The Tomo Awards 2020 — Gamer Edition
My Top 5 Video Games Of 2020
2020 was a bit of a rough year for all mediums, from television to films and music, though the latter is more or less back on track, albeit having opened a fairly exploitative new trend of releasing “deluxe editions” of albums to offset the loss in profit from artists’ inability to make touring revenue as a byproduct of the literal plot of Stephen King’s The Stand taking place in real life. Video games are no exception. As game developers faced a new hurdle in the form of working remotely, game publishers saw it best to delay many releases. While mostly-complete “AAA” games like Ghost Of Tsushima and The Last Of Us Part II were delayed only a few short months (for better and for worse, respectively), other likely less-finished titles like the Giancarlo Esposito-starring Far Cry 6 and disastrously bad-looking Halo Infinite were delayed indefinitely into 2021 from set release windows, a smart move on the part of their respective publishers. Other, less ethical publishers, chose to delay clearly unfinished games that frankly should be illegal to sell in their current states so many times that they were eventually pressured into releasing the game to massive criticism from both a gameplay and workplace ethics standpoint. We won’t name names there though, just know that it was a “seedy project” and that System Shock 2 is still the greatest game of all time as far as the cyberpunk genre is concerned.
While delays were a huge and inevitable part of the hell year that is 2020, it’s also worth noting that games were also a major form of escapism for those of us locked at home. We got a pretty damn good Bring Me The Horizon album out of frontman Oli Sykes being inspired by the music of DOOM Eternal while playing it during the first quarantine. I personally gave myself digital eye strain from playing so many games while stuck inside with nothing better to do. I found myself enjoying games from past years that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise played were it not for the intense boredom of unemployed pandemic life. For starters, I bought myself a racing wheel controller and spent a handful hours between arcadey games like Forza Horizon 4 and the fairly unknown OutRun-inspired indie title Slipstream, but found a lot of joy in older sim racing titles like Assetto Corsa, Project CARS 2 (especially with what a shame this year’s Project CARS 3 was), rFactor 2, and more recently, 2019’s Assetto Corsa Competizione, though I’m not much of a GT racing fan, preferring more open-wheeled motorsports like Formula 1, W Series, and Formula E.
I also found myself enjoying the hell out of what I thought was an awful game, EA’s controversial STAR WARS: Battlefront II. They really turned the game around, adding tons of content that would please anyone who loved the original Battlefront series from the mid-2000s if they just gave it a chance. It’s graphically incredible with stunning and lush Star Wars locations from across all three trilogies and the spin-off films and hyper-realistic recreations of the films’ stars like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher as well as both Billy Dee Williams and Donald Glover as alternative skins for Lando Calrissian, the gameplay and loadout customization is surprisingly deep, and the microtransactions that made the game so controversial at release are 100% completely gone. It’s quite good, and the super duper special edition is almost always on sale for less than $20 lately, well-worth the pickup due to its fun Star Wars fanservice, engrossing story (seriously, the story mode alone is worth it), and active online community with over 4,000 active PC players in the last hour as of writing according to Steam Charts, though the actual number is much higher due the game being available with crossplay on multiple PC platforms.
This fall, I found myself utterly engrossed in the championed Yakuza series, having tried to get into the breakthrough 2017 title Yakuza 0 since release, only finally being able to get into it and finish it this past September, with no small thanks to the extra free time this year has given me. These games are utterly massive, a masterclass in balancing tone, going from cutthroat drama and action one moment to wacky time-wasting nonsense the next. The 90 second song ‘Friday Night’ from Yakuza 0’s disco dancing mini-game has become nothing short of an anthem this year for me and my friends, and according to this Twitter account that gets tens of thousands of likes and retweets every Friday, most other gamers this year. After Yakuza 0, I found myself blazing through most of Yakuza Kiwami, the 2016 remake/reimagining of the 2005 original Yakuza title, though I was admittedly a bit fatigued from the somewhat unbalanced and iffy 3D brawler combat. I found myself a bit frustrated by a few bosses to the point of watching the last hour or so of the already-short story on YouTube before giving Yakuza Kiwami 2 a spin. Kiwami 2 is a much more refined and modern remake of the original 2006 Yakuza 2, featuring truckloads of new content and an entirely new chapter that gives tear-jerking resolution to some of Goro Majima’s unfinished business from Yakuza 0.
I also managed to get pretty goddamn good at Dead Or Alive 6 in January, for whatever that’s worth, seeing as industry sleazeballs Koei Tecmo officially pulled the plug on further updates a mere week after the release of the game’s final DLC character, Tamaki. That set me up for a solid year of trying out more fighting games from a competitive standpoint, finding a particular amount of fun in games like Tekken 7, Killer Instinct (the 2013 reboot), The King Of Fighters 2002UM and XIII, Samurai Shodown (the 2019 reboot), and 2018’s SoulCalibur VI, a game that I put down shortly after release but recently picked back up once developing a solid set of fighting game fundamentals, courtesy of my teammates on Team FLOOFY.
Going even further back in gaming history, me and the other Team Poolsi.de founders have been obsessed this past year with Taito’s Densha De GO! series, a surprisingly difficult but nevertheless relaxing train simulator that saw its first brand new game release in over 16 years just this past month on PS4, with a Switch release to come in March, which I’m personally waiting for. I’ve since been having a lot of fun with the 2003 PS2 version Densha De GO! Ryojouhen, which features a recreation of the entire Enoden line, my personal favorite train line in the world as a big fan of Asian Kung-Fu Generation’s 2008 album Surf Bungaku Kamakura, where every song on the album is named after each station on the Enoden’s historic seaside route, with the song’s lining up perfectly with arrival at each station’s namesake. I’ve had a wonderful time trying to get this experience through my computer screen by listening to the album while playing DDG! Ryojouhen’s recreation of the train line in a year where I had otherwise been prevented from going forward with plans of doing the same thing in real life.
Despite the excess in free time, I played significantly less of Final Fantasy XIV this year than I have each year for the past 7 years of my time subscribed to the ongoing massively multiplayer online masterpiece, which I find a bit funny seeing as this has been the year where so many people have begun to discover how incredible the 2013 rework of the 2010 disaster is. I did however get a few friends into it after years of trying, so I’m basically playing the waiting game while I actively do not help them trek through the hundreds of hours the base game and its first two expansions give until they get to 2019’s Shadowbringers expansion, in my humble opinion, the absolute best the Final Fantasy series has ever been, full-stop.
I replayed the entire BioShock series, gave myself a terrible migraine by playing the wildly buggy and unfinished disaster that is Cyberpunk 2077 which I find to be the most over-hyped Far Cry game of all time, flew over my town in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, speeded through the wip3out Omega Collection on PS4, and beta-tested for both Fall Guys and NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, the latter of which being a surprisingly competent and unique take on the prevalent battle royale genre set to release this summer. I have yet to play Hades, but I will when I get time and when my eyes hurt less.
I did not play Among Us.
It was a solid year for games. I heard a rumor that Capcom is even working on a Dragon’s Dogma 2 according to a leak, which anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to be around me during an event like E3 or Tokyo Game Show knows that I only want five hypothetical games more than anything else: Dead Or Alive 7, Virtua Fighter 6, Metroid 5, F-Zero 7, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. As long as Dragon’s Dogma 2 has absolutely nothing to do with the abysmal Netflix show, I think it’ll should be nothing short of a masterwork (s’all, you can’t go wrong).
There were plenty of games that came out in 2020 that I found myself enamored with. Here’s five of those brand new games that gave me unfettered joy during the Hell Year Of 2020:
5. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out at both the best and worst time in March 2020. It was supposed to be a normal year — or at least, the word we consider “normal” despite atrocities being committed against under privileged and marginalized peoples not in far-off foreign nations, but in our own cities. Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out at a time where the government was too afraid of their fake, made-up economy collapsing immediately, so they decided to let it collapse over time instead, killing millions of innocent people so that they could keep millions of dollars that they will never spend.
Animal Crossing is a game where you water flowers and talk to dogs wearing t-shirts and silly little hats. Rather than getting fired from your job at Starbucks because you had a panic attack while being berated by a woman named Susan because you spelt her name wrong on purpose and made her cappuccino with the wrong amount of heavy-cream foam that she both didn’t ask for and also won’t even taste anyway and then get evicted by your landlord because you can’t keep up with paying the inflated cost of living in your recently-gentrified neighborhood, you live on a peaceful island with a snooty but well-meaning cat named Olivia and pay your rent in fruit and fish to your landlord who is a tanuki who never gives you due dates or eviction notices. Honestly, Tom Nook gets a bad rap for how ideal of a landlord he actually would be in real life. Boo-hoo, he made you “help out around the shop” on your first day in town in 2002 when in actuality he more or less just gave you a tour of the town and saved you the stress of meeting every villager on your own. He’s a good guy.
Animal Crossing is a game that’s meant to be played for less than an hour a day over the course of several years, with small updates every few months adding new things to do and craft. It’s a perfect little Utopia where my best friend is a pink dog named Cookie. Cookie wants to be a pop star, and I believe she’s both talented and passionate enough to achieve her dream some day. Cookie also really likes me almost as much as she likes herself; she proved this to me once by telling me about what a great friend I’ve been to her after our first few months on the island together. She then proceeded to hand me a framed photograph of herself.
I think Animal Crossing: New Horizons could have been a much longer-lasting game had it not released during the first of unfortunately many poorly-handled lockdowns of the year and we spent too long playing it every day with nothing else to do. It would have been a fun game to play on break with coworkers at work without having to wear masks just to not die because the bossman still needs to sell coffee even though people are dying around the world by the barrel-full at a simultaneous and easily-preventable rate.
9/10, not enough to do after I spent 12 hours a day for 5 months straight playing a game I’m only supposed to play for half an hour a day for several years.
4. Ghost Of Tsushima
Ghost Of Tsushima came as a big surprise to me. It was announced at a time when were already just getting announcements for FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as well as Team Ninja’s own Nioh 2, a sequel to the beloved surprise hit Nioh back in 2017, which in itself was a tribute to the emerging gameplay style of FromSoftware games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, being one of the first non-FromSoft games actually capture the magic of what makes FromSoft games so good. It felt like we didn’t necessarily need another samurai game in the mix. We didn’t even know what kind of game Ghost Of Tsushima was until early 2020 gameplay showed it off as being more of an open world action-stealth game inspired in equal parts by the innovations of the recent Breath Of The Wild and older Assassin’s Creed games.
At this point, I’m tired of hearing “we need an Assassin’s Creed set in feudal Japan” all the time. After Ghost Of Tsushima, I really don’t think we actually do. Frankly, as good as Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla have all been, I don’t think the current series’ direction would make a better game than Ghost Of Tsushima were it in the same setting. Tsushima frankly does everything Assassin’s Creed does better, save for only story.
What makes Tsushima one of the most endearing open world games of the last decade is that it doesn’t fill you with an abundance of bullshit and filler. The sidequests are not one-off meaningless fetch missions you’d find in so many other games, especially Ubisoft ones: go kill 5 soldiers, bring me 10 animal hides, go talk to my wife on the other side of the island. None of that is here. Instead, Tsushima has what I believe I remember being called “tales”, which were sidequests in the form of multi-part narratives concerning individual characters. One of the early ones in the game involves the main character Jin helping out Lady Masako, a widowed, dishonored woman at rock-bottom, after the slaughter of her entire warrior clan of a family at the hands of unknown conspirators. Throughout the 7 or 8 separate quests of the chain, you help her find peace and vengeance while trying to uncover the identities of her family’s murderers. Every sidequest is a chain of several narratively-driven and meaningful missions just like this. For helping Lady Masako even the Adachi Clan, she rewards you with the armor of the Adachi Clan, a rare cosmetic for you to equip.
You don’t loot armor from every enemy in Ghost Of Tsushima the way you would in a Bethesda game. Instead, armor often comes from these sidequests. Not only do you get to enjoy a well-written story, but you also get more ways to customize your character by doing them. This is also one of the best ways to get skill points as well. You get to kill three birds with one stone this way, experiencing some of the best stories in the game, getting new armor, and leveling your character up. No sidequest feels like filler content.
As a matter of fact, nothing in Tsushima does. Tsushima is one of the few games on the PS4 to truly utilize the controller’s unique multi-part touch pad button. One of the absolute greatest innovations the game makes is through its use of the touch pad — if you swipe up, the wind blows in the direction of your current objective, which you can change from more obvious things like quest markers or custom waypoint to smaller things like the general direction of a specific crafting resource like ore or plants. And despite being so visually subtle, the wind is far from it, sweeping through the trees around you and rustling the leaves, causing them to fall at what would in real life be a drowning rate, but it’s nevertheless gorgeous. Swipe the touch pad to the right and you’ll either draw or sheathe your sword. Swipe it down, and you’ll bow. You can also swipe it the left to play your flute, and depending on which flute you have equipped, this dynamically changes the weather, much like the ‘Sun Song’ and ‘Song Of Storms’ in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
Tsushima also happens to be drop-dead gorgeous. The lighting and particle effects in particular are incredible. I’m surprised that my generation 1 PS4 didn’t make a peep while playing this, meanwhile God Of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 had it practically on its knees begging for mercy. There has to be some kind of sorcery involved. The second time I played the game, I booted it up, got to the title screen, hit continue, and looked down to doomscroll Twitter on my phone — before Twitter had even opened and loaded, I looked up and saw Tsushima already loaded and running. I even read somewhere when the game came out that Sucker Punch Productions actually purposely elongated the load times to last longer than they needed to be because it loaded so fast that players had no time to read the tips on the loading screen. There has to be some kind of blood magic involved with optimizing a game like this.
Ghost Of Tsushima is an absolutely brilliant open world game worth every second of your awe and attention.
9/10, please give me Assassin’s Creed set in dynastic China instead of feudal Japan because Tsushima did it better than Assassin’s Creed can, thanks.
3. Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon 2
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of both Metroid and Castlevania. Super Metroid stands the test of time as one of my favorite video games ever made, replaying it at least once a year out of something of tradition and also instinct. I grew up with the SNES, blazing through Super Metroid hundreds of times and being haunted by Super Castlevania IV, a game I played a lot of but never actually beat until 2010 while using a web-browser emulator in a high school computer class.
Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night was my Game Of The Year for 2019. It captured the true essence of the Metroidvania genre and the two games that inspired it, Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. Bloodstained is, in essence, the new Castlevania, being the creation of Castlevania series innovator Koji Igarashi, who directed Symphony Of The Night and furthered the series with incredible titles like Aria/Dawn Of Sorrow and Order Of Ecclesia.
One of the Kickstarter goals for Ritual Of The Night happened to be a classic Castlevania-style game known as Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon, which in a lot of ways could be considered a total reimagining of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, featuring an 8-bit graphical style, chiptune soundtrack courtesy of Castlevania series veteran compose Michiru Yamane, straightforward front-to-back level design with exploration being handled by different paths only excessible with certain characters rather than an open world, and improvements that the original CVIII simply couldn’t have had due to the NES’ hardware limitations; things like more detailed backgrounds, better framerates, and not taking 10 whole seconds to switch between characters, instead being able to switch characters with the press of a button, something that added to the strategy and depth of the game, with each character having their own set of abilities, movement options, and base weapons.
For instance, the main character Zangetsu uses a short sword for his basic attack, has a short jump, slow walk, and has a pickup ability similar to Castlevania’s holy water item. The vampire Gebel on the other hand is a parallel to CVIII’s Alucard, shooting three projectiles skyward, allowing you to get multiple hits with one button press in on larger enemies and hitting airborne enemies easier. What makes Gebel unique however, is that he has no pickup abilities to swap between. Instead, when he uses his ability, he transforms into a single small bat, allowing you to fly across pits you can’t jump over or into high areas you couldn’t otherwise reach. The unique thing, however, is that when you break a lantern that would give any other character a new pickup, Gebel will instead get ammo to share across every character’s abilities, meaning if you’re running low on MP, you can switch to Gebel to hit a blue lantern and get more MP for the whole party. This is the type of strategy I meant.
So why am I talking about the character’s from the first game? Doesn’t Curse Of The Moon 2 star a new cast of characters? Yes, it sure does. Dominique from Ritual Of The Night takes on the role of a support character, having an ability that creates much-needed HP pickups as well as an ultimate ability that lets you resurrect the entire party. She also features a spear that allows you to attack directly above your head as well as bounce on enemies like a pogostick, even being able to bounce over pits of spikes to activate areas you would have needed Gebel to fly over in the first game. My personal favorite is Hachi, who takes Gebel’s place, also having only one ability, thus letting you use Hachi as a way to get more HP much like Gebel in the first game. Hachi’s ability toughens his armor, making him completely invincible for as long as the fast-draining ability is active. Did I also mention Hachi is a fucking shiba inu who pilots a train-shaped robot? I love him, he’s a very good boy.
However, the game requires multiple playthroughs in order to unlock the final level. In one of the several replays of the game, you play as the original Curse Of The Moon cast, and in the final replay, you once again go through the entire game again with all 7 characters from both games. While replaying the same game multiple times sounds boring on paper, there are some places you simply can not get into without specific characters. For instance, you might need Gebel’s bat ability to fly into high areas or Miriam’s floor-slide to get through cramped spaces on the ground. After getting to the whole gang back together, the game does something that absolutely floored me: you play a bullet hell level before the final true boss, which I won’t spoil as it’s a beautiful “a-ha!” moment for fans of Ritual Of The Night. But the bullet hell level? Wow. It’s tough as nails but an incredible surprise at the end of an already incredible experience.
9.5/10, that bullet hell level almost broke me.
2. STAR WARS: Squadrons
How. Did. This. Happen!? STAR WARS: Squadrons is a stroke of genius from the industry’s most hated publisher. After the disaster of 2017’s STAR WARS: Battlefront II, the future of Star Wars video games seemed grim at best. That is, until, the lawsuits came and smacked EA’s heads back on straight. What we got soon after was STAR WARS: Jedi - Fallen Order, a pretty solid action-adventure game that has one foot in Dark Souls territory and the other in Uncharted. The best part? No microtransactions. You simply buy the game and you play it.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that a small team at EA had been working on a passion project on their off-time, a realistic Star Wars dogfight simulator. When likely some EA executive caught wind of what the small group were doing, they seemed to have liked it enough to greenlight it into a full game. STAR WARS: Squadrons as a concept feels simply too good to be true. It’s a $40 game with absolutely no additional prices, microtransactions, or loot boxes, and it’s a full-fledged and frankly incredibly fun game. Taking place after Return Of The Jedi, Squadrons’ has three modes: Story, Dogfight, and Capital Ships. I will be honest, I have only played 2 of the story missions (though I hear there are 14 and that they’re great) and have only started to dip my feet into the complex waters of Capital Ships, a mode in which you and four other teammates go up against a team of either five other players (or AIs) and several hundred weaker generic AI-controlled starfighters and partake in a tactical game of tug-of-war where you’re constantly either on the offense or defense trying to take out the opposite team’s cruisers and eventually their main capital ship.
There’s a lot of strategy and depth involved, and the game features something of a “class” system where certain ships take on certain roles. For instance, the X-Wing (or Tie Fighter) is your standard allrounder, but the Y-Wing (or Tie Bomber) is focused on heavy damage. Conversely, you have the interceptor class, featuring the A-Wing or Tie Interceptor based on your faction, whose main focus is speed and aggression. You also have the U-Wing and Tie Reaper as heavily-armored and shielded “support” ships, with abilities ranging from healing and resupplying weapons on ally ships, briefly camouflaging your team, or even using ion weapons to fry enemy systems leaving them vulnerable for your interceptors to swoop in for some easy pickings. Due to the overwhelmingly positive critical reception and fairly simplistic (by comparison) nature of the game, the team also recently added two new ships as a surprise holiday gift to players in the form of the B-Wing for the Rebels and the Tie Defender for the Imperials. The B-Wing is another ship for the bomber role and the Defender is another generic Fighter role ship like the classic Tie Fighter.
I’ve spent most of my time however in Dogfight mode, a classic 5v5 team deathmatch, first team to 30 kills wins. I’ve had games where I’ve taken 19 of my team’s 30 kills in my Tie Bomber and other games where my team has been so new and disorganized that I was the only one on the time to get a single kill at all and only reaching 3 kills before the other team pummeled us 30 to 3. There may be only 7 maps (originally 6, but an unused map from the story mode was tweaked for multiplayer use and added in late November), but they all have unbelievable amounts of strategic depth. It feels absolutely exhilarating to hear that “missiles locking to you” sound on the Esseles Space Station map and dip my ship from above the station and down into its corridors, dodging shots and swooping a U-turn around the core to dumb-fire a missile at the poor sucker still dragging down the hallway trying to pull a fast one on me. Getting a full understanding of the game’s semi-complex control scheme and narrowly navigating my way between the asteroid fields of the Galitan map, deftly dipping my starfighter out of my pursuers sights, cloaking myself from the radar for a brief 7 seconds, and coming out behind them to blast them away with my gattling-laser is something I’ve only dreamed about doing as a little kid watching Star Wars.
Squadrons is in so many ways the almost perfect encapsulation of an ultra-specific Star Wars fantasy, and its mere existence, free of any controversies, loot boxes, or any other types of predatory marketing and monetization is a miracle. You can even customize your ship with different paint jobs, holograms, air-fresheners, and Grogu bobbleheads. I made my A-Wing pink because I need to look cute while I’m smoking these fools on Yavin, objectively the worst map in the game, but still loads of fun when you learn the complexities of “jousting” in the game. Unlike every other map in the game, the Yavin map is completely empty. There is nothing to hide behind at all, just you and the other team hurling straight at each other. It seems awful at first, but once you get good at jousting, it’s frankly still pretty terrible because your teammates probably suck, but it’s at least bearable once you’ve gotten the hang of it. It’s an especially fun map to bait people into your mines on, get them to fly straight out you, nose-dive down, drop a mine, and watch as they fly directly into it for immediate and devastating damage.
My only gripe with the game came from its lack of optimization on day one. It took an almost full 5 minutes of black screen loading to get to the title screen, and despite having my old Radeon RX 580 capped with Chill at 60FPS, the loading screens insisted on loading at several thousand frames per second and forcing my poor GPU into running at around 85 degrees Celsius, however the game itself once loaded ran around a cool 67 degrees. The game at launch also had a hard time caching objects and would kick you out after 5 minutes of trying to load a Dogfight, forcing you to go into practice mode, wait 10 minutes to load every asset the game has, and then go join a game only to see someone else on your team had the same thing happen to them so the game starts 4v5. That was the first month though. The game has since been very well-optimized. I’m not sure if it’s still the default, but for mouse and keyboard users, there was one specific mouse setting that was the last hurdle to me having oodles of fun with Squadrons: there is a setting called “Mouse Screen Motion Range” which is set to around 58% by default, from what I’m reading online (could be wrong, I don’t remember nor do I care to). Setting that to 100% made a world of a difference, with the ships beginning to feel wildly precise once I got passed the surprisingly-engaged learning curve the game has. With all of that out of the way, STAR WARS: Squadrons has been smooth-sailing since then, and I still play it often, even if it’s just for a quick match before resigning for the night.
All it truly needs at this point is time and love from EA, something that I don’t believe we’ll see much more of. I’d reckon they have a Jedi - Fallen Order 2, Battlefront 3, and likely something else up their sleeves instead. And while the idea of a Battlefront 3 could be incredible, I think a massive new-era update to Squadrons, or even a more fully-featured sequel, could be a perfect game.
9.5/10, there are some depraved things I would do to get Clone Wars-era and Resistance-era expansions to truly complete this game. Also let me make my Tie Fighter pink, please. Like a really bright pink, like the same shade of pink you can make your X-Wing, but for Tie Fighters.
1. Yakuza: Like A Dragon
If you’ve ever heard me talk about JRPGs, you’d know there are only 5 JRPG series’ that I truly love — Paper Mario, Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei Persona, Mother, and Dragon Quest. I have heard great things about the Bravely series, but I missed out during the 3DS craze so I guess we’ll just wait and see how Bravely Default 2 is on the Switch. I otherwise can’t fucking stand turn-based JRPGs. Whilst Paper Mario eased the tedium of JRPGs by allowing timed button presses to create more involved action, Persona 5 in particular used a lot of button shortcuts that allowed you to immediately target enemies with spells that they’re weak to and added that “Hold-Up” mechanic that I thought was good and goofy fun. Mother 2/EarthBound had that rolling-HP mechanic that made you think on your toes. And Dragon Quest is…well, it’s like peanut butter & jelly; it’s as classic as you can get, and it frankly just does the essentials of JRPGs better than any Final Fantasy, Pokémon, or Mana game that I’ve ever played.
I don’t outwardly hate Final Fantasy or Pokémon either. You can bet your buns that I’ve bought every Pokémon game, going as far as to say that I think the often-maligned Generation 6 might even be my favorite if I didn’t have a softer spot for the Generation 3 games I grew up playing on my GBA in the backseat of the family car as a kid. I even suffered through most of Final Fantasy IV, VI, IX, and X before growing tired of each over the last half decade. I do hear that the Bravely games serve as refreshing spiritual successors to Final Fantasy with much needed features to reduce the tedium.
All of which is why when I found out Yakuza 7, officially localized in the west as Yakuza: Like A Dragon — referencing the series’ Japanese name “Ryu Ga Gotoku” which literally means “Like A Dragon”— would be a turn-based JRPG, the first in the real-time 3D brawler series to do so, I was prepared to hate it. Of course, as I said earlier in this article, once I got further and further into the Yakuza series, I actually got quite burnt out on the real-time combat and the inconsistencies a not-low but not-high budget brought along with it. About half-way through Kiwami 2, I actually started to get a little excited by the prospect of the turn-based Yakuza 7, thinking about how despite not being my cup of tea, at least turn-based combat has consistency. No enemies blocking attacks that definitely broke their guard the last time I used the same attack. Just a consistent by-the-numbers experience.
Not only is Yakuza: Like A Dragon just that, it’s all of that and more. You see, Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s naming convention is quite perfect — despite being the seventh game in the franchise, it stars a brand new character we’ve never seen before, Ichiban Kasuga. Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life saw the finale of previous series star Kazuma Kiryu’s story, leaving Yakuza 7 a perfect place for RGG Studio to do something of a soft-reboot. While it has references to and characters from the old Yakuza games, Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a new experience that can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of the series. It briefly introduces you to the main setting of the series, Kamurocho — which is itself a near-identical recreation of the entire district of Kabukichou in Shinjuku, Tokyo — before (literally) throwing you to the curb in Yokohama, a city we’ve never seen explorable before in the series. It features an all new cast of main characters and has a less lonely feeling. While other Yakuza games had you almost exclusively playing as Kiryu alone the entire time with few exceptions, you spend almost the entirety of Yakuza: Like A Dragon with Ichiban Kasuga, the homeless ex-nurse Yuu Nanba, the shamed ex-detective Koichi Adachi, and traumatized bartender Saeko Mukuoda among a handful of others. This is a tight-knit group, who find themselves involved in something bigger than their own lives, and keep you company the entire game, often calling out to have conversations about surrounding areas while exploring the cities the game calls home. These characters are equally as lovable and endearing as Kiryu, Majima, Sayama, or Goda.
So what about that dreaded turn-based combat? Well, being a soft-reboot, it was a perfect time to try an experiment. You see, within the game, Ichiban is a big fan of the Dragon Quest series. He will literally see something happen on the street and go “haha just like Dragon Quest” while his ‘party members’ (he actually calls his friends that) sigh at his delusions. When you enter combat, the opponents transform into either glowing-eyed versions of themselves or monstrous and unreal caricatures. Ichiban’s party all take on the appearance of the job class you’ve set them to. For instance, Adachi’s default class is Detective, which leaves him in his default outfit. However, if you change him to “Enforcer”, he dons a full suit of riot gear when you enter combat. Some of these job classes are absolutely hilarious, with Ichiban becoming a b-boy breakdancer or Eri becoming a dominatrix, whip and all.
The combat itself is where things get fascinating. Rather than just static turn-based combat, the battlefield is fully rendered and takes place wherever the battle was started, anywhere on the streets at all. The characters move around at will, often veering off into parts of the map where things can happen. The combat interface is similar to Persona 5’s very clean and stylish interface, showing the four face buttons and what they pertain to. X is attack, O is guard, Triangle is skills, and Square is items. If you’re close enough to a loose item on the ground, using the standard X to attack will pick up the item and use it to attack, much like you were able to do with the real-time combat of previous games. I’d argue that picking up a bike off the sidewalk and proceeding to beat the shit out of someone with it is more synonymous with the Yakuza series than the actual organized crime syndicates the series gets its name from. There aren’t too many crazy and hard to remember type advantages like other JRPGs are known for. Three melee and three ranged types. What makes this so unique however is the method for which some of these are performed. For instance, one of the ranged types is Fire. Rather than Nanba casting a generic fireball spell, he plays into his trope as a heavy drinker by taking a swig of alcohol, putting a lighter in front of his mouth, and spitting it out like a flamethrower. Funniest part? The idea of a turn-based Yakuza game started as an April Fools joke.
More than just the combat being engaging and actually fun, the story is as good as the series has made itself legendary for. Rather than being an experienced yakuza like Kiryu was, Ichiban is an absolute runt, the bottom of the bottom in Kamurocho. The only reason he even became a yakuza was because he got kidnapped and tortured in his teens by a few yakuza grunts. The head and namesake of the Arakawa clan comes to his rescue, and Ichiban dedicates his life to him, with Arakawa serving as a father figure to him. A little into the future, while still at the bottom of the ladder, one of Ichiban’s superiors murders an officer from a rival family. Arakawa asks Ichiban to take the blame instead as a test of his dedication, to which he eagerly accepts. He gets sentenced to 15 years in the slammer, though he gets into a fight during his first few weeks and gets an extra 3 years tacked onto his sentence. 18 years later, Ichiban is freed only to find nobody waiting for him on the outside. He manages to track down Arakawa, who proceeds to shoot him at a meeting with a different clan than they were a part of 18 years ago. Ichiban is woken up by Nanba in a dumpster in a Yokohama and gets caught up in an even bigger conspiracy involving Arakawa and the three different international criminal organizations engaged in a cold war over the city.
On top of all of that, Yakuza: Like A Dragon also comes through at full-force with perhaps the series’ most beloved quirks: minigames. The Yakuza series is well-known for its balance of gritty drama and silly antics. One moment, you’re playing as Majima, captured and being tortured by the boss he betrayed, blood dripping down his entire body. Two minutes later, you’re in the arcade on the north side of Sotenbori (a recreation of the real life Dotonbori in Osaka) playing a fully-emulated version of the classic arcade driving game OutRun or singing a sad ballad about how hopeless you are because your wife left you at the karaoke bar. In Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the minigames are taken to the next level. The entirety of the arcade version of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, often regarded as one of the greatest and most complicated fighting games ever made, is included in the game’s SEGA arcades. They literally made their own Mario Kart racing game with 12 tracks and 4 cups and customizable karts where Ichiban drives around the streets of Yokohama on a tiny go-kart, shooting bazookas and jumping off of ramps. It’s called Dragon Kart and deserves to be spoken of as its own full game the way that Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown is its own full game, not just a minigame in Yakuza.
Yakuza: Like A Dragon is nothing short of a masterpiece, and with some time, might even go on as being the best in the entire series, beating out beloved titles like Yakuza 0, Kiwami 2, and Yakuza 5.
10/10, possibly the greatest JRPG ever made.
Honorable Mentions —
- While I haven’t come anywhere close to finishing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in my 40+ hours with the game so far, I can say without a doubt it’s the absolute best the series has ever been, controversies of its development cycle aside. It comes so close to make true innovations on the open-world genre but falls just short of it.
- Having reacquainted with the wip3out series early this year in the form of the Omega Collection on PS4 and in my thirst for literally any new F-Zero game, I was delighted to find out about PACER, the unfortunately named but incredibly solid new anti-gravity racer much in the vein of the wip3out series. It’s fast, it’s dropdead gorgeous, and the customization feels quite fun and offers a variety of different playstyles based on different vehicle components and weapon choices. A must-buy for any fans of anti-gravity racers like F-Zero, wip3out, or the Star Wars Podracer games.
- Maiden and Spell is a bullet hell-fighting game hybrid that puts your reflexes to the test. It’s got a beautiful and charming art style and a fairly enjoyable story mode. Where it shines is online, with the ever-so coveted rollback netcode to boot. My team and I have had a blast playing M&S from time to time all year. MOON!
- Spellbreak is a pretty dang cool take on the Fortnite-style of battle royale games. Instead of guns, however, you’re all wizards, and you acquire different runes and gauntlets that give you different magic spells to cast. You can even combine elements to do unique things, for instance, with the ice gauntlet, it shoots a long ranged arrow that leaves a trail of ice for you to skate really fast across the map. If you use a fire gauntlet against someone else skating on ice, you’ll melt the ice, startling them enough to get the drop on them. Another fun one is using the poison gauntlet to spread a cloud of toxic gas. If you throw a fireball at the gas cloud, it’ll explode. I think, maybe. It probably does, I don’t 100% remember, it’s been a minute since I’ve played since none of my friends really want to play an Epic Games Store-exclusive game even if it’s free.
- I had a few weeks in the middle of the summer where I was absolutely plagued by anxiety and convinced I was dying of something that didn’t exist. During that time, I needed the absolute most engaging games I could find to get my mind away from the fear for a while, and it was around that time when I dove into puzzle games like Baba Is You. However, the game that stuck out the most was the just recently-released (or made-public, it’s still in Early Access as of writing) Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It’s a phenomenal game with a dystopian, cyberpunk sci-fi aesthetic that puts you in the suit of a shipbreaker riddled with billions of dollars in debt to a company who puts you to work carefully dismantling abandoned space ships. The physics simulation in Shipbreaker is incredible and it can be played in fairly short bursts, as each time you go out into the shipyard, you have both a timer for the day’s shift as well as oxygen and fuel tanks to keep an eye on. It might not be the best game for someone who could get easily motion sick as the game is entirely zero-gravity and has a control system that lets you pitch and roll yourself to access narrow corridors and ship parts in the corners and the like. It’s a really fun and relatively cheap new game that’s constantly being updated. Well worth the $20 or probably less on Steam sale.
