Yakuza: Like a Dragon has a strong storyline, awesome cast of characters and the same Yakuza-fare chill and grind sidequest galore gameplay tweaked up with a Dragon Quest esque battlesystem, even with a fully fledged job system.

As far as sidequests goes there's a lot of great stuff from some of the BEST substories in the series, rich selection of Arcade games, a frikkin indepth Yakuza Kart minigame, amongst a list of other cool minigames.

Enemy variety is great and the job system adds so much different styles and flavours to your preffered playstyle. There's a lot of replay value here.

That's not to say there isn't a few bumps and rough spots with some slow middle chapters as well as some strong spike hit towards the final chapters.

Some of the late game bossfights can be pretty unfair and rough to deal with, so be prepared to potentially game over, lose a few hours and then grind up different jobs to get approriate skills to avoid sponge battles and to counterplay some enemy skills. The process around it can be pretty infuriating, but for me it was only one particular instance this was pretty jarring.

Enemies also respawns super fast in the city areas, so unless you nabbed a battle encounter negate accessory you will be forced to do a lot of battles.

Some jank and hinders aside, Everything great about the series is represented here with new fun twist and turns which for the majority of the game hits right at home.

In general I felt Yakuza: Like a Dragon was consistently funny, though not always fun.

The first handful of chapters is so wonderful in its cross of absolutely menial stuff (a whole segment dedicated to recycling, another to finding a job, looking for coins under vending machines) and adorably wacky (Ichiban hallucinating enemies and special effects, Nanba's special pigeon attack). Combat follows the same logic. There's just this chaotic energy permeating the whole thing which makes it very difficult to be strategic, like the way each AoE effect has its own peculiar and unpredictable logic. The game does not take itself seriously in the most satisfying of ways—even when things start to get serious, there's still this joyfulness to it that is refreshing in a AAA gaming scene dominated by an attempt at portraying serious people doing serious things.

The second half of the game is a bit more confusing and seems less sure about how to move forward. This is particularly visible in the disparity between the first four team members (a cop who was dishonourably discharged, a homeless man, a barmaid) and the last couple of arrivals (such as a hitman very much still in his job), or in how people start to actually die. The zany, wacky spirit remains alive for the most part, probably thanks to Ichiban being such a silly and charismatic protagonist, mixed with the usual melodrama common to the Yakuza series.

Finally, a lot of mixed feelings regarding gender representation. There are about five named female characters in the game, out of which two have any sort of agency. Jobs are strictly gender-specific in weird ways. This is a game where a cook can beat down a construction crane with a wooden spatula, but a male Idol or a woman breakdancing are somehow too outrageous. The Night Queen job (a dominatrix) also evokes uncomfortable feelings—nothing wrong with kink and with women expressing their sexuality outside of standard social boundaries, but the fact men do not get their own highly-sexualised job choice is telling. Mini-games are also an occasional victim here, as Eri is presented as infinitely more qualified for the CEO role, but somehow falters without a nice strong man making all decisions.

While a dramatic departure from the rest of the Yakuza series in terms of gameplay, almost everything else about Yakuza 7 is the franchise at its absolute peak. It’s not only one of, if not the best entries in the franchise, but it’s also one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s tremendously addicting in just about every regard, once I started playing it, I had such a difficult time putting it down.

The story is very well told, and I think it’s up there with some of RGG Studios’ best work. The new protagonist, Ichiban, is not only my new favorite Yakuza protagonist, but one of my favorite video game characters of all time. It is impossible to not get swept up into the flames of his kindness, passion and charisma. While I absolutely adore and idolize Kiryu, and he was my favorite character in the series until this point, I was absolutely won over by Ichiban and his grueling journey of losing everything and then crawling his way to the top. I enjoyed the rest of the cast quite a bit as well, but I did find that they all take a backseat to Ichi as far as their involvement in the story goes. This isn’t really a bad thing, just noticeable. Thanks to the Bond system, you do get a chance to learn more about them and get involved with their personal stories on the side. I just prefer it when the party members of a JRPG are more involved with the overall story.

Whether or not you’ll enjoy the combat will hinge entirely on how you feel about JRPGs. If you actively despise turn-based combat, there’s admittedly not much here that will get you to reconsider your feelings for it as it’s mostly pretty standard. Skill attacks require you to either mash a button or press a button at a specific time similar to the Heat actions of old but otherwise it plays like a traditional turn-based JRPG. My only complaint when it comes to the combat is that if the protagonist, Ichiban dies then your game is immediately over, and I absolutely despise it when JRPGs do that. It just makes no sense when you have party members or items that can bring other party members back to life. Normally it's not a huge issue, I rarely found it happening to me, but later in the game there are bosses and certain enemies who have either instant kill attacks, or attacks that can kill a party member if they weren’t at full health already and it's when Ichiban dies during moments like this that make this design choice absolutely infuriating.

My only other complaint about the game is how the game handles enemy encounters. Enemies in the overworld have a wide and far range of vision, especially compared to previous Yakuza games. This makes it easy for them to spot you and difficult as well as annoying to avoid them. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve defeated a squad of enemies on my way to a destination, only to watch another 5 or 6 dudes literally materialize right in front of me and I’m forced to fight them as well. At the very least, they completely vanish from the map if you successfully run away, but this was still annoying to deal with, especially in Sotenbori, where the streets are so narrow that it's almost impossible to avoid enemy encounters altogether.

Everything else about the game is absolutely top notch. The game has an abundance of different mechanics and systems that all feed back into one another and make for a title that feels like it's constantly rewarding you. This is primarily what makes the game so addicting. I couldn’t put this game down when I started it. I was thoroughly engaged and entertained from beginning to end. Fantastic game.

I'm not a Yakuza expert or whatever, but I feel this game did an amazing job transforming the series' usual formula and vibe into an even crazier, and slightly more lighthearted RPG adventure. I'd wish for it to be more whacky, honestly, because at times LaD feels way too much like Yakuza and not enough like whacky urban Dragon Quest, and the story ultimately doesn't quite manage to bring these two influences together. The ending was especially rough for it, with two consecutive boss-fights that were pretty boring both narratively and gameplay-wise, in large part because the Fantasy Adventure-stuff was weighed down by the Crime and Conspiracy stuff, which wasn't that cohesive or well-developed.

In terms of gameplay this was a blast. Perhaps a bit more complexity and strategy could've been injected, but stuff like your entire supporting cast technically traveling with you, thus allowing you to shuffle your party on the fly, was a nice touch that also fixed the ever-present issue with optional party members in JRPGs, where some of your characters would sit in the hub, not participating in the story. And overall, the bombastic presentation of Yakuza combat was pushed to the limit here, and I can't wait to see what crazy shit they're going to do with Joryu in the sequel.

P.S.
I honestly don't like the fact that Kiryu is returning in the sequel, it felt like we're turning a new leaf here, with this ever-growing cast of supporting characters and an idealistic shonen protag to bond with them. But now we're just back to Kiryu? And any party member after Nanba wouldn't be returning? Kinda sucks man.

I think my standards were always gonna be too high since this game was the whole reason I wanted to play the series but sadly didn’t really enjoy this as much yakuza 2-5, 0, or judgment. Still good though, Ichi is a wonderful protag and the gameplay loop is fun enough for what it is. I think if LAD 8 irons out the pacing issues as well as a couple of other things then it has the potential to be the best in the series. Good base for the series going forward even if I’m not as big on it as I wanted to be.

While turning a 3d beat em up into a JRPG while also introducing a new main protagonist after 7 games sounds disastrous, Yakuza: Like a Dragon made it work and came out being what is in my opinion a great RPG. This game feels like Earthbound for a new generation in a sense due to how it subverts the classic JRPG tropes. Despite the genre change this game managed to keep the series' charm of being both hilarious but intriguing and serious at times in this new genre. My hope is that Yakuza: LAD serves as a foundation for a new even better game by RGG.

The word "deconstruction" gets thrown around a lot these days. Formally defined as "questioning traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality", it's often used to describe works that seek to criticize a specific genre. I disagree with this use of the word, but less because of the "what" and more because of the "why". I believe deconstruction should be used not only to criticise media, but to use that media's pieces to build something new.

An excellent example of this is one of my favorite films: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's 2007 action-comedy masterpiece Hot Fuzz. It deconstructs both the contemporary American cop flick and the traditional detective story by flipping classic tropes on their heads. However, all of this is done not out of criticism, but as a way to both pay tribute to those genres and highlight their potential.

In that sense, yes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a deconstruction of the JRPG. Rather than a teenager killing God, you're a 40-year-old man trying to find a job. But the game is still very much a JRPG: It has all the classic mechanical trappings, numerous references to other games, including multiple explicit mentions of Dragon Quest (and people still compare it to Persona), and yes, it relies on the tried-and-true trope of the power of friendship.

That last one is a major criticism of JRPG's I've seen from certain online sources, and I feel Like a Dragon does everything in its power to embrace it. Everything from the combat to the substories to the summons to the incredibly complex management minigame revolves around helping others. There's a major mechanic that involves spending time with your friends and helping them work out their personal issues (alright, it's a little like Persona). A lot of the strongest attacks in the game involve working with your other party members.

But more than anything else, Yakuza: Like a Dragon embraces the theme of friendship through its story, especially through its protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga. He's someone who spent most of his life at "rock bottom", and gets dragged through the mud on a regular basis, often by powers much greater than him. But he gets out through a power even greater than that: the people he can count on. Everyone who supports him, from his party members to the most insignificant NPC, makes his journey just a little bit easier. Even in his darkest times, Ichiban can still bounce back to his infectious optimism thanks in no small part to the support he gives to and recieves from the people around him.

Of course, the game still isn't perfect. While it's an amazing first attempt at a JRPG, you can also tell it's a first attempt. Dungeons are a slog and sometimes combat is too (you didn't have to borrow everything from Dragon Quest, guys). Job systems are fun, but the lack of ability mixing combined with not being able to switch on the fly means there's very little reason to experiment. Also, there are some pretty nasty difficulty spikes near the very end. I get why they're there, but I would've appreciated a little warning.

Despite all my criticisms, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is still an excellent game with a wonderful story and the best deconstruction ever made of the JRPG. Suck it, Undertale.