Sifu (Zero Punctuation)
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- čas přidán 14. 06. 2022
- This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Sifu.
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#zeropunctuation - Hry
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You should have a look at "chronus: before the ashes.
It's a prequel to remnantfrom the ashes. However rather than a shooter, it's a sort of soulslike, but has the every time you die, you age a year. You gradually change from a young warrior, into an elderly wizard.
Thought it might interest you
My very strict rule of revenge plots spare/kill endings: if i killed 7777 underling to get to the boss, it would be unfair to them to let it live.
In this case though, you only end up killing mooks if you use specific items and environmental finishers
Pfffffffft.
Same
Whereas if you've gone for a pacifist run, choosing to kill the big bad feels like an important step up
@@JavaSchoolBlues 🙄
Remember, killing poor people is okay, but if you kill the powerful person, that's mean.
I know, right? Meanwhile the dudes just trying to pay rent floating off to oblivion's embrace: =_=
WELL WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE _THAT_
The true motto of America.
The moment when you try to have an important thematic message with your game but you're not creative enough to think of gameplay mechanics that work with it so you only include it in certain key moments while ignoring how it clashes with the rest of the game.
Edit: point being, I don't think it should be seen as a rich vs poor thing, just as, y'know... it's hard to think of a game design that criticizes revenge but still also focuses on combat being fun.
@@viljamtheninja It's almost like they should have just forgotten about the whole preachy message part.
"I killed every man, woman and office worker in this building to get to you just to say... I forgive you."
[Good ending acquired]
Really can tell this was made by a non-asian company. Because in the kung fu movies I watch, the main guy do get their revenge and beat the hell out of the main villain.
@@atomic747 You beat the hell out of the villains in sifu too. Even in the good endings you fade them, you just don't kill them. You also don't kill the underlings (unless you use a knife) so there's actually very little death in the game.
Kind of hard to spare a protagonist by the evil bad guy in a plot.
I know we're enemies but we want the same thing, truce?
You killed over a dozen of my men in ten minutes and it's been 5 hours!
Point taken.
@@degiguessactually there's quite a few moves that would be considered lethal even with your bare hands. getting punched in the throat for example will literally make you stop breathing and could damage your vital structures which could be lethal. not to mention 90 percent of the blunt weapon finishers would most likely break a few bones or cause a serious concussion
also the one finisher where you strike the back of the opponents neck, hard enough to send them to the floor. which I'm pretty sure would atleast cause a serious neck/spine injury if it doesn't kill them
Sifu taught me that enlightenment was when you kill 100 people and sap decades of your life away to only to flex on your revenge targets a bit instead of just staying home and catching up on reading. The actual gameplay in addictive AF though
Just get good and beat it at 27
I can't get the under 25 trophy
Did it at 21.
Can’t even fucking do hard mode
@@m0ng00se4 I can get to the final level at age 23. After a couple weeks, I can dominate large portions of the game. But Kuroki/Yang will still kill me two or three times on any attempt even if I do everything else perfectly. That Under 25 Trophy is not in my future
Technically he doesn’t kill anybody though…just knocks their asses out (unless you use the sword). It’s the bosses that he can directly choose to kill or spare.
is, is that a fucking wuxia?
yeah, that really annoys me where in a game or movie the protagonist suddenly decides to spare the life of the big bad guy after just killing a few dozen guards who've done a lot less evil.
Annoys? It's batshit insane. You're *even more* evil for letting them specifically live, because that means you valued their life above the other people. You valued the *monster of a human being* higher than the people just doing their jobs.
The one I like is from Avatar the last Airbender, where it is easier to kill the Fire Lord than to spare him, yet Aang chooses to spare him. It is... undecided if he has killed all the goons before, but he has thrown him off ledges and into the freezing waters of the Artic... As well as wrecked hundreds of boats. Does this count?
@@setcheck67 yeah, I find it kinda confusing why seemingly all fiction has settled on the same answer to the trolley problem.
@@icarue993 He was kinda possessed by an ocean spirit when he was throwing people into the water so I don't think that counts.
Yeah, the Ocean was using Aang's body to kill people, he wasn't really making the choice to drown all those people.
To all those scriptwriters who are so damn sure revenge is not the answer, I say don't knock it til you've tried it.
It sure feels like they wrote it as post-regret state after doing said revenge. So they did tried it.
@@Deliveredmean42 Clearly they didn't revenge correctly then. /s
@@Deliveredmean42 nah, revenge feels good. aggressions against your person should be punished. Now, or perhaps when the person who aggressed against you doesn't even remember what happened
@@smutz131 I'll make them remember
@@floricel_112 I’ll make sure they’re gone before they can remember.
"Revenge is bad" only holds weight if the villain isn't committing numerous atrocities with the threat of more if he isn't stopped and the hero has not racked up a huge body count on their way to get to the villain. But sure, let's make the player feel bad every time a hero wants some righteous justice.
The "Revenge is bad" trope only works when the story truly comments to it; which rarely happens because they force a happy ending.
Seriously, more writers need to have the balls to have the revenge-seeking protagonist either becomes the implied villain for someone else or they are left with nothing to be happy about.
Maybe if there was a mechanic that only caused mildly debilitating injuries to the underlings, slowing them down slightly so you can leave them behind. You might see specific ones later on in the levels, but that was just part of the challenge of not murdering everyone.
The thing is, Yathzee skims over the plot, but it's a bit more nuanced than just your average revenge story. Simply put, the villains had a very, very good reason for doing what they did, and three out of the five of them turned a new leaf, with one in particular becoming CEO of a company specifically to use her profits for charity, while another created a clinic that uses the same magical power that keeps reviving the MC to save the lives of terminally ill patients.
In short, it's less "revenge bad, spare the villain", but "revenge is extremely counter-intuitive, and killing the villain affects thousands of innocent lives, so maybe don't do it".
It only works when they have the MGS sort of approach where you can play the entire game without killing anyone.
The point of most "revenge is bad" stories isn't that killing an evil person and stopping them from doing more evil things is morally reprehensible, it's that seeking revenge is a universally self-destructive activity that leaves you worse off than you started. Most of the time, the villain of the story is more of a personal nemesis for the protagonist and isn't some kind of supervillain mass murderer. The only time you see that coupled with the "killing is bad, folks" angle is in childrens media and really shitty films designed by focus groups.
“It’s bad for a revenge story to have the main guy kill all the underlings and spare the bad guy!”
Well it’s a good thing that unless you’re using a very specific weapon none of the underlings are ever actually killed…
“Flip-out spanky-wanky”: yet another subgenre name that the industry really should adopt.
Yup. How many subgenres has Yahtz created over the years? Let's see...
. Big Headed Child in Scary World
. Like God of War But...
. SpunkGargleWeeWee (best one imo)
. JimminyCockThroat (last year)
And then there were obscure ones like :
. Spectacle Fighter (Devil May Cry 4, I think)
. Particle Effects the Game (Smash Bros. Brawl, I think)
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch.
Oh, and if anyone has a name for a genre they made up, share away.
How about one for games like Super Meat Boy where you die over and over and spawn instantaneously, to keep dying over and over?
ScreamControllerFlingFlings?
@@elberethgilthoniel1397 Ghost Train Ride and Choices-Matter-Except-Not-Really
You mean a Brawler. Just like how Spunk Gargle Weewee was just a funny thing to call a military shooter
Recursives and sprawlers too
Only Yahtzee would make me click on a review for a game I played 4 months ago
The good ending taught me bosses lives matters more their underlings who actually done nothing wrong to the main character.
None of the underlings die though. They just get knocked out.
I actually quite like the background bits of the story. You can uncover some intrigue if you pick up the collectibles that give the antagonists some character. They largely aren’t even bad dudes. The big bad built a clinic that heals people, and even sends letters to his mute machete psycho mate telling him to take his pills. The rich lady constantly builds community improvements and gives to charity. You could even argue their motivation at the end was very valid, where the old masters were hording power out of fear of abuse, the same power the player abuses to fight the baddies.
Reversing time is only done on easy mode right? Where enemies are also less aggressive and you age less, so no wonder most of the design elements don't come through.
Yeah on easy also you only age by one year each time you die, it doesn't go up which was why yatzee said he didn't feel the impact of the mechanic I reckon
@@pauldeasy4531 Yeah 40-50 lives lol. Also the more you die in a row the more you will age, so it is important. I also feel like he missed the main point of getting better and more flawless, which is also supported by the story. And he also missed that the villains aren't actually villains, and you need to get so good that you forgive them. You don't have to parry them always either, you can beat them up until the meter is high... Very sloppy review.
Exactly, he played easy and missed the entire point of the game lol. If he just fessed up it, it wouldn't bug me so much, but he is just pooping on a game he didn't even bother to give a proper try.
this is why easy mode was a mistake. the game was perfectly fine on release, but the complainers had to ride in on their horses and deem the game “”inaccessible””
I mean, the easy mode is part of the game. Unless the game clearly communicates that "this is not the intended way to play," you can't blame people for assuming that it is. If this isn't a genre you're comfortable with, it makes sense to play the game on easy, and if that's a bad experience, that's the game's fault.
One thing I've seen some games do to solve this problem that I like is to have only one difficulty, but then incorporate ways to change the difficulty yourself, like assist or challenge modes. That way, the game can clearly communicate its intended play style while still letting people adjust the difficult if they want.
Since Yahtzee is clearly angling for some praise, let's all take a moment to appreciate what an uncommonly talented wordsmith he is.
So I initially read this correctly but quickly scrolled past and thought, "did he just call Yahtz a commonly untalented wordsmith?" And had to come back to check.
I thought you said hes clearly aging, and thats just rude.
Like a crackhead becoming a master glass blower after you take away his pipe
I mean... it's klinda gibberish and yet I hear "Flip-out spanky wanky" and it definitely sounds like the sort of just destroying everything.
I mean “articulously”? Enough said. Yahtzs unrivelablestedness level of wordsmithing is above all others.
I swear I had read "stfu" as the title and thought yahtzee was full of our shit and about to spill the tea
*sick of our shit
I'll admit there is a fine line between cliche and homage but I think Sifu toes the line well. It doesn't innovate on any of the kung fu movie tropes but it executes them perfectly from writing to set pieces. I think for that reason it felt more like the full realization of a kungfu movie-game to me than it did a cliche rehash
Smelly brat, you dare to approach me!?
Unwittingly, Yahtzee has outed himself as playing on easy mode. The normal mode doesn't allow you to de-age and you get significantly less lives as the years start to mount as you focus on managing special enemies that make death less punishing.
This is why easy mode sucks. He sells the combat system short because he was never forced to really learn it. Nevermind throw loops or back attack differences, apparently he never even figured out the difference between high low dodges and still got to an ending. Sifu has so much to offer and it'd be generous to say Yahtzee got 30% of it by playing easy.
Give the guy a break, he has to pump out a review a week.
Yeah, it's a frequent issue with Yahtzee's MO. He has to play these games in a week, so if he's not forced to deal with the difficulty via lack of alternatives as in FromSoft games, he dials it down to easy and that naturally kills off a large part of the appeal in combat-focused games. DMC5 and Stranger of Paradise got a similar treatment. Which is a shame, because it's like skipping cutscenes in a story-focused game then complaining that the story was unengaging.
@@amrabdelazeem9689 he's got enough of an audience he can put more effort into fewer videos. While his cynical banter is fun it is quite clear he's frustrated a bit with the grind of getting a relevant video out to chase the algorithm.
I'm not wholly upset at him, its just wholly misrepresentative of the standard game that most others played as easy mode was added last month.
It's funny and it brings the review aspect down a bit. I dont want to see him lose his charm with burn out.
@@amrabdelazeem9689 Sifu has been out for like 4 months.
Honestly I love this game so much! Been playing it non-stop since I got it trying to get smoother and smoother runs. Feels like it falls into that category of games where it's not a new genre and does not introduce any significant technical innovation, but it is a really solid execution of this type of game and by far my favorite of the year.
Also really appreciate that Sloclap added more difficulty modes to the game than the initial release. I find it quite fun after practicing a bunch on disciple mode to drop into a student save and tear things up. I get that it's From Software's "thing" not to have difficulty options, but I hope that doesn't become a standard.
I used to watch these videos back in 2012 so it brings me great joy that I have 10 years of content to catch up with
To be fair, both videogames and movies peaked early this year. I don't think there's a release that's beating Elden Ring until December(Callisto Protocol, please don't let me down) and I don't know if there's a movie this year that's gonna amaze me like Everything Everywhere did.
I'm really excited to see Top Gun Maverick myself. I heard that they used 6 cameras in the jets to be able to switch shots for the absolute best viewing angle for the audience during the aerial maneuvers. Don't know how Tom Cruise keeps doing these incredibly demanding roles at his age. Maybe there's something to Scientology after all...
Morbius already came out, so cinema is basically over.
I'm still looking forward to Gotham Knights and GOW Ragnarok, but objectively neither of those are gonna be better than Elden Ring, I'm just a fan of the franchises they're part of.
Elden ring copy and paste bosses is what's keeping me away from it, i think i'll grab it on a sale.
@@gustavohuehue7460 Has a handful but those are mainly in dungeons and not on the main path and there are so many dungeons I can understand why they didn’t make a unique boss for every single one. Not to mention previous souls games doing it too
why is it always presented as "moral" to mow down dozens or hundreds of mooks but to spare the boss man?
Because the underlings are by products of mental and emotional abuse and have no real agency, while the boss is a snake oil salesman?
you don't really kill anyone unless you do the sword finisher (which I found really bizarre tonally to be honest, I think it might be a reused animation from absolver)
It wasn't always like that. Original stories always kill off the main evil. Modern writers(In the 1900's) started having protagonists spare the antagonists' life so they could keep having the same villain come back again and again and again. They came up with this "it's too evil to kill this one person" crap and people just bought it. It reached peak insanity in the comics where you have supervillains wholesale slaughtering innocent people and they just get locked up while their henchmen get exterminated. Some supervillains in the comics have been locked up and escaped like 10 times and have a body count in the millions.
Normally because the henchmen start off trying to kill you and never stop trying thus you have no real choice, but the bosses for some reason try to surrender instead and thus suddenly you actually have a choice in the matter
Because boss man actually have agency, and thus are moral agents, evil or not. While henchmen are always portrayed as interchangeable cogs of the machine, so no agency and no room for moral choices
If the theme for your violent video game is that violent revenge isn’t worth it, perhaps you should write a different story.
How about a non-revenge story where a martial arts student *doesn't* avenge his master because he was kind of a dickface?
"Now that my master, the man who intimidated my parents into handing me over to him so I could continue his bull[HONK] legacy or something, is dead, I can live my life however I want!"
Then the rest of the game is an open world simulation where you can beat up dudes for justice, beat up dudes for money, beat up nobody and just tend a garden or something, become a martial arts movie star, become a gang boss, become a parkour food delivery person, settle down with various people and start a family, etc.
Makes me think of Tenshinhan and the Crane Master from the original Dragon Ball 🐉😆
That's this game, in a roundabout way. The MC's father/master was a bit of a dick, withholding a magical artifact that could save lives, and the "villains" banded together to take it so that they could save people, and the "main villain" does just that, opening a clinic where he uses the artifact to save the terminally ill. If you spare all the antagonists, you can completely read the story as "student witnesses his father being killed, trains his balls off, and then uses his superior kung-fu to passive-aggressively flex on the killers, because his father was a bit of a dick and killing them over the incident would be overdoing it".
Continuing my idea above, the open world game could have an optional mission/side chapter where the player character imagines what would have happened if they had dedicated themselves to avenging their master, where they get to be temporarily super-high-level (like the fake-out prologue to Dragon Age 2) and massacre lots of dudes, but it's grimdark and miserable and unfulfilling, with injuries rendered in graphic detail, ordinary people fleeing in horror from the protagonist, etc.
If the abusive mentor trope wasn't also done to death, I don't know what was.
It is genuinely weird when games try to go all "no no no, you must spare this relentlessly violent ponce's life or you're the REAL monster" after significant boss battles, because you've almost certainly just spent half an hour mowing down their henchmen without the game batting an eyelid. Kinda hard to see how killing a couple of dozen people doesn't make you a bad person as long as you spare the one that begs - in fact there's a whole Doctor Who monologue about pretty much exactly that.
Show me a game where a protagonist wrestles with notions of revenge, remorse and forgiveness if you want, but surprise and impress me by having the protagonist realise that sparing a genocidal maniac who has destroyed countless lives and will destroy countless more, purely because I think it might not be as fulfilling as I hoped... would be both selfish and irresponsible. He can feel remorse *after* he gets the job done, but reducing revenge against injustice to "yes, but will it make YOU feel any better?" is the kind of thing I'd expect from a villain, not to be affirmed by the game's procedural rhetoric.
Consider giving Dishonored a try. The only people who have to die or suffer in that game are the dispicable people at the top of the system disenfranchising others and the bad outcome is actually just a natural consequence of "leaving bodies in the street during a pandemic" making things worse.
I still think "I saw the devil" is the absolute culmination of the "nature of revenge"-plot and there's nothing left to say on the matter, only exceedingly more outrageous reasons for- and executions of said revenge for style points. The killing blow at the end barely even matters, the true revenge was the psychotic rampage we made along the way. :')
@@GREENSP0RE
I always find it funny how people complain about Dishonored giving you the bad ending if you run around slaughtering everybody with your "badass murder powers".
Gee, it's not as if it ties in to the whole theme of the story or anything...
@@GREENSP0RE Dishonored has the issue that the non-lethal means are often fucking horrifying, sometimes more so than just sticking a metal through their throat. (which is the point the devs are going for I guess).
@@StyryderX There is one non lethal method in particular that seems a loose loose to me, but a large number of them are pretty rough. Might need to replay it now that I am an adult to get a fairer picture than highschool me. In general videogames are going to struggle with exploring non-binary conflict outcomes be they lethal or not. One space that actually has the opportunity to do a better job of this are tabletop RPGs but that's mostly dependant on the people at the table.
Every game writer ever: "Before you go on a journey of revenge, dig two graves"
Every gamer ever: "Or...hear me out...I could plan on NOT doing that???"
1:33 I'm pretty sure the reference went over YOUR head Yatz. The hallway sequence is a reference to the South Korean film 'Old Boy', not sidescrolling street brawlers.
Edit: It could be that it WAS the reference you were implying, but whoever makes the animations put a pixelated brawler thinking you meant that.
Been looking forward to this one for a while actually, thanks Yahtz
I do think that more games need to have an aging mechanic, if only to wake up Chester to the fact that he isn't 17 anymore, and may actually want to go outside and do something in the real world for one.
Wildermyth is a great one. Basically fantasy X-Com but it takes place over multiple generations and your soldiers will age, have children, lose limbs in battle etc.
I always like when games take their stories through years of characters lives and make an effort to show aging. Fable taking the tutorials through your childhood, grow up during training, then take like half a century for the adventure playing out. Real fun when you are a huge jacked man, but all wrinkled and white haired.
Some games I can think of with aging mechanics are Crusader Kings and a fun little mobioe game called Sword and Glory.
Pentiment is looking like it gonna have something like that.
"Fist of the East Bay"
I would pay to see Yahtzee, make such a film
god i love yahtzee, he makes entire videos for a single punchline that will keep you rolling for half an hour, golden stuff
I used to think revenge was a dish best served cold. Now, I know it means getting back at somebody.
I do believe Dipper Pines said it best "Revenge is so underrated, that felt awesome"
Aren't there some martial arts movies where avenging the protagonist's master depicted as totally worth it, if only to stop the evil guy from doing more evil stuff?
But yeah, the hero sparing his enemies thing seems pretty stupid if you killed a hundred nameless mooks to get to the boss. There are good odds that the big bad deserves it more than at least some of the mooks and killing the boss will do more to disrupt future evil plans more than some low-level thug. If they don't have a name and face, their life is worthless.
I honestly liked Sifu, but I do agree that it didn't bring much new to the table. The aging gimmick was interesting, but often times I feel like giving you more attack power and less life as you lose lives kind of feels like the equivalent of losing a bit of your life every time you die on a Souls-like.
The story was a *very* cliché martial arts revenge arc story, seen in almost every major martial arts film to the point where even the Simpsons made an Itchy and Scratchy about it. The amount of times I tried to get the spare function and ended up accidentally killing the bosses out of sheer force of habit was annoying, too.
It's a game that is stylish, and fun for the most part, right up until you die enough that you start to lose the will to live. The martial arts is quite impressive, the use of Bak Mei was an interesting choice. But Yahtzee does have a point. The majority of the enemies in the game have exactly the same fighting style as the last people, they only mix it up for certain special enemies; kickboxers in the club, fat dudes starting from warehouse, bodyguards in the museum, etc.
though to be fair sometimes you don't NEED to bring something new, just do something old well enough to be entertaining. hell, there are a lot of forgotten formulas out there that I would LOVE for some desperate indie studio to try to revive it.
@@danilooliveira6580 There's a saying which I love; "There are no original ideas."
Honestly, everything's been done by this point, because all plots follow an archetypal structure which ultimately stand the test of time because people find all sorts of unique ways to approach them.
Lost City was basically an attempt to revive the old Indiana Jonesy temple raiding plot which tbh has roots well before Indy. And it got praise for subverting the formula and making it about two people who *don't* have those survival skills
It all depends on how you do it. I loved Sifu, despite the cliché storyline; it was still a massive amount of fun.
it didn't necessarily bring anything "new" to the table, but it did bring something back that had been missing for a long time
I think the age mechanic has some potential and is a cool way to deal with the “Mary Sue” problems a lot of video games tend to have.
It’s hard to get intimidated by enemies when you are an overpowered badass with nothing to fear. And turning you from a tank to a glass cannon is a smooth way to tell the story of an aging badass while preserving the skill element of games like this.
@@NathanCassidy721 Actually, this is quite a profound take. I suppose it does make sense, and it's symmetry, in another way. The old master who dies at the beginning is exactly that - old. There's likely speculation that if he was the same age as Yang when they fought, he may have defeated him. But also, with age, comes experience and power.
Surely it would make a lot more moral sense to spare the goons, and kill the bosses who directly made choices that wronged you. Yet writers always go the other way around. Kill all the nameless goons you like, they don't count if you don't know their names.
Yahtzee's lack of time on this game kinda shows. It's understandable since he's on a timeline, but he missed several things, including the very important fact that it is, in fact, possible and not all that difficult to refrain from killing any of the mooks.
You essentially just have to avoid using weapons, which is easier than it sounds since by the time you're actually pursuing the good ending, you've had time to get used to the combat and understand how to counter your opponents.
But think of that from a gameplay perspective, sparing all of those minions would be a hassle.
@@TheKennyboy92 I played the game exactly like that for the Wude ending, and it's really not. You have to a) not pick up any weapons and b) be careful near high ledges, which there are very few of in the game.
Oh yes, Sifu. I’m sure the 50-odd people you left bloodied and broken in your wake last level really appreciate your hard-won life lesson, that revenge isn’t worth the sorrow and pain it takes to get it, and that the perpetrators are as human and flawed as the rest of us.
The exhibit janitor’s gonna have his work cut out for him tomorrow, picking all the knives and broken sticks out of people’s guts.
First playthrough: "you killed too many people and lost yourself to the spirit of revenge. So you get the bad ending!"
Second playthrough: "you spared these exact specific people. You are not a mindless killer consumed by revenge and therefore get the good ending!"
Player: "what about the hordes of nameless faceless goons I killed on the way up to those specific people?"
Game: "they probably molested kittens or something Don't worry about it here's your achievement.'
See the difference between Dishonored and Sifu is in Dishonored (other than the big bads actually getting comeuppance ) is that in Dishonored you can go through the whole game with no one getting hurt except the big bads. One minute you're just guarding them and they're just sipping wine, and the next minute one of them is now a tard or a heretic.
Funny how both of them are french games
I thought this game was a love letter to kung fu movies and action set pieces like raid, oldboy etc etc. Hence the camera angles were more references to specific fight scenes in those movies. If you enjoy those kinda movies, it's a really fun play through as you try to pick out parts that you recognize.
The buying years back as well as you only ageing one year on a death are both products of playing on easy mode.
Not that there's anything wrong with playing on easy but this one isn't implemented that well, leading you to never really having to fix your mistakes instead easily being able to pass any challenge by just dying and respawning enough times.
The title makes me think of that bad joke:
I'm on a seafood diet. When I see food, I eat it.
To Yahtzee's point, I found the dialogue much more enjoyable when switched to Chinese.
@@cranapple3367 I somewhat agree. I know I'll put up with very cringeworthy/cliched/over-idealistic dialogue if I'm reading it as subtitles where I probably would roll my eyes and stop watching if it was in a live-action show in English or being delivered by the kind of aw-shucks oh-gorsh American voices they often use (or used to use) for anime dubs no matter how inappropriate they are for the show. I'm talking about stuff along the lines of "I fight for my friends! And so that everyone will stop fighting wars! Because...because...I know now why people shed tears for those they never knew! STAR HERO HEART FIRE WORD SALAD ATTACK POWER LEVEL HUGE NUMBER INSERTED HERE!"
The Chinese is just as bland and functional as the English but if the language barrier lets you ignore that then more power to you
I am so glad you made this video because I have been on the fence about buying this game since it came out
I always thought the 2 d reference was referencing the classic old boy scene
Undertale did the "killing is bad" concept right, which is to say, there was never a person it was ok to kill. it stood by its message and themes the whole way through rather then waiting until the very end to remember it was supposed to be saying something.
(Deltarune might be doing something different from what I can see, but it's certainly got the same if not more heart in it so far.)
The game doesn't even shun you for killing, it even encourages it with weapons. Sparing a boss is just for players that have mastered the game.
You could do a week of Factorio if you have a dry spell again, provided you manage to put it down again after a week.
Very timely review Yahtz very timely
impressive, Englishman living in USA was told Sarajevo was in former Yugoslavia, never expected such elite geography. That shuts up what's left of Yahtz doubters
I’m not able to play this game yet but I so want to for a specific reason. While beat em ups are not unheard of, there are fewer that focus on the skill and aesthetics of Kung Fu. And among them, none that I can think of have that same “keep doing it to attain mastery” mechanic that fits perfectly with a martial arts theme.
I love this game so much, it's my GOTY 2022. Love the combat, love the environments, love the soundtrack, the story is functional and gets out of your way. Everything feels so well tuned and precise. Excellent game Sloclap!
"Man, revenge is underrated that felt awesome."
Dipper (Gravity Falls)
Watching this at two times speed is the ultimate challenge
Less "Killing you won't bring (x) back, so there's no point" stories and more "You can't bring (x) back, so there's no reason not to kill you" stories. Like The Princess Bride!
yahtzee brought out his inner Andy when he said change the fucking record I love it
Yeah playing on easy let's you rewind time which is the most unfortunate thing they've done as it removes all challenge. On other difficulties it just resets your death counter to 0 which is far better.
the shenmue big tree reference in the credits is an S tier in-joke
This review makes me wonder if anyone remembers jet li rise to honor. It was also a 3d beat em up for the ps2 that was actually pretty good. And for some reason may be the only time I wasn't annoyed by the right analog stick being used to attack
I was vaguely aware of this game's existence but it didn't got my attention before so I only knew it was a brawler, but I must admit than that aging gimmick is quite intriguing as a story telling tool.
If you do pick it up, please please please play on normal difficulty. Its difficult to fully explain how much you lose by playing the easy mode unless you absolutely can not progress otherwise.
5:00 Oh Fistmas Tree! Oh Fistmas Tree!..
So you spare the bosses, each of whom is far more responsible than all the henchmen you DO murder indiscriminately?
For the good ending, yes, but it's narratively justified in a sense. The "bad guys" killed the MC's father and a couple other martial arts masters because they were "protecting" powerful magical talismans that had literal life-changing powers, and you beat them in order of decreasing levels of assholishness.
The first guy makes drugs, but only because he's terminally ill and needs the money for treatment. The second guy is a battle maniac, but isn't directly villainous. The third one is an ex-assassin who wanted to get away from a life of bloodshed and became an artist. The fourth one used her talisman to become the CEO of a big company that focuses on charity and helping the poor, while the last guy and the "main villain" opened a clinic that can save otherwise terminally ill people.
Some of them are bad, some of them are good, but they did what they did for an ostensibly noble purpose, and when counting all the pros and cons, the MC does more harm than good by killing them.
@@Horvath_Gabor if i'm going to kill all of their goons it wouldn't be fair to the goons if i don't kill their boss too.
"Much the same way I gave up binge drinking, I didn't want to waste my 20s"
Brilliant line
Nice end line
Looking forward to another instalment in the "Occasional Guide to VG History." I mean, it's inevitable by this point, right?
Shenmue could have had an aging mechanic by giving Ryo a few more tree rings.
play viscera cleanup detail its relaxing and fun
Did...did Yahtzee miss the Oldboy reference? It's not even some "kids these days" thing it's an actual cult classic. It's also a fighting movie about revenge against someone who-shock of all shocks-did not kill the protagonist's master. It's also based on a manga or manhwa but the (superior IMO) koreean version lacks any sort of flair. It's just gritty bare-knuckle slugging through and through and also very depressing, it's great!
Yahtzee has made clear many times he doesn’t watch movies very often haha
@@theescapist It's just weird with all the other obscure media he seems familiar with. I mean I unironically didn't know about scorsese yet he made a reference regarding him a while ago. I just assumed he'd be more familiar with these kinda things. Regardless, I was more shocked by the misattribution of the reference than anything else.
@@chukyuniqul I dunno what kindof media you're watching, but Scorsese isn't obscure. He's one of the classic film makers of hollywood
@@Eidlones He was obscure *to me*. It's all about perspective.
@@chukyuniqul Then how can you get at Yhatzee for not recognizing the Oldboy reference? When you yourself admit that "obscure" is a perspective?
aaaah the good old southamerican operation condor..... jajajajja love the jokes and the content jatze, love from Colombia
Okay guys, I know it's fun to just grab the pitchfork, go with the crowd, and rally against the game because "Villain spare! Mook kill! Me think hypocrite! Hurr-durr!", but Yathzee kind of dropped the ball on this one, so put those farming implements aside for a moment and listen up.
First, this isn't a stereotypical revenge story. In short, the five villains teamed up and killed the MC's father because he had a magical talisman that could cure the sick, save the terminally ill, and even resurrect the dead, but he refused to share it with them because "Muh tradition!" and "Power corrupts!" and so on. Once they got it, three out of the five turned a new leaf, and even the other two aren't actively villainous. In particular, the artists just wants to get away from her history of bloodshed and make art, the CEO uses her power to make money to help the impoverished, and the main villain opens a clinic to magically save the terminally ill. By killing them, the main character ruins everything they accomplished for the sake of their own revenge, while sparing them allows them to continue their work and make the world a better place.
As for the mooks, keep in mind that we're not talking about TLOU2 crap here, where you sneak around and murder unaware scavengers who had nothing to do with you on your way to your target. These are people who, when noticing you, immediately attack, often with baseball bats and knives. In fact, while technically there are a couple of places where you can go out of your way to attack non-hostile grunts for a small advantage, if you just proceed with your objectives, they will attack you 100% of the time anyway, and there are many situations where they are waiting in ambush with the purpose to kill the main character.
So, in short, you have mooks that are attacking you with deadly weapons without any provocation, and they are willing to kill you without a shred of remorse, while the main villains range from desperate neutrals to literal champions of virtue who just want to help people, and yet for some reason applying lethal force against the ones who actively try to kill you is bad, while killing well intentioned extremists who are doing their best to live a good life and benefit society, and who only defend themselves from the crazy person who breaks into their homes with the intention to kill them, is good? Are you really sure about that?
This is the best comment on this entire video. I wanted you to know that
Yeah nah
@@roachybill In every scenario, you have one single person you have a beef with, and that's the boss at the end of the stage. Your goal is to get to that person and settle your score. You don't turn back when warned by a bouncer, because if you do, then what? Stop playing the game? That just wouldn't make a lick of sense as a player, and neither would it make any sense for the character you're controlling.
Secondly, if they don't stand in your way, you have literally zero reason to do anything to them. In the context of the narrative, you are not directly threatening them, yet time and time again, you're attacked by waves of mooks wielding sticks, baseball bats, knives, and anything else they can get their hands on and try to literally kill you... for what? Trespassing?
Even if we take the least charitable approach and say that the main character is an unlawful intruder, if they attack him with lethal force and intent to kill, I don't see the issue with him responding in kind, as at that point you could make a case for self-defense.
@@Horvath_Gabor When you're the killer breaking in somewhere, you can't claim you were just defending yourself when people put up a fight to stop you from your killing.
@@roachybill First off, stop strawmanning me. It's not exactly polite.
Secondly, stop strawmanning the game, because it seriously doesn't help the conversation.
Let's go from the top once again: our main character wants to take revenge on FIVE people. Canonically speaking, whether he kills or spares any of them is entirely up to the player, but so it whether he kills any of the mooks. Aside from a few special moves, mainly the ones with weapons, none of the attacks are explicitly lethal, and whether the MC uses any of them is entirely up to the player's choices during gameplay.
You are framing the argument as a false dichtonomy of "you either kill everyone, or you kill everyone but the bosses", while ignoring the entirely reasonable option of the main character not killing a single person throughout the entire game. It all depends on implicit player choice.
In other words, your point would be entirely valid if breaking necks, slicing, beheading and otherwise obviously killing mooks is the only way to reach the endings. However, you, the player can just as easily go through all the stages with zero casualties, and yet the enemies would still try to kill you with the exact same amount of lethal force.
This is a story about a man seeking revenge on people who may or may not deserve it. It's a morally grey topic, further complicated by narrative and gameplay segregation, because without mooks to fight, you don't have a gameplay loop. However, you are painting it as if it was all black while pretending I'm saying it's all white, which is disingenuous.
Here's a comparison to illustrate my point: Look at the Arkham games. Batman goes after the Penguin or whoever, breaks into his hideout, the mooks try to stop him because they are his loyal subordinates and criminals and whatnot, so he beats them up with his fists and gadgets that should be, by all intents and purposes, lethal implements, and yet when he reaches the boss, he always spares them. Do you have the same contention about those games as well, or are they okay because exploding, shocking, freezing, and curb-stomping mooks are glossed over as "just the gameplay loop" and you don't have the explicit choice to spare or kill the boss at the end?
Last, but not least, let's make one last thing clear: the narrative of Sifu is quite undercooked. The main character never speaks, we don't know much about his motivations, and much of the story has to be inferred by snippets and gameplay. The one thing that's certain is that the game is promoting mastery of the combat system. That's why the "good" ending is tied to beating the bosses the hard way, both to demonstrate the player's skill and to show that the main character is much more powerful and skilled than them. The point is even explicitly referenced in the ending as a philosophy of dominating your enemies so that they know they cannot defeat you, instead of killing them. In a sense, the whole game builds up to achieving dominance without killing, so you characterizing the main character as a "psycho" the mooks are justified in killing just because he entered their territory to challenge their boss is odd enough to make me want to throw your accusation back into your face and ask if you actually finished the game and understood what it was about...
How has Yahtzee been making these reviews for so many years and yet they are never bad and just get better
Funny that you say that under a review where he actually completely misreads the game. He not only plays a game entirely focused on mastering the combat and learning all the systems on easy mode (which neuters a lot of game mechanics, making his complaints about dodging and the aging mechanic being meaningless completely misguided), he also writes off the game's story as "yet another revenge-is-bad plot", when in reality it's a subversion of one, where the "villains" are arguably the good guys, and your rampage of revenge is causing harm to countless innocents by proxy, which makes it more of an "am I actually the bad guy?" plot.
That said, the comedy is still top-notch, but as far as accuracy is concerned, this is a definitive miss.
@@Horvath_Gabor i didnt play the game so that stuff isnt really an issue for me. I just like the comedy and stuff
@@posmen0e Fair enough, but many viewers seem to forget that ZP is more of a comedy show than a review one, and just take Yathzee's joke and occasional misinformation at face value. You can see it a lot in this comment section even, where people who never played the game take it for granted that it's just a clichéd revenge story about killing the mooks and sparing the bad guys with a combat system that doesn't have any stakes, just because he says so in the video.
@@Horvath_Gabor Yeah but people always seem to take reviewers, or critics at face value. How many amazing games do you play that critics or reviewers hated just to find out its one of the best youve ever played personally.
3:16 Oh my god, I'm laughing so hard I think I'm gon-
In Shenmue it isn’t the destination, It’s the friends we punched along the way.
Game developers pushing the "killing is not the answer" mantra should really remember what happened to the boy a priest saved from drowning in Austria.
If you're looking for games to play around this period, I imagine the recently released Swansong might fill that gap for new releases.
I'm on a sifu diet right now, I sifu and I teachfu a lesson in humility oh yes
I'm surprised that Yahtzee mistook the Old Boy hallway scene reference for a beat-em-up reference.
To be fair, he does not watch movies
Thank you.
From the mind that brought you "Spunkgargleweewee" comes "Flip-out Spanky-wanky"
"Flip Out Spanky Wanky" is the name of my new three piece slam band.
I really thought that I missed watching this episode months ago xD
I always love games that have these moments where they make killing a boss into a melancholy thing, like they forgot about the run up to the boss where you're a spree killer bigger than any american mass shooting could ever dream off.
You don't actually kill anybody in sifu though unless you go out of your way to finish off enemies with a knife
The way you pronounced "Sarajevo" I'd never guessed what you mean.
In Shenmue's case, if it takes much longer, Ryu Hazuki will end up being a petrified statue in the main bad guys zen garden.
And, at the same time, the shenmue will claim that "shenmue has already been rock bottom, but will rise again" and that "yu Suzuki is a visionary"
It's so annoying when stories preach that vengeance is not worth it and you should spare the baddies, no matter how vile they are. Meanwhile we've been crippling and killing goons along the way without a care in the world, like the game is trying to say that the lifes of the rich and powerful are worth more than the plebs.
All the villains in this have a good reason to do what they did, end most are decent people now. For example, the Executive, uses her company to primarily give money to charities. The main villain uses the power that brings you back to life to heal otherwise terminally ill people. Etc.
Yhatzee very oversimplifies the story.
Hello from former Yugoslavia and Sarajevo :D
I've never been a fan of the "hard games like Dark Souls shouldn't have an easy mode" crowd but this review demonstrates they might have a point - kind of?
Yahtzee is clearly reviewing the easy mode here, in normal (original) mode you don't age by just one year per death, aging becomes quicker with every death (and you can not buy back years). You inevitably would replay levels to get through them with no/minimal deaths to even have a chance further down the line because "40/50 odd lives" in easy mode may be enough, not so in the original experience.
And then it's *not* a short game, I easily spent 15 hours to get to the first (bad) ending and I'm pretty sure other, much better players, still required multiple tries.
This game isn't (originally) about consuming 5 levels in one go with plenty of lives, it's a lesson in patience. Easy mode is a completely different experience and I feel like - at the very least the review should have pointed that out.
Saying this is a short game is like saying Rocket League is a short game because you played through the one arena in 5 minutes and then there was no more content to consume.
Please do yourself a favor: Try it at the normal difficulty level at least for a while. You're not supposed to get through this on the first attempt. Before you give up frustrated, sure, ok, easy mode. But at least give yourself a chance to actually become good at the game before throwing in the towel.
NGL I definitely got put off before finishing the first level. I thought my skillset from what I learned from Absolver would carry over, but...
That's great
I'm surprised I missed this one when it first dropped. But I'm a little sad that there was never a ZP made for their first flip-out-spanky-wanky game: Absolver. 😔
I never thought Yahtzee would mention the garbage bin I call my home city.
the old boy hallway reference was obvious but nice
Shows your writing talent. I think "flip out spanky-wanky" will be in the Oxford's by the end of the year, really.
Any chance we might get a review out of Shredders Revenge?
Do V Rising! It’s in alpha but already feels pretty polished.
From Yahtzee's description of the aging mechanic it seems he's been playing on easy. Which is fine, I just want to point out that there are some important differences on harder difficulties. Like that if you suck the number of years you age each death is going to go up.
I will say, once Sifu clicked, it made me want to go back and try Sekiro again.
I like the game a lot.
I never got into stuff like the souls-games, because i don't have the patience. But here, it's "arcady" enough for me to get into it
I got the impression from mutuals that played this game that the combat was sick but they never seemed that interested by/wanted to talk about anything story or character related aside from meming on the age stuff. Now that its being echoed by Yahtzee, I do wonder it sifu ends up being one of those games that gets forgotten despite not doing anything really wrong at all.
The mechanics are the important part and worth remembering.
*Zero Punctuation prog rock album of the week:*
*Whirling Through Empty Air* by the *Ballistic Velocity Diamonds*
Oh fistmas tree!
Oh fistmas tree!
How bloody are your knuckles!
In terms of the whole "selectively judgey" trope that comes from these kinds of stories, where you kill hundreds of faceless mooks but decide to spare their boss because "revenge isn't worth it", I agree that the record needs to be changed. But would flipping the script on its head be sufficient?
Specifically, have the protagonist be skilled in explicitly "non-lethal" methods of fighting, instilling effects like Sleep, Fear, Disenchantment, etc, wherein the faceless mooks are no longer a problem despite you not killing them, as they're unwilling/incapable of keeping up the fight. In addition, as your reputation grows, the bad guys have to install "commissars" who keep the mooks in line by executing them if they don't do their jobs right, and you have to take out the commissar first before neutralizing the mooks.
And when it comes to the bosses, rather than choosing to finish them off or spare them, your options change depending on how much you know about them. If they're genuinely trying to do the right thing, but they're barking up the wrong tree, the protagonist will be locked out from finishing them off, and on top of merely sparing them, you'll be granted the opportunity to try and talk them around to taking a better path. But if the boss is a genuinely horrid bastard-fucker, you aren't allowed to spare them, but instead you have the option to brutalize them, setting an example of what happens to bona-fide bad guys. And of course, the head of the organization would get it worst: when you discover the truth about them, about how horrid they truly are, you aren't even given the option to end them quickly: the true final boss-fight is maximizing the horror and agony of their demise, in order to make them feel even a fraction of the pain and suffering that they've inflicted upon the city, the land, the world, etc, as well as showing all mankind what happens to the worst of them.
Only to find out after-the-fact that the final boss was a patsy figurehead and ignorant of the atrocities committed by those below him. You commit seppuku to repent for your error.