This was the first RGG game I finished. I bought Y5 back when it came out on PS3 cause I thought it was cool and I played it until part 4 but I didn't get the story so I never finished it until I worked my way back from Y0 many years later. The reason I did go back and play everything was because of this game, not Y0.
The thing that really drew me to this game before I knew much of anything about RGG was the fact that Kimura Takuya was playing the lead and I loved the HERO jdrama series. He actually plays a goofy prosecutor (instead of a lawyer) that acts like he's in his teenage years in that one too, which almost made me think the game used that show as a blueprint.
Chapter 1 of this game is insanely good in terms of the story hook that it presents. The plot of this game was amazing and it never let me down. The antagonist and the reveal were so good. The combat was pretty decent although I didn't have other RGG games back then to compare it with.
The biggest issues it has is the non-combat stuff and some minor combat gripes.
The non-combat stuff:
-Kim's text messages and the goddamn Keihin gang. The amount of times I would afk for a second only to get swarmed by enemies and come back to a retry screen cause Kim sent a text message...
-Tailing sequences. While they do distinguish Judgment as a series from Yakuza, I just don't like them. They were a pain in all Assassin's Creed games and they're still a pain here. Just remove them.
-Chase sequences are way worse than the older games. It's just pressing button prompts with nothing interesting to do. It was fun as hell in Y5 since you could actually go in wrong directions, kick the dudes, had some control over your own movement. Or the sequences went through interesting pathways like Akiyama's in 4. Here, they're just trash.
-The friendship system is awful. Hated it in 0 and hate it here too. Locking certain substories behind the friendship meter made things a lot more annoying than it had to be.
-As a 35 year old man, Yagami is allergic to women that are anywhere older than 20. The most sus romances I've seen in RGG games only matched by Infinite Wealth's.
The combat stuff:
-Crane is really bad compared to tiger.
-Mortal wounds would have been good if the cost to get them fixed wasn't astronomical compared to what you could normally earn and the place is so out of the way that you almost never wanna go there.
OST was great.
Good game with the added benefit of not needing to play any of the Yakuza games to fully enjoy it since it's very detached from everything else.
The thing that really drew me to this game before I knew much of anything about RGG was the fact that Kimura Takuya was playing the lead and I loved the HERO jdrama series. He actually plays a goofy prosecutor (instead of a lawyer) that acts like he's in his teenage years in that one too, which almost made me think the game used that show as a blueprint.
Chapter 1 of this game is insanely good in terms of the story hook that it presents. The plot of this game was amazing and it never let me down. The antagonist and the reveal were so good. The combat was pretty decent although I didn't have other RGG games back then to compare it with.
The biggest issues it has is the non-combat stuff and some minor combat gripes.
The non-combat stuff:
-Kim's text messages and the goddamn Keihin gang. The amount of times I would afk for a second only to get swarmed by enemies and come back to a retry screen cause Kim sent a text message...
-Tailing sequences. While they do distinguish Judgment as a series from Yakuza, I just don't like them. They were a pain in all Assassin's Creed games and they're still a pain here. Just remove them.
-Chase sequences are way worse than the older games. It's just pressing button prompts with nothing interesting to do. It was fun as hell in Y5 since you could actually go in wrong directions, kick the dudes, had some control over your own movement. Or the sequences went through interesting pathways like Akiyama's in 4. Here, they're just trash.
-The friendship system is awful. Hated it in 0 and hate it here too. Locking certain substories behind the friendship meter made things a lot more annoying than it had to be.
-As a 35 year old man, Yagami is allergic to women that are anywhere older than 20. The most sus romances I've seen in RGG games only matched by Infinite Wealth's.
The combat stuff:
-Crane is really bad compared to tiger.
-Mortal wounds would have been good if the cost to get them fixed wasn't astronomical compared to what you could normally earn and the place is so out of the way that you almost never wanna go there.
OST was great.
Good game with the added benefit of not needing to play any of the Yakuza games to fully enjoy it since it's very detached from everything else.