What are you playing, stupid?

[Barry the Nomad]

Sonic Chronicles was fun until it went into space and you realize that you are doing the same thing on each planet and it becomes such a chore... I got bored and stopped playing. Sonic Battle is a better RPG-esque experience IMO.

[SOUP]

Hyperstone Heist and Ghostbusters are some of my favorite licensed Genesis games and were some of my earliest experiences with the console outside of Sonic. I'd also recommend Dick Tracy, which was made by the Shinobi team, and of course the Illusion games but those are obvious.

I'll see if I can track that one down too. I didn't realize it was actually developed by SEGA.

[max_cady]

As of right now... I'm done with most of my games thus far. Until I get Atlier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book for PS4, I've been playing One Piece PW 3, Heart & Slash, Dead or Alive 5 esporadically.
I've also finaly gone back to Final Fantasy VII, which I was stuck in one particular dungeon for weeks on end, to a point where I never got back to it.

[SOUP]

Finally getting back to Yakuza 5. I'm really enjoying it, but it's just so long, and a few games have side-tracked me this year.

[CrazyT]

I still haven't gone back to Yakuza 5 since finishing with the boring streak of characters after the awesome chapter with kazuma.. Hard to go back after such a long time too. I might in the near future I guess.

Playing final fantasy 9 right now. Honestly screw all of square's games after it. This game is everything I love about the franchise. It's the pc version so it fixes soem of the issues people had with the ps1 version IE loading times and slow battles.

[SOUP]

Just beat Yakuza 5 today.
It's honestly not as long as I thought. It looked like the average time to beat it online was around 60 hours, but I did it in about 36. Even without doing much of the extra stuff, that's still pretty long for a Yakuza game.

[CrazyT]

Thoughts on it?(compared to the other games)

[SOUP]

Thoughts on it?(compared to the other games)

As far as the variety of things you can do, and amount of content, it's the best of the bunch. You could get by playing this game exclusively for months.

For me though, it was a little too much. There were so many side-stories, and optional missions that it was a bit overwhelming. Each character's chapter almost felt like it's own game, so the whole thing didn't quite have the focus of the average Yakuza title.

One of the big things I like about the series, is that as far as RPGs go, they're pretty short (around 20hrs), have lots of action, and really well told stories.  The length of this one hurts the pacing quite a bit, so it doesn't quite have the flow that the other games do.
5 is really good, but I'd probably rank it behind 2, 4 and the first game story-wise.

Really excited for Zero though. It seems like it'll be a bit more focused with only 2 characters.

[Tad]

I finished it a while ago now, but reading this has reminded me I finished Yakuza 4.

Overall, I enjoyed it. The story is convoluted, but if you cut away a lot of the pointless stuff, it was decent enough. My only other complaint is the amount of switching around you do between characters that felt a bit annoying. It would tend to happen just as the story was getting good too.

Gameplay, characters and mechanics were all really good though and I'm hoping for a release on PC before jumping into the next game. The scattering of the series between consoles and DD only etc really hasn't helped the series.

[SOUP]

Just playing through GoldenEye Reloaded on the PS3.

This has got to be the sparsest fall release schedule I can remember. The upside is that I can make some serious progress on the backlog until Final Fantasy XV comes out.

[CrazyT]

As far as the variety of things you can do, and amount of content, it's the best of the bunch. You could get by playing this game exclusively for months.

For me though, it was a little too much. There were so many side-stories, and optional missions that it was a bit overwhelming. Each character's chapter almost felt like it's own game, so the whole thing didn't quite have the focus of the average Yakuza title.

One of the big things I like about the series, is that as far as RPGs go, they're pretty short (around 20hrs), have lots of action, and really well told stories.  The length of this one hurts the pacing quite a bit, so it doesn't quite have the flow that the other games do.
5 is really good, but I'd probably rank it behind 2, 4 and the first game story-wise.

Really excited for Zero though. It seems like it'll be a bit more focused with only 2 characters.

Same with me with the rankings. I'd probably go 2>1>4>5>3. For some reason the pacing of Y3 was very off for me untill the end I didn't feel like I really enjoyed it. I liked Y4 a lot tho

My problem with 5 is that it tries to put quantity of variety over solid core gameplay. I also didn't like the switching of characters; multiple characters is an issue when you have to reset each time.  Its not fun to start from scratch, weak and re level again and again 2 games straight

Some story bits also didn't sit well with me, at least so far tho. I found the ending of saejima's chapter in the fight against baba a bit of a strange ending. What baba did was kind of messed up imho and saejima keeps his cool and still see's the good in him? Anything is possible of course, but being able to do something deceitful like that while acting inoccent and being treated really well... it takes being kind of evil imo, and I couldn't really find it believable I guess.. Baba should have felt guilt a lot earlier if there was some good in him..

[Tad]

This has got to be the sparsest fall release schedule I can remember. The upside is that I can make some serious progress on the backlog until Final Fantasy XV comes out.

I'm afraid this how it will be now unless the entire industry changes. Creating games is incredibly tough and there's been more then a few people who leave the industry or the triple A sector because of it. People expect the quality to go up each generation, but it's just too much for the developers. There's been numerous reports of people having to do 80 hours a week on games...it must be soul destroying.

This is why the indie and AA scene has really become a huge thing now. Yes, it's incredibly tough for them too, but it's still better than triple A development.

[max_cady]

I finally reached the final boss in FFVII...Annd I almost wanted to throw my gamepad at the screen. Wow, hard bosses is one thing. But this final stage is particularly harsh (almost Final Fantasy IV hard) so I wasted a full hour on basically three huge boss fights for nothing. Guess I'm gonna have to level grind some moar...

[SOUP]

I finally reached the final boss in FFVII...Annd I almost wanted to throw my gamepad at the screen. Wow, hard bosses is one thing. But this final stage is particularly harsh (almost Final Fantasy IV hard) so I wasted a full hour on basically three huge boss fights for nothing. Guess I'm gonna have to level grind some moar...

I find that's the case with pretty much every Final Fantasy game. The whole game is pretty gradual, then there's this huge difficulty spike for the final boss.
FFVIII took me forever to beat. I had to just load a save before the final dungeon, and spam the draw system like crazy, then re-do the whole last disk.

I finished up GoldenEye (a bit uneven, but pretty fun), and I'm working on Driver: San Francisco.

[Tad]

FF7 is particularly harsh in that regard. It's seen by many as the best FF game, but I personally really liked FF8 more. 7 had a lot of style and some great characters, but I felt the story really slowed down in sections.