The leadup to Yakuza: Like a Dragon was utterly fascinating to me. The giant shift in combat felt daring in a way that you don't see every day in the AAA space. It was so exciting to me that it pushed me to play through the entire series up to this point, just to fully immerse myself in the context for this thing. To say I was excited would be an understatement.
Like a Dragon delivers on numerous levels. It looks and performs fucking great on Series X. The music is like weirdly super good at points? I usually don't notice Yakuza's music that much but this time felt different. The assortment of side-content is great this time around with a bunch of hilarious and memorable substories and side activities, even if Dragon Kart was kind of a disappointment for me.
Ichiban and the rest of the cast are fucking stellar. RGG has shown themselves to be very skilled at introducing and endearing you to characters very quickly and this game is no exception. The story takes them on some really unbelievable twists and turns and I honestly think that this game may very well have the series' best villain. It's amazing stuff.
However there's definitely still a lot of room to improve. Especially on the RPG side of things. The combat is good and has a lot of good ideas but the execution really needs work to get it to feel like it meaningfully stacks up to the visceral and kinetic combat system that came before. (No, it wasn't always bad. You guys just need to learn to chill with some fun crunchy combat lol.)
On top of that, the jobs feel too skewed toward damage dealing. It didn't feel like there was enough in the way of support classes, especially in buffs/debuffs. Also the difficulty has some truly incredible spikes toward the end. They're super manageable so it's not a huge deal in my opinion, but it IS a show of the RPG system not being fully tuned. Maybe by the time we get to Yakuza 8 or 9 the system will stand toe to toe with the greats of the genre.
The last thing I want to mention is that while this game is a great place to start, it definitely still is the seventh game in the Yakuza series. Not to spoil anything, but it does carry over some points from previous games and iterates on them, leaving them in places that'll be surprising and rewarding to people that have given those older games a look. If this is your first Yakuza, you will miss out on the impact of that stuff and that is kind of a shame. So I dunno, there's that.
All that said, I really loved this thing. Both as a fresh start for the series and as a follow-up to Yakuza 6, and I'm optimistic about the direction RGG's gonna take this going forward.
Like a Dragon delivers on numerous levels. It looks and performs fucking great on Series X. The music is like weirdly super good at points? I usually don't notice Yakuza's music that much but this time felt different. The assortment of side-content is great this time around with a bunch of hilarious and memorable substories and side activities, even if Dragon Kart was kind of a disappointment for me.
Ichiban and the rest of the cast are fucking stellar. RGG has shown themselves to be very skilled at introducing and endearing you to characters very quickly and this game is no exception. The story takes them on some really unbelievable twists and turns and I honestly think that this game may very well have the series' best villain. It's amazing stuff.
However there's definitely still a lot of room to improve. Especially on the RPG side of things. The combat is good and has a lot of good ideas but the execution really needs work to get it to feel like it meaningfully stacks up to the visceral and kinetic combat system that came before. (No, it wasn't always bad. You guys just need to learn to chill with some fun crunchy combat lol.)
On top of that, the jobs feel too skewed toward damage dealing. It didn't feel like there was enough in the way of support classes, especially in buffs/debuffs. Also the difficulty has some truly incredible spikes toward the end. They're super manageable so it's not a huge deal in my opinion, but it IS a show of the RPG system not being fully tuned. Maybe by the time we get to Yakuza 8 or 9 the system will stand toe to toe with the greats of the genre.
The last thing I want to mention is that while this game is a great place to start, it definitely still is the seventh game in the Yakuza series. Not to spoil anything, but it does carry over some points from previous games and iterates on them, leaving them in places that'll be surprising and rewarding to people that have given those older games a look. If this is your first Yakuza, you will miss out on the impact of that stuff and that is kind of a shame. So I dunno, there's that.
All that said, I really loved this thing. Both as a fresh start for the series and as a follow-up to Yakuza 6, and I'm optimistic about the direction RGG's gonna take this going forward.