[This one is cobbled together from my review notes and also the 500~ Discord messages I exchanged about the game with some friends, so it’s a bit scatterbrained compared to my usual fare.]
When talking about games in a longrunning franchise, certain phrases tend to pop up around controversial entries.
“This game was one step forward, two steps back” and its variants.
Judgment confounded and still very much confounds me because it’s a step in every direction at once, with its directions seemingly mapped to someone’s rhythm game dance mat.
The premise of this game is simple: Dispense with the Yakuza franchise’s typical crime plots, machismo drama and half-naked rooftop brawls and replace it with a detective story that gradually branches out into a conspiracy tale. In the same vein, Kiryu takes a vacation from the series and is replaced by Takayuki Yagami, a guy who frequently calls to mind Geoff Keighley in that Yagami too is a relatively uncharismatic and drab man surrounded by the most interesting people on Earth. Rather than fighting with epic, powerful brawling moves, Yagami is a more agile and crafty fighter which is ludonarratively in touch with what I assume must be a frequent need to evade the authorities for chatting up high schoolers.
Right off the gate, the most immediately tangible difference between this game and its parent series is that Judgment has opted for a return to the quasi-noir style of Yakuza 2 - albeit if you play the current gen version you’ll have to fucking squint to notice it. It’s most obvious with Yagami’s constant internal narrations and an overarching feeling that you are but a cog in a machine you can’t really comprehend. Furthering this is that the Yakuza are no longer cool, noble modern heroes. They’re petty, lying criminals with no regard for civilians and a nasty habit of letting ambitions cloud judgement - pun not intended.
Yakuza games north of 2 have an awful tendency to drop about 50 NPCs on you in the first few chapters and only 10 will matter, and with Judgment they’ve bucked this trend in favour of sticking to a very small pool of characters. If you start with the franchise here you won’t get inundated with keywords, but it does expect you to remember who everyone is.
This, unfortunately, works against it. The worst sin a detective/murder mystery story can carry is being predictable. And Judgment is very predictable. Having a smaller cast means the suspect can only logically be someone within that cast, and the game makes no attempt to throw the player off or surprise them, as characters frequently interject to shoot down any suspects that aren’t the suspect. As a result, I’d figured out the killer’s identity by the middle of the game and their motive just shortly after. It’s not great, and the insistence on padding out a relatively unengaging conspiracy plot means the back half of this game drags.
I will admit, though, that there’s a good chance it was only obvious to me because I’m very attuned to the unspoken languages used in detective media, Yakuza games and games as a whole. In an RGG Studios game, the big bad is going to be someone who was face-scanned from a real actor. That’s just a fact, and it narrows the list down to four people.
As a detective story, the game also fails because there’s not a lot of actual detecting going on. Most plot beats are sussed out via pure instinct, and the trailing/investigation stuff often doesn’t actually matter due to the story progressing once Yagami makes a wild connection that Kaito calls ridiculous but ultimately ends up being right. Chapter 9 is AWFUL for this! Yagami essentially solves the entire plot barring two loose ends, and though everyone rightfully calls it out as absurd, Yagami is right.
Fortunately! There is a silver lining to this: The cast is exceptional, and despite the actual story being banal drudgery it is hard carried by excellent character dynamics, fantastic development for the main players, and a wonderful ability to pace out interpersonal reveals. I don’t like Yagami himself, but the supporting cast are phenomenal and the dynamic between the ever-growing members of his detective agency is worth the price of admission. Kaito might be RGG Studios’ best supporting man.
This is also the start of RGG Studios respecting the player’s time, so there are now optional
intermissions between long exposition dumps. While the story already drags, these excel in keeping things from feeling too suffocating - though the last couple hours are egregious even by franchise standards. On the ‘two steps forward’ front, the story manages to avoid the sins of past Yakuza games (4 and 5 especially) by knowing when to slam the brakes… Except in Chapter 7, which might be the most unwieldy exposition dump in the series. Other scenes go on longer, yes, but Chapter 7’s is so hamfisted it might as well be a pig.
There’s just one problem. A really really big problem. A problem so big that I can’t forgive it, even when I can forgive the obvious killer and the plodding middle third and the frankly weird left-turns the story makes near the end.
This was Toshihiro Nagoshi’s last big hurrah as a writer for RGG Studios and it unfortunately shows. With 0, 6, and 7 he took a backseat role which saw the writing quality rise dramatically, but the games he was a proper lead on tend to have some problems with the writing of women and Japan’s various minorities - Korean and Chinese primarily. It’s rather telling that the first mainline Yakuza after his stepping back from the role contains women in prominent roles and a direct addressing of the franchise’s prior treatment of Korean and Chinese migrants.
Judgment unfortunately maintains the spirit of his earlier work, and the game is suffocatingly misogynistic. Every female character in this story is either a plot device, revolves around the affections of men, or is someone for Yagami to prey on. It pains me to say it after the series managed to pull itself out of the misogyny pit, but Judgment is worse about women than Yakuza 1 was. Special mention goes to Mafuyu, whose entire character can be summed up as “Yagami’s ex” and she never evolves beyond this.
It is both hilarious and depressing, then, that this is the only RGG title to make an overt commentary on misogyny. Halfway through the game, you play as Saori - An assistant at Yagami’s old law office - and go through the hostess minigame from Yakuza 0/Kiwami 2… Which the game uses to comment on the misogyny faced by hostesses and indeed any woman faced on the streets of Japan.
This is tone-deaf in a million ways, yeah, but it stands out especially for being an uncomfortable commentary in a game that itself is incredibly misogynistic. Furthermore, for as much as I love the post-Nagoshi RGG games, they still include the skeevy and relatively unpleasant hostess minigames with absolutely zero sense of self-awareness. In another game series this would’ve been fine, but in a franchise with a still-growing black mark it has all the grace of a pigeon trying to do taijutsu.
Ah, speaking of clumsy martial arts, now is a fantastic time to discuss the gameplay.
I like the gameplay, but it’s not good, really. It’s a significant shakeup for the series, focusing less on brawling and more on acrobatics. Almost none of Yagami’s moves are reused, and for the first time in years we have a protagonist with a 110% unique fighting style - two of them, even!
And… One of them sucks. Badly. Really badly. Yagami has access to Crane (wide kicking attacks for crowds) and Tiger (Open-palm karate attacks for single target fights), and Crane is an utter waste of space. It gets no upgrades and its supposed use case is also perfectly doable by the versatile, powerful, hard hitting and exceptionally fast Tiger style - which also gets infinitely stronger as the game goes on. There’s some occasional uses for Crane as a combo extender, but normal melee attacks in this game do so little damage that this isn’t a meaningful use.
Instead, Judgment is focused on powerful single hits. Yagami can jump over enemies and bounce off of walls as preludes to exceptionally strong heavy hits, and Tiger style gets both the Tiger Drop from Kiryu’s games and Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. The primary focus of combat in Judgment is scrabbling around to get an enemy on the backfoot before you hit them really hard. Truthfully? I like it. Kenzan and Ishin both added ‘new things’ but were ostensibly just skins for the standard brawling Yakuza combat. Playing as Yagami feels much more tense, as though he’s outmatched and has to basically cheat to survive. It’s telling that his hardest fight is against a guy who fights mostly the same.
But it is ultimately a messy and undercooked system that’s enjoyable in spite of its mechanics rather than because of them. People have mercifully reassured me that Lost Judgment is better about this, opting to become “Yakuza DMC” rather than a half-finished mod for Kiwami 2. As a small aside, I need to harp on the game for just how bad the hyperarmor problem is. Even mooks on the street are able to resist several blows which makes the early game feel like wading through mud.
There is one aspect I’ll praise without caveats though:
THE DUB.
I’m blessed/cursed with enough passive Japanese knowledge to know what constitutes a ‘bad’ performance in that language, even if the specifics are harder to articulate because I’m hardly conversational let alone fluent. The JP track in this game is very… Stilted. Yagami’s VA isn’t putting his heart into it and is fulfilling every bad stereotype about getting TV actors to do VA roles without much prep, and the side characters are a massive mixed bag. Again, I’m assured that Lost Judgment fixes this.
The dub, though? Goddamn. Everyone is putting in work. Greg Chun and Crispin Freeman act their hearts out during the various Yagami/Kaito dynamic scenes. Steve Blum returns to larger videogames as Higashi and kills it, reminding everyone why he was so prolific once upon a time. The venerable Fred Tatasciore appears as Kyohei Hamura and utterly owns the role, providing an infinitely better antagonistic presence than the actual antagonist, and Cherami Leigh manages to salvage Mafuyu’s drab character with an excellent performance. I was really fond of Keith Silverstein’s role as Satoshi Shioya, too, and was sad he was such an underused character.
I’m a big fan of Yakuza 7’s dub and likewise think it’s superior to the JP track, but with Judgment I am infinitely more confident in making that declaration. It’s frankly a shame that the series’ dubbing legacy is tarnished thanks to Gaiden’s utterly lackluster efforts. Here’s hoping Infinite Wealth is better.
In the end… God, I really did want to like this one. It’s so cool and the cast is so wonderful that it actually makes me kind of sad to have my review be so glum, but there’s just too much shit I can’t excuse even for a franchise that demands you put up with some shit in the process of experiencing it.
Kaito is my best friend.
When talking about games in a longrunning franchise, certain phrases tend to pop up around controversial entries.
“This game was one step forward, two steps back” and its variants.
Judgment confounded and still very much confounds me because it’s a step in every direction at once, with its directions seemingly mapped to someone’s rhythm game dance mat.
The premise of this game is simple: Dispense with the Yakuza franchise’s typical crime plots, machismo drama and half-naked rooftop brawls and replace it with a detective story that gradually branches out into a conspiracy tale. In the same vein, Kiryu takes a vacation from the series and is replaced by Takayuki Yagami, a guy who frequently calls to mind Geoff Keighley in that Yagami too is a relatively uncharismatic and drab man surrounded by the most interesting people on Earth. Rather than fighting with epic, powerful brawling moves, Yagami is a more agile and crafty fighter which is ludonarratively in touch with what I assume must be a frequent need to evade the authorities for chatting up high schoolers.
Right off the gate, the most immediately tangible difference between this game and its parent series is that Judgment has opted for a return to the quasi-noir style of Yakuza 2 - albeit if you play the current gen version you’ll have to fucking squint to notice it. It’s most obvious with Yagami’s constant internal narrations and an overarching feeling that you are but a cog in a machine you can’t really comprehend. Furthering this is that the Yakuza are no longer cool, noble modern heroes. They’re petty, lying criminals with no regard for civilians and a nasty habit of letting ambitions cloud judgement - pun not intended.
Yakuza games north of 2 have an awful tendency to drop about 50 NPCs on you in the first few chapters and only 10 will matter, and with Judgment they’ve bucked this trend in favour of sticking to a very small pool of characters. If you start with the franchise here you won’t get inundated with keywords, but it does expect you to remember who everyone is.
This, unfortunately, works against it. The worst sin a detective/murder mystery story can carry is being predictable. And Judgment is very predictable. Having a smaller cast means the suspect can only logically be someone within that cast, and the game makes no attempt to throw the player off or surprise them, as characters frequently interject to shoot down any suspects that aren’t the suspect. As a result, I’d figured out the killer’s identity by the middle of the game and their motive just shortly after. It’s not great, and the insistence on padding out a relatively unengaging conspiracy plot means the back half of this game drags.
I will admit, though, that there’s a good chance it was only obvious to me because I’m very attuned to the unspoken languages used in detective media, Yakuza games and games as a whole. In an RGG Studios game, the big bad is going to be someone who was face-scanned from a real actor. That’s just a fact, and it narrows the list down to four people.
As a detective story, the game also fails because there’s not a lot of actual detecting going on. Most plot beats are sussed out via pure instinct, and the trailing/investigation stuff often doesn’t actually matter due to the story progressing once Yagami makes a wild connection that Kaito calls ridiculous but ultimately ends up being right. Chapter 9 is AWFUL for this! Yagami essentially solves the entire plot barring two loose ends, and though everyone rightfully calls it out as absurd, Yagami is right.
Fortunately! There is a silver lining to this: The cast is exceptional, and despite the actual story being banal drudgery it is hard carried by excellent character dynamics, fantastic development for the main players, and a wonderful ability to pace out interpersonal reveals. I don’t like Yagami himself, but the supporting cast are phenomenal and the dynamic between the ever-growing members of his detective agency is worth the price of admission. Kaito might be RGG Studios’ best supporting man.
This is also the start of RGG Studios respecting the player’s time, so there are now optional
intermissions between long exposition dumps. While the story already drags, these excel in keeping things from feeling too suffocating - though the last couple hours are egregious even by franchise standards. On the ‘two steps forward’ front, the story manages to avoid the sins of past Yakuza games (4 and 5 especially) by knowing when to slam the brakes… Except in Chapter 7, which might be the most unwieldy exposition dump in the series. Other scenes go on longer, yes, but Chapter 7’s is so hamfisted it might as well be a pig.
There’s just one problem. A really really big problem. A problem so big that I can’t forgive it, even when I can forgive the obvious killer and the plodding middle third and the frankly weird left-turns the story makes near the end.
This was Toshihiro Nagoshi’s last big hurrah as a writer for RGG Studios and it unfortunately shows. With 0, 6, and 7 he took a backseat role which saw the writing quality rise dramatically, but the games he was a proper lead on tend to have some problems with the writing of women and Japan’s various minorities - Korean and Chinese primarily. It’s rather telling that the first mainline Yakuza after his stepping back from the role contains women in prominent roles and a direct addressing of the franchise’s prior treatment of Korean and Chinese migrants.
Judgment unfortunately maintains the spirit of his earlier work, and the game is suffocatingly misogynistic. Every female character in this story is either a plot device, revolves around the affections of men, or is someone for Yagami to prey on. It pains me to say it after the series managed to pull itself out of the misogyny pit, but Judgment is worse about women than Yakuza 1 was. Special mention goes to Mafuyu, whose entire character can be summed up as “Yagami’s ex” and she never evolves beyond this.
It is both hilarious and depressing, then, that this is the only RGG title to make an overt commentary on misogyny. Halfway through the game, you play as Saori - An assistant at Yagami’s old law office - and go through the hostess minigame from Yakuza 0/Kiwami 2… Which the game uses to comment on the misogyny faced by hostesses and indeed any woman faced on the streets of Japan.
This is tone-deaf in a million ways, yeah, but it stands out especially for being an uncomfortable commentary in a game that itself is incredibly misogynistic. Furthermore, for as much as I love the post-Nagoshi RGG games, they still include the skeevy and relatively unpleasant hostess minigames with absolutely zero sense of self-awareness. In another game series this would’ve been fine, but in a franchise with a still-growing black mark it has all the grace of a pigeon trying to do taijutsu.
Ah, speaking of clumsy martial arts, now is a fantastic time to discuss the gameplay.
I like the gameplay, but it’s not good, really. It’s a significant shakeup for the series, focusing less on brawling and more on acrobatics. Almost none of Yagami’s moves are reused, and for the first time in years we have a protagonist with a 110% unique fighting style - two of them, even!
And… One of them sucks. Badly. Really badly. Yagami has access to Crane (wide kicking attacks for crowds) and Tiger (Open-palm karate attacks for single target fights), and Crane is an utter waste of space. It gets no upgrades and its supposed use case is also perfectly doable by the versatile, powerful, hard hitting and exceptionally fast Tiger style - which also gets infinitely stronger as the game goes on. There’s some occasional uses for Crane as a combo extender, but normal melee attacks in this game do so little damage that this isn’t a meaningful use.
Instead, Judgment is focused on powerful single hits. Yagami can jump over enemies and bounce off of walls as preludes to exceptionally strong heavy hits, and Tiger style gets both the Tiger Drop from Kiryu’s games and Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. The primary focus of combat in Judgment is scrabbling around to get an enemy on the backfoot before you hit them really hard. Truthfully? I like it. Kenzan and Ishin both added ‘new things’ but were ostensibly just skins for the standard brawling Yakuza combat. Playing as Yagami feels much more tense, as though he’s outmatched and has to basically cheat to survive. It’s telling that his hardest fight is against a guy who fights mostly the same.
But it is ultimately a messy and undercooked system that’s enjoyable in spite of its mechanics rather than because of them. People have mercifully reassured me that Lost Judgment is better about this, opting to become “Yakuza DMC” rather than a half-finished mod for Kiwami 2. As a small aside, I need to harp on the game for just how bad the hyperarmor problem is. Even mooks on the street are able to resist several blows which makes the early game feel like wading through mud.
There is one aspect I’ll praise without caveats though:
THE DUB.
I’m blessed/cursed with enough passive Japanese knowledge to know what constitutes a ‘bad’ performance in that language, even if the specifics are harder to articulate because I’m hardly conversational let alone fluent. The JP track in this game is very… Stilted. Yagami’s VA isn’t putting his heart into it and is fulfilling every bad stereotype about getting TV actors to do VA roles without much prep, and the side characters are a massive mixed bag. Again, I’m assured that Lost Judgment fixes this.
The dub, though? Goddamn. Everyone is putting in work. Greg Chun and Crispin Freeman act their hearts out during the various Yagami/Kaito dynamic scenes. Steve Blum returns to larger videogames as Higashi and kills it, reminding everyone why he was so prolific once upon a time. The venerable Fred Tatasciore appears as Kyohei Hamura and utterly owns the role, providing an infinitely better antagonistic presence than the actual antagonist, and Cherami Leigh manages to salvage Mafuyu’s drab character with an excellent performance. I was really fond of Keith Silverstein’s role as Satoshi Shioya, too, and was sad he was such an underused character.
I’m a big fan of Yakuza 7’s dub and likewise think it’s superior to the JP track, but with Judgment I am infinitely more confident in making that declaration. It’s frankly a shame that the series’ dubbing legacy is tarnished thanks to Gaiden’s utterly lackluster efforts. Here’s hoping Infinite Wealth is better.
In the end… God, I really did want to like this one. It’s so cool and the cast is so wonderful that it actually makes me kind of sad to have my review be so glum, but there’s just too much shit I can’t excuse even for a franchise that demands you put up with some shit in the process of experiencing it.
Kaito is my best friend.
5 Comments
Yeah I just hit chapter 10 of this one recently and can't lie, my overriding thoughts on the game are pretty much 'wow I can't wait to see how the sequel does everything in this better!'. I've heard from multiple people with similar stances on Judgment that Lost Judgement is the best thing RGG has ever put out, so me playing this is more like homework than I'd like to admit.
Also I don't actually know who The Mole is yet but if it ends up being who I think it is then yeah, this is one of the most obvious whodunnits I've ever experienced. Also a very weirdly structured one lmao.
Also I don't actually know who The Mole is yet but if it ends up being who I think it is then yeah, this is one of the most obvious whodunnits I've ever experienced. Also a very weirdly structured one lmao.
@Lunaher Chapter 10 was the breaking point that made me put this down for a month before coming back. I too am hoping LJ makes up for this game's shortcomings because I'd really like to come away from this subseries with something resembling a positive opinion.
This one hurts 😢 tho it was also my first "yakuza" game so maybe I should replay it
@NOWITSREYNTIME17 It stung to wrote too because I had really high hopes for it after the years of praise I've seen from even the more cynical Yakuza fans I know, and as RGG Studios' biggest simp I was READY to go to bat for it.
MiraMiraOTW
4 months ago