Dislike a Dragon

Just finished a second glass of sparkling wine.

In the previous entry I mentioned I was playing trough Yakuza: Like a Dragon and was about to encounter a notorious difficulty spike of a boss fight. I fought, lost, grinded my way higher levels and more varied movesets, changed team setup, fought again and won (felt like the fight took a while). Felt obnoxious.

What I wasn't expecting was this process would be repeated in similar ways for every upcoming boss fight, with their own annoying quirks that made to tired of playing the game. It got to it's breaking point in the final chapter where you have to go trough a 30 minute long dungeon and a fight a boss with ridicolous amount of health (no save points during any of this) and, get this, the boss starts using an instant kill move after getting to half health, trough the rest of the fight. The only way to deal with it was to use the rather unreliable blocking mechanic. He first attacked Ichiban, the protagonist. I failed to block, and it killed him, causing the game to ask me if I wanted to redo the fight again.

I didn't want to do the fight again. I got so sick with this annoying nonsense, so I watched the rest of the finale on youtube. Did you know there are two more long fights right after the boss? And, again, no way to save? Yakuza games have always had this weird dichtonomy where they want to have big long epic finales in these adult-themed games, but they are usually tedious and the lack of respect they have for players time (especially this game) has always made the finales dreadful. Doesn't exactly help that they rarely had satisifying endings, wether it's the gameplay and/or story.

Thankfully ending is actually among the best in the franchise. It's just a shame it's locked behind a massive swamp of slog.

It's a shame that I'm finished with the game on such a sour note, because everything up until that initial difficulty spike has been pretty darn good: main story, cast, side-quest and all.

I had plans to play either Hollow Knight or the DMC trilogy collection, but after being frustrated by game mechanics so much I'm feeling a bit hesitant of risking having that happen again, so I might take a break from games for a little time. Doesn't help that I haven't done much else today so I feel the desire to get other stuff done.

Bit of a shame to start the first proper work-weekend on a sour note. Should figure out what to do with the rest of the day, of the few hours I have left before bedtime.