Insomniac Nightmares

Rise of Insanity has finally been completed. It’s not 100% yet – have to go back through and find all the collectibles – but at least the main game is out of the way.

I don’t know how to feel about it. I know what they were trying to do, but I feel like they missed a lot of the boats that would have given it more punch. There’s a lot of imagery that seems there because “ooooooh, spoopy!” but doesn’t actually relate to the murder and madness that form the bulk of the plot. Perhaps I missed a collectible that explained it, but all the crow imagery – while very pretty and suitably atmospheric – seems tacked on with no reason. On top of that, the “twist” of who you’re playing and what’s going on was telegraphed five minutes in… but half the game’s notes and the way things are presented don’t seem compatible with it.

I’m not going to spoil it – if you want spoilers, you can see me playing it over on Twitch – because it’s still worth a playthrough if you enjoy games like Slender or Layers of Fear, and it’s pretty inexpensive… but if you like horror walking sims and haven’t yet played Layers of Fear or Layers of Fear 2, I recommend those first.

Beyond that, primarily been working on Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. It’s Sega doing what Koei has been doing with Dynasty Warriors: Take your well-known franchise, slap a popular skin on it, call it new. This time, instead of covering generic hack and slash with a coat of Zelda paint, it’s Yakuza with FotNS on top. It’s very well done, and for the most part feels like a decent Yakuza game, but it’s not taking any spots in the series’ hall of fame.

The main story’s fine, the combat works – even if it does become trivially easy once you get good at doing Perfect Channel attacks and unlock the Ki Field ability – and there’s certainly a boatload of content to explore. The problem is in the minigames. Most Yakuza games have a metric shitton of random minigames to play, and Lost Paradise is no different but unlike most Yakuza games, the amount of time you’ll have to spend playing them if you want to finish everything is ridiculously high… and there’s less variation.

For example, the club management minigame, which was most prominent in Yakuza 0 but also had variations in 3, 4 and 6 (probably 5 too, but I didn’t get to play much of that one since my PS3 cooked itself right after it came out here.) In those other games, if you want the trophies related to it (or the tickmarks for your Completion list, or the related substories) you’ll get through it in about 3-4 hours once you get the hang of it. There’s also some variety in the missions, the characters are actually developed, and you feel like you’re getting something out of it (be it money or items) that are actually worth your time investment.

In Lost Paradise, you’re pretty much forced into the game after you break a priceless vase and have to work off a 100,000,000 debt. The missions are 2-3 minutes long, usually stressful to start with, and until you unlock the last couple of them (and have a stable of S-Rank, max level hostesses), you’re going to get between 20k and 200k towards that debt. And no money or items to use in the meantime. When you finally get to the last mission, you’ll get around 1 million per go, but you’re going to need to repeat it around 85-90 times to pay off that debt (which is the roadblock to 3 substories, two hidden bosses, and the last match in the Colesseum minigame, all of which have associated trophies.)

The racing minigame is also a giant pain in the ass, tedious as hell, only has five tracks, and if you want to Platinum it, you’re going to be repeating one of them at least 20 times to rack up the BP (the racing currency) required to buy one piece of the top tier armor.

Right now I’m at 80% on the trophy list, with the primary hangup being the hostess minigame. Still owe 69 million. When that’s done, I can blitz the last few substories (and pop three trophies, one for each hidden boss and one for all substories done), finish the last two Colesseum fights (rematches against the hidden bosses, which pops two more), grind the Colesseum for crafting mats to finish upgrading junk, and then blitz Legend difficulty in about 3 hours, which means I’ll be done.

It will be the first Yakuza game I’ve actually platinumed. The mahjong stuff screws me over in most of the others, Dead Souls suffered from exploding PS3 syndrome, and Judgment is on hold because it’s been packed in prep for the move. Part of me is sad about that.

Beyond that, I’ve been picking at Caravan Story, which is a free-to-play “action” RPG that mostly plays itself. Going to be a nasty grind (you need to kill 10,000 monsters and enslave 1,000 more) but nothing exciting. Mainly something to stare at while holding X when I can’t take looking at the hostesses anymore.

Moving this week, so hopefully, things will be set back up and I can do a proper stream at some point next week; thinking either Alien: Isolation or maybe Yakuza: Dead Souls, if my PS3 wants to cooperate with me (I got a new one more than a year ago, but ran out of ports on the TV and couldn’t get behind it to rewire things. That will be fixed in the move.) If any of you out there have suggestions, I’m open to other ideas, too.

As always, shameless shill time: If you like my stuff and want to help me keep doing it, you can drop a dime in the bucket over on Patreon; everything helps and is always appreciated, but never required. If you want to help me get breathing again, I’ve got a GoFundMe for my surgery set up, too.

Until next time, folks!