Recent reviews by Nedur Frog

I enjoy the combat of this game a lot, precisely the WIld dancer style. This game offers you 4 combat styles but 80% of the time you would be using Wild dancer, most styles in Yakuza feels really clumsy and I think wild dancer should be the baseline of reactive moveset if they were to design more.
despite I do enjoy the controlling, the mechanics and enemy designs felt really off. Not a fan of Trooper card and floating damage number in a game which tries to get you immerse to a japanese 19th century history. boss can throw laser and some super power VFX things out of nowhere.

This game can be super grindy but since some bosses actually drop gears you won't actually softlock even if you don't grind that much.

Writing is pretty good but the ending is... Yokoyama being Yokoyama. Still if you played other Yakuza games, you get to see more interesting sides of the familiar faces, good character and good story with unfinished ending I would say.

Overall I still like Ishin a lot, it's a 8/10 for me and I wish it could use more of its potential.

It's Y7 with more engaging combat, and this time the way they do content for Kiryu really makes you think this is the last entry for Kiryu Kazuma, if you are a RGG fan who has played every games with Kiryu this won't disappoint you.

There are a crazy amount of side contents but I think they find a better balance than Y7. in Y7 if you did the minigame it'll immediately break the resource balance, making you able to buy all the best gears. This time you can get decent amount of money from minigame, they'll be enough to buy good gear but in order to get better ones your main income will be fighting high level enemies.

Story is solid but not as impacting, as the protagonist slows shift into ichiban you can see the whole theme of Like a Dragon becomes more and more fantasy style instead of serious yakuza drama. However the game is still a fun journey to have.

This was my childhood 20 years ago and I never learn to play the game nor finishing its campaign, but when you came back to it you actually appreciate a lot of things of it.

When I was a kid, I simply enjoy the fun of mass producing tank army and crush the enemy base. However RTS also gets very immersive when you are aware of the purpose of every steps you are doing.
Everything dies very quickly, Red Alert gets you very invested in controlling the front line because one misclick can lead to army wipe out. But since it's the same for enemy army the risk and reward makes it very intense and put you into high concentration mode.

The campaign designs are fun and won't get you bored, the cutscenes are goofy in a good way that makes you think they're just having fun and passions making all the stories. It was a good and fun ride!

I recommend this good guide for people who weren't learning a lot about this game

it's like Yume Nikki for ADHD

You need to install patch to experience full content.

This is it, The last part of Kara no Shoujo trilogy, ascending its aesthetic and writing to the paradise.

The pacing is kinda similar to the first part but with much less casual parts. Both part 1 and part 2 left some unsolved mysteries but they all eventually got taken care of.

murders and sexual contents are much softer in this one (there are still guro arts) but that doesn't make it any worse, with disturbing context it still makes certain scenes thrilling.

The whole trilogy is a super immersing experience, you care about every characters, you care about every dialogues they gave. finishing the trilogy took me 100 hours and that'd make me a diehard fan of Innocent Grey.

Also if you yearn for more game after finishing the Kara no shoujo Trilogy, you could try Cartagra REBIRTH FHD SIZE EDITION. It's like a prequel with Shuugo Takashiro being the protagonist, along with other familiar faces you saw in Kara no shoujo.
Cartagra is a 2005 game, but the FHD edition is published in 2023 and it added some contents which reminds you Kara no shoujo. It is a much gruesome and adult content focused game compared to Kara no shoujo so it's less about investigation and puzzle.

You need to install patch to experience full content.

The Shell Part 2 has a different vibe and pacing compare to the first game. It went to an ambitious approach which introduces you completely different storyline that feels little to none related to Reiji's story, but eventually it wraps up perfectly.

Part 1 can feel disturbing with its dark red UI, 0 sugarcoating guro illustration and the insecure of people around you becoming victim, while Part 2 felt more mysterious and abnormal.

The ending condition is way much less stricting so as long as you save at every choosing sections you should be able to play through every ending without much struggle.

The writing ages very well, such an underrated VN.

Ultrakill is literally how an action fighting game FPS feels like. The movement and weapon techs you could learn are massive you can literally put 100+ hours into the sandbox.
Weapon is designed in a way that they can collaborate together in order to have maximize efficiency so that almost no weapons felt overshadowed by other ones.

The author shows a lot passion in making levels look very different, having well designed bosses that are challenging and fun to fight, designing secret mini-game that are very different compare to the main game but still intriguing.

It is a hard game but there's also a lot of assisting options for casual players, if you find learning advanced techniques very overwhelming it's still fun to just shoot and blow stuffs up in lower difficulty.

Sick shooter, enemy AIs are super smart so it feels really good to outsmart them, the binding of different actions on grabbed enemy feels awkward at first but you'll get used to it

Very stress relieving shooter with 2005ish gunplay, main campaign is actually pretty short but I can see the replayability in this one.

(Review given after 100% achievement, roughly 20 hours and Rogue Steel probably took me 10 hours alone)

Dive through the glass and headshot enemy while you are upside-down mid air, that's what Severed Steel is.
The bullet time allows you to be fast while still giving you time to think how many tricks you want to combine together strategically. shooting feedback feels really nice, it does make you feel like 90s action movie protagonist.

Mechanic wise, this game can be very fast-paced. It went to a very different approach that instead of just rewarding player for doing hard tricks, it also protect players for doing it. You become invincible during Sliding and Wallrunning and killing enemies restore your health, giving you a very secure environment to constantly pushing difficult actions and try not to stop.

It does has a very good vibe, it's a game where chilling and dopamine coexists.

(Review given after 100% achievement, roughly 16 hours)

A tips for better story experience but contains level spoiler : If you reached a level called Pillars of Creation which you starts with the motorcycle, better go find online walkthrough of it otherwise you would spend hour getting lost in a badly designed open-world map and probably lost the motivation to continue playing the game.

I liked the first game a lot and I actually think GR2 improved some stuffs. Movement tech in GR1 is still applicable and they added blocking and tons of assisting skills which seems aim towards casual players, also the boss fight is so much better and fun compare to GR1. If you are new to Ghostrunner series I think it's still worth a try. If you already played GR1 you'll see some positive about it also more problems about it.

The Story is so John Cyberpunk you might as well just ignore it. The millennial dialogue is painfully cringe where the conversation is barely based on any character background but more like a bunch of college students trash talk each other.

GR2 added so much things that are either not helping with the identity of Ghostrunner's gameplay or even conflicting with it.
It has some Free Roam map with nothing worth exploring and just serve as making your objectives farther from each other, not to mention the terrible level layout that makes it notoriously bad among the community. That one map does everything WRONG and there's nothing redeemable about it.
New enemies don't feel fun to fight at all and sometimes even felt random (they did made Warden from the first game better tho)
FPS spike occurs and bug still happens, a lot areas felt so unpolished.

I didn't give negative review because it's a bad game, It is fun to me. But they went to a really wrong direction while developing the game. Sadly it's probably better if they remove whatever they added into GR2 and just focus on fixing the issues GR1 had and it'd be a much better game.