Thoughts On Games

RGG (that's the studio) recently announced a new Like a Dragon Gaiden game about Majima becoming a pirate. I don't have much to say about it because it's not actually out yet, but the reactions to the reveal of an in-combat jump piqued my interest: "Yakuza May Cry" "RGG making DMC6 before Capcom" that kind of shit. As a big fan of Devil May Cry I have my reservations about these comments - lots of games have aerial combat. There are even action games with aerial combat that's fun in a different way from DMC.^{[citation needed]} What stands out to me about DMC's air combat are its high skill floor and ceiling, its actions per second, and its variety of options - using a mix of different attacks and abilities and enemy steps, you can stay in the air with your opponent forever, but even one bad input or one bad attack will drop your combo, followed by both yourself and the enemy. And even if you let your character hit the ground, your grounded attacks can still keep enemies airborne.

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RGG does not make games that reward highly-skilled players - the opposite is true, really: less-skilled players will probably get hit more, which is the only way in most RGGs (that's the series of video games) to engage with the restaurants spread throughout the world. Their dedication to style over substance is a selling point by now. The Judgment games introduced juggle combos, which do raise the skill ceiling a bit, but even this form of juggling pales in comparison to Devil May Cry's: the game never gets so difficult as to require them, your available options are limited beyond stance canceling looped rush combos, and most enemies will die before you manage to do much of anything. Also of note is that Yagami only has ground combos: being "airborne" isn't really a state he can achieve unless he's a ragdoll, it's moreso a quality of certain animations that reposition his hitbox, like Crane's jump and some finishers. His jumps aren't any more substantial than Kiryu's original fourth double finisher.

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My biggest fear is that Majima's juggles will be even simpler than Yagami's: judging by footage shown, jumping into the air limits Majima to a new rush combo, and comboing enemies in midair seems to kind of magnetize them to Majima. As a new player character state that adds an extra layer to combat, this is fine, but Majima launches enemies so high that your followup options seem like they'd be limited to attacks following a jump, or otherwise his version of Vergil's upper slash followup from DMC3 that still hasn't come back (I'm not mad I'm not mad). If I can't decide as the player whether I want to use grounded or aerial moves on an airborne enemy, then the ground combat RGG has been developing and refining for the last 20 years goes straight into the shitter in favor of submitting to flavor-of-the-month action slop like Spiderman where aerial and ground combat exist independently instead of as a pair of states I can use as I see fit.