This review contains spoilers
People are at their worst when they're sure they're in the right.
A game about the love between the homies and how much cooler being a private eye is compared to being a silly old lawyer.
Technical foibles are absolutely unreal - on the one hand it's clearly because they're pushing the PS4 to it's absolute total limit with one of the most moody, cold and beautiful renditions of Kamurocho to date, but on the other it makes playing it a pain in the ass. The input delay in this might be the worst a RGG game has ever felt to me. I'd imagine running the remastered version of this on a PC with some kind of Reshade or whatever is the ideal way to play this, maybe?
But underneath all that - this bad boy's got a rock-solid narrative that eases up on the hot-blooded Passionate Battles Between Men melodrama the rest of the series is known for and instead goes for a serial law thriller melodrama; colder and cooler in a lot of places, but still with plenty of yelling and some Passionate Battles Between Men here and there. With a consistently strong soundtrack, the aforementioned moody gorgeous Kamuro, and a more 'classical' martial arts-inspired fighting choreography, it's one of the more aesthetically powerful entries in the series.
Yagami is a great protagonist; brittle in ways Kiryu or the other Yakuza boys aren't, but also maybe the most clever leading man they've had. Kiryu and company are akin to wandering knight-errants, solving people's problems and then disappearing into the crowd of Kamurocho - but Yagami lives in the city, and as such he relates, explores and is a pillar of it in a way nobody else really is. (I enjoyed the substory finale immensely in this - a much better reward for your efforts than throwing Amon at you and fucking off.)
I did find myself thinking about how funny + dope it is to play as Takuya Kimura as a RGG protagonist, though - it made me imagine a world in which we get a game where Tom Cruise runs around and solves murder mysteries, eats at McDonalds to replenish his HP, and engages in an NFL teambuilding minigame for the sake of 100% completion. Judgment 3, maybe?
Shoutouts to the sorta hilarious final boss in this, who comes across as an inexplicably effective Mass Murderer cop; the idea of a killer cop achieving a kind of Ultra Instinct-focus purely through wanting to kill as many people as possible is basically exactly what I wanted as the final obstacle in this game about how the institutions in our society tend to fail us.
A game about the love between the homies and how much cooler being a private eye is compared to being a silly old lawyer.
Technical foibles are absolutely unreal - on the one hand it's clearly because they're pushing the PS4 to it's absolute total limit with one of the most moody, cold and beautiful renditions of Kamurocho to date, but on the other it makes playing it a pain in the ass. The input delay in this might be the worst a RGG game has ever felt to me. I'd imagine running the remastered version of this on a PC with some kind of Reshade or whatever is the ideal way to play this, maybe?
But underneath all that - this bad boy's got a rock-solid narrative that eases up on the hot-blooded Passionate Battles Between Men melodrama the rest of the series is known for and instead goes for a serial law thriller melodrama; colder and cooler in a lot of places, but still with plenty of yelling and some Passionate Battles Between Men here and there. With a consistently strong soundtrack, the aforementioned moody gorgeous Kamuro, and a more 'classical' martial arts-inspired fighting choreography, it's one of the more aesthetically powerful entries in the series.
Yagami is a great protagonist; brittle in ways Kiryu or the other Yakuza boys aren't, but also maybe the most clever leading man they've had. Kiryu and company are akin to wandering knight-errants, solving people's problems and then disappearing into the crowd of Kamurocho - but Yagami lives in the city, and as such he relates, explores and is a pillar of it in a way nobody else really is. (I enjoyed the substory finale immensely in this - a much better reward for your efforts than throwing Amon at you and fucking off.)
I did find myself thinking about how funny + dope it is to play as Takuya Kimura as a RGG protagonist, though - it made me imagine a world in which we get a game where Tom Cruise runs around and solves murder mysteries, eats at McDonalds to replenish his HP, and engages in an NFL teambuilding minigame for the sake of 100% completion. Judgment 3, maybe?
Shoutouts to the sorta hilarious final boss in this, who comes across as an inexplicably effective Mass Murderer cop; the idea of a killer cop achieving a kind of Ultra Instinct-focus purely through wanting to kill as many people as possible is basically exactly what I wanted as the final obstacle in this game about how the institutions in our society tend to fail us.