Fading Afternoon

Bought this game because there is a dedicated button to put sunnies on and sling my jacket or bag over my shoulder like in anime.
10/10 worth it

at this point, we can just start saying that developer yeo has a distinct and very cool style of game, and Fading Afternoon represents the culmination of the gameplay and story ideals of their previous two games.
explore a lovingly crafted 2D open world and participate in the self-driven story of Seiji, a trusted earner in his Yakuza family who has just returned from prison.
Fight enemies with the bare-knuckle kickboxing as seen in Ringo Ishikawa, or with the grapple and gun based style from Stone Buddha. Go gambling, go drinking, romance a partner, buy new clothes, ride a bicycle, and just participate in Seiji's life. Tells you basically nothing but trusts that your instincts to explore and learn yourself are there. its actually quite easy to just miss story elements or even get locked out of progression. every hospitalization will reduce your overall health and after a number of hospitalizations, you WILL just die, so the first few rounds as you get used to the combat are easy to screw up. luckily there are a few key methods to end a run early while preserving your income.
No two playthroughs are the same: first and most obviously, the story progresses and ends in different ways based on gameplay and decisions. you can die after too many losses in combat, end the game by actual suicide as well as just miss various moments based on how you play, or reach one of multiple actual endings. While the first two weeks or so progress the same, the game never tells you how to react to its story and trusts you progress youself.
music and art are both great, and the dev is good at adding little features here and there.
cons are obvious but forgivable and in some ways make it better:
-no quest log or real status screen you dont have an inventory aside from smokes and bullets
-easy to forget whats happening, ive restarted multiple times because of breaks
-vague dialogue. Its written expressly to be like "you know whats happening"--repeated playthroughs are great because you understand more, but early playthroughs suffer from "whzt is happening"
-combat suffers from overpowered techniques, button overlap, and trying to be stylish tends to get you hurt--the players counter is the best move 8/10 times. Guard mode is also punch so you have to have enough time to get out the punch and enter guard mode before you start dodging, making bottle throwers a huge hassle, and just trying to get more elaborate combos tends to hurt a lot
-never tells you anything aside from how to fight. the tutorial is for combat, nothing else, so learning how to pregress, play minigames, get health, etc, is all up to you

Yeo's finest. Combines and refines the hand-to-hand and gun combat from Ringo Ishikawa and Stone Buddha, and weaves it into an emotionally resonant experience with the weight of a Kitano film.

It is a pleasant game but unfortunately a bit too ambiguous. Most events or variants of the story are undescribed in any way. Cutscenes happen all of the sudden, often without any explanation or follow up, and it is up to you to discover where and when to trigger a new route for the story, without knowing where it might lead. This combined with only one save slot means you will have to replay over and over again in order to discover different things.

Fading Afternoon is a side scrolling beat em’ up/open world action roleplaying game/”existential Yakuza crisis” simulator developed By Yeo, a russian game developer whose previous titles include The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa and Arrest of a Stone Buddha. In an FAQ at By Yeo’s website, the developer describes how the game was originally set in the 1980s U.S. before moving it to China over concerns that he would portray so much stuff wrong that it would affect the quality of the game. Soon thereafter he would move it to China and set the conflict of the game with the Triads, wanting to pay further homage to the likes of Hong Kong action movies like Arrest of a Stone Buddha before ultimately settling on the Yakuza and expanding on the various mini games and activities. Aside from that there hasn’t really been anything crazy development story wise that I’ve been able to find other than the announcement trailer releasing in July 2021. How about my encounter with the game? How did I come across it?
For most of review:
The gameplay for Fading Afternoon was once described as a combination of Yakuza, Shenmue and River City Ransom according to CerealSensei on Backlogg’d so shoutout to them. Would I agree with this? Yeah I can say that sounds pretty familiar in a sense, after all you have the literal Yakuza, events that lock you into certain pathways and potential endings in Shenmue and the pixelated side scrolling beat-em-up aspect of River City Ransom. The general idea of the gameplay is you can kind of bumble your way around the story and figure out what you want to do, but unless there’s a job market feature for Seiji that I didn’t discover you most likely will be joining back with the Azuma Family taking back the territory you need in order to get money, money that will be needed in order to pay for a hotel room or buy a new home. How do you get this money? Again the aforementioned territory takeover game, which involves you going around to several dots on the map that are color coordinated in order to either visit one of several businesses, explore for a bit or engage in a street brawl. For the sake of brevity, anything allied will either be black for Azuma or blue for Seiji (specifically the secondary office building), green is Tanaka, light red is Harada, dark red is Ando and white circles are neutral ground. If it’s a general location you’ll find a clear circle which will get filled when you visit it and discover whose territory this is, though keep in mind certain locations will only be discovered during specific story events and pathways. To take over territory you’ll need to enter an area and basically beat up/kill every enemy gangster there over a course of several week periods, with the star amount being equivalent to how many different times you’ll need to visit it (three stars means three visits and three different beatdown sessions) with the final means of full takeover being to visit one of two locations given to you to assassinate a “Shatei” (Yakuza lieutenant). This can be really random locations that you’ll either need to know the backgrounds by memory or you could rely on the likes of Kato (secondary office), a corrupt cop at the shrine (once you unlock the office) or I believe an informant who hangs out at the Pachinko Parlor. Once you take it over it’s recommended that you buy more guards for a territory as it will now be assaulted periodically by rival Yakuza who want their turf back. If you do lose a territory, you can beat them all up again and regain it back, though like all locations if you visit it during one week then you won’t be able to visit it until the next week and that includes hiring guards.
That’s the general idea for the territory takeover, so my advice is whatever playthrough you decide to go down (as territory takeovers push the story forward) you’ll need a gun so you’ll need to head up to the Pawn Shop in the top right hand side of the map to buy one for 50,000 Yen. Other things to note exploration wise is that you’ll have four or so different places you can visit per week before it ends and moves onto the next week, that you’ll need to pay for a hotel room or get a home or else you’ll be homeless sleeping on a bench which will affect your permanent health pool and get you to lose respect. What’s respect? Well other than the obvious, the price to purchase guards will get lower the more respect you gain, though luckily you’ll be able to gain respect through buying certain suits (I think) and taking over territory. Other than taking over territories, there are things to do and businesses to go too though again some of it depends on branching narratives. Some places like the Massage Parlor and the Restaurant on Main Street will help you heal a bit (which you will need as your health will permanently drop by four points every day or higher due to constant damage or story events), while some places you can gamble like the Casino or talk to girls at the Hostess Club, where you can shill out cash in order to “romance” someone and bring them back to your place for s e x. Other places you’ll visit will basically be empty aside from some pedestrians perhaps unless there’s a random story that'll take place there in the future. The thing with the exploration is that while the map isn’t a super big map, there’s so much room for random events and hidden game mechanics that I struggle to even describe the overall scope, so what I can do is give you some tips.
How about combat? As I said, your health will get lower and lower as time runs out due to cancer so you’ll not only have permanent health decreases, but you’ll have to fight dudes at the same time. Some of the enemies you’ll find include: blonde guys with bottles, martial arts dudes with grey ponytails, and others that’ll require you to switch up variation wise. For a full list of enemy types, click the link below:
Now how do I feel about these two gameplay loops? Starting with the fights again, they’re not my favorite and considering the constant health loss I would say that I started to get really frustrated the further I went into the game. (Tl;dr, despite some frustrations and jank, I really loved the story branching RPG elements and admittedly some of the combat feels visceral and satisfying).
Links:

A middle aged yakuza whose illness doesn't leave him with much time to live gets out of jail to find his boss has lost much of his territory and influence. Meet old friends, deal with your bosses problems and new young yakuza, start a romance, reminisce, and engage in beat em up gameplay as your wars with rivals lead to different endings but similar fates. Taking some of the mechanics and similar themes from The friends of Ringo Ishikawa and Arrest of a stone Buddha.
After getting picked up from jail you are given some money and time paid for a hotel stay, from there what you do is up to you. You can travel to different locations by train during the day and afternoon before returning to sleep at your hotel or on the streets at night. There a lot of interactions you can do with some more hidden than other, combing your hair and shaving to keep your appearance tidy when you have a place to stay, subordinates can light your cigarettes, you can find certain people to start a relationship with, play roulette, attend a hostess club, bat at the batting cages, buy a gun and train with it to increase your accuracy, drinking can prevent you from taking defensive actions and walking around drinking from a bottle can lead you to passing out, once you are able to buy a car you can travel to the countryside and fish, you can find meetings with old friends and ways to learn about your character's past. Health can be maintained by eating at a restaurant, getting a free sandwich from an old friend's shop, going to the sauna, or by getting a massage. As you play new locations open with a main building type it is named after but sometimes with side people to talk to or businesses to enter that may introduce new activities and certain days and story paths might have you and possibly an underling traveling to different areas to do jobs for your boss. Good visual variety to some of the areas and the usual good sense of atmosphere.
The main gameplay and narrative paths come from engaging in fights in territories owned by different rivals. Taking all the territory of a certain boss, spending a lot of time with certain characters, or engaging in turf wars with everyone can lead to different story outcomes. You start fights by approaching other Yakuza and hitting one of them which will then make that spot contested. Fighting off waves of enemies in a beat em up style for multiple days will lead to an information broker sending you two pictures of where the person controlling the territory hangs out and after fighting or shooting him you will unlock the area and a cut of the money if you visit your boss. Once wars break out your own territory can be attacked but fighting off an attack once or fighting at a territory once the person running it has been killed will reclaim it.
Combat involves multiple punch and kick combos, different grab attacks, a tackle takedown move, punches or kicks at range launching your towards enemies, and holding the punch button to enter a defensive mode where you block and dodge most moves automatically where you can also counter enemy attacks to instantly incapacitate them while possibly stealing a knife, sword, or gun from them that have their own moves and combos. It's combining some elements of the gun and counter combat of Arrest of a stone Buddha with a movement style and wider variety of beat em up moves than The friends of Ringo Ishikawa. It's a fun looking system but just countering everyone and lack of enemy variety can make it become repetitive even for a beat em up, with it being very hard to lose if you are doing something to heal slightly before entering a fight, the healing itself becomes a tedious activity of traveling to the same spots sometimes after being forced out of an area with the restaurant for story purposes. You will basically be attacked by two enemies with one being replaced every time they are killed or incapacitated about 10+ times until you finish all the enemies. The impressive variety of moves and some varied animations would make it a very fun beat em up if it wasn't so simple when it comes to the environment, enemy design, and how you are attacked. The wide variety of moves and the somewhat delayed entrance of new enemies can also create some problem. There is an enemy type that throws a bottle at you that you can dodge while on defense but some areas limited your movement to one plane and entering that defense mode can be an overly difficult thing to do when your character punches or does some random animation instead of blocking right away, and going into the mode before seeing the enemies appear might work unless the bottle throwing guy enters from the opposite side of the screen than the angle you chose to block from.
Good music and variety with vocal tracks being played in areas or during times when someone would be singing.
I enjoyed it but not as much as Arrest of a stone Buddha that broke things up between a quick fun action sequence before going back to the more limited and somber setting than what you have here as you waste your life away waiting for your next job. In Fading Afternoon there was so much pay hotel rent, walk to restaurant for slight healing, fight at two or three areas, go back to sleep, repeated, and try to guess which of two places a guy might be in for me to kill if I even known, have seen before, or can guess the place in the pictures. Going for different endings also means completely restarting the game and doing a lot the same things over again. A helpful thing you can do is pausing and backing out to the main menu to the continue and go back to the last travel train/car map section before you entered an area without spending in game time, which can make your attempts to find a character or do certain things less tedious. It can also help with the way the game prevents you from entering certain buildings or areas multiple times a day, so you might get thrown into a new area and with the entrance sometimes being on the left side, right side, center door, center up and to the left door, you might enter a place only to accidentally leave it if you flick the stick or read the environment wrong after you load in.
Screenshots:

This game is incredible. As a big fan of Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, I was concerned I wouldn't enjoy this game based on reviews that seemed to only play this as a surface level brawler. Happy to see they were wrong, and that this game rewards creative, inventive gameplay styles as much as Ringo did. The shorter runs in Fading Afternoon mean that you can explore different options and choices more quickly- I've done three runs now, and my li'l Yakuza had three very different lives. I've never been so delighted to be unceremoniously assassinated before.

This game is about the balance between living a good life and combat mastery. Can you do both? If fighting is the only thing you excel at, are you doomed to a short life as a pawn, or can you dream of something better?

Truly one of the most mature video games I've ever played. And it's fun too!