While I thought Judgment was a flawed but fun game, its sequel fixes most of its problems.

The gameplay here is possibly my favorite out of all RGG games. All 3 styles (not including the boxing style because I don't own it) are amazing and unlike the original judgment, crane is actually good, it's probably my favorite here. Juggling is so fun. The extracts are fun to play with. It's just perfect imo.

The detective mechanics are not so good tbh. While the returning mechanics like tailing are slightly better here, they're still not the greatest thing ever. The main problem comes with the 2 new ones. Stealth and Parkour. They're bad. Moreso stealth tbh it's so handholdy and it's so stupid that Yagami somehow can't hit these random grunts. Once you're caught it's immediately game over. I think I'd genuinely prefer if these were scrapped for the next game, or at least completely revamp them.

The school stories are great. I spent a lot of time in them. They're well written and most of the minigames are fun. It's obvious that the bottom 5 stories are weaker than the top 5 but still they're not bad at all. My favorites were the Dance Club and Boxing Gym.

The OST here is great. The street battles themes here are way better than Judgment imo. A lot of memorable tracks. Unwavering Belief. Very strong OST, one of the best in the series.


SPOILER WARNING
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The story here starts off strong. I really enjoyed the way this game tackled bullying. It continues to be quite interesting until a certain event. It just lost me after that. Every conversation between Yagami and Kuwana just became basically Kuwana explaining how the law doesn't grant everyone justice and that some people aren't punished for their crimes and then Yagami goes: "but what about Sawa-sensei?" Obviously the way Kuwana grants people justice isn't good. He blackmails the bullies and torments them and he's a killer, but I want Yagami to have a more powerful counter-argument than "but Sawa-sensei died because of you". Kuwana is very well-written. Probably one of my favorite RGG villians, but I think Yagami doesn't really do him justice. He acts as if Soma wasn't the one who killed Yoko Sawa.

Even with the flaws in the story, I do think Lost Judgment has basically perfect combat, so of course I liked it. If certain parts were written better it would definitely be my favorite in the series. It's still top 5 though.

It feels bloated and there are way too many boring walking sequences and chapter 17 is bad BUT it is final fantasy vii. It's wonderful seeing the og story expanded, the set pieces being grander thanks to not being on the ps1, the combat, I had a lot of fun most of the time I spent playing and I hope that the future installments will improve upon this.

The biggest flaw in the game is the pacing, mainly in chapters 14 and 17. When compared to the og game it feels really odd like why are we doing side quests now, why did they add an entirely new part to chapter 17, why is it slow and boring. ig the other two parts won't have this issue since they won't be trying to turn 6 hours into 30-40 hours.

Near the end the combat started to feel tedious, idk how but all of a sudden enemies started to cancel my big attacks bc it's so great to wait for my atb gauge to fill up to do the big move that needs 2 just for the boss to hit me once and cancel it but the game still removes the gauge anyway, I think this might be a replacement for missing attacks in turn based combat but then I don't have to wait to the attack and also cure spells never missed then, now a boss can hit a party member who is healing another party member so now I have to wait for the gauge to fill until I can heal them and most of the time the boss would have enough time to kill the party member I was trying to heal.

I won't judge the ending until I see the results of what happened then in the next parts.