 Uh, before we get started, let's get the elephant out of the room. Yes, I had a trim, I cut my hair about like three inches. If you don't know the reason why, then clearly you don't watch my other channel. So, thanks. Thanks for your help. This channel actually is almost about to hit a million. That would be nice. Can't do it without you guys. Now that that elephant has left the room, let's kick this other elephant out of the room because I want to say this video right here, right now, today is my very, very early impressions on Dragon Ball Kakarot and Fire Emblem Mirage Sessions Tokyo Encore Something long title. The reason why it's very early impressions, a lot of you, some of you, I don't care, might remember in December, Kim and I were supposed to go to Australia to, I haven't been home in like six years. It's a whole lot of my problem, not yours. I was really excited for it. And then I had some medical issues, a certain part of my body that I talked about in the video very awkwardly and I had to cancel the trip. I rescheduled it for the 23rd, it's the 21st right now. That has snuck up on me really quickly. These two games came out on the 17th. I have tried really hard to play as much of them as possible. I feel bad again. I usually try to, I mean, finish a game. It would be nice, but I try to at least get as far into the game as possible while the game is still relevant before I review it. I don't like being one of those people that rushes out a video on a game just for the views, but I don't really have time to wait. So instead, I'm going to rush out this video for the views. Sorry. So if you guys are okay with it, I am okay with it. I still plan to make this a fun, entertaining and exciting video for you to watch. And I do feel like I've played and experienced enough about these games to be able to give you guys a good first impression on them, and you'll be able to figure out whether it's a game that interests you or not. And if it does, you might just need to go and seek out further information before you make your final purchase, because I'm not far enough in either of them to really say yet. Oh, and if you sat there thinking to yourself, oh, what didn't need a haircut? He didn't have to cut off like two inches of his hair. Look how messy and tangled it was here. Hi, welcome to Chili's. What do you have dangling from your ear holes? Um, earphones? You're still using wired headphones in 2020? I'm sorry to interrupt you. I should have paged your pager first or maybe even sent you a fax. All right, dude. I get it. It's funny. Do you or do you want to double check with Ask Jeeves first? What are those plugged into? A walkman? No, look at you. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you? Brendon, praise your blast from the past looking boy. Look, I know you're here to sell me something. How about you just hurry up already? You got it. Raycons, the best and wireless earbud technology. They come in a range of fun patterns and colors. I got the blue ones. They're super comfortable and will fit into whatever weirdo hole in the side of your face you've got. You try them on. Well, these are actually pretty cool. The case acts as a power bank. So when you're done listening to the Raycons, throw them back in the case and it will charge them back up four times on a single chart. Wait a second. There's only one in here. Raycons started about half the price of other premium wireless earphones on the market. I've had their latest model, these E25s for a week now, and it's by far the best ones yet. Wow, six hours of playtime and seamless Bluetooth pairing and their noise isolating. But where is the other one? Click the link below to get 15% off these bad boys. Hey, future boy, are you listening to me? Where is the other one? Oh, it's right here. And now you've activated my greatest trap card yet because when I place this one in my ear, we'll fuse together and become one stronger ultimate being. Wait, what do you mean? Like the Battara earrings and Dragon Ball Z? How on theme for this video? Wait, no! This is our ultimate form. I really thought we would look, you know, cooler or something. Well, we didn't really look exactly the same as it was, so I don't know what you thought was going to happen. Are we at least any stronger? No, that's a no. Let's, let's un-fuse. We can't un-fuse? Great. At least we have Raycons. Look, I am a huge fan of Dragon Ball. We're talking, I've watched through all the anime of Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super, Dragon Ball GT, like five times each. I've, I collect all the figures and believe me, I have played all of the games or at least pretty much all of them since the Game Boy Advance days. Which is why, and I'm sorry, because I love the story of Dragon Ball Z, but I am so sick of having the story of Dragon Ball Z regurgitated, reanimated, and thrown back at my face for the billionth time. Don't go to... Don't hit that dislike button right away. I still love this game and I believe it is a huge step in the right direction for the Dragon Ball Z gaming franchise. It's just, oh boy, I wish they had at least taken some liberties with the story if they were going to retell it for, again, like the millionth time. I'm not kidding. I mean, we have Dragon Ball Z burst limit. We have Dragon Ball Z Raging Blast 2. We have Dragon Ball Z Raging Blast 1, which I can't find right now. Probably should have planned this skip beforehand. And of course they cut out a lot of the filler, which you might think is a good thing, but honestly, with all of these games recreating the same story and always pushing past the filler like it doesn't exist, this might have been the one time I would have been okay with filler. Well, thankfully that is not the only element within Dragon Ball Kakarot. You also have the combat, the fighting, and the exploration. So Dragon Ball Kakarot features that more open feeling 3D, moving around at your own free will, fighting that we've been experiencing since the 360 game, like Dragon Ball Raging Blast 1 and 2. However, they've condensed it a lot in Dragon Ball Kakarot. They've made it a lot less complicated, which is good because it was pretty complicated before. There's much fewer options available to you, both in the amount of attacks you have and the way you perform your attacks, and then also the way that you dodge and deflect. All of that has been changed and simplified a lot. You really just hold down the left trigger. You can guard at any time, and if you want to dodge out of the way, it's the left trigger. And then A, it's a lot more simple. And I do like that, and I think it's going to be a lot more newcomer friendly. However, unfortunately, that leads to very repetitive feeling gameplay, which wasn't a good mix when I already felt kind of stuck repetitively into the same story. It all felt very rinse and repeat, and now it's just going through the motions. As the game progresses, then you start to unlock things like transformations, and you can go Super Saiyan and Kaioken, which is probably my favorite move in the Dragon Ball franchise. It does start to open up, and the battle starts to feel a little bit more different. But if you are strictly going battle to battle to battle, I do feel it will get repetitive. However, thankfully, we have a third element of this game we haven't touched on yet, and that's the exploration. Something that Dragon Ball games haven't really dived into since the GBA games was a more open world RPG feeling experience. And I do really like what they did with the open world in Dragon Ball Kakarot. Again, I can't help but mention that almost every element they included into the open world, and to the RPG mechanics, they all feel very half-baked and not unfinished, but they don't really go far enough in the direction to feel fleshed out. I guess. They don't feel fleshed out is what I'm trying to say. You can find side quests in the world too. Characters will give you extra bonus quests to do, and then if you complete that quest, obviously you get rewards, and then if it's a character within the Dragon Ball universe that you probably know of, then most likely it'll join your community, and you can then start throwing their little token around the community board, which we'll get to in a second. But these side quests also pretty much amount to fetch quests. Let's just go here and do this. Come on back. And then the community board that you get those tokens for, it's one of the many ways in this game that you can level up your characters. You can level them up in various different ways from cooking skills, which if you level that up, then when you cook, you'll get more benefits and rewards from cooking. I really liked moving the tokens around the board and trying to find out what relationships these tokens had with each other. Like Gohan and Goku, you pair them up next to each other, you get a stat boost because they're father and son. Um, and then I guess my last big complaint is the flying. You fly, you move around this game. You move around the world by flying because, you know, you could fly, so why wouldn't you want to? The flying controls terribly. I don't know why they've never managed to get this right in a Dragon Ball game. Usually in Dragon Ball games, the flying is pretty much the same way it is in Kakarot. However, in the other games, you really only do it within combat. So things like using the right bumper and the left trigger to go up and down, it's not as bad in a fight because you already are using all the other buttons to attack with and that kind of just makes sense. You go up and down during the fight, that's fine. But they took that same control scheme and they just gave it to you in the open world. You still go up and down by using the triggers and that just doesn't feel fluid in an open world. I hate to draw a correlation to a game like Anthem, but honestly, the one thing Anthem really did right was the flying. That game felt amazing. If you played it, you know what I'm talking about. They were trying to do a lot for the first time really ever. I mean, we haven't had a game like this in the Dragon Ball universe. Concepts and elements like flying around an open world and then running into a random enemy and the battle triggering in the open world and just getting to fight them right there. Like that's really cool and it's a step in the right direction. All of these RPG elements, they're all a step in the right direction, the exploration, meeting characters, leveling yourself up. All of this makes for a very fun Dragon Ball game and there was just enough new concepts in Kakarot that kept pushing me forward and kept making me want to explore more of the game. It's just there was so much of the same and so much of it wasn't really fleshed out that none of it actually kept me engrossed in the game and engaged in the game. It's not a bad game and honestly, if you haven't played Dragon Ball games to death like I have and this might be one of your first Dragon Ball gaming experiences and you've watched the anime and you think it's a bit of a right, this could be an amazing game for you but for a hardcore Dragon Ball Z fan that's played a lot of the games, I don't think it's a rush out and spend $60 on it title. Dragon Ball Z fighters is still the best one I think we've ever had but for a 3D fighting Dragon Ball game this probably is the best one we've ever had. It's just not that exciting for me but maybe it is for you. I don't know. All right, moving on. I think I was way too negative on that one. I didn't mean to be. It's just I have more complaints than I have nice things to say about it which I didn't realize until I started talking. I don't script these things by the way. I just blab from my face hole. I do like the game. I can be critical about a game. I can point out its flaws and tell it where it needs to improve while still enjoying it and I do enjoy it because it's Dragon Ball. Whatever, Fire Emblem. Let's talk about this one next and hopefully I'll be more positive on this one. I do have some things to say though. Surprising no one, this was a port from Wii U. One of the few Wii U games left that Nintendo hasn't yet crammed under the switch somehow. I'm actually all in favor for this because no one played them on no one played any Wii U games. So give us as many as you can Nintendo. I didn't think we would see this one come over but I was wrong. It's always nice to be wrong. And I did play it back in the day. I don't really remember how much I played and honestly I think I've forgotten more about this game than I remember. Like right out from the start I don't remember any of the characters, any of the cutscenes. Did I play this game? I think I talked about it at some point. I really don't remember. So I am going into this with a fairly fresh set of eyes. Forgetful, fresh set of eyes. So Tokyo Mirage Sessions Fire Emblem Encore is the full title. The game combines gameplay, narrative, and aesthetic elements from Atlus' Shimagami Tensai and Nintendo's Fire Emblem series. So the game has these beings known as Mirages who appear out of nowhere and then make everyone else disappear into nowhere. No one knows where they go and that's what you're trying to figure out. The game follows a group of young teenagers who pair up with these good Mirages who just so happen to be from the Fire Emblem franchise and together with the teenagers the Fire Emblem characters become Mirage Masters. So Tokyo Mirage Sessions takes most of its gameplay inspiration and elements from the Shimagami, from the Shimagami Tensai, from the Shinagami Tensai, from the Shinagami, from the Shinagami Magami, from the Shinagami Tensai. I don't care. The game takes its gameplay inspiration from that series and then some of the characters like Krom, who is the only one I know because I haven't played a ton of Fire Emblem games and I only know Krom from Smash Brothers. It takes some characters from Fire Emblem and uses them as the Mirages in this game to then become the Mirage Masters. But the actual main protagonist, teenagers, are brand new characters introduced into this franchise. So to be honest with you, for a game that was supposed to be a collaboration between Fire Emblem and Shinagami, I hate myself. For a game that was supposed to be a collaboration crossover between Fire Emblem and Shinagami, Shinagami, what is wrong with me? I know how to say this. SM, okay? Which sounds like something else, but it's fine. FE and SM, okay? It really doesn't feature much or any of either of those franchises. Again, just a few characters which you don't actually play as more that just there and they fuse with your actual playable character. And then the game itself just takes inspiration from the setup of SM-style games. Actually, the setup and the story and the way you play the game feels a lot like Persona 4 or Persona 5. I'm gonna be honest. I haven't played an SM game before, but I have played Persona 4 and 5 and this feels like a light version of that game which I really enjoy, since Persona 5 apparently isn't going to ever come to Switch. I don't know why. So if you're strictly a fan of Fire Emblem or SM, and that's really what you wanna get out of this game, you wanna see those universes come together in this really cool collaboration Smash Bros. style RPG, that's not here for you. That's not what this is and that's not what it's about. However, if you just like the gameplay in SM-style games and Chrome really does it for you, then this might be for you. The story follows you and your friends who are performers, singers, talent. Working for this secret organization who disguises themselves as a talent agency to try and figure out what is going on with all these disappearing people and you get warped into these other dimensions, Persona 5-4 style and that's in those dimensions where the Fire Emblem characters can reveal themselves, merge with you and then you can get into these battles and you can start killing things. And I do really like the way they set up the turn-based combat. Obviously, this game has such a heavily influenced by performing, by the arts, by singing and dancing and all of that. So when you're in the battles, it reflects that aesthetically. Like, while you're selecting an enemy to attack, it shines a studio light down on them, like they're standing on stage and all of a sudden they're the center of attention. The attacks are all very showbody and if you manage to actually hit an enemy's weakness, it'll trigger a combination move thing between all the characters which looks like an elaborate dance performance and it's called a session. Those are sessions when you manage to string attacks together. They look really cool and you're able to inflict a lot of damage that way, especially because it's triggered by a weakness. So you're really just crammed it into that enemy's weakness and sticking it to him. You also have performance attacks and those ones are the real flashy ones. That's where Krom will come out and start slashing his swords around and you can even chain those into session attacks and have your other characters follow up for even more damage. My biggest complaint, I guess it's not really even a complaint, it's just I'm a little disappointed by it. There's no English dub and that might be controversial. I know a lot of people like to play JRPGs with the Japanese voice acting. Every time I mention that I prefer English dubs, a lot of people get really like... But if the option is there, I speak English. I can draw more from that language. I can tell more about the emotions behind the characters when I can understand what they're saying and I'm not reading something. A lot of tone can be missed in text and I always feel like I'm missing a lot of tone when I can't understand what's being said and I'm just reading. I feel like it would have been nice for them to include an English dub for those that prefer an English dub just to have it there. And it wouldn't be such a big deal if there was subtitles, but weirdly, there's not. And of course throughout the game, everything has text anyway. Like just it comes up on the screen regardless. You can see what people are saying, but during battles, there's no text. There's nothing. And the characters are talking to each other. They yell stuff when they're attacking. Sometimes if it's a boss fight, the boss fight will literally have dialogue and say things. And there's no option to turn subtitles on for that. Like there's no subtitles, there's no text to back what they're saying. I don't know, it's a small complaint that maybe is actually a big complaint. I don't want to make a big deal about it because I don't want to look like a noob, a casual noob, but I would have liked it. Speaking of a lot of the cut scenes though, they are very well animated. There was a lot of actual anime animation throughout the game for the cut scenes that looks fantastic. And then there's even some parts that kind of splice anime with 3D, and it ends up coming together really nicely and looking fantastic. And then the music, which is obviously you want that to be good in a game like this that is so heavily centered around music and performances, the music is so great. Early on, there's this big performance in the middle of Shibuya where the star is being lifted up on a stage and it just sounds and looks really cool. Now, unlike Dragon Ball, I'm actually able to take this one with me to Australia because Switch is portable. Did you know that? What a shock. And I do intend to keep playing it, but I am a little butt hurt by the game right now. I'm not going to lie because last night, I was trying to play through more of it. I sat down and I had an hour long session and a lot of the stuff I talked about today was stuff I did in that session. I met new characters, learned about my mission, I went to Shibuya, I explored, I ate food, I bought items, I trained my singing talents, I was given tickets to see a show, I saw the show, all hell broke loose. I found my way into a new dimension, I killed things, I leveled up, I explored, I leveled up some more. And about 50 minutes into this session, I was introduced to savage enemies. I was told that savage enemies were stupidly difficult and hard to beat so you're better off running away, but you know me, you guys know me, big rough and tough Woodison. I don't run from a fight, okay? I at least wanted to find out what these enemies looked like, how tough they were, so I willingly opted into this fight and they completely wiped me out in their first turn. I didn't even get to attack. Okay, that's fine, kind of, I should have, the game tried to warn me, I got game over, it kicked me out to the main menu. So I loaded back in and that's when I found out that the game does not auto-save ever. You have to save this game all the time, constantly all the time. I'm talking like after every fight, unless you just want to risk it, because you never know when a death is around the corner and for me, it was an hour into a session. It was very frustrating. I can't stand games that don't auto-save. What, just save a lot, okay? Save a lot all the time, always and you won't have a problem and the game is fun. I like the game a lot. To recap, I would say, again, if you're a Dragon Ball fan who hasn't played many Dragon Ball games, then Kakarot might be perfect for you and if you've just played Dragon Ball games to death, I'm definitely not saying that it's not for you. I would just do a little bit more research and look into it more before you spend a full 60, but I'd say that game is worth it at almost any kind of price drop under 60 and I really hope that they flesh out this idea more in a sequel because it could go somewhere really awesome. Just right now it's just really okay. And Fire Emblem, Tokyo Mirage, Shin Megami, whatever you want to call that game, it's a very solid game and if you're really hurting, you're really begging for a persona-like experience on the Switch, it's the closest you're going to get and it's a game that stands out on its own right while not being better than either of the parts it's supposed to be comprised of and it's really not even comprised of them, but it's still a solid game that I feel like most, if not all, JRPG fans will love and be able to enjoy. Are they the most exciting releases for 2020? No. They were the first ones though and for that, they deserve a little, a little, a little round of applause for neither of them sucking and both of them being critical. Way more excited for things like Cyberpunk, Last of Us 2 and so many other games coming this year, Final Fantasy VII. So hey, if you want to see me talk about those and hopefully be nicer to them, ah, you're going to have to subscribe, please help me hit that million. I really appreciate you. I love you all so much. You're all fantastic. Thank you, Jordan, for editing this while I'm overseas away in Australia. I couldn't do this without you. You are all amazing, incredible people. Oh, look at that subscribe button. Isn't it cute? Isn't it sweet? Get the heck out of here and half lip all over that subscribe button. Again, like this video because apparently that helps. I don't know. I've been asking you guys to do like challenges recently and all those videos are doing better than my normal videos. I didn't think likes did anything anymore but apparently they do. So hit like, please. Oh, God, please. Why are you still here? Why are you still here? The video has finished. I've already gone. I'm not doing anything of value anymore. I'm snapping my fingers and I'm dancing on the floor. This is actually kind of relevant. Now I think of it for the topic at hand because it's a dancing game that I just reviewed. And now I'm kind of dancing but I'm more singing and the only thing that would make this any better is if I did a Kamehameha.