For me, side content is always welcome within games. After all, it’s side content because you can choose whether you want to interact with it or not; it’s choice, and choice is good. If you’re not into it for whatever reason, you can simply stick to the main story and enjoy a more streamlined experience.
The best side content is usually the kind you can’t imagine skipping. In the recent Insomniac title, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, every piece of side content had a narrative element attached to it, making it feel compelling, if not exactly mandatory. That’s important, because mandatory side content turns fun into a chore. It’s a cardinal sin of gaming, and Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name has it in spades.
A Sea Of Side Content
To be clear, I liked this game, but if it wasn’t for this aspect then my liking could’ve blossomed into something greater. As I made my way through the gripping story, the game would occasionally slow down to introduce a new side element. Some of these were Akame missions that act as both narrative side quests and simple jobs. Other activities, like the pocket car racing and cabaret club, felt jarring and out of place.
These tutorials weren’t a problem in the beginning, but they were just a taste of the trouble on the horizon. I understood the need to tutorialize these activities and give a basic intro to the game’s side content. It was the equivalent of being told the day’s special at a restaurant: you may or may not be interested, but now you know your options. Unfortunately, the vast array of side content is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure, you have an extensive menu of activities to satiate your appetite, but that means squeezing in a lot of tutorials during what should be a fast-paced story. I’m sure these activities would have felt better-spaced in a longer game.
While many of these tutorials felt a little random and oddly placed within the main story’s narrative (though they were always charming and fun)), the upshot is that there is truly so much to do. Unfortunately, chapter three is where things go truly awry.
Hurry Up And Wait
One of your allies has an important job for you. In fact, the job is so important that he’s going to call you about it in three days. In this moment, I started to get the uneasy sense that we were entering the filler-arc portion of our program.
I was correct, but I was not prepared. To circle back to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which is fresh in my head because I just reviewed it, there are moments where Peter or Miles suggest doing some things around the city while they wait for a call. While these moments exist, they aren’t locking you out of content. Swing around for a few moments and someone will contact you to put you back on the path of the main story. You don’t have to complete a single side activity.
Fortunately, when the game did finally allow me to progress the main story, I was back in full-tilt.
The Man Who Erased His Name refuses to let you progress until you’ve hit gold rank in the coliseum. The days are almost an afterthought, as you never actually see one day end and another begin. It’s about ticking boxes off a checklist for no real narrative reason. There’s no way around this. Furthermore, achieving Gold rank isn’t as simple as going to the coliseum and throwing down in a few fights. Instead, you have to level the Akame Network to level 10 and then earn three silver trophies in coliseum fights to progress to gold. The Akame Network is an underground information network where the leader, Akame, helps homeless people in return for information. So essentially, you need to do a side-activity to progress another side-activity, to progress the main game.
You can level the Akame network by performing small jobs from people on the street or through bigger jobs assigned to you from Akame herself. The jobs given by Akame herself are a little more time-consuming, but they offer large amounts of Akame Points and cold hard cash. While these resources are both helpful when upgrading your abilities and buying gear, grinding to level 10 in one shot is an absolute chore. You end up doing these quests not because you want to level the network, but because you have to complete the grind to advance the story.
Padding Upon Padding
The only redeeming quality of this grind is that the stories (while thrust upon me) are actually quite good. While I was grinding through these side stories, I questioned why the developers would gate so much content behind a grind. Then it hit me that they were probably concerned with the main story being too short. When I finally got back to the main story, I thought the story of chapter 3 would begin in earnest. I was very wrong. The bulk of the chapter was the grind. The developer recently confirmed that this game originally began as DLC, but was expanded to a 10-20 hour experience, which is palpable in the design here.
It’s clear as day that Sega didn’t have a true 10 hours of main story content, so instead of owning that their main story is a tight eight-hour experience, they threw in road blocks to keep players spinning their wheels for a couple of hours. The outcome, for me, was frustration. I liked the story of The Man Who Erased His Name. I was hooked, but when forced to grind out Akame levels, my eyes started to droop. I nodded off a few times. The excitement was gone. I watched the experience bar crawl up with sighs and grumbles.
Fortunately, when the game did finally allow me to progress the main story, I was back in full-tilt. That’s what made the experience so damning. The main story is thrilling and fast-paced, while side-content should be savored as optional. Forcing players to grind it in the name of progress undermines both the side content and the main dish.