i have not played any of the other yakuza games but this was a very promising introduction to the series.
i really enjeoyed this game, especially all the goofy side stuff like the crayfish sidequest and the business mode. the story and combat were also good although i do have gripes with both.
for the most part i found the story really engaging however it had a few rough spots that really bogged down my enjoyment. there are so many instances were characters just spew expsposistion, after i while i just stopped paying attention. i really wished the characters would just stop talking.
while i think this game couldve really improved with a more show dont tell oriented approach the fact that i completed this 60+ hour game where the main story is mostly cutscenes and talking is a testement to the quality of the writing.

the combat i also found to be somewhat flawed. im not a big fan of turn based rpgs, i usually find myself getting bored of the combat pretty quickly. hell even in the turn based games that i do enjoy like the persona series i find myself getting bored of the combat towards the end. and yeah this definitely was the case here, especially during the endgame bosses i was really starting to get tired of the battle mechanics. compared to the persona games in therms of mechanics this game is worse in almost every way. there is a huge amount of enemies but it never feels like you have to change your approach to acount for different enemy types, for the most part you simply pick your best attack and hit them with it. there are buffs and debuffs and other tactical options but i never felt things like these were ever effective compared to simply spaming your strongest move. especially the bosses felt really tedious as the late game ones just felt like complete bullet sponges, offering no real challange apart from simply enduring what would often be 10+ minutes of just picking your strongest move and healing when you were staring to run out of life.

with that being said the combat is also one of the best parts of the game the loads of unique enemies i founf to be exdtremley entertaining, discovering a new sujimon always felt like a treat. my favorite gotta be druggler. also all of the wild animations really caried the combat for me, brakedancing an enemy never got old (apart from when it did). all the pound mates animations were incredibly funny and haha.
very good game, really looking forward to playing the rest of the series

got a fair bit in but this shit is just way too tedious. awful story that hadles issues like mental health and suicide with about the same subtlety as a hydrogen bomb. gameplay isnt much better, walking around looking at things interspersed with the occasional "horror" sequence which consists of running around samey looking corridors and hoping that you choose the right path and dont get insta killed by the monster that kinda just shows up wherever. an incredibly bad and boring game, the only redeeming factors i can think of are the graphics being pretty nice and i guess they kinda tried to say something about mental health although they failed miserably