Neue Rezensionen von Hourai

After 120 hours I finally finished the game. Is the game worth the price? Yeah. Is the gameplay good? Absolutely. The story? Not so much.

The story falls apart near the end of the game, without getting into spoilers, why is the villain for Ichiban called a "monster" by others? It's not like he has some superhuman power, it's never explained. Aside from he's apparently in his 90s.

There is basically no closure on ANY characters, there is no character development for Ichiban, the forced romance between him and Saeko is so awkward and they have no chemistry, none of the villains except for one had their "endings" I mean we know they probably all went to jail, but we don't know what actually happened, seriously?

I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of Ichiban, I don't like the "hero beat the big bad with the power of friendship" trope and unfortunately this is the main theme of Ichiban, I actually didn't mind him in Y7 but in Y8 he's unbearably naive & stupid.

Kiryu's ending is worse imo, the Daidojo situation is not explained, and it's very obvious that they wrote this game's story before Gaiden because this game picks up none of the plot from Gaiden, I don't want to get into spoilers but in Gaiden, Daidoji is this all-knowing shadow cabal that's controlling Japan in secret, and in Y8 they can't afford to do a background check on people in one of their safe house?

That one minor antagonist actually feels so much more evil than the main and second antagonist because the screen time he had, and it actually pisses me off how Ichiban treated him, this man literally kicked a girl on a wheelchair with a tear gas grenade on her lap down some stairs, and was mocking Ichiban non-stop, tried to kill your mother and is directly responsible for 2 characters' death, just because "yakuza ruined my life so I'm going to work with yakuza to ruin your life", this guy is a literal psychopath and never showed any remorse until he got a taste of his own medicine, and Ichiban is like "I can fix him"? He wasn't Ichiban's friend for a even second, he was pretending from the start, this "everyone deserves a second chance" ideology doesn't work in yakuza universe considering the amount of cartoonish evil villain we have seen so far, we already have a "redeemable unredeemable villain" and it's called Masato, it worked in Y7 because he actually shared a bond with Ichiban, they grew up together and were basically brothers, his "I love you" speech were so much more powerful, in Y8 Ichiban spend one night with this dude and can already die for him, what? I know the writer want to draw a parallel to Y7's ending but honestly it pales compare to what we got in Y7.

Also did they invent portals or something? Ichiban spend 24 hours traveling from Japan to Hawaii, ride a tugboat to a random island in the middle of the ocean, fight a cult, fight final boss, comes back to Hawaii from island, and return to Japan, meanwhile Kiryu spend half a day doing nothing, ride a car from Ijincho to Kamurocho (around 50 minutes in real life), climb the Millennium Tower, fight Yakuza, fight final boss, dying on a roof top until morning(???), also there were at least 2 people in critical condition and they only showed saving Kiryu, which is funny to me

The game is missing a lot of basic features atm, for starters, you can't even DROP items from your inventory, like how is this not in the game? You also can't craft from a chest, you need to grab items needed to craft from your chests manually, inventory management is one of the worst aspect in survival games imo. Edit: You can craft Magic Chests after unlocking the Carpenter NPC, which lets you craft from chests directly, tho I don't think this is a right call to have it locked behind progression. It's such a massive QoL feature, that I think should be in every survival game. Edit 2: They moved the Magic Chest Recipe unlock more early in progression.

The game is set in a single hand-crafted world, which heavily hurts the replayability of this game, I'm a huge advocate of procedural generated world for PVE focused games, I think having a hand-crafted world is cool and new-player friendly, it makes sure everyone has a similar experience and a balanced difficulty curve, but once you played the game for long enough and learned everything the world has to offer, you pretty much are left with nothing to do unlike a game with proc-gen world you can play it over and over again and still have the feeling of exploration (which is the main point of a RPG game, the feeling of have your own special adventure.
Also if you are playing in a dedicated server, or simply playing with friends, be cautious of making any progression ahead of others because everyone in the server is sharing the same progression, meaning if you finish a quest while the other people in the server are offline, they will skip it as they share the same progress as you, also there can only be one copy of each NPCs, so building multiple bases is unideal for group play unless you are okay with teleporting constantly just to craft something.

That being said, I won't refund the game because I believe in the future of the game, but in the current state I don't recommend getting it.

Already better than Pokemon

Relatable

Women fear me, fish want me

AI is just bad, shooting through walls and sometimes ignoring flashbangs/stinger-grenades, the missions are out of order, "Sins of the Father" mentions Brisa Cove being the mission you did "yesterday", but there are 6 other missions between them, you would think for a game that's supposed to be focusing on narrative these will be important.
Still can't rest your weapon, what's that sling for if you don't use them? Even CoD has quick swap, when my gun runs out mid-fight and I need to switch to a pistol, why would I slowly put my gun away and calmly pull out my pistol?
S tier is only achievable with less-than-lethal and 0 incapacitating/excessive force, which doesn't make any sense if there are active shooters or bomb threats.
Oh yeah, did I mention the game uses AI generated content A LOT? Like the poster from the second mission with double eyebrows, weird hospital concept art for the last mission, and even the subtitles are auto-generated, "Thread is down" "Requesting Thames" "M. George here"???? Did the dev even played their own game?

Don't buy it, at least not yet

I finally found out who was in Paris

I'm doing my part

> Talks to the only co-worker who's still alive through radio
> He returns to the ship
> "Um... Hourai there is a monster right behind you"
> Monster snaps my neck immediately
> The dead co-workers tell me the monster has been right behind me the entire time
10/10 would work again

Was actually expecting some QoL changes, for example free aim with mouse, or even just being able to attack diagonally while holding W/S+A/D, it feels bad getting killed by some random enemy one block below you. This is the main reason why RoR feels a lot more clumsier than RoR2 and why strafing feels bad imo, the platforming also doesn't feel that good, and I like 2D platformers.
So far if you liked the first game, you will like this game (duh, it's a remake), but if you came from the second game and was expecting RoR2 but 2D, this is not it.