I want to give this a higher score but I can’t for reasons atypical to what I see as far as complaints go. I think it rules you beat up high schoolers for the first 5-8 hours of the game, basically a non issue that’s overblown, and I don’t mind the plot contrivances though it would be much better if every avenue was explored - it’s already a 40-50 hour romp. No the issue is the games confidence in its player, what I mean by this is how it feeds the narrative and regurgitates itself every chapter because it’s not sure how much time you’ve spent in the batting cages or chasing up school stories like Dancing, Boxing, or Robot battles. There’s a lot of fat that could be trimmed off in the games story to make it tidier especially in how it presents new facts as “gameplay” elements in the detective side of things. The worst of it is the continuous and repetitive urge to repeat plot points like your dad just walked in on a prime time tv show with catch up time after the ad break. It happens every chapter sometimes multiple times in a chapter. There’s an easy solution of course it would be something like a chapter manual or ledger in Yagami’s phone to help you recap for yourself. The kicker is it does have a kind of recap section it just happens to be almost completely useless and is more concerned with the appearance of being a detective game than being informative. Make no mistake this a detective story but it’s not a detective game even if the gameplay tries (a little) to put you in those shoes. Much like Judgement the strength is in the story, combat, and exploration and mini games. The story here is much stronger though I’d argue being probably the most grounded of the entire RGG catalogue while still managing to pull funny business where it counts in the side content and typical stuff like punching people solving everything in the end. It’s a great time and the additional Kaito files are an extra snack with a satisfying end. The school stories, side content, and the kaito files make the whole thing more appealing but the story and cast is certainly stronger and better done here than in Judgement. It’s a huge step up and considering its early days (hopefully with more to come in the future) the Judgement series is much stronger than Yakuza was on its second entry no doubt.