wasn't exactly happy with my review of judgment so im redoing it. got a lot to say about this one

this is a really strange game to me, before playing it and i heard about was praise for the game, how great the story is and how much of a good game it is, some even said its better than the mainline games, naturally when i heard that i was pretty intrigued, playing as a detective trying to solve a big mystery while having the beat em up gameplay that rgg is known for sounds great!

after finishing all mainline games at the time, i finally started playing judgment to see what all the hype has been about. after dropping the game twice i finally finished and it... sure was something.

i think the story starts out really strong with the mystery and does a really good job showing you the new cast of characters and setting up the mystery that gets you interested all through the game. to me the problem is after the beginning chapters, the pacing is all over the place honestly, i'll get more into later it but there was times where i was just not interested by whats going on or felt like things were dragging and there was times where i was really interested to see what was going on in the story but i had to stop because the game forces sub stories into the story that just drags it on and makes me lose all interest i had, it happens so much with this game that it actually started bothering me so i dropped it, eventually i came back to it again this time on my xbox since i had switched platforms and i wasn't using my ps anymore and then another aspect of the game was really bothering me(that i'll get into later) was the detective parts of the game, mainly the trailing missions, these parts of the game are honestly the worst, they arent fun to do and makes the game a slop to get through since they are really slow and they EVEN appear on side cases too.. WHY. that and "mortal wounds" were so annoying to me i dropped the game a 2nd time there because at that point i couldn't be bothered, the third time i actually sat down and finished the game in a week or so, and while i do think the game gets better and way more interesting at the 2nd half of the game. the final 3 chapters are seriously some of the best parts of the game, that and the final boss are really good, it's just a shame because i think the game could have been so much better but for a good chunck of the game i just either couldn't care about what was happening or when i did care they would just force you to do a sub story, and dont get me wrong i love doing side content in RGG games, its just that when i want to see where the story is going i don't like to waste my time trying to do some fetch quest or trailing mission for some random guy so can then tell me important info so i can move on. yagami i also found to be a pretty boring protagonist, he's not bad by any means, i just found him bland and boring, which is weird to me because i really liked the rest of his crew, kaito is an amazing character, higashi and Sugiura are really good too so its really weird to me that yagami himself is really not that interesting but the rest of the cast are.

gameplay wise im pretty mixed on it, judgment at the time when released had the best dragon engine combat, it really feels like they figured out how to use the engine to their advantage unlike k2 or y6 where it felt like they were still trying to figure stuff out, yagami has 2 styles that he can use and the game actually has some sick ass new heat action. both styles have a pretty good battle theme too, thumbs up for that, it's just a shame because out of the 2 styles, i barely found myself using crance style at all, in fact i checked the upgrades menu and i noticed that crane barely has any upgrades at all, tiger style got all the cool shit which made me not even use crane for like 95% of my playthrough, they also made a really weird mechanics called "mortal wounds" which i just don't get why it gets, so the way it works is certain enemies can do attacks that if you get hit, ur health meter permanently decreases and the ONLY way to fix that is to use a medkit which are very expensive to buy, you could also go to a doctor thats only 1 in location across in the sewers... so basically half way across the map. WHY. this mechanic is so fucking dumb i don't get why it exists, this means that when doing story if you get mortal wounded you basically have to hope you have a medkit or otherwise your health bar will just be smaller for no fucking reason, its so fucking dumb.
another part of the gameplay i wasn't big on is the detective side of stuff, none of them i found fun to play, these detective stuff range from lock picking, investigating areas, trailing mission (ugh) and showing evidence to people, lock picking is fine ig, investigating areas itself just comes down to looking at the right areas, press R2 and yagami going "woahhhh a clue!" and repeat, trailing mission suck as i have mentioned before and showing evidence to characters is okay i guess, you can get some funny lines if you mess up but its really not anything noteworthy. the detective stuff just feel like a gimmick more than something that was made in mind for the game "aw shit we haven't had the player lock pick a door in 5 hours lets make them do that"

activities and mini games are fun, there is like some weird VR mario party type game, and drone racing which is really fun, you also have side cases which are the sub stories of this game and they are... fine. i would say they sub stories are the weakest here, not many of them were funny or interesting, infact a lot of them were really weird, there is like a 5 chain sub story that involves dudes stealing panties away from women which is just ugh... yeah no, and there were also like 4 sub stories of some dude fake hair flying and you having to catch which is eh, surprisingly this game also has no karaoke which is so weird considering its a serious staple at this point, even ishin had karaoke man like cmon.

honestly when i finished this game i was just confused, i don't get the hype around this game at all, it's fine. just fine. story itself is decent but im not a fan of it, combat is fun but has way too many issues that bother me, the detective stuff ranges to ok to really annoying, i found yagami to be really boring and bland as a protag and forcing the player to do sub stories just go through the game is really annoying.

i don't hate this game by any means, in fact i would rather play this than any other ubisoft or other triple A open world game but as far as the yakuza series goes, this isn't one i am planning to revisit, at least not anytime soon.