I've played through Yakuza 0, Kiwami, and 6 and I love them. I love them so much.

Like very frequently with games I'll get engrossed in them for hours and hours and then peak my head out the other side and wonder what it was all for. Like did I really enjoy it or did it just hook a part of my brain that makes me want to press buttons over and over again?

Yakuza tho, it always feels good. I can't really pin down why, I think it's partly just cause it's just so good at so many different things. Like it can feel intense and be this huge spectacle, it can be really funny, it can also be like really super chill. It really does nail that feel of being its own little world inside a videogame.

And like most games it's still just this super masculine power fantasy, but it feels more graceful and thoughtful about the messages it's putting across. A MC in a Yakuza game never looks to solve problems with violence, it just happens to them, and often that violence makes things worse anyway. They stick to this to the point where it's fairly absurd, though I still appreciate it.

Like every game I play now, no matter how good it is, I kinda just wish it was more like Yakuza. Like every RPG talks about how many sidequests and stuff they have to do but they really just boil down to deciding how to do a violence. Yakuza earns so many points for building a world that's great for punching but also for like, baseball or arcade games or what have you.

Anyway games good. Happy Friday