Recent reviews by Takumi

I love playing POV: You're not Gordon Freeman.

One of the very, VERY FEW games where the actual story justifies the suffering you have to endure in order to finish it.

This is THE ultimate "Man I HATE this game"- *proceeds to play for another 5 extra hours*

Sure, you could go and watch a video explaining the whole story, but you would be skipping a big chunk of the meaning behind the story of this game: You're supposed to suffer, retry countless times, learn from your mistakes and still see your agents die over and over, lose tons of progress because you got stuck with no way of moving forward because you're the only person left alive.

But that's okay, just start over, be more aggressive, but also smart, in order to face the fear and be able to build the future to reach the ending.

In the end, it will be worth it, Manager.

Crashed 3 times when loading the first map. It was giving me almost 9 gigs of memory usage, and it ate 14 gigs of disk space by simply crating a map, what the hell? And people said CS2 was poorly optimized...

Warning: Slight spoilers to the story and demons/superbosses.

After spending two months playing from SMT 1 to SMT 4A, I gotta say SMT V:V is the best SMT experience after all those games, and its a very close competitor to 3 and 4, so im extremely glad i got the chance to play it on PC.
It took me 115 hours to get all the achievements, the rest of the hours are just AFK and paused game.

While I never played the original version I can totally tell this game is an improvement over all the other games, be them SMT or Persona, so lets analyze the best bits:

- The music is god tier, ATLUS never disappoints with the music direction. Each world map has his own theme and most of them are either catchy or relaxing, meanwhile the boss themes are super hype. Some songs such as the one from the 4th area (Ueno/Taito) scream "last area" and its beautiful. A fav of mine is the Empyrean track, its so powerful... I hope someday I get to hear something like that echoing from somewhere higher up...

-The gameplay is perfect. Everything is very direct and doesnt have any silly overcompicated mechanics such as the stupid demon source from Strange Journey. In this case you have demon essences, which is basically fixed skills from specific demons that you can find or sometimes buy, and with those you can give skills to both the MC or your demons. Imagine Skill Cards from Persona games but with ~5-8 skills; Beautiful. And on top of that you can copy a demon's affinities into the MC with the same essence. Do you wanna block all damage aside from Almighty? Get the essence from Demi Fiend and you got that, but do you wanna use that instead of aquiring his powerful Gaea Rage skill instead? First try to beat him if you can, the guy hits hard...

-The amount of demons is huge. You have over 270 demons to choose from, from old classics such as Jack Frost to the most current ones such as the new Satan design from SMT 4A (which I admit, I miss the odd blue mostrocity Satan was back then , but the new design goes super hard), all in beautiful 3D models with their own animations and even unique signature skills for almost each one, and I gotta say, from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ old 3D models from SMT 3 to the 2D sprites from the other SMT games, seeing some demons in 3D walking or floating around is beautiful.

-The open world. Lets get one thing out ouf the way, a lot of people complained about every area feeling "copypasted" just because its just ruins and sand, and to that I say: No ♥♥♥♥. Everything got destroyed and you have demons roaming around, do you expect frigging Mcdonalds to be open? People dont complain about Fallout games and those games are 95% ruins, so what gives? Anyways. the exploration is very fun, you can run directly to the main quest or take a detour and find other quests that give you unique demons that you could not get otherwise, while also picking up lots of trasure chests along the way. Its a lot like 4 except you have 4 huge open maps and 2 story dungeons, one of them changing depending on which story you pick at the star of the game. While I love the open world bit, I kinda hated the dungeons mostly because they're forced onto you, and after completing the game 6 times it gets tiring doing the same puzzles so many times...

-The story. So, I started with Canon of Creation, the original story, and I only noticed the "poor" writing after trying Canon of Vengeance. In the later they give a lot of depth to some characters, while others get a tiny bit of extra exposition but ultimatedly they end up the same. I dont wanna spoil the story, so all I'll say is CoC is a bit more open having up to 4 endings and some things just happen, and CoV is more linear and SMTish, aka its either Law or Chaos, you side with one or the other, and while in CoC you can choose which ending you want at the end, CoV doesnt allow you to do that and it gives you an ending depending on your choices thorough the playthrough. Its like the older games, sure, but it pissed me off when I had to replay the entire game an extra cycle because I got Law twice, when I was pretty sure I got most choices right to get the Chaos ending. Bit of a fumble there.

-The replayability is nice, but it did got a bit tiring after so many playthroughs. For context, some achievements require you to do virtual battles, which are just challenges where you fight 2-3-4 bosses continiously, but they unlock after you beat them in the story, and to unlock all of them you gotta finish the game with each ending, so, to get that achievement you need to see every ending in a SINGLE save slot. The good bit is that while your first cycle might be 40-50 hours long, the other ones will be maybe 10 hours, and later on probably 6 if you rush through the story, but you still gotta do the dungeons... and there is no escape there. Demon King Castle is a piece of-

-The optimization left me dumbfounded, I cant believe this game never went under 60 fps and that was only because I had VSync on, otherwise it would have been more. Sure, the game was for Switch originally, but it DOES look better and more pretty than the version for that portable calculator, so.

-So, finally, the difficulty: I'll say it depends. I played lots of SMT games, and this one was the most forgiving while still giving some challenge in some bosses, which wasnt something that a bit of leveling didnt fix. Sure, I played on normal and it was a chill experience up to the time some boss appeared, but even SMT 4 was punishing during the first dungeon on normal (ILL END IT THUS-) so in this one I actually liked the challenge, not too hard but also not easy. However, a challenge that I didnt enjoy much were the superbosses. The first one being the exception: Shiva . I really enjoyed the fight, it wasnt really difficult, and I enjoyed it more than the final boss... Then you have Demi Fiend . I'll admit, I had to cheese him, BUT, I cheesed him in normal mode, aka he would still ruin my setup or my damage wasnt enough and Id end up dead shortly after. I had to retry 10 times or so until RNG helped me a bit with him not dodging or ruining my setup with Mirage/Seal until I beat him, so, what I didnt spent in fighting him the legit way I spent on setting up a proper team, which was expensive, so theres that. Then... you have Satan . You can say whatever you want but im sure 80% of the people who got to him switched to safety mode to kill him, including me. The reason for this is that if you beat him you get access to Godborn mode, where you can level up past 99 up to 150 and buy lots of balms/incenses to in short create your dream overpowered MC/Team with 999 on every stat (if you can endure the mitama grinding... i cannot imagine the grind without that DLC, please buy it and save yourself). Now, the problem with that is that he hits like a TRUCK, most of his attacks are almighty so it doesnt matter if you can block everything, you will get oneshoted to the moon and back unless you spent +300 on vitality, and there is no way to grind for better stats outside of Godborn unless you're a masochist and wanna kill mitamas for days in the hopes of them droping 1 balm/incense each battle... nah. So, lots of people decided to just oneshot the boss themselves using Safety mode just to get him out of the way and be able to enjoy Godborn mode. If you wanna be a TRUE SHEEN MEGUMI TENSAI GAMER then sure, go beat him legit, more power to you, I just couldnt lol.

And there you have it, sorry for the huge wall of text but I had to rant a bit. I LOVE THIS GAME and you will love it too, so stop reading and go click on purchase game already.

As beautiful as the first time I played it 15 years ago, if not better.

Without spoiling anything I think this is the best Yakuza game so far with the worst ending of all. Not because it was good or bad, but rather because it felt rushed, and for the amount of time the games goes on the ending bit it was extremely underwhelming. SEGA has a stupid habit of making ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scenes in some of their games specially at the end, to the point it leaves you thinking "what the hell was that for???" and this felt like, again, another of those cases.

Also, do NOT jump into these series with this game, since you will not get the same experience as if you played every Yakuza game prior to this one. This isnt me gatekeeping, its true because a good chunk of the game is Kiryu reminising about past events, and if you go in blind you wont get any nostalgia, thus the emotional factor wont be the same.

If you want a truly emotional ride you wont regret playing this game, but if you dont know Kiryu's entire story leave this review section and get to it, enjoy those games first and then come back.

-Adds pronouns to the game as a joke to make stupid people mad.
-They actually get mad over such thing.
-Enjoy the game even more.

If "feeling all warm and fuzzy inside" was a game this one would hit the spot, just like all of Mystia's dishes!

For real, I haven't felt such happy vibes and tranquility in a game in years... The gameplay is repetitive but even then it keeps you wanting to see more, and the game indeed delivers: New recipes, new locations, new characters... The feeling of reaching max bond level with your fav 2hu girl and her giving you a cute outfit is so cute, but then you see how Mystia looks while wearing it at the izakaya and man, she surely looks beautiful in any costume she wears.

On another note: THE MUSIC. I cant stress this enough, THE MUSIC IS BEAUTIFUL. Getting a big order streak only for the music to change and you notice its a remix of iconic Touhou songs... You know the feel of going to the last boss fight and you hear bits of the main theme? Well, exactly like that, but it has mixes of characters themes or even stages themes, and i'll never get tired of it.

The game even has DLCs if you want more, so what are you waiting for? Go buy this game right now and you will spend countless nights simply running your izakaya, no youtube videos in the background, no chatting with people, no distractions, just you, your recipes and awesome Touhou songs to hype you up as you cook.

123 hours in and I haven't finished it yet. I'm in love.

It was extremely fun until I had to enter the house.