I really, really wanted to love this game. I was ready to call this my game of the year, even before launch. It had everything to play with my emotions, but it unfortunately didn't deliver.

Let me at least start with what I did like:
-The combat is great, and much better than Y7. I loved being able to walk around in battle and placing my character in a precise position to hit multiple enemies.
-The OST was great, I loved the new Karaoke songs and battle songs.
-The new ( playable ) characters ( Tomizawa, Chitose, and Seonhee )

What I disliked:
-Weird story decisions
-Blueballing in Kiryu's Life Links
-Ending

( story spoilers start here )

I wasn't really a huge fan of the Hawaii story part to begin with, but when the game switched to Kiryu's side in Yokohama halfway through the game, that's when the story started to pick up more.
This was also where they introduced Kiryu's bucket list with his Life Links,
where all the blue balling happened. They show off old characters but don't allow Kiryu to meet them or talk to them. It was so unfortunate seeing Taichi, Nakajima, and Kaoru, but not having them interact with Kiryu.

What makes it even worse is that starting chapter 10, starting the third life link, Kiryu is exposed to be alive. But somehow none of the Life Link characters except one have seen it, or act up on it. It's so infuriating. This brings me to my second point that doesn't make sense: At this point in the story, you know who the V-tuber is who exposed Kiryu. It's revealed that Chitose is being manipulated behind the scenes to do all this on her Tatara channel. So why does Chitose not delete the videos/livestreams that happen after she reveals the truth about being the V-tuber? If she doesn't have access anymore, could she not have said that she doesn't? It's the small things that inconvenience the story/Kiryu/player. I was confused, but disregarded it when a good Life Link happened, the Akiyama Life Link. Akiyama puts Kiryu and Date in a set up, and forces them to meet. Causing Kiryu to finally interact and talk with a major character from a previous game. I was so happy, would this mean the next life link is Haruka? Can I finally meet her?

Yes. Date calls, and had a meeting set up with Haruka. When Haruka and Haruto are in Serena, Kiryu is about to walk in. When they pull some bullshit and Kiryu goes away before meeting her. I've never been more mad in a Yakuza game. I coped and thought. Ok ok, she's a major part of Kiryu's character, I feel like she should be a part of the ending right? Maybe they'll meet and talk towards the end? After all, Tatara did expose Kiryu to be alive.

Nope. Last 20 minutes of the game. Kiryu fell unconscious and is being rushed to the hospital while one of the worst songs I've ever heard plays in the background. Is it finally happening, are they killing off Kiryu?

Post credits scene arrive, a shot of Haruka and Haruto walking in the hospital on their way to Kiryu's room. Hinting that Kiryu is alive, I was both sad and happy, because he didn't even get to interact with Haruka.

Haruka & Haruto walk in Kiryu's room, and... He just got out of the room for treatment while they walk in. Before I even managed to think they might interact later, Kiryu said his name and the ending card appeared.

I don't think I've ever been more disappointed in an ending. I binged Yakuza 0 to Yakuza 7 in a month to have Infinite Wealth hit hard. Yakuza 7's story was so good, I genuinely thought Infinite Wealth would be even better. I really wanted my emotions to be played with and that I would be thinking about this game for weeks, or months. Unfortunately, the only way it played with my emotions is that I get mad whenever I think about this game and it's ending.

I hated this game when I played it at launch, you know. Pure, utter vitriol. It actually made me tap out of the franchise for years until 7. For the longest time, it occupied near-permanent spot in my Bottom 25 list. I've often said that Yakuza was the refuge for MGS fans who were scorned by MGSV, and sure enough Yakuza itself scorned me with 6.

What I wanted from this game was a good Last Yakuza Game. A nice sendoff to a series I'd fallen hard and fast for over the preceding years. What I got wasn't that, it was a relatively lowkey and frankly boring mess with bad combat, droll side content and a complete disconnect from the games that it's meant to cap off. All of these criticisms still apply; the combat is slow and uncomfortable due to being a beta test for the Dragon Engine, a lot of it is just plain boring and the Yakuza Conspiracy at the heart of this game is the franchise's least interesting, the side content is snoozeworthy and god knows it has fuck all to do with the previous games.

Anyway, the thing about growing up is that change usually isn't an explosive shift towards something new, a sudden binary change or what have you. It's walking through life, day by day, not noticing any changes until you stop, rub your face and look behind only to be met with a different life - a different you.

Coming back to Y6 now that I'm much older feels strange. Difficult to articulate.

It is indeed a bad Yakuza game, but I realize now that it's not even a Yakuza game by design.

Y6 is a Kiryu Kazuma game. It's not about Yakuza, it's not about conspiracies, and it's not about clans or supporting casts or whatever:

It's about Kiryu, the guy who leads these games but only really got any meaningful depth in Yakuza 3, and has mostly been carried by side content.

It's about fatherhood, both in the literal sense (of Kiryu as Haruka's adoptive father) and more abstract ones (Kiryu's mentor role to Daigo, a man whose father was murdered by Kiryu's best friend). Mercifully, it avoids a lot of pitfalls that other sad stories fall into by not being a hyper-maschismo "fathers are the most important men in a girl's life! :D" tale nor is it a weird self-insert story by a director who recently became a father (I fucking see you, Ken Levine).

It's about an old man who is at once the worst Yakuza on earth yet also the textbook definition of their ideals. A man who disavows all that nonsense yet is ironclad in his loyalty and would take bullets for those in need. A man who respects his enemies if respected in turn, and who mourns a tragedy regardless of which 'side' it comes from.

It's about the process of blinking and realizing you're in a new world that you'd slipped into by accident; a wrong turn on the road that you can't reverse out of.
His 'daughter' is all grown up, old enough to court men and have children. She no longer just has 'children's problems', but faces many of the same woes Kiryu's compatriots ran into in older times.
The orphans he doted upon in days gone by are now young adults, ready to enter the world he'd sheltered them from. The whacky yet noble Yakuza he spent many years living alongside are now a minority. Besides Majima, Daigo and Saejima it's all unfamiliar faces and the young.
Time has eroded the difference between the Tojo Clan, the Omi Alliance, the Triads and the Jingweon mafia, for they're all staffed by young, ambitious, ruthless and amoral criminals. So deep is their decay that even an ambitious businessman with no scruples can pose as one.

When this game came out 5-6 years ago, I hated it because it wasn't what I wanted; a big glorious send-off to everything Yakuza related. The Endgame of Yakuza titles, if you want to go for the low hanging fruit. I wanted to see and fight alongside/against tons of supporting characters, I wanted characters like Majima and Daigo to have arcs running concurrent to Kiryu's, I wanted the villain to be some ghost from Kiryu's past come back for revenge. And when it didn't give me that, I hated it.

Coming back to it now, I respect it. I respect that RGG Studios opted to go against the expected finale and to create what's basically a character study, for they've always been fans of pushing the envelope and this is no different. Don't get me wrong, most of the complaints up above are still present (The Yamato 2 plot is so fucking dumb, it makes the baby lockers seem sensible), but they're easily ignorable honestly? If you focus on this as a character study you have a relatively compact story where most characters are mirrors to some aspect of Kiryu and the concepts he embodies that also manages to not overstay its welcome compared to the game immediately before it.

It's doubly easier to respect what this game did in hindsight because it set the stage for yet another Yakuza renaissance and a significant paradigm shift for the series. From this game we got two Judgment titles and the utterly mythical Yakuza 7. In an age where most publishers seem content to shit out More Games in an endless status quo, it's actually nice that Yakuza avoided that. I really do hope Y8 is the end of Kiryu.

The combat still sucks tho.