Last Hurrah for Chivalry

Yakuza Zero is really impressive, I can't remember any recent prequel game that is this good. I think Studio RGG is simply incapable of making a bad Yakuza game.

Each time a major female character is introduced in these games, something magical happens for the series.
These stories usually revolves around honour and loyalty but having a female character brings some good old chivalry and romance plot into the mixture. It's no coincidence that Yakuza 2 and 4 are the best games in the series.

I was very happy that Kiryu is back as the main lead character when studio RGG decided to cut back on the number of playable characters.I was a little skeptic about having Majima drive the story of the game because his character is used quite sparingly in the older games. Overexposing him in this game could potentially diminishes the greatness of the Majima character. Thankfully I was wrong and I could definitely see Majima heading future Yakuza games all by himself.

There is a real sense of threat and urgency in this game, the story is a lot darker than the recent games. Studio RGG has a habit of saving lame characters from dying so they could use them again in future games. Maybe because of the prequel nature, a lot of characters die in this game and these are very good characters.

Finally we get to switch the fighting styles of the characters which I have been longing for since the PSP spin-off games. Changing the fighting styles on the fly makes the whole gameplay feels fresh again. Some say the series is suffering from fatigue but I feel it's been re-invigorated by this game.

Thanks to Salty Yen for his video translations. It's nice to play the games alongside with him and I don't think I could enjoy the game this much without him.

Zombie On The Go

Mercenaries 3D gathered quite a bad rap upon release that people barely remember anything else about this game. Bad enough that Capcom decided to charge for what used to be a free mini-game but then they went ahead and locked the save file too. Preventing owners from re-selling the 3DS game which Capcom later acknowledged was a bad move and left Revelations alone.

I purchased the digital copy of this game when it was on sale during Halloween. I wasn't really planning on getting it so I never made any attempt to look for the retail copy. This Mercenaries is more of a greatest hits compilation of all the stages and characters from RE 4 and RE 5. There is barely any new content until very late into the game where you get some nice new stages. 

On the surface, the game looks better than Revelations because of all the re-used assets from old RE games. However play it long enough and you will realise this is certainly not the case. A lot of the character animations have been simplified which becomes apparent when you perform melee attacks. The reused stages are also cut down in size compared with the original. At least the game performance is pretty steady even with the 3D effects on, thanks to all these graphical shortcuts.

As much as I hated RE6, I still had a pretty good time with the game's Mercenaries Mode. Of course, Capcom decided to ruin a good thing by making most of those stages DLC. This prevents most gamers from enjoying the complete Mercenaries Mode on RE6 which is a shame. Looking at the current state, the Mercenaries 3D is still the only way to enjoy the mini-game on the go. Maybe it's not too absurd now to think why Capcom would charge money for this game after all.