It's been ages that a game had had me smiling like an idiot and actually clapping my hands at the ending but this one of those hall of fame games that genuinely touches your soul
RGG how do you make it seem so easy i owe my life to this studio
This game made me realize how much i love the detective/murder mystery unfolding stories. the way this game laid out its narrative was fucking PERFECT they cooked so fucking well on the first game of a spin off duology from a yakuza series which is the literal opposite of this
Just goes to show how absolutely fantastic the writing is for these games that they did the boldest move ever and switched it all up and somehow made an almost perfect game
i fucking love the cast to death, They made the perfect cast to a story like this i cannot describe it
Kaito and Yagami are my favorite RGG duo by miles from just one game and i genuinely cannot wait to see how Lost Judgement takes the blueprint to an even higher level
my only major issues with the game are some egregious padding examples and the combat is slow at first

I feel like I’d have enjoyed this game a lot more as a kid rather than now. The gunplay is fluid & fantastic and the gun variety is solid, almost every gun here feels well designed and balanced. The soundtrack is immaculate, lends heavily into its setting & the circumstances of the story & makes a lot of these explosive scenes and moments feel much grander than what they honestly really are. Speaking of the story, it’s… okay? I’ll be honest, I just wasn’t remotely invested in any of these characters or their stories, there was no hook here and the climax & ending made me feel nothing. This game was essentially a shooting gallery for me and as a shooting gallery… still not all that amazing either. While the gunplay is great, the level design wasn’t as well polished. So many levels are just frustratingly designed with annoying enemy spam, and when the late game hits with the brutes it becomes even worse. Maybe the co-op input lag made it feel a lot worse than it should, but it wasn’t very fun getting one or two-shot with a 1 second delay on firing. There are parts of this game that have aged well, and others that feel like a product of its time period. As great as the game looks and feels at times, its taken away by its bizarre and frustrating design. Yet even then, still liked it a lot more than my short time with Combat Evolved. Hope the series shows improvements from hereon, especially the story.