When I finished this game, I thought, "That's it?" This phrase summarized my experience with this game.

Exploring is still fun, especially in downtown Boston. Some of the settings in this game, like the Prydwyn or the radioactive sea, are stunning and a joy to go through.

However, the gameplay loop of getting a quest, going to a place, and killing everything in sight gets boring extremely quickly. It gets boring after the third or fourth quest. It made me avoid doing quests because I already knew what I needed to do. A few side quests strayed away from this loop, which I appreciated and wish there were more of.

While the gunplay is certainly a step up from its predecessors (not much to go but up from there), it still gets boring after a while. There are the same 3-4 enemy types in the whole game, and there's no real change in difficulty outside of an increased health bar. I also constantly ran out of ammo in the early to mid-game, as enemies were complete bullet sponges, and ammo was scarce.

I also see people criticize the lack of "RPG" elements, like the shallow dialogue tree. I honestly don't have much of a problem with this since I think Bethesda tried to make the playable character more of its character. Although I wish they had fully gone this route instead of half-assing it.

I still haven't played the DLC, so maybe that'll change things, but I doubt it will.

The best part of this game for me was the Gameplay loop of exploring, talking to people, and doing side quests. Nearly all the companion quests and quests that award achievements were great.

The gunplay is old and outdated, which makes combat pretty unfun. I felt like guns would straight up not hit targets when I was aiming right at them. Also, some enemies feel like bullet sponges. Mods help can help improve this aspect of the game, but it is what it is.

There's also some technical issues I had with this game. This game notoriously crashes; thankfully, it didn't crash much while I played it. However, there was this one bug where music would go static and would stutter a lot after a few minutes of playing, which was super annoying, and I couldn't find a fix for it.

The show got me into this game, now I understand why people call it one of the greatest RPGs ever.

While this game is an enjoyable experience, the game doesn't live up to Yakuza 0's standards. This is expected since this game is a remake of the first-ever Yakuza game. I haven't played the original so I can't compare/contrast the remake to the original so... yeah.

While I enjoyed the story I didn't find it as impactful as Yakuza 0's. None of the "new" characters made a mark on me and all my favorites were ones I saw before. Nishiki and Majima were still some of my favorites.

I didn't like much of the side stuff. The side quests I played through were rather underwhelming. Maybe there are some hidden good side quests that I missed, but idk. I only tried the cabaret club minigame which was alright.

Combat was a positive for me. These games are always fun when you can just beat the shit out of people and it's always satisfying to do so. The upgrade/skill tree in this game was also much better than Yakuza 0's (IMO) since I didn't have to endlessly grind to get most of the upgrade paths. Most of the bosses kinda sucked in this game except for a small few, but the very last fight was phenomenal.

TLDR: Play this game if you've already played zero and liked zero. If you want to get into Yakuza, go play zero then come back to this one if you like it.