a few quick thoughts

- pacing a little poor in the front half of the game, side content is awkwardly crammed into the campaign as if to justify the price tag, if you took out all the non-story stuff the story probably sits at about seven to eight hours but as it stands it's probably like closer to twelve or so. that being said it picks up heavily after the halfway mark, enjoyed seeing 7 from an entirely different perspective... feels very culminative for kiryu as a character - i'm not immune to fanservice!

- was surprised to see hidenori shoji absent from the credits (unless i'm blind), but sega's entire sound team is of incredible talent and the music stands tall, chihiro aoki as music director is a treat

- combat feels closer to 6 than the judgment games which is a little disappointing, seems like they wanted to stick to the street fighting roots of the series and we're back to the weighty attacks and facetanking of the early DE games. it's a big step above those thankfully but still outdone by a few of its predecessors. additionally, despite there being two styles most combat encounters feel like they were designed explicitly for agent... regularly occurring waves of at least a dozen enemies at once call for gadget abuse, meanwhile yakuza has little to no crowd control options in comparison

- definitely the best iteration of the colosseum so far. while their movesets are largely afterthoughts, it's super cool that you can play as pretty much anyone you can recruit, and i enjoyed putting them to use in the hell team battles... i could do without the grinding though - practically necessary to burn through some of those hell team healthbars

- i appreciate this being a comparably concise package, you can experience pretty much everything it has to offer in fifteen hours or so, maybe one of the yakuza games i'll be itching more to revisit. substories can be hit and miss, a handful of great ones but also a good amount of them can feel like busywork. that being said, this is a constant in every yakuza game, and the scale of this one means there are proportionately less of those, so i think it's okay in this instance

- fucking bawled my eyes out at the ending man, seriously.... these games generally have very strong emotional cores but this takes the cake. death to all yakuza 3 skippers

this is a game made pretty explicitly for those who have experienced all of kiryu's story thus far - it's honestly harder for me to recommend it to those who have only played 7 even if this is mainly an interquel to 8, and i assume the events of this will be covered in that game regardless... that being said i really appreciate that they decided to go out of their way to make this. can't stress enough how insane of a package this is for six months of development time. i will be counting the days until infinite wealth.

this game is kind of a clusterfuck, and not in the fun, artsy way i'd hoped it'd be when they announced that Naoto Ohshima, the director of CD, probably better known for designing the character and his studio would be working on this game, but because almost every aspect of it feels so sloppily thrown together... deeply upsets me to see a classic sonic, no - a sonic game so ridiculously stricken of anything even resembling style and art direction, from the sight - a cacophony of extremely tired level themes, genuine google images results for searching "industrial" or "desert", trying its best to fit itself into the confines of a game that, fidelity wise, looks like it could have been sold on the ps3 store for $10, to the sound - an abhorrent mix of sfx ripped from different games, and a soundtrack that is so incohesive to the point where it feels like it was made by a dozen different people (because it was, lol.).

and the level design ... what do i even say? they did a passable job, but evidently, sonic team nor arzest don't have the chops for this, hard to dish out any genuine praise when these levels are so indistinguishable from each other, like they found a formula that they thought was "good enough" and applied it to every single zone ... the result is something that's mildly enjoyable, if not brought down severely by a plethora of awful, just awful boss fights and poorly integrated gimmicks that tend to vary severely in quality, but of course this leads to a pretty tasteless experience throughout. the only real attempt to push classic sonic forward here is with the emerald powers, which are sadly useless for the most part - only found use from the screen nuke and fireball, the rest were either too situational or obsoleted by the fireball... if there's one thing i can really hammer in, it's that, despite being the most advertised feature in this game, playing this game with four or probably even three players is truly miserable - to boot classic sonic gameplay is fundamentally not built for this , but the way they constantly switch from speed sections where everyone else puts the controller down to extremely slowed down gimmick / platforming setpieces so that everyone can reasonably exist in the same space had our heads throbbing by the end, doesn't help that you aren't given time to recover from being offscreen like say, a nsmb game, because that wouldn't be frustrating enough, no - instead you despawn virtually the instant you're offscreen, down to the millisecond i'm willing to bet.

did have a lot of fun tag teaming the special stages with my friends. couldn't tell you how disappointed we were that going super counted as an emerald power - meaning only one of us could use it at a time, and we'd lose it when we go offscreen, and that unlocking the true final boss required playing through the game again with a specific character with no co-op support. oh well

CASE NO. 13-2018
MINISTRY OF HEALTH V. TAKAYUKI YAGAMI

reading about RGG's history, it's evident there was a bit of a conscious tonal shift when the main Yakuza series was transitioning to the seventh generation — the development team wanted to move away from the more brazen kiryu portrayed in 2 and especially 1 in order to focus on a different side of the character, and thus began his arc from 3 - 6, his journey with the kids at morning glory, and the never ending struggle to crawl out of the hellhole he thrust himself into so many years ago, lest those he love suffer for it.

i bring this up because, as RGG's approach towards Kiryu's character changed, so did the series itself, going from very classic yakuza-flick inspired games to these more earnest, almost melodramatic titles, and as a result, Yakuza 3 in many aspects ended up being the bedrock for the next ten years of the franchise. I like both styles, but while I'm not here to argue about which one is better, a quick glance at the top spot of my series ranking (note when i made this review it was Yakuza 2, it is now Lost Judgment) should give you a good idea of my personal preference. regardless, playing through the post-2 games I'd always wonder how the series would have progressed if they had stuck with the tone and design goals of the ps2 games. this sentiment was amplified during my playthrough of 7 - probably the game that buckles down the most on the goofier reputation this series has garnered, especially across various social media circles. i don't take issue with it, but it's hard to deny a small part of me longed to see the more grounded experience of the older output ... in a twist of irony, my decision to not play these games in release order led me to gloss over the fact that, in those moments, my wish had already come true...

judgment is a look into that exact reality - an evidently tight budget does little to tarnish the most well executed story in this franchise yet; a delightfully gritty mystery that displays how over-ambition and guilt leads even the most well meaning of people astray, and their varying efforts to claw back to the path they were to walk, yagami and the crew's relentless search for the truth against those who will stop at nothing to conceal it leads to some of the highest points in this series for plot, characterization, conflict, theming and structure — rarely do they ever miss a beat on any of these fronts - even the crowbarring of side content into the main story, especially prevalent here and something I'd usually lambaste if it were any other game I find difficult to get mad at because of how on top of their game the writers were... out of the eleven RGG games I've played, this is only just the second one where i had bothered to do all the side content, because of how much of a joy i found it to simply exist within this world.

to continue on, in general this is probably my favourite iteration of kamurocho, yagami remarks about the city's seediness at the beginning of the game, saying something among the lines of "the brighter the lights, the darker the shadows", and you can physically feel this when walking around at night, the grading of the environments and the toned down glitz from 6 leads to something that looks like it was plucked from a neo-noir movie, small pockets of sensory overload do little to drown out the air of darkness that envelops the city, extremely apt given the lurking threat we spend so long investigating. despite that, the place still buzzes with life thanks to a much more expansive version of 0's friendship system and the side cases - the voice of kamurocho is really felt here, once again like the original games you really have to ruthlessly engage with the city to progress and upgrade, and yagami's position gives you a real chance to look into the lives of these people compared to the other protagonists, which i deeply enjoyed.

being a detective also leads to some real shake-ups when it comes to scenario design, while it can be hit or miss (mostly miss in regards to things like tailing and chases), the gradual deviation from the standard waypoint to waypoint progression of yakuza games is something that was sorely needed, and the overall vulnerability of yagami as a character compared to someone like kiryu leads to setpieces far more interesting than those in the main series... imagine my surprise when a protagonist in this series' first instinct when it came to infiltrating a building wasn't busting in through the front door!

my main complaints really largely lie with the combat, obviously an important thing to get right being a beat-em up - to give credit where credit's due, this game is responsible for some of the most innovative stuff to grace the series's combat since Y2, and as a result there is some real fun to be had in the moment to moment stuff, but the designers continue to stumble through their first attempts with dragon engine - the crane style is all but useless in ninety percent of combat encounters, it's borderline comical how utterly devoid of upgrades it is compared to tiger and genuinely makes me wonder if it was a late addition or something, and while we're on the topic of upgrades, this is probably the most atrocious game in the series when it comes to exp distribution... doing a few of the trite "interact with this character, walk to this location" story objectives can net you hundreds of skill points, something as simple as restaurant completion will earn thousands, yet genuinely taxing things like bosses and side cases dish out crumbs. there are the street fights, but the abysmally high encounter rate puts me off after a while, and while that makes them easy to grind, i find that to be a really shitty way to have to stay up to par in a game like this when it could have been done a million other ways - the reward for beating amon ( prerequisite of clearing every friendship and every side case , being far and beyond the most difficult fight in the game) in this game is three hundred sp ! talking to a character for a story objective is worth two thirds of that... even the keihin gang encounters (which are probably the most infuriating reoccurring combat events in the series) barely reward you with anything for going out of your way to engage with, and as a result it ends up being unnecessarily difficult to get yagami upgraded sometimes, a severe issue, as he can feel hopelessly sluggish without the adequate skills.

many of these things are relatively simple fixes i'd say, but alas this is the final product and unfortunately this is what has to hold the game back being such a crucial element. it's easy to see why judgment's shortcomings in gameplay can really hamper a person's experience of the game, and it certainly did mine in some regards, but as someone who usually never comes to this series for the punching, rarely does it stain what is in my eyes the apex of virtually everything RGG otherwise. a fascinating look into the mind, or more accurately, the eyes of toshihiro nagoshi. very much looking forward to playing lost judgment.