Gallery: Skyrim (VR)

 

Now Playing: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Like the other Yakuza games I’ve played, Like a Dragon gets off to a very slow start. But I’d say LaD is by far the slowest. It’s painfully slow. It wasn’t until I’d played 10 or so hours that I felt like the game was finally opening up and letting me loose, and it probably took another 10 before the remainder of the side content became available. Be warned: Like a Dragon isn’t a bad game but I’m probably going to spend most of this review complaining about it.

Taking a break from Kazuma Kiryu, LaD focuses on the likeable Ichiban Kasuga. It’s Ichiban and his friends that are the highlight of LaD – their relationships, interactions and little conversations as you traverse the city. The story may be slow paced and predictable but it’s enjoyable enough to see you through to the end.

The big change in LaD is the combat, with a new turn based party system. I’ll talk a lot more about the combat later but for now, let’s focus on the more familiar elements of a Yakuza game. The optional sub-stories are largely lacklustre and forgettable but there are a few good ones sprinkled throughout.

The main mini-game is Dragon Kart racing which could have been pretty fun if it wasn’t so damn easy – I won every race with ease just using the default kart. The only race I lost and that required a kart upgrade was the very last ‘boss’ race. Even then, I cleared it on the second try. Mechanically, it’s not a bad game within a game, but it’s just so easy that it’s also incredibly dull.

 

And that criticism also applies to the business management in LaD. The idea is that you buy and invest in various businesses, assigning staff and increasing your profits to raise your share ranking. The problem is, it’s a very passive system. ‘Opening for business’ just means it’s time to hold down the right trigger to speed through your earnings. You don’t actually interact in any way with your customers or employees.

Every four turns you have to attend a meeting to win the support of your shareholders and push your company higher up the rankings. This is the only real ‘gameplay’ part of the management experience and it’s basically just a colour coded game of rock, paper, scissors. You don’t keep any profits from your business to spend in the world, only the ‘bonus’ you get from each meeting which, even when you’re Rank 1, still only amounts to 3 million yen when your company may have 10 billion in the bank.

In short, business management isn’t hard at all – like Dragon Kart it’s just a tedious grind to the finish line. There’s no real need for strategy, skill or planning. It doesn’t really matter how much money you make or what kind of employees you hire and assign. All you need to do is grind through each sales turn and then ‘win’ the meeting to progress.

Speaking of grind, let’s talk about the level and class system. Every character has a base level and a separate job (class) level. Their base level determines what character skills they have access to, and their job level determines what class skills they can use. The job system is very flexible – every character can switch between multiple job types whenever you please giving you a massive range of ways to build your party.

The problem is, levelling up jobs takes f**king forever which rather discourages you from switching. You’re better off finding a job you like for each character and sticking with it to the end. Even then, you might not hit their max job level by the end of the game. Even using in-game xp boosters, it’s a real grind to level up your character classes.

But the more you do level up, the more messy your list of skills become. Because LaD doesn’t replace or remove redundant skills, every attack turn you’ll be scrolling through an extensive list of largely useless abilities. Ichiban, for example, will learn an AoE bat swing when playing as the Hero class. And as you level up, you’ll learn more powerful variations of this skill. But the game doesn’t remove the old ones.

I guess you could argue that it’s not a big deal, that you can just ignore them and that actually, there may be times when you want to use the weaker variation with the lower MP cost. But this feeds into the other major problem with LaD – each character has way too many skills.

Actually – scratch that – it’s not really the number of skills that’s the issue, but how obtuse the turn based combat system is in relation to these skills. LaD features a variety of attack types – blunt, sharp, elemental (fire, water, electrical) and status effects such as bleeding, poison, stun, sleep and silence. And many of these skills are categorised by damage – Light, Medium, Heavy and Extreme.

But even after completing LaD I’m still not sure why I should pick one particular skill over another in a fight. Some enemies do have a marked ‘weakness’ to particular damage, but the majority either don’t, or the attacks that they are supposed to be weak to don’t seem to do any more damage to them than those that they aren’t.

In fact, sometimes a ‘Light’ attack does more damage than a ‘Heavy’ but there’s no real logical reason why. And this connects to the issue of each character having too many skills – you have this big list of potential attacks, but you don’t have any real indication as to why you should choose one skill over another. You can never predict what kind of damage you’re going to do so you end up just picking and choosing skills at random until you find the few that are the most regularly successful.

The combat system in LaD isn’t very good. It’s bloated with useless skills and relies heavily on damage sponge boss fights which – like Dragon Kart and the business management – aren’t hard to beat, but are a tedious grind to get through. Seriously, there’s a couple of boss fights in this game where the boss is resistant to pretty much every attack type so you just have to slowly whittle down their health over 20 minutes or so. It’s boring as f**k.

Oh, and then there’s the penultimate boss fight in which your opponent can one shot Ichiban forcing you to restart from scratch. There is a skill that allows Ichiban to survive a ‘one shot’ attack, but it only works once and this boss can queue up 2-3 attacks in a row. If you’re unlucky, he’ll target Ichiban more than once and there’s f**k all you can do about it.

Although battles are turn based, enemies can and do move about as you select your next attack. This means that the timing of various AoE skills is vital to maximise damage. Unfortunately, your characters often get stuck on scenery as they move to attack, causing a small but significant delay which frequently renders your attack completely worthless.

And although the game has a wide range of elemental attacks and character debuffs, the majority of them rarely come into play due to enemy resistances. Bleed and poison are the most useful against certain boss characters – if you can get them them to stick. Charm and stun are the most useful against groups. But lower evasion or accuracy? It seems like a waste of MP. Silence might be great . . . if I could ever get it to work. And with no indication of how long a debuff may last you can’t really be sure how valuable they’ll be or when to line up another attack to reapply.

I don’t think switching to a turn based combat system was a bad move for LaD, but switching to a bad turn based combat system was. Okay, to be fair, the combat in LaD does have its moments. The classes are all fun with lots of themed special attacks. The ‘poundmates’ system is kind of useless but it’s always fun to attack people with a lobster.

It’s kind of frustrating because if the damage and skills system wasn’t so bloody obtuse and if the enemies – and the bosses in particular – were better designed, it would actually be really good. But it’s not. It’s only ‘okay’ at the best of times, mediocre at the most, and just plain bad on more occasions than I’d like. I don’t hate it. It didn’t piss me off. I just think it could have been a lot better.

Okay, I guess I should wrap this up. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is easily the weakest of the Yakuza games I’ve played. As much as I like Ichiban, the story isn’t that great, the side content is fairly lacklustre and the combat is poorly designed. I wouldn’t say any of it is bad as such. Just mediocre, disappointing and forgettable.

5/10

Now Watching: Wonder Woman 1984

I’d heard Wonder Woman 1984 was bad, but not this bad. I’d say it’s almost as terrible as the theatrical release of The Justice League. What the hell happened? The first Wonder Woman movie was pretty decent. It lost its way towards the end which kind of spoiled everything a bit but, overall, I still liked the film. But this? This is a complete mess from start to finish.

The first hour is mostly dull and meandering, but the second is when the film really goes off the rails. Gal Gadot, who I still really like in the role, looks more and more confused as the film goes on, as if even she has no clue what the f**k is happening. And Chris Pine, returning as Steve Trevor in the most pointlessly weird and creepy way possible? He just looks permanently baffled. Pedro Pascal is clearly enjoying himself though, hamming it up as Max Lord. He’s having a great time. At least someone is, I suppose.

You can pinpoint exactly when the film completely loses its way and that’s when Diana and Steve travel to Egypt. It’s like, an hour or so in, someone suddenly realised there hadn’t been any action scenes since the opening of the film so we get what may be the laziest and most stupid set up to an action scene I’ve seen in a long time.

Diana and Steve travel to Egypt to find and stop Max Lord. Apparently there’s only a single road in all of Egypt and Diana and Steve just so happen to pass by Max as he’s travelling in the opposite direction with his newly acquired convoy of soldiers. Diana just looks out the window as the cars go by and is like ‘look, there he is!’

They quickly turn their car around to pursue Max who, despite not knowing who the f**k they are or what they could possibly want, orders his soldiers to murder them in what then becomes an absolutely awful and poorly executed action scene that leads to one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments when Diana has to rescue some dumb, seemingly blind children playing football in the middle of the road in the middle of the f**king desert.

Children that magically transform into dummies when the stunt double hits the ground, the poor child dummies slamming against the road and bouncing away. It’s not meant to be funny though. How did something that looked so terrible end up in the final film? Was Patty Jenkins drunk in the editing suite?

It’s just so totally confusing as to how this film got made. Did nobody read the script prior to shooting? When there’s so much money and talent invested in a project, did nobody stop and look at what was planned and say ‘hey, this is f**king terrible what the f**k are we thinking?’

Some of the scenes in this film are so bad that it boggles my mind. When you consider the entire process of setting up these scenes from the script to the actors, extras, location shooting, stunts and effects, it amazes me that some of these scenes exist. They feel like they were shot on a whim without any thought put into them. But that’s not the case at all. People did think about them a lot. A lot of work went into them. But did nobody notice how terrible they were?

It’s not as if it’s a single scene or two. Everything is wrong. And I haven’t even talked about Cheetah or how ridiculous that character is yet. In fact, I don’t think I’ll bother. This review is long enough as it is. And what about Steve? If he’s going to return, just have him return at the expense of Diana’s powers. That’s the ‘cost’ right? But for some reason he also has to possess an actual dude? Okay . . . but if you’re going to do that then maybe Diana and Steve should be a little conflicted about essentially stealing another person’s life?

But they’re kind of not and treat the whole thing as a joke? What? I kept waiting for the dude’s wife to walk in and accuse Steve (but not Steve) of cheating. It’s another bizarre choice that’s poorly handled in a film full of bizarre choices. The whole film has a Saturday morning cartoon vibe to it – but not a good Saturday morning cartoon. One of the really bad ones.

I could keep going and break down in excruciating detail just how bad this film is and how it gets nearly everything wrong. But I think I’ve ranted long enough. Wonder Woman deserves better than this crap.

4/10

Now Playing: Skyrim (VR)

Skyrim VR is terrible and you shouldn’t buy it. Even if it was given away for free I’d still not recommend it. Skyrim was never designed for VR but that doesn’t excuse this incredibly lazy and poor excuse for a VR port. Practically nothing was done to make Skyrim VR an enjoyable VR experience. I picked up the game in a sale and I refunded it within an hour.

The controls barely functioned. My character height continually reset when loading into new areas. The visuals were a blurry, headache inducing mess. The fact they had the audacity to charge 40 quid for this garbage is practically criminal.

So . . . I bought it again. I just couldn’t help myself. I do like a challenge and what better challenge than using mods to transform Skyrim VR into something actually playable and enjoyable? At the time of this review I have 60 active mods running and I’d say that’s roughly the minimum you need if you want to turn Skyrim VR into something worth playing.

Skyrim VR is only worth playing if A) you’re already a fan of the game and are aware of its many issues, quirks and bugs and B) if you’re willing to spend a good few hours tweaking configuration files and installing and testing a variety of mods. Even then, there are going to be aspects of Skyrim VR that you can’t really ‘fix’ and all the existing Skyrim issues still remain.

Because Skyrim VR is still Skyrim. Get ready for broken quests you need to use the in-game console to work around. A lacklustre plot and disappointing guild missions. Invisible dragon attacks. Terrible NPC AI. Shoddy combat – which is even worse in VR.

But I still love exploring the world, building my character and hoarding a massive pile of gold bars in the basement of my modded home. I sunk 600 hours into (modded) Skyrim despite all its flaws. I don’t see myself putting quite so much time into this VR version, but I’ve already clocked over 50 hours and I expect I’ll hit 100 before I’m done with it.

Seeing all of these locations and characters I’m already so familiar with in VR has been pretty great, I must admit. But that’s only thanks to the mods. Now this review isn’t intended to be a modding guide – there’s plenty of good guides already out there. I’ll just give a general outline of the kind of things you want to do.

To begin, install the game and run it at least once to generate the configuration files you’ll need to start tweaking. Once that’s done, get yourself the Vortex mod manager from Nexus Mods. It seriously makes modding so much easier than in the past. Almost too easy, I’d say – f**king kids these days, don’t know how good they got it.

Configuration edits come next, which you can do manually or use a tool and there’s various guides online as to what kind of values you might want / need to change. Next up is what I’d term ‘utility’ mods – these are mods that provide the framework for other mods to function such as SKSE (VR version) and SKY UI. You’ll also want the Unofficial Skyrim Patch. It doesn’t fix everything, but it fixes a lot.

VR specific mods that are a must would be HIGGS and VRIK – these radically transform how you play and interact with the world in Skyrim VR. When it comes to visual overhauls there’s plenty to pick from but I’d always recommend SMIM to be used in conjunction with whatever you pick – just be sure to check for file conflicts and set the load order accordingly.

In fact, you should always be sure to check mod compatibility / requirements before installing anything. World overhauls, character overhauls and weather improvements will all drag Skyrim VR to a visual level that, whilst not exactly cutting edge, still looks significantly better than the vanilla experience.

Beyond this, it’s really a matter of personal choice and that’s why I’m not going to give Skyrim VR any kind of score. How could I? Once you mod the game to your own preference your experience and enjoyment may vary wildly from mine. I feel like I’ve got Skyrim VR in a pretty good place, but I’m sure I’ll keep experimenting with different mods to see if I can improve things further.

If you already like Skyrim and you’re willing to put in the time and effort to mod this VR version then you’ll likely end up with a game you’ll sink a lot of time into and enjoy quite a bit. But it is still Skyrim – warts and all – and as novel as it is seeing everything again in VR, no amount of mods will change that.