Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (Yakuza, Judgment, Binary Domain + more!) Discussion Thread

[HoboForEternity]

it's unpacking as i type

 

[LESS T_T]

It's very early but, just 77% positive? Ah, almost all negative reviews are Chinese and seemingly most of them are about the lack of Chinese localization (which existed in the console release it seems?)

 

[HoboForEternity]

Iirc the wholw series is subbed right? I wonder what do i miss by not knowing jaoanese >_>

Walking around the streets and there are so much random chatters

 

[HoboForEternity]

holy shit i enjoy this so fucking much. it's janky as fuck and most likely low budget af, but it hits all the right note of janky. the combat is good so far, kinda like sleeping dogs but with a less polished but deeper mechanics. the ambient and atmosphere is great and voice acting is great as far as my non japanese ear can listen.
it is also fun af how it goes from suspenseful drama, to over the top slapstick comedy. the thing is about 90 minutes it, they nailed both drama and comedy and it change tone as smooth as chameleon change color. one time it's serious, one time you are making a fisting joke and it doesnt feel out place.

i dunno, the game is janky and crazy, but the good kind of janky and crazy for me. i think i am gonna enjoy this so much.

 

[Ivan]

Should have skipped work today....

 

[Morkar Left]

Bought.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Should have skipped work today....

Fucking this. Oh well, going to grab a nice bottle of whisky on the way home and play into the morning hours.

 

[Rahdulan]

For extra immersion:

 

[Great Deceiver]

Drunk massacre simulator. This game is so good.

HoboForEternity What makes you think this is a low budget game? Quite the opposite. There's a ton of little details everywhere, the character modeling is ace and the environments are quite detailed.

However, it is nonapologetically still a game, because good JP developers are monocled and Nagoshi is definitely a individual. Is a game acually having gameplay what you call 'janky'?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

One can never get tired of Kiryu just swaying past a haymaker and stretching his neck before getting ready to kick ass while Force Addiction starts to play.



EDIT: Okay, Receive You ~Tech Trance Arrange~ starting to play is also amazing:

 

[Deflowerer]

FEEEEL THE HEEEAAAT BOIIIIIIS

 

[ultimanecat]

Got to play this for a few hours this morning. Seems like a decent Japanese port (so actually not amazing but at least functional) and runs really well...

...that is, after I got it working. If you use a laptop with an nVidia card and the game runs like dogshit, the sound stutters, or it freezes during cutscenes, it’s because the game defaults to integrated graphics. Set it to only use your actual graphics card in the nVidia control panel.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Runs at 4k 60fps on max without any drops for me and I'm running an ancient 5+ year old i5 with 8gb ram. GTX 1070 tho. It's a very solid port.

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

And I was just going to buy a ps4 to get into this series, ahaha what a fool. Buying this for PC. Hope they release the other games!

 

[Belegarsson]

That karaoke game is truly

 

[Reinhardt]

That karaoke game is truly

 

[HoboForEternity]

The 80s japanese pop and rocks are awesome

 

[HoboForEternity]

Drunk massacre simulator. This game is so good.

HoboForEternity What makes you think this is a low budget game? Quite the opposite. There's a ton of little details everywhere, the character modeling is ace and the environments are quite detailed.

However, it is nonapologetically still a game, because good JP developers are monocled and Nagoshi is definitely a individual. Is a game acually having gameplay what you call 'janky'?

well i guess i just havent used to the movement yet, it feels kinda heavy as for combat it is like sleeping dogs but with actual combo system and more gamey mechanics.

The low budget assumption because there are no flashy cinematic cutscene, isntead just dialogue with still models, but it might be that i am wrong and it is an artistic decision and not resource constraint.

Which is totally fine because cinematics are overrated. The voice acting sounds great, the use of music is great and the stills looks like a manga panel shot, which is cool.

My (probably wrong) assumption mostly came from unfamiliarity and views based on conventional AAA game design style.

I dont care at this point if the game actually a AAA production or made with shoestring budget because its good as fuck. Cant wait to go home from work and continue playing.

 

[Great Deceiver]

There are tons of fully animated cutscenes (with lip-sync and better character models) in the game - the stylized ones with still models and dialogue are pretty rare. I just don't understand how you could say this looks poor (especially for realtime - nevermind the pretty bad DoF implementation):

I guess you mean pre-rendered cutscenes? There are none of those (and thankfully so).

As for the fighting controls, I think you have to realize that they are a sort of heir of SEGA arcade beat-em-ups, like Die Hard Arcade or Spikeout. I think it's pretty great (especially the boss fights), and some of the power moves look incredibly brutal and feel awesome.

 

[Vorark]

How is the performance for those with mid/low spec PCs? I have a 4th gen i5 @ 3,1ghz and hopefully my 1050ti will return fixed from rma.

 

[Dreed]

How is the performance for those with mid/low spec PCs? I have a 4th gen i5 @ 3,1ghz and hopefully my 1050ti will return fixed from rma.

I can run it on max on a 4 years old laptop with a 3 GHz i7, 8GB of RAM and a 2 GB graphic card (like for ultimanecat the game defaulted to the integrated GPU).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It is true that it's I'm fairly sure relatively low budget though, with a small development time. IIRC aside from concurrent development most Yakuza games have around a year of development. But still, SEGA's not a big company like it used to be, and Japanese third party developer budgets overall are lower than the giant bloated triple A budgets are nowadays.

If anything, I'd say the lower budget and shorter development time is a credit to Yakuza series, since they punch way above their weight and show how much you can get done by proper asset resuse, good craftsmanship (SEGA's face scan tech is a good example of this, way better results than what something that got more time and money put into it gets) and clear idea of what you're trying to achieve. Yakuza stands as a stark contrast to something like Assassin's Creed which has probably double digit multiple sized budget and assets at its disposal, but Yakuza just does everything better even if it doesn't have the graphics money (and Yakuza's graphics too I believe deserve greater credit because even if it doesn't stand out in texture detail Kamurocho feels way more alive and real than just about any other open world area).


As for the combat, it only feels heavy at first until you start to figure out the flow of attacks and how you can build up and conserve Heat efficiently. Having enough Heat that your battle aura gets visible significantly increases your attack speed. After you get a grasp of how fast each stance is and how you should position yourself in a fight, you start to quickly adjust.

Now jam to one of the best boss themes evar and remember that the man who loses is the one who stops getting back up after being beaten down:

 

[Rahdulan]

I was about to say Yakuza 0 must've been an exception to their development practices, but looking at game release schedules that doesn't appear to be the case. They simply got that good working with what they had.

 

[Reinhardt]

Kuze is a beast.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Kuze is a beast.

I spent a good 40 minutes on him on Hard. This game is amazing.