Recent reviews by BlueMaxima

The following are my negative points:

- Controller input is way too sensitive and it makes it hard to enter certain entries properly.
- The audio drama side of things is constantly interrupted - you press the button to play the line, only for it to be cut off when you swap files. This happens a lot.
- The endgame has a handful of entries that are a bit much for the difficulty curve - it took me a lot longer to hunt down the last 10 entries versus the first 40 (and I eventually gave up). It feels like some clues are a bit too out there.
- If you're going for just an ending as opposed to 100%, it's on the shorter side - I was there in four hours as seen above.
- The inciting bad guy for the whole story being "old rich dudes" is inherently boring. Heck, add "white" to that and you have the leftist trifecta of -isms.

With that said, I did otherwise enjoy TR-49 - the premise is fun, the files you're searching through tell an interesting interwoven story, there's plenty of little twists and turns and there are multiple endings to go for that all make sense in context (yes I did look them up). It's a good price for the experience you get.

So. You know the final Zero mission from San Andreas where you play an RC helicopter, fighting an air war while helping the vehicle on the ground to the other side? Imagine that, but more sim-lite, multiple vehicles, huge maps, multiplayer, nukes, and on and on. I just have fun trying to hold the fort in some of the smaller maps.

It's easy to crack wide open and definitely shows its age, but it's still an English Gundam Battle game and the port is good. Really hope Artdink get to make a new Gundam Battle one of these days.

I'd rate it somewhere between 6 and 7 out of 10. Good, not amazing.

Good parts:
-Snappy and straightforward. Guns and enemies have clear animations, menu is perfectly servicable, your goals are never not clear.
-The hoverboard and general agility you have are top notch, you'll never get tired of being able to ram someone, grind a wall and headshot two people as you do it.
-Steam Deck support is excellent. Outside of a few endgame challenges the game can hold a solid 40FPS on the non-OLED Deck, and the controller support gives you snap aim, but requires you to lead shots even when aimed in if the enemy is even slightly moving or if you want a headshot, keeping the game overall a challenge.
-Completionism is not cripplingly frustrating thanks to the radar showing the location of every collectible from the word go as long as you get close and the map listing every nearby collectible.
-Perks and hats are fun, although until you hit endgame as long as you're getting all the hats you find along the way you'll never not be able to equip every perk.
-Sometimes the logs are funny.

Bad parts:
-Repetitive. Scans are always "square arena with a little cover" and the rest are "kill a dozen-ish enemies to open the crate" without fail. Scan arenas are very similar to eachother, with most of the effort put into them nullified by the best strategy of "stay in the sky for maximum speed/bullet dodging ability", and this never changes. Compared to the dev's previous game, where encounters could be modified by enemy types or arena construction, it matters very little here. It doesn't help that towards the lava biome, scans are less prevalent and chest-opening exercises quadruple in count.
-Not much difference between enemy types until endgame, and pretty much everything loses to "rocket at feet or face", so there's no real difference between a grunt on foot, a grunt on foot with armor, a grunt on foot with a shield, and a big flying ship - the most interesting thought I had was "I need to put away the RPG for a bit, I'm low on rockets and that mech will respawn in 10-ish seconds".
-Bosses are all garbage - big moving thing with a bunch of turrets and weak spots to hit. Weakest area of the game by far and barely a challenge if you know what you're doing.
-The more interesting challenges and perks are unlocked after the final boss, making a fair few perks irrelevant (why do I have to beat the entire game to go for an 'only headshots' run).
-Jank sometimes (two crashes, a bunch of sinking into the floor or getting stuck in tiny parts of terrain, the ability to "flip" just confuses you on controller).

As I said, good, not amazing.

I've been playing Gundam Breaker since the original Vita release. I have two end-game level playthroughs of Gundam Breaker 1, 2 and 3 each. We ignore New Gundam Breaker in this house. I even played Gundam Breaker Mobile for a while. Long story short, I know what I'm talking about.

Gundam Breaker 4 is the middest of mid. It doesn't dip to New Gundam Breaker's level, but it doesn't rise above Gundam Breaker 2, let alone 1 or 3. Long story short, I think it was developed in a real hurry after the shutdown of Gundam Breaker Mobile.

There are some positives. It looks good, the diorama feature is great, how much you can customise everything cannot be understated. This was also the set of positives attributed to New Gundam Breaker. As per that game, if you can secure a 100% save file, there's tons of enjoyment to be had in building and posing Gunpla, if you're into that sort of thing.

The problem is that the gameplay just isn't really there, in a variety of spots. The game holds up for a few hours, there's a bunch of nostalgia drops during the main plot calling back to the previous Gundam Breakers, and it all seems it's going to be fine. Then the cracks start to show...

-Enemies never get more aggressive beyond the first mission. Mostly they just stand around and sometimes, rarely, once in a blue moon, take a swing. The semibosses and big bosses are more aggressive, but predictable, and easy to beat (it's much, MUCH too easy to get a semiboss into a permanent stunlock that other semibosses can't interrupt, and big bosses usually have somewhere on their body you can hover around and swing away at their healthbars). The only difficulty comes from how hard they hit; once you max out your HP at the 1.08 million mark (which is so easy to do - elaboration later), you'll never be threatened again even in Newtype difficulty.

-Instead of Gundam Breaker 3's difficulty system where you unlock Extreme and Newtype at the end of their previous difficulties, you unlock both by the end of your first run. You also unlock the level cap at the end of your first campaign run, so you can make max level, max rarity parts as soon as that final mission is over, and they give you all the materials you need to do that by finishing a single mission. As a result, your endgame progression goes like this:

* Finish final mission.
* Level up weapons to 50/max rarity (takes approx 2 missions).
* Play a couple of Newtype missions.
* Level up the rest of your gear.
* You are now unstoppable.

There is no such thing as a Gundam Breaker 4 endgame.

-Abilities, which Gundam Breaker 3 put such a heavy emphasis on with part fusing, are a lot more streamlined, and entirely for the worse. A bunch of them are always must haves (everything that gives you HP) while others are worthless (OP equipment is so weak that I can't imagine it being better than just swinging weapons, so why would I bother taking the abilities). There's also much fewer of them, some they don't bother explaining (what the hell is Hate) and they even went to the incredibly annoying distance of having some abilities be specific to the hand you wield them in (so you have different abilities for damage increases for Left Hand Twinblade and Right Hand Twinblade). Combine this with the UI that makes it very difficult to tell what you're doing, and your entire process for merging abilities is "select every part you have, also have fun because we prompt you about high rarity parts every time, throw them all into one part and go with the abilities you want" instead of having to make hard choices about what way you want your build to go. It commits the cardinal sin of being BORING. You also can't merge top rarity parts, so if you want to swap your look while keeping your parts, tough. I thought there may have been some relief when they unlocked Ability Cartridges, which is a throwback to Gundam Breaker 1, but again, find two that increase your HP by 400% total and you'll be fine for the entire rest of the game.

-And finally, the missions. Story and Quest Missions play exactly the same way, every single time - big open area, one-three waves. Big open area, one-three waves. Boss or slightly - SLIGHTY - different take at the end. No paths to travel down, no choices along the way. I didn't think this would end up mattering as much as it did, but man does it grate after a while. Bounty Hunter is as boring as it's ever been because of the braindead AI. And Survival? The biggest slog imaginable. Over an hour of the same crap - endless waves of identically behaving enemies. I suspect that they really want to push the whole 'time attack' aspect with needing to get S Ranks on both Breaks and Time, but by the time I was at endgame I was S Ranking everything that I tried with no real effort.

There's just nothing here, gameplay wise. The simple level design, lack of abilities, completely braindead AI even in comparison to the previous games, it all reeks of being made in a hurry without respecting what made the previous games great - they have the callbacks, but not the soul. Either that, or they just don't have what it takes to get the balance right. I don't hate Gundam Breaker 4, but I find myself thinking I'd rather be playing the original trilogy instead.

It's just not worth the time.

Didn't like LAD, didn't like Infinite Wealth. There are SOME improvements, but not many, and parts of the game actually got worse, somehow. Assorted list of points below. The entire game comes off as half-finished, for so many reasons.

-Combat is slightly improved by being able to move around a bit and classes being slightly more incentivized, but the battle system is still boring, AOE attacks are still king if you can aim them right, there's very little variation from battle to battle with maybe two story fights changing it up, if only slightly, and the only character I liked having any control over was Kiryu. Perfect Guard seems a bit off in this one too, if your controller or monitor has any level of input lag you're gonna have a bad time.

-Hawaii is at least a better region than Ijincho was, but the segways they give you to get around it are useless since they don't let you pick up items, say hello to people or otherwise interact with the environment, but it'll be more than happy to steer you right into a fight with people if you use the auto-guide. Go on foot or use the taxis.

-Sujimon battles are braindead, just like the big financial minigame in the last game. I'm a fan of the idea of making gacha-like games akin to mobiles if they're done right, but even if you don't use the preorder bonuses (which give you absolutely huge advantages) there's nothing stopping you from getting through them with the slightest of effort. Have your fastest, highest rarity guys at the front with a decent spread, make sure the levels match, and you'll be fine.

-Dondoko Island is just grind, grind, grind, with no real thought behind it; buy ads, plop down the biggest buildings you can as you go, and you'll get there eventually with a few hours of grind. The monetary rewards you bring back can shortcut a bunch of the game, but there's no reason to go back as the rate you earn money is so bad that you never want to unless you spend hours building up your island more.

-Minigames are a real mixed bag. They bought back two of the worst ones (Can Quest and the Vocational School) but added a couple of neat new ones that I actually enjoyed (the Crazy Delivery game and photo taking one). All the other ones are the same as they always are, and the arcade games, as far as I can tell, haven't worked since day one and still don't, on both my main Windows PC and Steam Deck.

-They did the substories wrong again by making over half of them required during the story (as in, it is literally impossible to not clear them while you're playing) in order to introduce other mechanics. They also did something really odd by having your party members simply not show up in them. In the first half of the game, when you still have Kiryu with you, it just doesn't track.

-Aloha Links are braindead, just press X to win or give item to win, there's nothing to them and I find them a waste of time and space.

-The story is padded the worst out of the entire series and they could've cut 20-something hours off the game and it would've been fine. Have the substories that introduce new mechanics be optional, cut out all of the early running around the story makes you do (seriously, there's 2-3 chapters of "do they have the macguffin, no, do THEY have the macguffin, no, do THEY have the-") and you would have a much tighter package.

-Now that you're beyond the read more fold, story spoilers - I'm really not happy with what they did with Kiryu in this one. At first I thought they had restraint; in the first few of Kiryu's chapters you don't need to go to Kamurocho, it's just there, but they force you there for all of 20 minutes at three points in the story and it would've been way more impactful if you never needed to actually go there, but when you do you get the battle music remixed from Yakuza 1, the recollections and all.

-Then they have the new Life Links, great little cutaway parts where Kiryu hangs out near his former buddies and manages to resist saying hello to them, including Haruka right at the end. I enjoyed them a lot, and it felt much more subtle and restrained compared to just letting Kiryu meet back up with most of his buddies. But in the very last seconds of the story they let Haruka and him meet up and let go of all restraint. It would've been so much better if they'd held back, but this is just them finally giving up on pretending they want Yakuza 6 to exist by retconning his sacrifice in 7 and then finishing the job here - all the nostalgia bait with Daigo/Majima/Saejima and the memories in Kamurocho don't make up for this.

-They actually went to the effort of warning you about how high of a level you would need to be at every point in the game, which would be a positive EXCEPT THEY DON'T WARN YOU BEFORE THE FINAL DUNGEON. You go through an hour plus of fights (with some genuinely annoying boss fights inbetween) with enemies that are roughly in the high-40 range (which is about where you'll be if you have been keeping up with the game) and it's doable, but the final boss is level 52, has single attacks that can wipe out over half the health of your entire party, and is basically impossible if you're anything below level 50 once you hit the second half of the fight, even if you did what I did and bought the best gear and upgraded your weapons a ton right before the final dungeon.

I wasn't going to rewind, do two hours of grinding, then go through the entire endgame dungeon again just to watch the final cutscene (which if YouTube is to be believed, is shorter than the final boss fight). Not after 55+ hours of what feels like the most bloated and half-baked game in the series so far.

There's so many little things that make the game feel like it wasn't remotely thought out too, like how characters will make a dramatic exit in a cutscene, only to run back to the party right after, or how needing to retry by spending money means you're not incentivized to use Poundmates again because you don't get that back unlike items. These things all pile up over 55 hours and just make the entire exercise not worth it.

I don't know what happened to this series post-6 but I don't enjoy it in the slightest anymore. I was hoping after the absolutely insane review scores (does anyone in the games journalism business have eyes or any amount of taste to point out ANY of these issues anymore) that it might be better but, nope, same old crap that 7 did. If they ever put out Kenzan or Dead Souls ports I'll buy them, but I think at this point I'm tapping out.

Also, that subtitle choice was horrible, it doesn't play into the narrative anywhere near as much as you think it would, and it makes me worried about the future of the localization of the series if they're pulling this kind of thing. A better subtitle would've been "Legacy of the Yakuza" or something along those lines.

Welcome to the West, Super Robot Wars. Nice to have you here.

This is a great first SRW game to play. It emphasises the inter-franchise interactions, overwhelming unit flexibility, great strategic gameplay and gorgeous animations all in just the right ways, and for a price that doesn't break the bank, while still at least having one music track for each franchise to add that little extra authenticity.

I really hope this brings more SRW games West. I really want to see X, V and T available on Steam here, but I'd also love to see Z finally get localized. That would be the holy grail. You might think that's not possible, but, man, we went from V being localized 5 years ago to 30 coming out worldwide on Steam. Anything's possible now.

It's broken.

* The mouse cursor goes invisible at random times, good luck navigating any menus.
* There's very little in the way of settings, not even fullscreen / windowed.
* The title screen looks like it was thrown together out of random Unity assets.
* One video in particular has the slogan "Hot Tacos" painted over the top digitally with "Combat" for no discernible reason and it looks terrible.
* Worst of all, there's an unkillable enemy in the first act. Texas Feed something or other, woman with a red shirt and cowboy hat, bottom right corner of the scene. No matter how many times you click her, she doesn't die. There are multiple enemies that seem to have problems with collision boxes, but this one is just borked.

I'm a huge fan of the Yakuza series. I own every game on the PS3, PS4, and Steam, including the duplicates. I've played through most of them (some I've had issues with like my PS3 breaking halfway through 5 and accidentally losing my save in 0 on PS4). And even after having put 40 hours into the game, out of loyalty to the series, Like a Dragon manages to be the worst in the series by a decent margin, to the point where I don't understand where most of the praise is coming from. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's new to the series despite that being the marketing angle they're pushing, mainly because of how it doesn't do the Yakuza formula well, and all the brawlers are steps above.

The main problem is the battle system, which is legitimately infuriating, for several reasons. Outside of the Jobs system which is very simple, the majority of it feels like a bare-bones RPG, with nothing special going for it. No neat mechanics, no justification of the idea of Heat (which doesn't technically exist in this game) outside of Kasuga's imagination. There's a bond system with your teammates, but all it does is unlock jobs, and the default jobs are usually enough to get you through fine (and are more unique to each character's personality, which is why it feels weird to switch it out). There's also personality that you increase Persona-style, but it doesn't come in much use outside of certain abilities being more likely to work.

The thing about Yakuza is that it's about people beating the snot out of eachother, and that's where the real problems lie. It's a turn-based battle system now, but it tries to retain the Yakuza feel, but honestly, it just doesn't work. The problems are tenfold. Characters move around at random and you have no control over yours or theirs, meaning that you'll often get stuck in certain positions like having characters need to run fifty feet to attack someone, only to run away another fifty feet and lose you an opportunity to attack a guy while he's down for bonus damage. Don't even get me started on how this ♥♥♥♥♥ over area-of-effect abilities. In the time it takes for you to pick an ability and use it, the enemies that you *thought* you could hit will drift far enough apart that your AOE attack will only hit one dude. The game is more than happy to ♥♥♥♥ you over though; it can and will teleport your dudes in range of boss AOE attacks, while not giving you the same option. It's insane that anyone thought this was a good idea and thoroughly infuriating to deal with.

This isn't even getting into things like how, since you can only do attacks in a straight line, your idiot characters can't figure out how to go around a guy to avoid being blocked, or how you COULD pick up items in the field and swing them at enemies, but of course if the enemy moves to just a little bit out of the way you can't do that because you can only run in a straight line, or how you can get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by the physics acting up - my favorite of this was how I hit a guy, who went flying, hit one of my teammates, who went tumbling into the road, got hit by a car, and got knocked out.

It doesn't help that battles take an absolute age now. Yakuza's previous games weren't great about this, but it was still manageable in that you could beat most groups in ten seconds or so and just move on, and you could easily avoid every fight on the way somewhere. In Like a Dragon, the enemy spawn rate, density and just general tendency to block literally every path is way, way too high to be reasonable. They can see across an entire street with no wiggle room, they will see you as soon as you get close with no just walking by, and as soon as the fight is done, there'll be another group spawned within twenty paces in the direction you need to go, guaranteed. You'll end up desperately trying to get across the city on foot in the early game where you have no money to spare, only to be blocked by four or five sets of dudes on two streets. And battles can take anywhere upwards of two minutes to finish now, meaning I would usually just put down the controller and have the game on Auto. (I'll also point out that Auto has a few advantages over manual play, one big one being that your dudes can't get blocked trying to attack someone, which just makes me even madder at how positioning works).

The Heat system has also been replaced by more over the top abilities, which are nowhere near as satisfying as they used to be because they aren't as in-the-moment as the old abilities. They're also ridiculously long (an old JRPG trope I wish they'd done away with). They have also introduced Poundmates, a pay-money-to-have-a-guy-wreck-their-♥♥♥♥ system, but I was so short on cash when they introduced it I just filed it away in the never-to-be-used pile of JRPG items you always build up. You do have the ability to guard against attacks but even at my low level I never felt the need to use it. The game is also missing a lot of the over-the-top action that would happen in mid-fight, like the quick time events, the special moments of silliness that would happen like jumping from building to building or what have you, and it feels like it's missing when they only bring them in for the first and last battles in the game.

Speaking of low level, there's now gear walls in this game. But the worst part is that they're incredibly inconsistent. There's a part early on where a yakuza captain takes you to meet his boss, but he warns you that his boss is going to be annoyed that you're not geared up. Once you are, he tries to kill you anyway. It doesn't make any sense in the story that he'd let you gear up before that. It's nuts. And it's the only time that happens; there are plenty of "are you sure you want to continue" prompts, but some of them hide massive bosses who are thoroughly above you in levels, meaning you have to go back and grind out more levels, something you could, at least, avoid in the Yakuza games thanks to health potions and properly balanced difficulty. In this game, if something is ten levels above you, you're probably gonna die faster than you can heal, and it's probably gonna be dropped on you out of nowhere, and it makes me miss how streamlined the older games felt, where you could power up if you wanted to, or just see the story for what it was without it.

As a result of all of the above, the combat is a massive bore, infuriating on occasion, and too grind heavy to be really enjoyable. It makes me pine for the old systems so much because it just doesn't seem very well thought through. I was eventually just spamming "hits everyone, no questions asked" abilities and refilling my mana after every fight because it was just the most efficient option I had available to me, and trying anything else would be too inconsistent and unfair to me as a player to try. It's the main reason why I'm not going to even consider coming back to this game in my eventual replay of the entire series, but it's not the only reason.

(review continued in comments)