A good sign for Yakuza Kiwami.
Can't wait for it.
In other news:
-Finished Tales of Vesperia.
It's... fine. Looks great, sounds like shit (but Tales of music was always rubbish to begin with), the characters are great.
But the pacing is out of whack, the game is ridiculously long for little reason, and the last act is a sham. Not unlike other games in the franchise, it really comes out of their ass, contradicts the previous 40 hours and retroactively makes character development for Estelle veeery stupid. And the group doesn't seem to notice, because hey, we need more screen time apparently.
But the biggest issue is the combat, which just falls apart as soon as it's not optimal conditions: that is to say, 1v1, in an horizontal line, with a heavy emphasis on long combos. When you fight 9 ennemies all alone, it's a shitshow... but at least it's not hard.
When you reach bosses where their hitboxes are so tiny that their own body gets in the way of your hits but "obviously" aren't part of it? Yeah, that's plain crap.
The last boss is by far the worst fight in the game, because it also gets an extra random teleport! Nothing better in a combo based gameplay to just have the enemy blink away. Good design.
In general, the game is terribly balanced, fights are too easy and short in Normal mode for the player to use finishers, too long in hard mode not to. Except you only get finishers 15h in, so Hard mode is ideal for masochists.
And then it's not relevant anyway, since it doesn't work against bosses and fighting for 50min is not the most entertaining thing around. Especially not with the item spam common of the series at the time.
If you like a nice world to explore (with microscopic towns however), it's quite fun.
But honestly, just plowing through the game is Easy might be the better choice, at least you don't suffer the gameplay for too long. Too bad, because there's tons of crazy combos to pull, when you're allowed to.
Oh and if you like achievement, you'll need a guide guaranteed. It's physically impossible to do everything yourself, and even then, it's not even a certainty that something won't be stuck because you did something else too early or too late and you'll have to come back to see if it works or not now... but at the right moment, or else you are screwed for everything else anyway.
