So, to catch up on things…
Recently finished Like a Dragon Gaiden: the man who erased his name. By nature of it being a side story game, it was objectively shorter than a main numbered entry in the Yakuza series; that being said, definitely satisfying for what it is, since it was able to focus on what happened for Kiryu more or less after the events of #6, what happened during #7 (where Ichiban debuts) and the extra content leads into #8.
Really easy to get engrossed in the games when the story hits because by the end of it, you feel like you lived through that character’s life. And with everything that happens, the finale cutscenes are quite the gut wrencher; they were for me, anyway. Feels were had, but it was satisfying to get some closure; and find out why Kiryu happened to be in Hawaii for the events of 8 to start taking place.
More recently, that Steam Capcom sale allowed the wife to surprise me with some additional entries to help fill in what I had for Resident Evil. While I’ve yet to start with 5 or newer entries, one I recently finished the first playthrough on was the remake for RE 4. Gotta say, I was expecting (fearing) that the game was just going to be more demanding for the sake of it, but if anything it feels like ever since RE 2 remake, the team handling it has been optimizing better and better. Like, just the fact that I could actually turn on ray tracing as high as it could go and suffer near no performance hit (9070XT, mind), was astonishing, and made it easy to appreciate all that was done to improve the visual style of the game for me. Kept hair effects off because I didn’t like how it looked with it on, even if it didn’t really impact performance much.
Speaking of the series though… Kinda leery with 5 because of how famously bad the AI companion is, but also because I distinctly recall the marketing around it felt suspiciously racist. Obviously a hard pass on 6 because even reviewers of the day called out how it was trying to CoD-ify the series that had no business going that hyper-spastic route. Keep forgetting I already had 7, and wife also gifted me 8, too 🙂
Also finally bought myself Balatro on pc, since I had as much mileage with it on my Switch. 🤷
