Dead by Daylight: Sadako Rising Chapter Review (Talirium)
The Sadako rising chapter is a licensed chapter, with a new killer and survivor, but no new map. The Onryo, or as a lot of people I know call her; "The Ring Girl" is the featured killer of the chapter. Her ability is to phase in and out of reality, turning invisible like The Wraith, but lacking the speed, and removing her collision against survivors, so you can't body-block anyone. While demanifested, she can teleport to one of several TVs spread around the map, allowing for nice mobility and gen control, since they tend to spawn near generators. As an added bonus, teleporting near a survivor adds her exclusive condemn status, allowing a free mori if you get this status high enough. This all sounds really powerful, and can be with the right addons and strategy, but it takes a lot of effort to really make her work. TVs take 2 minutes to reactivate on use, and condemned can easily be removed by a survivor grabbing an item from a TV and bringing it to a different TV. The incredible ease of counterplay, and lack of utility in her primary ability makes her a really hard sell, but if you dedicate to playing with condemn builds, she can be powerful, it just takes a lot of effort, and kills any build variety she could have.
Her perks however are a different story. Her 3 new perks; Floods of Rage, Call of Brine, and Merciless Storm, are all really good. Floods of Rage is a scourge hook ability, revealing everyone's aura to you when a survivor is saved off of a hook. Not necessarily worth bringing by itself, but if you're running another scourge hook ability alongside it, it can be a wicked info perk. Call of Brine is currently a meta perk, and chances are you've seen it more times than you can count. Upon kicking a generator, it regresses twice as fast, and gets highlighted in yellow. If a survivor gets back on, any great skill check they hit will send you a loud noise notification. Great info, and crazy slowdown, there's a reason everyone runs this one. Lastly, Merciless Storm. This one send a relentless barrage of skill checks in the last 10 seconds of the generator, and failing one of them will block it, leaving it to regress for awhile, and showing you exactly where it is. This loses effectiveness the longer you play, since experienced survivors can hit skill checks without problems, but it can catch inexperienced players off guard, and with the right build, (or playing doctor) you can make this barrage last a ridiculously long time, or make it impossible to hit them all without a crazy amount of focus and timing. All three of these are awesome, and across all of my killer builds, they're all present more than once, which is rare in a lot of killers.
Yoichi on the other hand, is not so great. He lacks any stealth, wearing a big yellow coat and being pretty loud, and his perks are all pretty terrible, to the point that I tend to forget what they even do. Parental Guidance hides scratches when you stun the killer, which could work in a killer stun build maybe, but chances are the killer will be able to see you after the stun anyways, and regardless, there are so many more better stealth perks. Empathetic Connection lets injured survivors see you and lets you heal faster, which isn't terrible, but once again, perks like Bond and Botany Knowledge do these jobs better. Worst of all, Dark theory, is a boon totem that makes you 3% faster when you're inside it. Maybe if like all 4 of your perks are boon perks, and you happen to have a bunch of objectives inside the boon radius, maybe it could be nice, but I never see it get used, and even when I do, it's never made any difference. The radius isn't even close to making it worth it, and with the time and effort to put up and maintain boon totems while keeping them in relevant parts of the map, its more time wasted in setup than it saves in chase. Its sad that a cool spin on the original character is such a waste in practice.
Overall, if you wanna maximise your bang for you buck, and don't want to buy everyone, buying Sadako with auric cells, or just getting her perks in the shrine is probably the way to go. Yoichi is only worth it if you're trying to get every character, and Sadako as a killer is pretty lacking compared to everyone else.