It's somehow better and worse than Yakuza: Like a Dragon, with the better side being the more refined, consistent, and very satisfying gameplay and huge amount of (mostly) quality content within, and the worse side from RGG's crazy ambition of shoving two games worth of narrative ideas that ends up with Kiryu's strong portion of the game eclipsing Ichiban's weaker side of the story, which is a bit disappointing because when it was just one party with both of them and the two new characters (Chitose and Tomizawa) who are really cool, I was loving where the game was going initially. While I loved Kiryu's part of the game and felt slightly underwhelmed with Ichiban's second-half of the story, I still feel overall I had a great time with the game and its story and characters old and new, and hopefully they can finally retire Kiryu as a character when he basically has a three-part epilogue now.

With that being said though, I really hope to God they scale back to LaD7 with its tighter story and content, I genuinely do not think I could handle another Like a Dragon entry this long and bloated for the next 10 years despite my enjoyment and I would not blame anyone who feels like the content and narrative overload makes the game worse for them.