Recent reviews by Tuttar

Quite an interesting detective story that spans several lifetimes.

What I liked:
- there is room for the player to think and deduce what happens; paying attention to detail pays off
- the acting is great (some of the actors really shine)
- very stylistic menus and details
- some jawdropping plottwists
- when you miss a prompt sometimes you get to see something funny

What I disliked:
- it can be rather tedious to fill out your hypotheses
- failing a prompt sends you back, forcing to skip forward again to the point where you failed
- the epilogue was way too wild/dramatic for my liking

In my opinion there are almost no other games that offer the same as this game gives you. This game is more of a work of art, providing you with a unique experience. I certainly hope we will see more of these.

This game is probably the best potion-brewing game I have played so far. It has a good storyline, fun characters to interact with, and the actual mechanics of potion-brewing are also well designed. It took me about 38 hours to finish the game. Sadly, replayability of this game is very low, unless you want to go back and max out other character stories.
The final 'week' was a bit of a slog to get through as I already amassed significant quantities of money and top-tier potions. Getting to know the various mechanics at the start of the game was certainly a lot of fun however. I highly recommend you try out this game. Uncharacteristically of the present trends in video game industry, this game is well-polished and seemingly did not feature any (significant) bugs.

Prepare your strongest potions, potion seller!

This game is a remake of the game that started it all. It uses the battle styles from Yakuza 0, so if you are familiar with those you will quickly get used to them here. While I recommend the game, it definitely is a downgrade from Yakuza 0 in many ways:

Pros:
- Lots of fun sidestories available to find, as well as familiar minigames making a return.
- Majima Everywhere, almost as fun as playing Majima himself in Yakuza 0.
- Nishikiyama is a great antagonist, with a great backstory and amazing voice acting. His bossfight is, while not particularly difficult, definitely the most enjoyable fight in the entire game. The fight is fair and packed with emotion.

Cons:
- Enemies/bosses have boring attack patterns, and some attacks are almost impossible to block forcing you to stock up on health items for every bossfight. This makes the game the wrong kind of 'difficult'.
- The enemy regenerating and forcing you to do a specific move every time, is really annoying. Probably the worst feature and again forces you to cheese by drinking heat potions or having enough heat when they do this regeneration. All the bosses have this feature and it always works the same way.
- Flinch, flinch, flinch. Kiryu drops to the floor and gets up after 5 seconds every time you get shot or knived. And you will get shot and knived a lot, much more than in Yakuza 0!
- The upgrade system is pretty... meh. You will forget about half of the abilities and never use them anyway.

A masterpiece that will take you 60+ hours to finish from start to end. There is something in the game for oldtime fans and players new to Yakuza. There are some rare times where the gameplay will feel a bit grindy, but the ending is well worth your time. I'm hoping they will make even more of these games!

I can somewhat accept the unnecessary political correctness.

I can somehow accept that this game is still lacking some features that the original game did provide.

I can barely accept the bugs, like units getting stuck or certain unit upgrades not being available.

But what I can't accept, is that the game just stops working after you are an hour into a match. Spent an hour trying to fight off the enemy and now making a comeback? Boom, out of sync. Maybe the next game it won't happen? Boom, it happened again. Sometimes the game doesn't bother to tell you it is an out of sync error and just makes the game freeze for half of the players involved. Any victory or loss obtained this way, does not reward players in the slightest.

I do not recommend people to play this game. The original game is much better, because you can actually play that one without the game crashing all the time. The devs have had a lot of time to improve this since release, but instead they changed the Chinese voice lines from the original game (wtf!?). Get the game if you only like the single player, otherwise as of the time I write this avoid it like the plague.

As a longtime fan of the game, I was excited upon hearing they were going to release a big dlc with much more content than normal and fixing some of the longer-standing problems of the game. Feeling the game was getting stale, I got really excited and pre-ordered the Emperor DLC as such. While I don't fully regret buying it (because I am such a big fan of the game itself), I don't recommend it at all for people that are not so invested in the game as me.

The main reason why I say this: Paradox Interactive has no idea what it means to deliver quality. Yes, they have unique and fun ideas to improve and expand upon the game. But they don't follow through with perfecting these ideas. What's more, the people at Paradox don't seem to be knowing what balancing means, and just throw numbers around without thinking about the consequences.

The major issue is the HRE: not only do the imperial incidents not work as advertised, it has also become laughably easy for even the AI to do a fast revoke of the privilegia. This is something that was previously hard to accomplish for human players, and next to impossible for an AI. Most of my friends (and me) that play this game have experienced this firsthand. This leads me to believe that Paradox does not playtest their own games (at least to a certain extent) and that we the players are their quality control. Absolute nonsensical, as we also had to pay for this DLC.

Other things that are broken: I can add provinces to trade companies, even though they border my capital state. How is that possible? But once you cored those provinces it is no longer possible; clearly another oversight.
The imperial incident with Burgundy, where Burgundy picks an OPM as their PU overlord, and gets free integration of the lowlands.... why don't the lowlands get their freedom instead of this nonsense? And Burgundy gets the easiest freedom of their lifetime.
The Shadow Kingdom; force out the Italian states. Clearly the superior option, as it allows you to immediately invite them back to the HRE and actually gain more imperial authority. Why could they not give those states a negative modifier for rejoining the HRE? Such a simple fix...
And why is the Pope allowed to indefinitely delay reform desire progress? This can really have potential for killing fun in multiplayer games.

Paradox also tried to do some stealth 'balance' changes. Don't think I haven't noticed. Manpower is king now that mercenaries are more difficult and restrictive to use, and thus the idea group quantity that gives you bottomless manpower has been left.... untouched. At the same time, we have the innovative-quality policy being downgraded from 20% infantry combat ability.... to 5% infantry combat ability. In what universe is it not more appropriate to make it 10%? There would be no complaints if you did that, but to use a 75% nerf of something that has been in the game for forever is just mindblowing.
There are some other 'balance' changes in the idea groups, but basically they just feel nonsensical and don't really do much at all.

After many years of interacting with paradox, I can safely say that they have developed an echo chamber of sorts for themselves. During dev clashes, I'm sorry to say, only about 20% of the players really knows what they are doing. The way Kaiser Johan loses hegemony because he accepted a white peace from a secondary participant, and they justify that that's the way it should be... no. It makes no sense to punish a player so severely for something that happens so frequently in EU4. But alas, I am but an ignorant player, who doesn't know what's best for the game.

To be fair, this patch has a lot of cool new things, and on the surface it looks great. But once you play one or two campaigns, you start seeing the seams and cracks, and realize: these game developers did not aim for perfection. And sure, perfection is never truly obtainable, but clearly it hasn't been the goal at all for this DLC. Shame.

Looking at the steam review score, it is easy to think that this expansion is not worth your time. This however, is just because the loud few on the internet disagree with changes made in the free patch for version 1.26. It has little to do with Dharma itself, although Dharma does have to be played on version 1.26.

Why do I recommend buying this?
- Government reforms are great. They really managed to bring life to nations that I thought I was Sikh of playing.
- Indian mission trees. These are quite fun to pursue, and are unique to their nation instead of being shared with other nations.
- Upgraded trade centers are a nice little addition to the game. With more trade centers available, you can be more flexible in what states you need to become a rich merchant.
- Scornful insults, especially in multiplayer.
- New estates in India. These estates are a bit different than normal, and allows for more unique local gameplay.
And some other small features that only add to the game. The government rework alone is enough for me to want to buy it, but I can see why people would want to wait for a sale.
I also purchased the content pack, which has fantastic music in it. And elephants.

As for the controversial free changes they made:
- Corruption gain when blobbing is currently detrimental for playing as a horde. I'm hoping in the next patch they will put a lower cap on the maximum corruption you get per year.
- Endtags. I don't mind it personally, but I do think this should be optional outside of Ironman games.
- Missionary rework. Just means you will likely go Humanist ideas for now, but again I'm hoping they will buff Religious ideas to allow (limited) conversion in territories.

Paradox is frequently updating and incorporating opinions of players into the game. You just need a bit of patience.
For example, when people were complaining about money being no issue whatsoever in the lategame, Paradox decided to lower many money factors in the game to change that. Nobody is forcing you to play on the latest patch; EU4 can easily be put back to an earlier patch, and you can still enjoy it to your own heart's desires. I find it extremely odd how the loud few are trying to pressure Paradox into doing what they want, while Paradox is a developer that goes above and beyond than most other current developers would. Roll back to patch 1.25, relax, and await the next patch that will probably address your problems.
As for the real fans, I'd say this is one of their best DLCs yet. A must-buy for a true fan.

Has got to be one of the most addictive games ever. Heists are original, fun, the gameplay is good, and most importantly, the creators care about their players. Lots of content keeps getting released every month! And you do not need the DLC to play a heist, it suffices when only the host has the DLC!