Judgment Review

This is my first RGG Studios since Yakuza 6, I played the latter game back when it came out since I got burnt out on the series. I started it back in 2015. With that said, I won't be touching the mainline games since the main series' plot I have lost all interest in. I'm playing Judgment becuase it's divorced enough from that. In a sense, Yakuza and by extension Kiryu is Spider-Man and Yagami is Daredevil. I held off playing Judgment for such a long time because the length of the individual chapters are as long as a feature length films if not longer. It made organizing my playthrough whenever I would start very difficult.  

Anyways, with that out of the way, I spent a long time for years even deciding to play the game with the english dub or subtitled. For a while, I was going to with subtitles since RGG games with the exceptions of the first Yakuza and Binary Domain never had them and all though I watch anime english dubbed unless if there isn't one for it at all, Judgment's very realistic looking characters was going to create that weird effect of watching a live action movie of any kind not in it's original language. I can take this with anime and Japanese games since everything doesn't look realistic and it's mainly just the voices being replaced more than anything. 

With all that said, I think the english dub for the game is very well acted and the actors did a very good job. A lot of the VAs from games, anime and even western animation pop up here. It's far above the dub of the first Yakuza and I try not to trash on that as much as other people do even if there are moments in that can be really funny and not for the intended reasons. Everyone is directed well and considering how much talking and exposition there is in the game, I'm glad I chose this since the cutscenes and exposition can go on for some time and subtitles is going to make me feel like I'm reading more than watching it and my eyes will be glued to the bottom two inches of the screen. 

Enough of all that, the story of Judgment is good and entertaining for the most part. The characters in particular are well written with Kaito especially being my favorite with how he can be an over the top tough guy but also has a chill and goofy side to balance it out. Him and Yagami have a pretty good chemistry together. Higashi won me over in how he is still conflicted about Kaito after being banished from Matsugame family. Izumida was a character who greatly angered me at first with how little he seemed to know about critical thinking to the point where he would bring up the look who's talking and appeal to the person fallacies to a witness while then getting owned by the same fallacies a few minutes later but he does slowly start to get less antagonistic towards Yagami and even contributes to the plot. 

The story itself also has interesting themes and an extremely fascinating moral dilemma on the very idea of if there was a geniune cure for Alzheimer's disease with cover ups, conspiracies and how far people are willing to go to get the medicine put out even if it was never that effective to begin with. 

However there are issues I have, like how Yagami won the Shinpei Okubo case because the Jury felt sorry for Emi Teresawa than because Yagami did a very good job at arguing, the story hyped him as someone who somehow did the impossible when it was the sob story that won the jury over. 

The villains are on the underdeveloped side with the exception of Hamura but he turns face later. Kuriowa is a big example, he's a police officer who has the skills of a hitman yet there is barely anything revealed about his backstory and this is a game with lots of cutscenes. Shono doesn't really have much to him other than being cowardly. 

The story's pacing also isn't the greatest since at least 4-5 hours is you being forced to do side quests to progress the story, these can lead into the realm of filler since they get in the way of the moment to moment story beats, if one good thing about them is that you get more money to get healing items and to get past progression roadblocks. 

Much of the game consist of cutscenes which I don't mind since I enjoy the story but it really felt like they can drag out the chapter lengths since I view game chapters like episodes of a TV show and if I were to evaluate Judgment's ability to get story beats and ideas across very quickly without relying too much on words and talking, I don't think the game does the greatest job at doing that.

I have spoken mostly about story but that's the thing, if you choose to only do the story missions much of the game consists of watching cutscenes, fighting, investigating, running around Kamorocho and using the drone and tailing missions. 

Investigating mainly just involves moving the cursor around to until you found the clue to interact with to progress the story and pressing dialogue options that reminds the player that they are playing a game and not watching a movie and to pay attention to the plot so you can progress the story. 

The drone pops a few times and it's not particularly that interesting since you just need to position it and press a button, you might need to deal with wind even though the game doesn't tell you.

The stealth sections which mostly involves tailing and one infiltration level where you dress up as a repairman where the hardest part is getting the money to get past the progression roadblock early game to buy the disguise to do the mission. 

Contrary to popular belief, I don't think the tailing missions are as frequent as some make out. The first level made me think there was going to be many but they pop up once every few hours. The hardest parts of these is when you are following them and the npc you are tailing turns his back and you are now in his line of sight and hoping you can stay out of it long enough for you to get behind him again and not get a game over. The hardest tail was with Higashi late game where the you have to be in a very specific hidespot in order for Higashi to eventually get out of his patrol pattern and get back to following him again. 

This pretty much leaves only combat, when not watching cutscenes, investigating or exploring the city. To put it simpily, it's tolerable at best and very obnoxious and grating at worst.

You have two styles to fight with crane and tiger and at first the game wants you to switch these two up one for crowd control and the other for one on one battles. Thing is Tiger style is objectively the best one since you will be fighting and taking enemies out one at a time anyway, crowd control is never needed to be done. There is acrobatic attacks but they seem very contextual and something I needed to go out of my way to do. You can just use Tiger style and use the 4-5 hit combo to get past most enemies and boss encounters.

The lock on system never feels accurate or reliable. You can actively switch between targets and it just focuses on who Yagami is the closest too.

However the biggest grievance is the mortal wound system. This just adds needless busy work. Since the lock on and by extension the dodging isn't very reliable, when you fight tougher enemies or bosses and they start to get powered up after wailing on them, it becomes a game of luck of dodging out of the way before they destory a chunk of your health bar which means you need to find and buy expensive medkits or keep on healing yourself as you tank hits if you want to save medkits.

The random encounter rate can get out of hand considering combat isn't amazing since there will be times where the Keihin gang will be everywhere around Kamrocho will keep spawning and you want to get to the next story objective.

Overall, I do enjoy Judgment but I'm not sure how much furthur I will delve into playing RGG games.

Assassin's Creed 2(Nintendo Switch) Review

This was a game whenever I would recall it, I always tend to remember not have very fond memories of. I have been playing AC games lately albeit in reverse order minus the RPG games. Every time the thought of me coming back to playing this came to my mind, I always dreaded it and after playing it, I can say I wasn't wrong. I may not be as impressed by mainstream games and by extension mainstream media that are fondly remembered by many on the internet, but I try to accept that people have their prefrences and what they think is good might just be "okay" or "dull" for me. With AC2, outside of the art direction, music and to some degree the parkour system, I have a very hard time seeing what many people see in the game. I don't even like to attack Ubisoft as a company as much as many people do now and how the company gets vilified by the gaming community every time when given the chance, I have enjoyed their games before 2014 and even after where you could consider when they became the infamous "heels" they are now and I do get some enjoyment from their games from 2014 and to now even if I mainly have an attachment towards their games before that. Their games 2014 and onwards I do get some enjoyment from depending on the title even if I don't consider them to be "great". 

AC2 however is a game that either made me laugh for how incompetently designed it is, annoyed me with it's design quirks or just bored me so much. At times, I wonder why I even got to the end especially when you shove in the fact that the Ezio collection version of AC2 forces you to complete it's DLC chapters that got made later as mandatory to finish the game, it made a game I already wasn't big on into something that was slowly starting to make me angry. This is also the most easily accessible way to play AC2 btw. 

I will start with the story and to point it simpily, there's so many writing sins the game has that everything about the story seems like it was designed to annoy me. A big problem is that Ezio Auditore is a very dull character. The inciting incident of the story involves Ezio not knowing any better than because it happening due to the choices he made. Ezio didn't know the papers proving his family's innocence were given to Templars. Then there is the fact that Ezio decides to become an Assassin and helping Mario despite his initial reluctance comes out of nowhere and has no build up to it happening. Ezio barely even struggles or goes through any personal growth of his own. Every time he asssassinates his targets, Ezio is always designed to be in the right for doing so and his targets are just generic bad guys who are in on the conspiracy and never makes Ezio or the player question anything. He is always designed to look good and never be vunerable(he gets stabbed by Rodrigo towards the end of the game and then just gets up like nothing happened). The biggest kicker to all this that Ezio only thinks of his father and brothers on occasion if even that, he never once brings up a memory he has of them before they died to sell you on how much they mean to him. Loranzo de Medici remembers Ezio's father more than Ezio himself.

It doesn't just end there, the amount of contrivances to bail Ezio out of a potential situation is too numerous to count. The game has no respect for foreshadowing, build up or just making the player pay attention to plot points or ideas that could pop up later on. I'll give you three examples, when Ezio's father and brothers die, the family's maid just so happens to know of someone who can keep his mother and sister safe while goes out killing people and conviently teaches him crowd blending. Mario and his villa never gets any mention from his father before he dies, Ezio just so happens to remember Mario exists when something bad happens and he needs a get out of jail free card espeically since Ezio will have no where to go since him, his mom and sister are wanted fugitives. When Ezio needs to a pass to go to Venice, Caterina Sfortza just so happens to be inserted into the story and is there for Ezio to help her so he can get to Venice. That's just a few examples out of many. 

One good thing I could say on the story is that there is also a decent change in scenery after a few missions but the Venice portion of the game drags since it takes so long for the plot to move forward, there is a guy Ezio needs to kill but then he is framed and then there is another guy Ezio needs to kill and the DLC being mandatory drags out the story even more. The DLC is esstentially a filler arc of a shonen anime but at least those you can skip if you don't enjoy them. This is mandatory. 

The plot twist late game makes even less sense the more I think about it, Niccolo Machievill pops up out of nowhere and they kept a secret from Ezio that doesn't even do much to benefit them. What advantage do they even gain by keeping Ezio in the dark about his "training"? His father died because he was an Assassin and Mario tells him about his heritage and heavily encourages him to join the cause.Then there is the ending section of the game where Ezio suddenly spares Rodrigo Borgia despite him already having an extremely high kill count before this moment. I could also complain about how Rodrigo became the Pope off screen, somehow got the Staff of Eden, and knew where the Vault was even though you needed the Codex Pages to find them. 

I will be a little nice on the story in that the concept of Ezio's entire life of being nothing more than a conduit to deliver a message to Desmond who won't be born until centuries later and Ezio will die before he ever meets him or knows what the message was even about is fascinating on paper, the  problem is that all of this is just frontloaded at the end and I already went in length on how the game's story has no respect for foreshadowing and build up.

The worst part is, this story is not even an excuse plot so I'm much less forgiving on how poorly written it is, if the story was nothing more than an excuse for the gameplay, I'd just put all my story issues aside. At the very least I can put AC2 under, "play the game, skip the story". I do enjoy the Team Ninja developed Ninja Gaiden games, Ratchet and Clank 2016, Star Wars Jedi Survivor and I'm forgiving on the numerous story issues Insomniac Spider-Man 2 has due to having solid gameplay to name a few examples. 

Unfortunately, I can't call AC2 this. 

The game has stealth but there is no crouch button, cover button or lure a guard over to you. On top of that, the game gives you throwing knives, poison, and smoke bombs but you don't even need them since every guard can be countered and Ezio is a one man army, not even the final boss is immune to this. The hidden gun I only used when forced to because of the game's buggy detection system or how some missions just forces you to assassinate some targets with it since any other way won't work. 

The hidden blade has a counter kill that instant kills every enemy upon activating it's animation. This move can kill at least 95% of all enemies. The game actually gives you the option to hire mercenaries to help you in combat with Ezio being as powerful as he is. Occasionally, the hidden blade's insta counter killing won't work, luckily, the sword has a smaller counter window, it won't be an insta kill counter, but the counters with them will widdle away at the enemies' health and they will die. You can also play with fists and disarm enemies and get free kills that adding options to a combat system that is already to break. 

The AI is very buggy and doesn't have very consistent rules on what you can or can't do. That just makes the no detection missions that much worse since the AI's buggy nature can lead to many unfair game overs, this is even worse in the Bonfires of the Vanaties DLC since many of those missions are no detections some of the assassinations in that DLC borderline requires you to be lucky because of the AI's buggy nature. To name an example, you can try to kill a guard seconds after spotting you and it could either lead to an instant fail or you can continue onwards. There were times where guards would spot me and it takes the game a while to even acknowledge the fail state. 

You can hire prostitutes to distract guards but I only ever used it once and that was escourting Ezio's remaining family out of Floreance and I can't use parkour, guards were covering the entire gate and it was an escourt mission. This is known for being the most reliable and easy way to cheese stealth encounters but I never even relied on it that much. 

With the amount of mechanics and systems AC2 has, it almost seems like the game is designed to see how many different ways the game could be broken something along the lines of Metal Gear Solid 5 but it never really ever leans into this since many of the missions are the typical Grand Theft Auto style mission system of linear missions taking place on the open world so there isn't much in the way of finding clever ways to "break" and play around with the amount of options you have. 

The health system makes little sense, there are doctors all over the map and getting a quick heal costs very little so there is little need for potion use. The armour system gives you more health but it's already hard to die due to counters being a quick solution for everything. The repair system is nothing more than an inconveince since fixing armor costs little and happens so infrequnently that when it does happens it feels like a massive inconvience that just wastes time. 

The funny thing is that the final mission has no doctors meaning that you might have to worry about your potion count but this could come out of left field since I hardly if ever need to heal myself using potions before this point. 

You also get WAY too much money, doing main missions even those that don't add much to the plot will have you rolling in cash. You can buy armor and that eats up money sure, but you will make all that money back again in no time if you just do story missions.

The parkour system is...interesting. I wouldn't call it good by any means. I do like the idea of wall and side ejects even if wall ejects I almost never needed to use since in the main game there were rarely if ever any any instances where there two opposite walls nearby by each other either because it looked cool and because there was random tower in the game where you can't sync the viewpoint with unless you do a side eject to reach it. I did wish the game forced you into using it more often instead of that one instance. I really do like how you can slow down your descent and even do climb leaps, the former however is inconsistent since I would hold the grab button and there is a good chance I could grab a ledge or tackle someone instead.

The big issue I have with the parkour is the amount of rooftop guards there are, for a game that really goes out of it's way to have an interesting movement system, there always a rooftop guard who spots you and then you either kill them before they spot you or fight them on the roof and their body falls to the ground and it raises your notreity. 

This leads into another issue I have with game is the notriety system, you can kill guard where no one is even a witness to the crime and it goes up. You can kill all the guards who is even aware of all the kills you did and it goes up. What's worse is that getting your notriety down can always be done by ripping off wanted posters, there are other ways, but there will always be posters to find and are all over the map and it's the easiest way to get it down. 

That's the thing with much of AC2's design. There's just inconviences after inconvience that wastes the player's time. Taken fall damage? Run to a doctor and heal yourself for little money. Armor gets damaged? Just run to a blacksmith and it's quick and adds nothing to the game on the occasion it gets damged. Want to use the parkour to run on rooftops? Watch out for rooftop guards and then you kill them and your notriety goes up and then you got to rip off some wanted posters than back to usual. 

To top everything off, you also need all 30 condex pages to unlock the the final mission but the game never once makes it urgent for the player to get them, I already knew about this beforehand but this is just even more tedious since inbetween main missions I would do, I had to sync viewpoint after viewpoint just to get them and it just wastes time. This is going to be even worse if you play the game for the first time and aren't aware of this. 

Final issue is that I'm not sure if this can apply to the original release but the Ezio Collection version but the game is insanely buggy and has bugs happen regarding parkour or air kill animations. The worst part is when at the game's final mission, the sound would bug out and not play and I couldn't continue the game, there is no checkpoint restart feature, I tried to get an intentional game over but the game would never respawn me and I had to load from the menu, if your checkpoints weren't your save points and I had start from the very start of the mission, I would've lost it since I just wanted the game to end by that point so I suppose I can give that as a positive. 

Overall, I should've just dropped AC2 at some point but playing it does remind me why I enjoy the games I like. There are people to this day who complain about games being "too short" but I argue if AC2 was much shorter, I would be much kinder on the game. I try to avoid calling any "mainstream" game I don't like as "bad" especially those I got to the end of and rolled credits on but there were many moments when I played the game that made me want to call it just that.