Putting this game down, and I think it’s largely because I burnt myself out. It’s a shame because I really enjoyed Yakuza 0 - enough to play through it twice. I made a couple mistakes with this entry, one of those being that I jumped into it directly after Yakuza 0. The games are so similar in nearly every way that it didn’t feel like a fresh new step, and in fact, it can easily be argued that many of the differences between this game and Yakuza 0 are a step down.

The other mistake I made is that I was intensely following a guide to do every substory because it is a staple of the franchise. But the substories here just aren’t that interesting and largely fall into the same type where Kiryu gets scammed, a fight occurs, rinse and repeat. These can be entertaining if experiencing them naturally during your playthrough, but I focused strongly on this and it was to my own detriment.

This all led to me feeling bored by this game, and it has been sitting on my “playing,” status in some level of limbo for close to two years. I’ve noticed that I hardly felt a drive to boot it up, and when I just recently did, I realized I would have had to redo approximately two hours of gameplay. Maybe I didn’t save, maybe my power went out, maybe my console updated in rest mode, I honestly can’t say. But I’ve had this hanging over my head as something I started but never finished, and I think I’m going to close this off by just dropping it.

I do want to continue the Yakuza series, so I’m going to watch the rest of this story on YouTube. I will come back to this series in the future, but I need to take some time away from it and move on from this specific entry. As someone who generally has trouble putting down games before finishing them, this is a big step for me and I feel better for it.