Persona 5 (2017, PS4) - How to Be a Heartbreaker

In spite of making my own turn-based RPGs and playtesting ones made by friends, my interest in the genre waned over the years. I'll pick up an occasional Pokemon game, but don't get excited for them. I've never played an Atelier or a Neptunia or any of the tens of thousands of similar looking games released every three months by Gust and Idea Factory. I enjoyed Final Fantasy XV, but even that series has moved on from turn-based combat. The last one I got excited about was Ubisoft's fantastic Child of Light, a small game that excelled stylishly.

I was a little unsure going into Persona 5. I've only played the original title in this series, released on the PS1 in 1996, and hearing that the latest installment was 80-100 hours long was honestly a turnoff for the modern me, while I would have eaten that up as a kid. With lots of flashy, graffiti style art, I knew it would win me over on style, but would I actually have fun? I'm happy to say that yes, this is indeed an excellent game, a high-water mark in its genre.

Yakuza Zero (2017, PS4) - Smooth Criminals

The release history of the Yakuza series outside of Japan has been a wild ride. Sega released the first two games on PS2 in 2006 and 2008 and I missed out on them, turned off by marketing which promoted them as Grand Theft Auto-style open world crime games, a genre I don't have much interest in. Two years later, a poorly-made demo for Yakuza 3, the first PS3 installment of the series, showed me a little more of what the game was about, but didn't sell me on it.

Yakuza 3 was largely doomed from the start: A bad demo, fan complaints over cut content in the English release, and a release date on the same day as the hugely anticipated Final Fantasy XIII. The series would struggle in the west for years, with an even worse, combat-only demo for Yakuza 4 and with Yakuza 5 coming out here a whole three years after its Japanese release, long after the PS3's lifecycle had waned, and without a physical release. I fell for the series after reading enough positive reviews of the third game, but there's no doubt it's been tough to be a western Yakuza fan, with long translation delays, questionable release strategies, and skipped spinoff titles.

Valkyria Chronicles Remastered (2016, PS4) - Kawaii War II

Eight years after its original release on PS3, Sega's cult-classic turn-based strategy game Valkyria Chronicles has been remastered and re-released on PC and PS4. While it spawned two smaller sequels on the PSP, this series has never been a breakout hit, but this new version has the potential to inject new life into it. I was a big fan when I first played this title in 2008, so how well has it held up?