after 7, it seemed like they were finally moving away from kiryu and having ichiban be the series' new main protagonist, so i was a little bit skeptical when they announced the next game would focus on both kiryu and ichiban. i was still pretty interested in seeing where they would take ichiban's character, and the hawaii setting sounded promising. having not payed much attention to the trailers and previews pre-release, most of this game's story and content came as a surprise to me and i'm happy to say i really enjoyed it for the most part.

gameplay-wise, it's quite a large step up from 7's combat. in a game where positioning is a big deal, being able to move your characters around manually allows for more strategy during battles. being able to see what direction you'll be knocking the enemies into, as well as proximity bonuses and back attacks which do more damage, gives you the opportunity to better optimize encounters and finish off groups more quickly. this also lets you change the path of aoe skills, including as many enemies as possible in the attack or hitting only ones with a specific weakness. this was one of the biggest improvements i wanted to see from 7, so i was excited that they went through with it.

jobs also work a bit differently compared to the previous game. before, only certain skills from each job could be inherited, and they would be attached to that character permanently once you unlocked them. it made it so that you would grind every job up to a certain level to unlock all of the inherited skills. now, you're able to choose which skills to inherit out of the entire job's move list. of course you still have to level up those jobs to unlock more skills, but being able to choose adds an element of character building that wasn't present before. it's balanced somewhat, you can only inherit five skills total, but being able to customize each character's move set to this degree brings a lot of depth to the job system.

admittedly, i'm not a completionist, i did as much side content as i felt like before i got tired and i still ended up spending a lot of time with this game. most of my time was spent grinding characters and bond levels so that i could fill out everyone's move set. not that it's necessary to grind that much, the main story wasn't super challenging, i just wanted to unlock more skills as soon as possible. the dungeon is marginally improved from the previous game. there are more floors and some floors have trapped civilians, giving you a bit more of an incentive to explore more before moving on. completing a floor also gives you points that you can exchange for weapons, collectables, or crafting materials. the level design of the dungeon is still not too interesting, but at least it doesn't feel as monotonous to grind in there.

while on the subject of side content, the new minigames are... okay i guess. sujimon battles are an amusing idea, recruiting random enemies you find and building a team to fight with is pretty fun. i didn't find the battles themselves to be super engaging but maybe that's just me. and honestly i kind of ignored donodoko island entirely lol, maybe i'll go back eventually to finish that but the little i played of it was not very interesting.

i mentioned earlier that i was skeptical of kiryu coming back as a main character, but his side of the story turned out to be the highlight for me. this main story in general is what i'm mixed on the most. it has a lot of great ideas that just don't come together super well, and the antagonists are pretty uninteresting. kiryu has his own set of substories separate from ichiban, where he reminisces on events from past games, and we see what some of the old characters are up to now. these smaller moments are where i found myself enjoying the writing the most, and i ended up pretty happy with kiryu's role in this game's story. perhaps this very well could be his last game? maybe? i dunno, i'll wait till Like a Dragon 9 comes out to see for sure.

i enjoyed this game actually a lot more than i expected to. it was pretty easy just to sink time into exploring the new location and experimenting with the combat and new jobs. the new party members are all pretty likeable and have satisfying arcs by the end. and despite my issues with the story i can't say i was disappointed with how it all turned out. this is definitely up there with some of the better games in the series overall.

"this happened to my buddy eric"/10