Not quite as good storywise as Judgement but the combat in this is insane.
Moment to moment experience is much MUCH better compared to Y0 and first judgement. You get to skip all pointless busywork from early on once you get a crazy fast skateboard, if it's not enough you can also use the taxi from anywhere finally (why did the other games not let you call a taxi lmao). Letting me skip tedious running around the map and the excellent combat pushed me into completing the most side content in these games so far. I ended up doing 40/54 side cases and completed all school stories.
Speaking of school stories, They're pretty much exactly what I wanted from the side stories in Y0 and judgement. They're much more expansive and significant than any given side story in Y0 and judgement, and they're tied together into a single overarching plot. It's a full fledged story that exists next to the standard main story of the game. Gameplay wise they're a mixed bag. About half the clubs are pretty fun I'd say, boxing club being the standout. But you also have stuff like the girls' bar and robotics club which are an exercise in tedium.
When I say the combat is on the level of pure action games I'm not kidding. Lost judgement keeps the cool stuff they introduced in the first game like wall jump and leapfrog, but crane style and tiger style have been massively overhauled. Tiger style is now no longer a one size fits all solution, crane and tiger now complement each other. On top of that you can now instantly style switch(which cancels certain animations) and receive 2 new styles. All styles have insane amounts of moves to them, they all fill different roles and you're encouraged to switch between them frequently. This results in amazing potential for creativity, just watch some combo mads on YouTube for reference.
Unfortunately, while bosses are generally great, it feels like the regular enemies can't keep up with your options. They often simply die too fast, to the point that I recommend not leveling your damage until very far in the game. Even aside from the low health, the regular enemies could really benefit from more variety. They have similar movesets and all exhibit the same behavior. When you swarm the player with enemies, you often have to compromise to make the encounter more fair. The way they do it is by making all regular enemies stand around and do nothing most of the time, this is just too simplistic of a solution. In a way it's something they brought upon themselves, almost all enemies in lost judgement have some moves that are not reliably reactable and have indistinct audio cues, so you can't have them be agressive when they're in large quantities.
I hope in a future judgement game that they keep the excellent combat but work on the enemy design, give them more variable behavior, give every move a clear audio/animation telegraph and for the love of god get rid of the Agony and Blind status ailments, shit's gay af.
Moment to moment experience is much MUCH better compared to Y0 and first judgement. You get to skip all pointless busywork from early on once you get a crazy fast skateboard, if it's not enough you can also use the taxi from anywhere finally (why did the other games not let you call a taxi lmao). Letting me skip tedious running around the map and the excellent combat pushed me into completing the most side content in these games so far. I ended up doing 40/54 side cases and completed all school stories.
Speaking of school stories, They're pretty much exactly what I wanted from the side stories in Y0 and judgement. They're much more expansive and significant than any given side story in Y0 and judgement, and they're tied together into a single overarching plot. It's a full fledged story that exists next to the standard main story of the game. Gameplay wise they're a mixed bag. About half the clubs are pretty fun I'd say, boxing club being the standout. But you also have stuff like the girls' bar and robotics club which are an exercise in tedium.
When I say the combat is on the level of pure action games I'm not kidding. Lost judgement keeps the cool stuff they introduced in the first game like wall jump and leapfrog, but crane style and tiger style have been massively overhauled. Tiger style is now no longer a one size fits all solution, crane and tiger now complement each other. On top of that you can now instantly style switch(which cancels certain animations) and receive 2 new styles. All styles have insane amounts of moves to them, they all fill different roles and you're encouraged to switch between them frequently. This results in amazing potential for creativity, just watch some combo mads on YouTube for reference.
Unfortunately, while bosses are generally great, it feels like the regular enemies can't keep up with your options. They often simply die too fast, to the point that I recommend not leveling your damage until very far in the game. Even aside from the low health, the regular enemies could really benefit from more variety. They have similar movesets and all exhibit the same behavior. When you swarm the player with enemies, you often have to compromise to make the encounter more fair. The way they do it is by making all regular enemies stand around and do nothing most of the time, this is just too simplistic of a solution. In a way it's something they brought upon themselves, almost all enemies in lost judgement have some moves that are not reliably reactable and have indistinct audio cues, so you can't have them be agressive when they're in large quantities.
I hope in a future judgement game that they keep the excellent combat but work on the enemy design, give them more variable behavior, give every move a clear audio/animation telegraph and for the love of god get rid of the Agony and Blind status ailments, shit's gay af.