It was pretty fun, all things considered. It would have made it a lot more enjoyable if I knew anything about the Bakumatsu period that it's referencing, but I still somewhat enjoyed the story.
As cool as it was having the Yakuza actors be in this one in different roles, it made all the plot twists extremely obvious. Wow you're telling me the good guys from the previous games are good here? You're telling me the big bads are bad here? I don't think they should've necessarily switched it up, because then it wouldn't feel right either, but I suppose this problem is inherent to what this game was trying to do. On the one hand, it made me greatly appreciate what the more complex antagonists could have been in the main series, and how the protagonists would interact with each other in this new timeline.
The story has a really eerie Japanese ultranationalist position. It shows this especially hard in the ending. Considering the horrors that were committed by them in the next period following Sakamoto Ryouma's assassination, it's really tough to just stand there and watch Ryouma talking about the bright future of Japan and how great a country it is etc. when RGG seems to be doing the thing that's popular there: pretending the 1900s didn't happen.
The combat was... ok? I think I initially tried to play it like the mainline games and it felt really wrong. Brawler is basically useless. Only when I got to the barracks missions did I finally realize that it feels much more like Nioh than Yakuza. After putting myself in that mentality, I really started enjoying the combat.
This game probably hurt the most in terms of not having infinite sprinting like the newer games. My god does it suck to constantly run out of breath until you can afford enough virtue to sprint for longer.
OST had some cool callbacks to older games which I really appreciated. Substories were pretty decent. Platinum grind was very very painful.
Alright game if you're looking for some more Yakuza gameplay.
As cool as it was having the Yakuza actors be in this one in different roles, it made all the plot twists extremely obvious. Wow you're telling me the good guys from the previous games are good here? You're telling me the big bads are bad here? I don't think they should've necessarily switched it up, because then it wouldn't feel right either, but I suppose this problem is inherent to what this game was trying to do. On the one hand, it made me greatly appreciate what the more complex antagonists could have been in the main series, and how the protagonists would interact with each other in this new timeline.
The story has a really eerie Japanese ultranationalist position. It shows this especially hard in the ending. Considering the horrors that were committed by them in the next period following Sakamoto Ryouma's assassination, it's really tough to just stand there and watch Ryouma talking about the bright future of Japan and how great a country it is etc. when RGG seems to be doing the thing that's popular there: pretending the 1900s didn't happen.
The combat was... ok? I think I initially tried to play it like the mainline games and it felt really wrong. Brawler is basically useless. Only when I got to the barracks missions did I finally realize that it feels much more like Nioh than Yakuza. After putting myself in that mentality, I really started enjoying the combat.
This game probably hurt the most in terms of not having infinite sprinting like the newer games. My god does it suck to constantly run out of breath until you can afford enough virtue to sprint for longer.
OST had some cool callbacks to older games which I really appreciated. Substories were pretty decent. Platinum grind was very very painful.
Alright game if you're looking for some more Yakuza gameplay.