Yakuza

Ray McGill's Top Games of 2021

Ray McGill's Top Games of 2021

2021 was a shitty year for sure, and I am not heading into 2022 with much confidence. However, while society falls apart, video games have been pretty great. That was a depressing, yet also probably trite sentence to write at the end of this year. While society continues to grapple with sickness on unprecedented scales, it becomes more the role of video games to make our lives feel more normal, more fun. In a year where I had only recently been to a movie theater, and where I don’t feel comfortable at things like bars, the stories and experiences we take in come increasingly through a screen at home. Whether that be a television, computer screen, tablet, or phone, we need to have fun, and be able to remind ourselves not everything is doom and gloom all of the time. That being said, maybe don’t use the television to watch the news…

Rich Meister's top 10 games of 2020

Rich Meister's top 10 games of 2020

Congratulations, despite everything, you made it through the fever dream that was 2020. Despite the strange circumstances surrounding this year, a lot of good happened on my end, like officially joining the Swordchomp crew. I wanted to use this intro to thank the community for embracing my integration into the podcast and encouraging the work that all four of us do here. It’s just the beginning of the road for me, so I hope to bring you more great written content and even more in 2021.

Enough of that, though! Do you know what else happened in 2020? I played some fucking video games. Some good, some bad, some weird, but these were my ten favorites.

Review: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Review: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

As a series, Yakuza has been about telling drama-filled stories in the world of Japanese organized crime while pivoting to wacky, offbeat shenanigans on a dime. Along the way, long-time protagonist Kazuma Kiryu would smack some local mobsters over the head with a nearby bicycle in proper action RPG fashion. The fast-paced beat-em-up combat was as much part of the series’ DNA as anything else. That’s why it came as a shock to most when they announced the seventh mainline entry in the series Yakuza: Like a Dragon would switch things up to a more traditional JRPG turn-based combat system. It’s a gamble that mostly pays off. Save for some late-game grinding that felt out of place in a modern game, every moment of Like a Dragon was a pure delight, and it felt good to be back in the underworld of the Tojo clan.