For the love of god this series needs a new writer.
Kasuga gets cancelled by a Vtuber and then Joe Sawashiro (who totally didn't murder the Seiryu Clan chairman in the last game) shows up to tell him that his mother has been alive in Hawaii all along. He flies there and after meeting Kiryu who's also trying to track her down for the Daidoji faction, Kiryu reveals his terminal cancer diagnosis. The reveal is fine but they attach this goofy backstory of him working at radioactive waste facility and there being an accident, it's just pointless and ruins the impact of the scene.
For the next 7 or so chapters you run around Hawaii randomly looking for clues to Akane's whereabouts while the game constantly tosses you into lengthy tutorials for one of it's many WHACKY side activities. Not only does that negatively impact the pacing but the overall silly tone really clashes with the more serious aspects of the story. One second I'm looking at the Dragon of Dojima, on his last legs with a defeated look in his eyes and next second I'm on a random island playing animal crossing learning about furbys called "Gachapin" and "Mukku". Past Yakuza games obviously had silliness but that was usually better placed or contained to optional sub-stories you could do whenever.
It is only in chapter 9 that Kasuga has the brilliant idea to go to the place where Akane's picture was taken and ask around if anybody has seen her. This then leads them directly to her because a random Tattoo lady was hiding her on a boat all along. As anticlimactic as that may be you'd think the plot could at least move forward now but it never really gets anywhere, it just keeps tripping over itself.
The antagonists are such a complete let-down.
Dwight has this really cool and imposing design but then literally pisses himself minutes after being introduced after which he is not seen for 90% of the game. He only shows up again in chapter 13 where he is beaten twice and then eaten by a big shark.
Eiji reveals himself as a double agent for Dwight. Turns out the Arakawa family framed him and ruined his life so he joined people who are 10x more evil than any Yakuza to "destroy the Yakuza" (whatever that means since they're dissolved). When Kasuga of all people, points out the stupidity in that he just responds with his silly maniacal giggle, what an awesome character. He proceeds to threaten Akane just to torment Kasuaga so you have to run through Yamai's dungeon a second time to fight some nameless grunts while Eiji's on a skype call laughing at you. The entirety of chapter 11 is a waste of time and after that he is not seen until the final cutscene where he's randomly back in Japan, rotting in an apartment and after a talk he gets escorted to the police by Kasuga.
Yamai is probably the closest to being an interesting "antagonist" but the story fumbles his character so insanely hard. In the first half he just shows up every so often, goes "mmmmm Kiryuuuu-saaannnn...." and then you need to fight him and after the 5th time it get's a little repetitive. Once he becomes an ally he's just a safehouse until chapter 13 where you go to Japan with him. There you get a scene that finally explains his history with the Tabata Family and the scene itself is fine but it's chapter 13 out of 14 why are we learning about this guy's backstory that has absolutely nothing to do with the main conflict? He then walks off into the sunset and is never seen again.
Bryce turns out to not even be an insane cult leader, instead doing all of this simply so he could profit off Nele Island as his private island with things like waste disposal. Lani and her stupid amulet, the very thing this story revolved around from the opening cutscene, end up as a useless macguffin. Bryce straight up says they don't matter at all because he has enough influence and power regardless. LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After the fight Chitose does a goofy Vtuber stream where she exposes Bryce to the world and admits her wrong doings. I get that they try to be "trendy" with these games but all the Vtuber segments are pretty insufferable and here it's especially out of place.
Ebina's revealed to be the bastard child of Arakawa and Yuriko Hikawa and after his father massacres the Hikawa Clan he obviously grows to detest him. Unfortunately he slept through the events of the last game so now that the Tojo/Omi are dissolved and Arakawa is dead he sets his sights on the Yakuza as a whole and engineers this whole nuclear waste plan to (i think) kill Yakuza in the most convoluted way possible. He randomly renames the Seiryu Clan to "Bleach Japan" despite there being no connection to the original Bleach Japan. The public wouldn't even have a good reaction to that name after the events of the last game, it's completely pointless and comes off as some pathetic callback to a better story like they're going "Remember Bleach Japan? Yokoyama remembers." As underwhelming as all that may be you'd think he'd at least be Kasuga's final boss but no, Kiryu fights him because he is still the CEO of Yakuza.

The pacing and structure of the plot is just a complete mess.
In Chapter 12 Kiryu goes out to the middle of nowhere to fight Daigo and the gang because he needs them for a "Second Great Dissolution" since the first one in the last game just wasn't enough and we need to do it for real this time!!!! The fight itself is really cool but it's all so random and disjointed, it's chapter 12 and they're giving you an update on the aftermath of 7 and how they also got fucked over by the Vtuber.
Kiryu's section as a whole barely has anything to do with the main story. His life links seem like they were written completely separately since in all of them Kiryu is still believed dead even if they're inaccessible until after the Vtuber expose. Like Haruka would know he is alive in chapter 12. Despite that they are by FAR the best aspect of the writing.

There is an overall lack on tension, it almost feels like none of the characters even give a shit about what's going on and granted most of them have no reason to care since they have nothing tying them to the story and are only there because Ichiban/Kiryu are such cool dudes. Like in chapter 13 Joongi-han just randomly shows up in Hawaii because he's bored and feels left out so you go hang out and buy some new clothes for him. This is chapter THIRTEEN out of FOURTEEN. In later chapters you get sections that can't be described as anything other than padding like Kasuga having to "Run From Bryce's men" which translates to running across the whole Hawaii map that is now filled to the brim with enemies or when Kiryu decides to just walk around Kamurocho a bit and do optional memoirs except they're not optional now and a part of the main story now despite being completely unrelated.

The Daidoji Faction deserves special mention as they have to be single worst thing about this franchise, a comedically incompetent and inconsistent shadow government. During the Hawaii section, Kiryu not only tells everyone he meets (including japanese citizens) that he's Kazuma Kiryu, legendary Yakuza that's supposed to dead but he also straight up tells them "yea I work for the deep state". Back in Japan he is then just allowed to run around freely in Kamurocho? I guess since he's dying it's chill that he could expose their entire operation, the deep state sure is nice. Well then in Date's life link after he sets up Kiryu to meet Haruka they torture and threaten to kill him to remind Kiryu that they're a serious organization that's NOT to be messed with... sure.
The best part is Hanawa, after Gaiden spent so much time setting the character up, here he just gets gunned down by a random unnamed grunt in the most unceremonious way possible. Ichiban then video calls Kiryu and shows him Hanawa's bloody corpse only for Kiryu to have 0 reaction whatsoever, completely stone faced, he does not give a shit. It is only after the scene is over that you get one of those "memoir" pop-ups with mellow cheerful music that was obviously shoehorned in last second where Kiryu goes "Hanawa you were a cool guy I'll finish this fight for you!" to make it seem like this character mattered and Gaiden wasn't a complete scam.
Hanawa 2.0 shows up in the Finale to tell Kiryu that despite his identity being completely exposed and breaching their contract, it's actually chill and they won't shoot up the orphanage because Kiryu is such a cool and handsome agent. They even offer to protect Akane and Lani who at this point are completely useless to the story. Love how they pull a complete 180 after every scene.
In the end Kiryu is allowed to "reclaim his name" so at least we can all pretend none of this ever happened.

The ending scene is just the cherry on top.
Ichiban finally confesses his love for Saeko properly, all is happy in the world until he ruins it 5 seconds later by revealing a cliché "I LOVE SAEKO" shirt and she runs off. After so much build-up, ruining a big character moment with a shitty punchline is just disgustingly insincere.
Kiryu does get his name back but we can't even have a scene with Haruka, nonononono just a little tease!! Buy Like a Dragon 9 to find out more!!
As a side note, so much focus lying on Kiryu really undermines Kasuga as the "next" protagonist.

tldr
Past Yakuza games had their own identity with largely self contained stories while Infinite Wealth is mainly just following up on stuff from the last game like the great dissolution and beyond that it's genuinely creatively bankrupt. It's a whole lot of nothing that's stretched INCREDIBLY thin over 14 chapters only for the ending to then somehow be insanely rushed. The 2nd half especially feels so strangely chaotic and incoherent yet there's no actual substance, seems like they had a list of random trending topics they wanted to mention (nuclear waste, vtubers etc) but they don't delve into any of it and there's nothing tying them together. The endings for Kiryu and Kasuga aren't only unsatisfying, they essentially make this journey + Gaiden completely inconsequential as we're left exactly where we started.
In a way it's a masterclass in bad writing and planning.

While not tied to the main story, drink links return and they're just plain boring and forgettable, especially for the returning characters since you learn nothing new about them. Saeko had the only entertaining one because it followed up on Kasuga's confession and she had a great dynamic with Kiryu. Beyond that, if you max out a bond, you get a sort of "secret drink link" where you again meet the character at Revolve/Survive and they basically tell you "Hey you're my best bud". These scenes are literally <5 long seconds with voice acting, they're bizarre.

For this being the first Yakuza/LaD game to leave Japan, I was disappointed with their approach to language/voice acting. After the opening sequence in Hawaii with Tomizawa and the police, Kasuga's inability to speak english becomes completely irrelevant as 99% of Hawaii just happens to speak fluent japanese. Was hoping for more of a fish out of water story. Most characters that speak both japanese and english have 2 voice actors which obviously don't sound alike but I'd say it's still better than the few that only have 1 voice actor like Bryce and Tomiwaza where the VA can barely speak english despite them playing an american.

Just like every past Yakuza/Like a Dragon game, Infinite Wealth has lighting issues. Most noticeable in Hawaii during day time where the lighting is so blown out it almost looks white while the shadows are strangely dark, it can make the characters look really fucked up as well. Of course there's also no gamma or contrast settings. It's always a shame when lighting "ruins" an otherwise beautiful and detailed game.

-Gameplay
The combat improvements are what salvage the experience. Really wasn't a fan of 7's janky and overly simplistic combat and they basically did everything I wanted by adding tons of mechanics and letting you move characters.
One thing that still bothers me is the AI movement and how it relates to proximity based skills. The AI loves nothing more than to spread out as far as possible, for enemies that makes your AOE attacks, especially the "path" ones, annoyingly useless at times and for party members who also spread out when you're not controlling them, it ruins a lot of healing/buff abilities, good luck hitting Hero's heal on more than 1 member outside of small arenas. Past a certain point you're better off just calling poundmates constantly because their cost becomes irrelevant and their AOE attacks actually just hit every enemy. Would like to see them redesigned as more of a rare last-ditch mechanic rather than something you use every fight to quickly clear grunts.

The job system on the other hand still needs a lot of work. Letting you pick which skills to inherit was a obviously good change but the jobs remain unbalanced, some jobs like samurai give you so many useful skills while a good third of them are just completely pointless (breaker lol). Same thing applies to how the damage types are spread out, for non-character specific jobs there's only 2 electricity skills with both of them being magic while there's like 15 fire/water skills. No male job has debuffs or team wide ailment healing either.

Just like with the game's predecessor, there's no difficulty options apart from New Game+ (which is paid DLC LMFAO!!!!) so the game ends up being way too easy (again). There aren't even any difficulty spikes this time, it's just complete babymode.

There's not one but TWO (THREE if you count dlc) auto generated dungeons because every RPG needs them I guess, not sure why since they are downright terrible 99% of time and Infinite Wealth is no exception, in fact it might be at the bottom of the barrel. Bland layouts as well as extremely basic mechanically it's just a boring slog but my favorite part have to be the doors! Doors doors doors, I love opening doors a million times that close after an encounter!! On PC there's a mod that just simply removes them and it makes the whole experience 100x better. Wonder why they were there in the first place? You also can't fast travel to the ladder after finding it early which is something Persona 3 incorporated like 20 years ago. In terms of aesthetics and music the first 2 are incredibly bland with only the DLC being at least somewhat distinct.
The other story dungeons are passable albeit calling them dungeons seems wrong when they're generally just basic hallways with not much of anything going on.

The side activities are too numerous to mention but the 2 big ones are Sujimon and Dondoko Island.
Sujimon is like a Pokemon Go rip-off. During the introduction you're told about all the crazy suji mechanics and suji places that are all over the map. There's a lot to it but the Sujimon battles themselves are just incredibly simplistic and boring. Sujimon only have 1 normal attack and 1 special attack and for the special attack you have to spin a fucking roulette wheel where if it lands on blue the attack just misses on most targets, feels like you're better off spamming normal attacks. Doesn't help that the sujimancer job sucks.
Dondoko Island isn't even really a side activity. It's a full fledged Animal Crossing + RollerCoaster Tycoon game that has no connection to anything else with the only reward from it being some pocket change. Beyond the forced hour long tutorial that's part of the main story, it's pretty enjoyable but due to its disconnected nature I almost forgot it even existed.

tldr
Ignoring some relatively minor complaints, it's impressive just how much the writing drags Infinite Wealth down. This could've been a 9/10 even with a passable script.

Yakuza 6 ends with Kiryu refusing the Daidoji's hush money instead promising them he'll disappear completely and "die" for them so that the orphanage can finally live in peace.
Cool, great ending.
This game starts with Kiryu being a Daidoji agent who is held prisoner by the faction with them actively threatening to murder the orphanage at every turn... How did we get here? None of this was mentioned at the end of 6. Why do the Daidoji have him walking around town when he is supposed to be dead? What does the supposedly super powerful shadow government even get from having Kiryu as an agent when he obviously doesn't wanna corporate?
The Daidoji faction suffers the same fate as many other Yakuza/LaD antagonists where they're presented as super intelligent and cunning but in reality are just dumb as shit.
The rest of the story is just Yakuza 7 dlc that tries to explain how Kiryu was able to show up in that game. At only 5 chapters long the game is quite short but the issue is that those 5 chapters are padded to hell and back with uninteresting, fetch quest level tier content.
The Akame network and to a lesser extent the Castle are complete inconsequential slop that is just there to stretch out ~2 hours of content to ~15. Even in universe Kiryu just helps out with the Akame network because he has nothing better to do while waiting for her to bring him to the Castle. You could remove both of them and Nishitani and the narrative would not be impacted.
The Watase family buys Kiryu's freedom -> They welcome Watase -> Shishido betrays you etc.
On that note, Shishido's betrayal as a whole feels so flat. His introduction is cool and instantly paints him as a big player in the story but for the rest of the game leading up to the betrayal he is just a minor character that even Kiryu doesn't care about. Him representing the old yakuza who don't want to/can't move on from the life also feels redundant because it's stuff 7 already touched upon which again further cements Gaiden's lack of identity or originality.
His fight is pretty sick tho.
At the end both him and Nishitani are taken in by the Daidoji to become agents (again not sure why they do this shit) probably never be to be seen again. At this point I'm hoping the Daidoji faction as a whole just magically disappears from the series.

It's never explained how Kiryu was able to show up in the later part of 7 wearing his iconic red-white suit and fight Kasuga at the Geomijul hideout. Not surprising because clearly none of this was planned and it makes 0 sense.

The combat is certainly better than Yakuza 6/Kiwami 2 but the Dragon Engine is still as janky as ever. It's hard to really put into words but everything from hitbox/hurtboxes to attack interactions just feels so insanely inconsistent. Every time I revisit the older titles I am instantly reminded how much more functional the combat used to feel.
The new Agent style's main gimmick are the 4 gadgets which were cool at first but you quickly realize just how useless they are.
Both drones and firefly don't synergize with Kiryu's gameplay whatsoever and straight up just suck. What even is the intended gameplay pattern with them? Am I meant to run in circles and spam drones for mosquito damage? How do I prevent the enemies from just walking outside the firefly blast range? They're fun ideas but poorly thought out.
I straight up forgot the rocketboots or whatever they're called even existed.
This only leaves the spider, which you'd think would really come in clutch with how much the enemies love to block but uh oh it doesn't work on bosses, elite enemies and bigger enemies (not sure what the exact rules are) and the spider's AOE capabilities are outshined by Extreme Heat Mode making all 4 gadget essentially useless.

While the ending scene is really well done and it alongside Kiryu's and Hanawa's bond are the highlights of the game, it in no shape or form justifies a 50$ price tag.
Gaiden's existence and Kiryu's inclusion in 7 just spit on Yakuza 6's ending and show RGG's inability to close out the "Kiryu saga" and move on.

After playing Infinite Wealth I can say that Gaiden is completely pointless and Yokoyama is incapable of planning anything.

The story is pretty good for the most part. It already has a leg up on a lot of the other Yakuza/LaD stories simply by not having massive pacing issues and/or nonsensical plot twists that'll melt your brain. Despite that I can't say I was too invested in it and most of that has to do with the new protagonist, Kasuga.
Throughout most of the game he moves the plot forward by constantly making the most nonsensical, high risk low/no reward decisions possible that happen to work out thanks to his incredibly thick plot armor and the power of the friendship. It gives the whole story this weird comedic unserious tone. He basically just waltz into every organized crime HQ in Ijincho and they all hear him out for no real reason despite him an his gang (pre Joongi/Zhao) being a bunch of unaffiliated nobodies. In past games Kiryu at least had the Tojo Clan affiliation and his status later on that made people respect him. Realistically they could just blast Kasuga's head off and not lose anything or suffer any consequences. The silliest instance of this is when he decides to break into Omi HQ for literally no reason other than to meet Arakawa a day earlier than scheduled. Even the other party members are bewildered as to how this peabrain can't follow simple instructions. But hey, Majima and Saejima are randomly there and Arakawa then fills the gang in on their big dissolution plan so I guess it all works out in the end!
Kasuga is just uncompelling to me, his personality reminds of a shitty shonen protagonist.
There's some other things that don't really add up.
Why did Mabuchi make Nonomiya's murder look like suicide? If Saeko wasn't on the phone with Nonomiya and then sought out Ichiban later his suicide wouldn't have gotten investigated further and thereby not achieved anything.
Why did nobody (especially the tech-savvy Geomijul) think to record Ogasawara's long-winded confession? The 2nd in command of Bleach Japan is admitting to everything and the recording would've then also disproven the narrative that he died in the fire. What makes this even stupider is that in the final confrontation against Ryo Aoki they DO use video recording to expose him.

Due to the larger cast, many of characters aren't fleshed out enough. This applies to some party members but especially Omi antagonists who (apart from Jo) have nothing going on.
Adachi and Nanba were pretty great but Saeko ended up disappointing to me. Her main motivation of avenging her boss comes off as weak when compared to other characters who hold more of a personal grudge. This is amplified by Mabuchi fading into irrelevance as the conspiracy unfolds and her then not really mentioning the boss anymore. She also doesn't get any scenes where she's the focus or even contributes anything major.
After Zhao and Joongi Han get recruited they basically become background characters as well with the latter only existing to serve as a fighter stand in for Seonhee because Kasuga can't fight her since she's woman!!! They even reuse a model from Yakuza 6.

After the "not so great" combat of Yakuza 6/Kiwami 2 I very much welcomed a change in direction but unfortunately the turn based combat is overly simplistic, beyond basic weakness exploitation there's nothing to it. It feels like a rough draft that needed some more stuff attached. There's also a fair bit of jankiness mostly relating to AI movement and inconsistent or lacklustre AOE ability hitboxes. It doesn't end up mattering all too much because the game is overall very very easy, I have no idea why they decided to make difficulty options a new game+ only thing but I'm not a fan of it.
There are 3 (more so 2.5) massive difficulty spikes in the form of boss fights, Majima & Saejima, Kiryu and lastly Tendo. The first 2 fights are great despite the insane spike but I can't say the same Tendo. He essentially serves as the final boss since the actual final boss is more so just cinematic. Not only does Tendo's character suck since they never gave him a proper backstory or anything beyond "boxer who wants to make it to the top" but his fight is a chore as well. He has a billion health and 2 phases, during the first phase he basically does nothing but once he's down to 50% hp (this takes forever even when exploiting his weakness) he enters phase 2 and starts spamming a guaranteed one shot move, cool. Fortunately Kasuga has an ability called "Peerless Resolve" which allows you to survive a KO and up until this point it's completely useless but here it's ESSENTIAL. There's really nothing else to the fight.

As a final note, all the underground dungeons are a slog and Subterranean Castle might just be single worst song in the series.

Much of Yakuza 6's development time was spent on the Dragon Engine so the game is a lot smaller in every aspect especially if you compare it to 5 it's like 1/10th the amount of content. On the plus side 6's story is nowhere near as bloated and convoluted as 5's was. For the first half it's pretty enjoyable, Kiryu running around trying to figure out who fucked his daughter and stumbling upon a massive conspiracy involving the Saio Triad, Jingweon Mafia and Yomei Alliance. It's pretty standard Yakuza stuff with a great cast of supporting characters. But in the 2nd half all of it just falls flat and the pacing becomes messy, Big Lo of the Saio Triad gives up on trying to kill his half japanese grandson and the whole Saio Triad just fades away. The Jingeon Mafia gets dealt with during the stupid boat section that feels completely out of place and end up being nothing more than mere henchmen, they just seem like a complete afterthought. After that you're basically told "alright go to the Millennium Tower and wrap this shit up" without any sort of of build up or tension. Once you're at the top the 3 main string pulling antagonists greet you via Skype video call, Iwami, Sugai and Koshimizu who are all just incredibly unremarkable downright Yakuza 4 tier antagonists. Koshimizu randomly betrays the other 2 without there ever being much of an explanation, I guess he was tired of being their lapdog or something. Then you have Sugai and, gun to my head, I could not remember 1 thing about him other than him being the acting Tojo chairman. Last but not least Iwami, who maybe had like 10 lines of dialogue throughout the game with him and Kiryu not even interacting once before the final confrontation. He's only targeting Kiryu because the evil Daidoji deep-state are mad he exposed their cool boat. The ending cutscene is definitely a highlight and would've been a good bittersweet conclusion to Kiryu's saga but that's not what this game turned out to be and every game that has come out after tries it's hardest to spit on this ending.
The main strength of the story are the supporting characters, the new group in Onomichi has a great dynamic which really isn't all too surprising considering this is the stuff the series has always excelled in. Now as for returning characters, you mainly just have Akiyama who for plot convenience has to be completely broke because as it turns out, having a guy with infinite money around is not a good idea! Other fan favorites are missing and in Majima's case I'm starting to think Yokoyama (or whoever) just downright hates him.
Yakuze 4 -> Gives Saejima a summary of what happened while he was in jail and is then just locked up for the rest of the game.
Yakuza 5 -> "Dead" for 99% of it and only shows up at the end to randomly fight Saejima.
Yakuza 6 -> In jail for 100% of it.

Now for the combat, the only positive thing I can say is that the Dragon Engine's physics are occasionally funny but aside from that it's an annoying clunky piece of shit. Words really can't describe how much worse the engine's combat feels. Beyond that you have the new progression system which isn't helping the overall experience either. The exp bar has been replaced by the gut gauge which forces you to constantly open up the menu to check if your stomach is empty in which case you then have to run (or walk thanks to the dogshit sprint) to the nearest restaurant to gobble up some food and get your silly little colored orbs. Fighting itself doesn't give you jack shit as it just empties your gauge faster. Said colored orbs are what you then use on your upgrade paths which is where the system REALLY gets good!! The stat increase skills were simply a bad idea, specifically attack power. Your base damage is so obscenely low and putting orbs into it early is bad because the game also offers upgrades like increase the overall amount of orbs you get and other QoL things which you'd obviously wanna prioritize. The maxed out attack should've been the base instead and the skill itself removed alongside all the skills in the "other skills" section. The game also LOVES throwing big crowds of enemies at you but they forgot to give you tools to deal with them. None of your moves have any sort of protection and the charge attacks specifically are just an invite to get stunlocked. With the physics and everything else, Kiryu's entire kit feels so pathetically weak and dysfunctional but hey, the environment tends to be filled with things you can pick up so I guess they don't expect you to use your abilities anyway.

First of all regarding this "remaster"...
Loads of minor visual glitches, shadows constantly flickering on characters, wobbly anti-alising, strange reflection on eyes that makes it look like characters are crying, animations bugging/snapping (probably related to framerate, I think 3 Remastered had the same issue but 4 somehow didn't) etc. A lot of the textures are also REALLY crusty.
Then there's a PC specific problem with pre-rendered cutscenes having severe artifacting issues.
Aside from that 5 has weirdly flat lighting, most noticeably during daytime which somehow looks worse than in any previous Yakuza game. Maybe something that could've been addressed in a remaster..
Anyway

-Story
Kiryu's part starts off slow with him trying not to get involved with any more Yakuza Drama and live out his days as a taxi driver. However, after a very trustworthy detective informs him that Daigo has been kidnapped Kiryu's father instinct kicks in and it really starts getting good. Watase's introduction is done so well, he pretty much makes Kiryu look like a clown without even lifting a finger, it's probably the closest we'll ever get to Kiryu losing a fight. Sure hope we see more of him over the course of this game! After a few more brawls, the final confrontation of part 1 happens, the 100 man battle which one may refer to as "kino" or "peak".

Saejima's imprisoned yet again. The cellmate dynamic is pretty good and you get a little bit of plot development but a large chunk of this section is just "talk to random NPCs to slowly progress the plot" which is pretty lame. After a little bit of torture and another prison escape, we get the twist of Baba being a double agent and the one that employed Kugihara which really doesn't make much sense because why did Kugihara then try to stop their prison escape? Better yet, why does Baba even threaten to shoot Saejima? Getting him to Tsukimino was his entire goal and he's supposedly integral to his Bosses plan. After all of that Baba asks "don't you wanna know who my boss is?" to which Saejima replies "I don't give a damn!" amazing writing.

Haruka's part is the least Yakuza a Yakuza game has been and while I'm not inherently against that, Haruka's idol life and Park trying to live vicariously through her was just uninteresting to me. Also seeing Haruka constantly do nothing while getting harassed by the shitty mean girls antagonists was annoying, just knock their fucking lights out!!! cmon you've lived with Kiryu long enough!! Aside from the Idol stuff, I did like Park's character but when I realized they're setting her up as a mother figure for Haruka I knew her days were numbered.
Akiyama's part is just there to explain how anything that happened in Haruka's part ties in with the rest of the plot and it does it surprisingly well considering you're mixing Idols with Yakuza drama. Unlike in the 4th game the twists are actually setup and well executed here!!

Shinada's part is even more disconnected from the rest of the story, feeling like a spin-off.
He does add a unique perspective to the series by being someone that just got randomly roped into the conflict and had his life ruined by Yakuza simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The dynamic between Shinada and his sadistic loan shark Takusagi is just great, easily a highlight of the game and I wish we could've seen more of it but the structure of the part definitely suffers from RGG having to cram a spin-off in the middle of the story like this. There's a lot of infodump, in-engine "cutscenes" with characters just standing around and they got a little boring to watch. The pacing towards the end also gets messy with the final confrontation being rushed and the Nagoya family being dealt with very unceremoniously.
While the part's significance to the overarching plot may be minimal, it delivers a pretty engaging, mostly self-contained story but it probably would've been better as a standalone game.

Finale Time!!
The totally not evil "detective" that shows up in all the parts turns out to be Kurosawa, the 7th Omi Chairman, who set up this whole bizarre convoluted scheme just to kill Watase, Katsuya, Kiryu and Saejima all in one place which is kind of ehhhhh stupid... Like the game acknowledges that he's just a twisted old man who's 1 foot in the grave and just wants to watch them die/kill each other because he hates them but after so much setup that doesn't really make it any less unrewarding.
Makes me ask why Kurosawa even joined an alliance with the Tojo in the first place.
Kurosawa being Baba's boss also makes Saejima's entire part completely fucking pointless. If it wasn't for Kurosawa meddling with The Ministry of Justice and Kugihara he would've been out on parole and then gone to Tokyo anyway (or Tsukimino first doesn't matter)??
At the end of chapter 4 Akiyama shows up and gives you an hour long info dump that's supposed to explain how all of this is connected, especially to Haruka's concert which is probably the most confusing part of the story. Who's trying to cancel it again? For what reason? Why is Kurosawa now targeting it? It's all just very convoluted and and in a way not worth remembering, TLDR is Kurosawa is threatening to kill Haruka so that the protags dance to his tune.
Well the concert goes on and so now it's final boss time to stop whatever Kurosawa is trying to do.
Saejima fights Majima, who has been missing for 99% of the game, because Kurosawa says so.
Shinada fights Baba to beat some sense into him. His whole crybaby assassin shtick comes off as even goofier than before. It feels like these scenes are presented as if Baba was a "deep" character but the game never even bothered to give him a backstory, explain his relationship with Kurosawa (if there even is one) or why he's doing any of this.
Akiyama fights a nameless grunt- I mean Kinai for the 5th time.
Which only leaves Kiryu and at this point I guess the writers realized he had nobody to fight since Kurosawa was dying anyway so in a sudden twist, it turns out, Aizawa of all people, was actually Kurosawa's son and Kurosawa has been doing all of this so that he could inherit the Omi Alliance and the Tojo Clan! Alright... Well the fight itself is at least good but everything else about it is just so... underwhelming.

In the Finale the game also wants to pretend that there is some sort of central theme here surrounding "Dreams" with characters mentioning the word dream every 5 seconds and Haruka's new idol band even being called "Dream Line", it's all very subtle. But the issue is that "Dreams" as a theme is way too vague to be interesting, all Yakuza games and most stories in general are about dreams, goals, ambition etc. there is just nothing of value being said here. YUME!!!

While the story may not be as egregiously stupid as 4, it does get incredibly messy with so many aspects of the story just not leading anywhere and a lot of characters not getting as much screen time as they deserved.
As much as I like their characters, Saejima and Akiyama especially have been mishandled so insanely hard in both 4 and 5.

-Side Stories
Kiryu's "Taxi Driver" is just amazing (even if the pedestrian AI is suicidal) and they could've stretched it out a bit with some more races, more customization options and maybe a 2nd track. The foundation is so good that it's kind of a waste.

Since Saejima just escaped prison and is now on the run from the police (again) his side-story job possibilities become more limited resulting in "Hunter and Killer" which, unlike the other 3, is completely disconnected from the main story. The "introductory" part of the side-story, which the game forces you to play to progress the main story, is too "hand-holdy" and sorta drags on. However once the game let's you hunt freely it does get pretty fun.
A slight gripe I had was that at first I thought inventory management was gonna play a big role with you having to balance rations, repair kits, game etc. but upon filling my inventory during a hunt I found out that the game just gives you the option to send things to the item box, at that point just give me an infinite inventory. The mode is just lacking in challenge.
Aside from the actual hunting you have the little delivery quests that spawn in the village in which, for whatever reason, you can't hand over items directly from your item box so you constantly have to walk back and forth to the hut to grab whatever animal piece you need. Tedious!

While I couldn't care less about Idols, Haruka's "The Road to Fame" is a pretty fun mini-game collection. If you do all 48 of the jobs some of them do get a little boring, the basic singing and dancing jobs feel like padding and I would've been fine with fewer handshake events.

Just like in the main story, Akiyama gets nothing.

Shinada's "The Cost of a Swing" is easily the least interesting out of the 4, it's just the basic baseball minigame with some small gimmicks and an unremarkable story attached to it. It's not bad but all the other ones clearly had a lot more love put into them.

-Gameplay
In previous Yakuza games enemies in city were spread out quite thin and you could pretty much completely avoid encounters if you wanted to.
Here they're quite literally everywhere and will come running at you at supersonic speed if they so much as hear you. You pretty much can't go 5 seconds without some dickhead screaming "CHOTTO MATTE" at you.
Kiryu gets a "beads of good fortune" (which turns them off) from a substory early on but the other characters just have to suffer.
Before the combat, there's the upgrade system that's worth mentioning. Soul Orbs return from 4 but instead of having a list of skills from which you can pick what to unlock, the skills were now split into 4 "paths" where you have to unlock skills linearly and you can't see the next skill in the path. No idea what the point of that was but it's just straight up worse.

Anyway, the combat is pretty good!
This is peak Kiryu. His gameplay is so smooth and he gets access to everything you could possibly want. Bounding throws also don't cost heat anymore so you can just chuck enemies all over the place in crowded fights, it's great. I didn't even use the new "Dragon Spirit" mode that much because base Kiryu already tears through the game.
Saejima already perfectly embraced the gorilla playstyle in 4 but here it's cranked up to 11. Grabbing enemies at their feat and spinning around like a helicopter, mowing down everything around you or straight up slamming into the ground, it's just pure dopamine. And then you have Herculean Spirit, the first time I read it I thought my eyes were deceiving me, no flinching in heat mode? With that comedy ability, the amount of HP you have and the damage you deal you can just completely turn your brain off. As the cherry on top, he even gets his own tiger drop, not that he needed it.
Kiryu and Saejima are so blatantly overpowered.
Akiyama is kind of whatever, he has the speed but his damage doesn't really compete and he's mostly the same as in 4. His new special technique, the "Launch Strike", just kind of sucks? In crowded it can be interrupted easily and bosses either don't get knocked up at all or seemingly "tech" out of it if you go for the combo. The best part about it is that the knock-up gives you easy heat actions follow ups.
Shinada is just weak and his moveset is disjointed. They want him to be the weapons guy when weapons in this series are clunky to use as well expensive as hell and his free, unbreakable weapons are complete dogshit. On top of that he then randomly gets a bunch of grappler abilities despite you not being able grab while wielding weapons and grabs generally not being that good either. Instead of the usual counter hit ability like tiger drop he gets a counter grab, which shockingly enough, the bosses will just break out of making it pretty useless. People will say stuff like "he's not supposed to be a fighter of course he's shit!!" as if that explains his incoherent abilities. The game also shows off he is able to keep up with Daigo in a fist-fight and it's also never explained why Akiyama's bum ass is randomly a taekwondo master.

Then there's the combat trainers, most of them are decent or unremarkable but there's definitely some stinkers.
The IF7 has been upgraded to the IF8 equipped with new 2D beat up stages! Shame is they're just not very good, not only is the mode incredibly simplistic but enemies can (and will) be knocked out of frame and you then have to wait for them to slowly walk back into frame making it a whole lot more tedious than it should be. Also the boss AI might be broken because the bosses don't really do anything. It comes off as a just proof of concept and I can't see anyone having fun playing this. The male protags do get "Flashback Battles" where you refight a certain story boss but for whatever reason they made it so each character can only do their specific battle and not all of them, like it was in 4, which is lame. Minamida really needs to go back to the drawing board because this is more of a downgrade than an upgrade.
Akiyama's trainer, Saigo, makes his triumphant return from 4 and his training is just as asinine as it was in that game making me wonder if they intentionally designed his missions to be annoying.
This also applies to the "breakthrough" trainers aka Sotaro and Sosuke Komaki. No idea how Akiyama and ESPECIALLY Shinada are meant to beat them without using some bullshit like guns. They just relentlessly clobber you and Sosuke can use his stupid "rage mode" like every 5 seconds.

Aside from exploration and combat there's the somewhat infrequent chase missions which were slightly changed from 4. Instead of the specific running gauge you now have HP bars and when you catch up to someone you can't actually, you know, catch them anymore but instead have to attack them and slowly whittle down their HP. It's clunky and it drags these sections out.

-Conclusion
The story very much took a back seat to cramming as much content as possible into the game. Thankfully that content is overall really good. The 5 cities are unique and fun to explore and the combat is probably the best in series.

Probably some of the worst writing I have witnessed in video games, maybe even fiction.

Everything in the plot revolves around the hit back in 85 until that gets resolved by the absolutely asinine rubber bullets twist (which they reuse later where it's just as stupid) and Katsuragi is shot in the head after which it becomes irrelevant.
Issue is, now the writers had 0 idea how to wrap up this nothingburger of a story so Akiyama literally goes "fuck it let's put 100 billion yen on the top of milenium tower and see who shows up."
The story is so insanely unremarkable there's genuinely nothing to else to say about it.
The antagonists are embarrassing, what did Kido or Arai even want? why is Daigo even here? and Munakata doesn't even deserve to be mentioned.
I was thinking of just skipping the final cutscene because I could not stand listening to this drivel anymore.

Probably the best part about the game are the movesets of the playable characters, they're diverse, they suit the respective character's personality and they're all just fun to play.
However this is the only nice thing I can say about the combat.
The enemy AI is so aggressive that you can basically never combo anyone in group fights because enemies will constantly interrupt you and while they do very little damage, it's immensely annoying getting stunlocked for like 15 seconds.
The grappler enemy type is especially dogshit because they love nothing more than chain grabbing you and forcing you to mash A/X to break it (which seemingly gets harder to break with each consecutive grab), I died 3 times during Saejima's prison section because I essentially got stunlocked by one of them while 3 other enemies were pummelling me to death.
I should sue RGG because this shit has given me permanent thumb damage.
The bosses aren't really all that noteworthy and the game is overall quite easy (albeit very annoying at times) but I do have to give a special shoutout to Saito for the absurd difficulty spike he provides at the start of Kiryu's part with his annoying moveset that has almost no openings whatsoever and you have to fight twice back to back alongside a bunch of his henchmen and then Munakata, the final boss, who is nothing more than a sacred tree armor check and even with that his henchmen are still a pain in the ass to deal with and the fight as a whole remains unremarkable, up there for one of the worst bosses in the series.
Some of the sections in this game leave me genuinely 110% convinced they don't playtest these games whatsoever.
Aside from combat, Saejima sneak sections where he has to hide from the cops are noteworthy because they make no sense, police are positioned in ways you should be trapped but turns out cops can only see what's 1 foot away from them, it's just a shitty stealth game.

Yea the protags are cool, some of the the substories are kinda fun and the rooftops and underground are nice additions but beyond that Yakuza 4 is as bad as a Yakuza game could be.

One of my bigger gripes with the first game was how a lot of the humour was pretty unfunny and occasionally really out of place and while that still applies here I'd say it's at least somewhat improved although it could just be because Date isn't the protag anymore (they still make sure to include some unfunny porno mag jokes).

Beyond that though, the writing took a massive nosedive.
First of all, the story here is held together by plot conveniences and superglue, for example, Tearer gets knocked out but uh oh, turns out his mask is rigged with explosives and therefore can not be taken off so i guess we have to psync with him. Thankfully the Prototype Psync Machine (very expensive and dangerous device) was left in the abandoned factory because apparently it would break if transported (?) AND it also randomly got upgraded at some point so now you don't have to remove Tearer's eyeball.
Man that sure is convenient!!
Tearer also has absolutely 0 presence as an antagonist (he's straight up dead for half the game) and all the nirvana stuff just amounts to 2 or 3 cool abstract videos that you watch in the first few hours of the game and nothing else. Feels like they were trying to go for something more "grand" than a standard murder mystery whodunit but it just kinda falls flat.
Beyond that the simulation theory is also moronic, if the world itself were nothing but a simulation, we would be a part of the simulation and therefore fundamentally incapable of escaping it (they compare it to video game glitches but even if you go out of bounds in a video game, you are still in the video game, you haven't somehow transcended).

The thing that irritated me most was Mizuki's past getting retconned with her now being a cloned super soldier of Bibi and only being the adopted daughter of Renju and Shoko. This makes absolutely 0 fucking sense considering the biological relationship between Mizuki and Shoko was an integral part of the first game with Shoko constantly telling Mizuki "I wish you were never born." and Renju saying that Shoko had an equally difficult relationship with her mother. Beyond that there's numerous instances that show that this was not planned in the 1st game like Shoko complaining about her crying as a baby, Mizuki explaining that her strength comes from her grandpa etc and i mean just look at their designs.
The game even acknowledges how nonsensical this is by playing a flashback of Shoko saying "I wish you were never born." to which Mizuki responds "I guess she meant adopted". lol
The fact that Bibi is Boss' adopted daughter makes it even dumber because she had no reason to hide it from the player and the game once again acknowledges this and jokes about it so I guess being a bad writer is OK as long as you're self aware.
Furthermore, the timeline twist feels random and somewhat pointless since it doesn't fit with any of the games themes and it once again requires loads of plot conveniences to work in the first place like shoma not aging, Mizuki and Bibi looking identitcal (despite the age gap) and wearing the exact same clothes etc.
It's pretty much just a twist for the sake of having a twist.

The dialogue and how information is revealed to you is still done well although some things are teased for too long like Amame's involvement or Masked Woman's identity etc. There's also noticeably more action scenes than in the 1st game but they still kinda suck, the animation really lacks weight, the framing is bad, they go on for too long and it does the whole "bad guys can't aim and just stand around waiting to get beat up" thing. To put it bluntly, they're boring to watch and the final stadium cutscene is especially bad.

Regarding gameplay, the new VR investigation mode is pretty fun and obviously fits a detective game well but the returning Somnia still aren't a joy to play through and characters tend to now talk way more during them and often over-explain stuff which can get annoying. They also still suffer from some of the same structural issues regarding split paths where, just like in the first game, 1 path is more of a "story" path while the other focuses more on character relationships. Unlike in the first game however, the relationship path pretty much completely disregards the story while it generally tries to go for some abstract nonsensical romcom (Gen and Amame's Route specifically is so bad it almost becomes funny).
In the end the relationship paths barely even matter because nothing that happens there affects the "main timeline" so it comes off as bad fanfic.

Overall super disappointed, genuinely made me wonder if Uchikoshi feels no shame when writing this shit.