hurts the ending of Gaiden.

The voice acting is really bad! Ichi is awesome again, but holy cow, who approved that new voice for Kiryu!? It's terrible! I know it's some Youtuber I'd never heard of before, but c'mon. The villain in the demo is really bad too. You hear Ichi speak and it's "ah yes, that's a voice actor" and then Kiryu or the bad guy speak and the gap in quality is through the roof. LaD1 had an absolutely stellar cast, what happened? Here's to hoping I can assemble the old crew and ignore the new ones? Or maybe a mixed audio where I can make the old cast use English voices and the new cast use Japanese? This is seriously dampening my desire to play the game. Who wants to play an RPG that's dozens of hours long if you don't want to listen to the characters speak?

They seemed to have made the combat system more complicated but not necessarily better. Lots more buttons to press. So many features seem dependent on character positioning and what you're near but within a few seconds, everybody has moved around so it seems like a bonus thing that's neat when it happens but would be too much of a hassle to plan around.

I already found scavenging items on the map tedious by the end of the demo. Briefcases, stuff under cars, stuff in dumpsters, shaking trees, items on the ground. The city looks huge too. A big thing I loved about the Yakuza games was how compact the city was. They took an open world map and squished it down to a few city blocks so everything was super dense and exciting. But this just seems like a regular open world map now.

The new Crazy Delivery mini game isn't fun. The trick system is annoying. I thought it would be more Crazy Taxi but it's mainly picking up items and doing tricks with a lot of starting and stopping.

All in all, nothing really sold me on needing to play the game. I 100%'d LaD1 and played through the story mode twice, but this demo left me feeling pretty uninterested. I'm sure I'll play it eventually, but it kind of seems like a wait a year for a deep sale deal rather than a must play.