Review of Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise

The Yakuza series is very loved in Japan, and more recently also outside of it. Its developers received their own division in Sega and released the second (after Binary Domain) game not related to the Yakuza series – Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. They only proved to her that, apart from Yakuza, they don’t know how to do anything else.

Lost Paradise is a game based on the famous manga “Fist of the North Star”, and its original source did not inspire optimism. "Fist" was released in the mid-80s, and it was a corny, straightforward shonen about a fearless hero wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland and dealing with bandits and villains with the help of his super melee skills. Uninitiated people often compare "Fist" with "JoJo", but in reality they do not have much in common – except for the exorbitantly broad shoulders and unshakable self-confidence of the main characters. The JoJo manga also comes from the 80s, and its boring first issues are about the level of Fist, but it is remembered for its much brighter and more inventive subsequent arcs. “Kulak” never became something big.

Lost Paradise takes extreme liberties with the original source: having started in much the same way (a hero named Kenshiro kills the kidnapper of his beloved and sets off to wander the wasteland), it quickly throws the action into its own setting – Eden, a city where wishes come true. It is unique in a post-apocalyptic world – it has food, water and electricity, allowing you to recreate some semblance of civilization. Of course, this is where Ken will find his bride, having spent the entire game searching for her. Anticipating the question – yes, the entire Lost Paradise takes place in one city (and on a patch of desert around it).

While the manga was more of a road movie, the game ties Ken to one location, forcing other characters to appear there as well.

Sorry for the spoiler, but I can’t help but talk about how the game deals with two of the original’s key antagonists – Emperor Sauser and Raoh, the King of the Fist, Kenshiro’s former martial arts training brother and the final boss of the first part of the manga. They both come to the city with their henchmen, fight with Kenshiro once, lose and leave. This looks incredibly stupid and doesn’t even work as fan service: how can you be imbued with the greatness of the emperor if he is no different from the leader of any other desert gang, and Kenshiro doesn’t even lose a fight to him? As the hero of Disgaea said: “now your name is Mid-Boss”.

Yes, this is the great Emperor spinning on a pole in a nightclub.

Outside of the manga references, Lost Paradise’s script fails to garner any praise either.

The plot of the entire https://buckybingocasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ game is marking time – on the way to his beloved, who is in the same city, Kenshiro must complete a thousand and one stupid tasks, artificially extending the game time.

Some noticeable plot twists begin only in the very denouement – and God, it would be better if they did not begin at all. Screenwriter Masayoshi Yokoyama is obviously used to putting one raft-twist on top of another in Yakuza and then decided to do the same. But he couldn’t even put together a coherent, logical, consistent story, despite the fact that all these twists and turns relate only to new, original characters in the game. How much I criticized the plot of the first part of Yakuza, but in Lost Paradise it is even worse.

The word Yakuza appears so many times in the review for a reason: in the original Lost Paradise is called Hokuto ga Gotoku, similar to the Japanese name Yakuza – Ryu ga Gotoku.

It’s actually a reskin of Yakuza – which explains why, instead of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we spend all our time in a city with bars and nightclubs.

This explanation, of course, does not suit me. Why take a very typical desert setting and insert into it a repainted Kamurocho with a casino and a hostess club??

Sometimes, of course, a copy of Yakuza is appropriate (as, for example, in the case of the Colosseum). Sometimes the reskin is a great success – for example, instead of karaoke there is “treatment” of patients, where Ken jumps from one enemy to another to the music, and instead of the usual baseball there is fighting off motorcyclists with a huge metal beam. But everything needs to be done in moderation, and when “Kulak” offers to dig up an arcade machine with the thrice-fed-up Space Harrier in the desert and set records in it again, it feels like a mockery.

And okay, if only the best were borrowed. But Lost Paradise usually takes form, forgetting about content, and about relevance, and about playability. Here, for example, there are typical “Yakuza” sidequests, but among them there is not a single worthy story, nothing even close to what Yakuza 0 or Kiwami 2 are remembered for. There is leveling up of relationships with some characters, but it is done in a terribly monotonous grind.

Here the voice actors of Kiryu and Majima from Yakuza play exactly the same roles, without even trying to sound any different. You can change the appearance of Ken to Kiryu, and nothing will change in sensations at all.

Since Lost Paradise was developed by a new and inexperienced team, the game was based not on the new Dragon Engine, which created the seamless open worlds of Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2, but on the old Yakuza 0 and Kiwami engine, preserved from the PS3 days. Its limitations are constantly striking here, as is the inability of developers to think about user convenience. Each entrance to the building is loading. Each point of interest is a cascade of slow, clumsy menus. The bandits chasing Ken disappear into thin air as soon as he speaks to anyone.

The whole game is built on scripts whose ears stick out a mile away.

But the worst thing here is with the “open world”, with the desert outside the city. You can only move around it using a buggy, and an empty gas tank is considered Game Over. The controls are unbearable: the car skids horribly at almost any speed. Kenshiro can get out of the buggy, but no further than 15-20 meters, after which the game forces him to sit back. Random battles are here to stay: a handful of bandits in cars are constantly driving around the desert, and when they see Ken, they ram him and start a fight. Such battles usually involve 20 enemies, and they drag on for a long time. There is fast travel here that allows you to avoid these battles, but it only works from save points outside the city. And it’s not fast at all.

Here is an example of what needs to be done to get from the central city to the location located to the south. In the city you need to go to the mechanic boy, talk to him, select exit from the city in the menu, wait for the loading, drive to the nearest savepoint. If you dismounted in front of him to talk (and NPCs save here, ordinary people), then bummer, Ken will run into an invisible wall. You need to climb back into the car (loading), drive the car into the face of the save man (loading), after which Ken will automatically dismount and be able to talk to him; then in the menu you need to select a fast trip (loading) in order to end up with a human save at the destination, where Ken will need to manually get into the car (loading) and drive to the destination. So that you understand how the story missions work here: the path to this southern location will be blocked by copy-paste stones lying in a row, you will need to return to the city to find out how to break them (see. above return procedure); the mechanic will name the list of loot required to upgrade the buggy; this loot lies around the same stones, so you need to return south to them again (see. above) and collect loot by riding back and forth, then back to the city to upgrade the buggy (see. above), then again to the south (see. above) to finally break the completely artificially established barrier and move on with the plot.

If it hurts you to read this, imagine what it’s like to play it.

Can the combat system save Lost Paradise?? No, it’s also inferior to what it was in Yakuza. Lost Paradise pushes the player to make spectacular finishing moves with Hokuto Shinken skills – but at the same time understands that it must be limited somehow. The result is sponge enemies that require a long time of being softened up with simple attacks before they can perform a finishing move. Compared to Yakuza heroes, Ken is very clumsy; he doesn’t hit as sweepingly, and doesn’t use weapons, and evading an enemy’s blow is an almost impossible task for him. He somehow copes with one enemy, but in the crowds there will always be harmful types who will attack from around the corner of the camera, knock over the hero and force him to tediously hammer on the “cross” so that he gets to his feet. There aren’t many finishes here, and looking at their repeated animations quickly becomes boring. As well as on completely identical looking opponents. As if in this world there were only big guys with mohawks!

Lost Paradise, in my opinion, has only two bright sides. The first is a list of mini-achievements copied from Yakuza: the game sees everything and rewards everything, motivating you to do a variety of things. The second is obvious in view of the original source: there is something inexorably attractive in the transformation of bandits into bloody dust under the gloomy “omae wa mou shindeiru”. But in general it is clear that

Lost Paradise is far from the best Fist of the North Star could be made, and a huge step back from the Yakuza series.