huge spoilers ahead, so reader discretion is advised!
im really mad with how this game turned out, especially considering how much hype the game garnered before release (and even after with all the meat riders). that's not to say it's bad, far from it - it's just got some glaring flaws that really did this game dirty, and i don't see anyone talking about them.
let me start with the good. gameplay is objectively a huge improvement over 7's. combos, moving around your enemies in battles helps so much since you can now get critical back hits if positioned right, wonky foreground objects that would mess up your attacks in the last game can now be picked up as weapons, and grappling attacks that break guards - it's solved almost everything i didn't like about 7's gameplay and i'm very glad they put more thought into it, the potential of 7's system has finally been realised.
one big issue that pained me in the last game is still glaringly apparent here though. enemies and bosses are piss easy up until chapter 10 i'd say, all being able to be done with in 3 or less turns. after that, the game has a difficulty spike (annoying, but a lot nicer than 7) which forces mandatory grinding. granted, one run of the mystery dungeon will give you enough XP to fight the final boss with ease, but the fact that it never hits the sweet spot in difficulty is very annoying.
also, the new characters added are an absolute treat - they never feel out of place with the gang and i'm glad they're written well. easily the greatest part about the ichiban games are their bonds together.
this game is also filled to the brim with content, and not in a bloated way like 5. the bucket list is an absolute tearjerker (even though i think it should have been part of the main story) and the substories are pretty developed this time around, even better than they were previously. that, and the quality of life genuinely make me scared to see how 7's features pale in comparison to this. an auto-win button for low-level encounters, finally being able to choose a taxi location from the map, and especially the electric scooter - one of my complaints in 7 was that the city was way too big to traverse on foot, and i had to rely on opening the phone menu and selecting taxis way too often. it's a blessing and i'm glad they've done this much.

this is where the praise ends, and story spoilers start.

i don't need to say much about the ng+ dlc, but it's shameful considering that this was a thing with 7 in japan - but the backlash got so bad that it was included with the game in the english version. just an earthly reminder about how scummy companies can get. if not for the emotional kiryu stuff that was heavily advertised with this game, i don't think i would have got it. but if there's some extra dlc content that is worth getting, it would probably make the dlc worthwhile.

the story is easily the worst part about this game. there's so much about it that genuinely pisses me off, but i'll try to summarise it in the best way i can. they had so many chances to do some wicked shit but ultimately pulled a lot of its punches and played it safe for reasons i can't really grasp. the first half of the story is genuine filler - the gang was really just running around looking for akane - the game does a good job and hyping her up (she's his mom - obviously learning more about this goat protagonist is interesting) and lani as well (even comparing her to haruka in y1 - kiryu's reason for helping out) and when we do find them, they contribute absolutely nothing to the story afterwards. I don't even think kiryu and lani had a scene together, given how much he wanted to rescue her.
in addition to this, there's a lot of shit that just gets glossed over for seemingly no reason at all. the whole daidoji thing with kiryu could have been expanded on given how much of a tight grip they had on him in gaiden, but nahhh, he's just able to live after being exposed because he's "important for the mission". we're also gonna forget about eiji, the man who literally fucked up ichiban and gang's whole careers, fuckin disappears after we get back lani, and now he's gone back to japan and is now looking homeless? how the fuck did that all happen within the span of a few days???? and don't get me started on ebina. his whole backstory just makes the arakawa family fiasco in 7 even more confusing, and the fact that ichiban isn't even made aware of it is just ??????
people wack on 5's story for being ridiculous but at least it was a good time. this genuinely feels lazy.

on top of that, the villains are boring. bryce is some cult guy who isn't even remotely interesting. his backstory is lame, and we're supposed to care when we don't see him AT ALL. until his boss fight i'm convinced he only appeared to ichiban at least 3 times max. eiji is a bitch boy - his blackmail with chitose was honestly great, a very good motive to do all the shit he did, but there's no real resolve or one-to-one convo with him about it. only at the very end do we see he's sorry, and even though the ending went insanely hard, it just wasn't convincing enough because we didn't see any development from himself beforehand. i already talked about ebina, he's basically a "daddy issues" villain but his speech at the end highlighted the yakuza being a necessary evil, that will always linger in japan despite the dissolution. couldn't care about it less about it by that point but it made kiryu cry (something that hasn't been done since y3) so it gets extra points.

i've left the bucket list for last, cuz it's the best and worst part about the game. seeing old important characters really just made me appreciate for wonderful all these characters are. i genuinely shed a tear when i saw taichi and kaoru - such a heartwarming section and i'm glad they've done this. being side content really hurts it however, haruka's part is a very good example. you think there would be some insane cutscene where they both start bursting with tears while being the sweetest shit ever, but nah, we get edged and kiryu leaves halfway through. the daidoji is their reason for this i think? you'd think kiryu would go through some tough shit because of this but he just gets away with a simple fight since he knows that he has plot armour 😭 you can't make this shit up
if the bucket list took up the first half of the game, with the lesser important people being side content, i think that would have been perfect.

but as great as it was, the worst offender of the story is the ending, simply because it just leaves way too much unexplained. very lazy to leave this much "to interpretation".
for starters, ichiban and saeko's shit could have easily been the cherry on top, with him finally getting the proper words to say to her. but they just had to ruin it with some weird fuck ass shit - even for ichiban this was out of pocket, especially since the whole team was building ichiban up to this moment (especially saeko's speech in the final boss, was that all for nothing????) ofc it'll be resolved in the other game, but it really feels lazy.
we don't even see how any of the characters are actually doing, just short summaries. chitose and lani not being seen at all was very disappointing considering that they've both taken on some big roles.
but the final cutscene with kiryu was easily the worst. honestly thought kiryu's final moments would have been well spent - and him being killed off in a either badass or heartwarming way, but nahhhhh, he lived. with him with cancer you'd think he would go (or be finished by the daidoji after completing the mission) but fuck what we've previously established am i right?
to end it all off, haruka and haruto are waiting for him by his hospital bed while he's out for an inspection or whatever. here he reveals his name, supposed to be a big deal, but why should it be when there is no reasoning behind it? why would the daidoji let him do this????? the bucket list moment felt like it was leading to this, but of course we don't see what happens at all...... haha
just hype the end of kiryu up for it not to be the end of kiryu. this should have been the dlc that gaiden was supposed to be to this game.

even past all that, i did have some good fun thanks to the quality of life and improved gameplay. maybe i will go back in premium adventure because looking at the completion list, there's a LOT of cool shit i missed. hard to do that when the entire game was essentially a big blueball.

The rare example of a game that is worse than its predecessor, despite being better in every way.

You name the aspect when it comes to the act of playing the game is better--the combat is more fun, Hawaii is beautiful and incredibly fun to traverse, the minigames are as wonderful as ever in addition to bringing back most of the ones from the last game, the the ost has a bit more sauce to it, its just wonderful to play.

But, the word of the day is pacing. This game suffers heavily from poor pacing in every aspect just as well. You get your overarching objective early into the game...and it doesn't change until about 70% of the way in. It quickly gets tiring as you walk to another place so the bad guy there can tell you the princess is in another castle. Eventually it gets so infuriating that they have a random npc come out of nowhere to give you her to end the plot and start the endgame. The final boss comes out of nowhere and is generally completely uninteresting, they knew it too because they added other silly bosses in the lead-up to him then shunt you over to Kiryu for the "serious" finale.

This in itself isn't bad, but it just really makes Ichiban's storyline even more unsatisfying that it already is. Ichiban has no relation to this guy or anything going on, he's just Here To Beat Up the Bad Guy. The main antagonist faction is also kind of questionable from a sensitivity perspective--the obvious intention with them was to pull from the Unification Church and the Shinzo Abe assassination, but by transporting that to America and making them worship an indiginous religion it comes across in rather poor taste.

Kiryu's plot fares better--I have never played the old Yakuzas before 7, I don't like that sort of action game, but it definitely sold me on his character and history, and it got really emotional in the sense of a man looking back on his life. When it wasn't focused on the Big Conspiracy of the game, the small moments were really good and brought some of the humanity of 7 back.

The pacing bleeds into the gameplay too. The game has a really awkward difficulty curve, its never like too hard or anything, but you'll just randomly hit spikes after sometimes arbitrary missions where the level requirement jumps up by 5 or 10. And the way they pace your currency is the game is just poor, they went for a strictly tiered equipment system this time around, with each tier of equipment costing exponentially more than the last. But the actual tuning of money in the midgame is poor--the game asks for significantly more money than it gives you to keep concurrent with gear through the middle of the game, which just meant I sat there undergeared through it until we hit the lategame that showers you with infinite wealth.

Tying into it is an uninteresting and mostly just annoying upgrade mat system, with the capstone mats being gated by long grinds or doing the fishing gacha minigame for an hour.

They also don't unlock the job change system until like 50% of the way through the game, which is absurd and really only messes with the curve since you're already significantly into the game before you can play with the system. I really don't know what they were thinking here.

Altogether, the tedium of the story and pacing just really brought it down for me. It's undeniably a great game, but its less than the sum of its parts.

Now that I’ve had a day to sit on my thoughts of the game I will make an actual non-shitpost review.

This game is a mess. I wasn’t kidding when I said this is the MGS4 of the series. An extremely ambitious, earnest, heartfelt celebration of the series that has extremely high highs but also constantly falls on its face with extremely stupid writing.

The pacing is some of the worst we’ve seen from RGG. For a game that can easily be 100+ hours long it is both too long but also too short in areas. It constantly pulls you away from the main story to do very involved mini game/sub system tutorials but then has no time in the final hours to wrap up most of the story. At least 4 of the main characters this game is about don’t show up in the final cutscene. You just have to be told about what they are doing from a mouth piece so we can wrap shit up. Kiryu is just kinda left in this weird limbo as they don’t explain what the fuck got them to this point with an achievement titles “man who reclaimed his name”. It genuinely feels like there is either an entire chapter or at least a huge segment of one missing from the end. One of the main villains just stops showing up for 10+ hours only to be seen again in a cut away and is completely unrecognizable for at least another few hours. They then try to do the coin locker scene again with them and it feels completely unearned because they haven’t done anything. The two main villains you do fight are extremely forgettable and underwhelming. One is given what you’d imagine to be a super important connection to Ichiban but it never comes up. The two share a single cutscene at the start of the game and that’s it. Why was it even a plot point to begin with then???? So many plot threads just go no where or are left extremely unsatisfying as they hand wave them away so it can’t be viewed as “a plot hole”. I seriously think how they structure their stories needs to change because I don’t think the Yakuza writing formula they’ve had for 2 decades translates to a 100 hour JRPG. Imo the best way to enjoy the main story of these games is when you can just progress the plot freely and not be bogged down by side content or busy work. I usually save that stuff for premium adventure so the story isn’t so “start and stop”. But you can’t do that in these games because of the rpg leveling and just how the story constantly blocks you to do other shit I am currently not interested in. No RGG I don’t give a fuck about your Pokémon clone and it’s 30 minute+ forced tutorial I just want to get on with chapter 4 please.

Most of the cast has nothing to do in this game which would be fine if they didn’t force them to have boring ass drink links you need to do to make them objectively better in gameplay.

The gameplay needs massive changes going forward because Jesus Christ was I sick of the multiple grinds it imposes. The long battles they do in this game are terrible. In previous entries you’d have a long gauntlet where you’d have to fight to a location and they do this here but they constantly make you take the most out of the way route and block off better ones with excuses like “there are dudes over there!” Only to send you down an alley with 7 fights. If 9 does the same formula 8 repeated from 7 I might just drop the series. I do not want to go back to scrounging for money and being locked out of jobs till chapter 5 again. I do not want to have to do massive material grinds for good gear. I do not want to have 80% of the moves you get to be fucking useless because they aren’t an AOE and don’t deal elemental damage.

Highlights of this game is everything they do with Kiryu outside of the final chapter. Life links are overall goated outside of some implications of how no one reacting to Kiryu being alive despite you are only able to see them after Kiryu is broadcasted on national news to be alive.

There is honestly too much to talk about with this game So I’m just gonna end it by saying this: I’ll look back on the good in this game as some of the best but I never want to replay this game ever again. Also this game only makes Gaiden look even dumber and further cements it at as a $50 scam. Yokoyama fucking lied Hanawa is not important and he fucking knew that.

Mark my words that this game while currently being hailed as the best game in the series, that its perfect and other things like that will be looked back on a lot more negatively once the honeymoon phase is over, once hypebeasts move onto the next thing, once people won't freakout if you have anything negative to say about it. It won't be a hot take or "being contrarian" to think that the game is mid, super front loaded and falls apart in the end. It's fine if you do think its perfect and its your favorite game or whatever but the amount of people who lose their shit when you have anything negative to say about this game or gaiden is seriously annoying.

This game also made me get into a car accident so fuck it lol