i love rgg games, i found them around this time last year and 2022 ended up being the hardest year of my life so they kept me company & kept me sane through all of it. when this was announced i was so happy that i was gonna be able to play another new game so soon, i had actually just gotten my import copy of the original in the mail the day of the anniversary presentation cause i thought people were insane for theorizing about ishin kiwami at the presentation, so when it showed up on the stream & it had a new engine, had yakuza 0/7 characters, and the fans who played the original were saying it was “easily the best rgg game” or “their favorite rgg game of all time” i was so insanely excited, i was so certain this would end up as one of my favorites, the hype kept me running for months until i finally got to play it
the story is a pretty simple revenge plot, but for those to be interesting i have to not see all the twists coming right away & i think the twists were especially bad due to character choices. im not going to spoil anything but there was quite a few characters who i knew were gonna be more important than they led on originally & cause some of them and their main series counterparts had extremely similar motivations, which i guess is kinda cool for a fanservice game like this but it ended up being a bad thing for me cause there was zero tension. the characters tend to be my favorite part of rgg games too but this one had like nobody i cared about at all, hijikata was cool & i love having more mine screentime but i feel like even he was pretty underdeveloped and i think that could’ve been fixed for him and the rest of the shinsengumi if this game had more content to get to know the characters instead of just sidecontent bloat
the combat is also really disappointing, i only have a few major things that bother me about it though. the game is very wild dancer centered, even late game when i had most of my trees unlocked. to be fair i didn’t do much of the class training either but i would be very surprised if that actually made a drastic enough difference. it felt like majima in yakuza 0, where all the styles are technically playable but in almost every single situation breaker was preferable. also the card system that you can supposedly just not interact with is a system the games bosses feel balanced around regardless of if you’re using it or not & speaking of bosses am i insane or was there only like 1 or 2 good fights in this game? yakuza bosses are very hit or miss and i rarely like all of them so i wasnt going in expecting a perfect group but only having a few that i like is very rare for me
i havent interacted with much of the side content in this game, but theres a lot of it as expected from the game that landed between yakuza 5 and yakuza 0, which are two of the longest games they’ve made. i really liked the minigames that i did play though! i think one of my favorite parts was them taking minigames that are very familiar to people who've played the rest of the games and turning them into something that actually fits into the era, favorite example being cannon coaching in place of baseball
i wanted to talk about the switch to unreal engine or at least the pc optimization for this game as well. i’m not knowledgeable enough about video game development to say whether or not the engine in this game is the reason for a lot of its technical problems, but i do know that the game runs worse than any other rgg game i’ve played thats been officially ported & i know that in at least 3 important cutscenes the screen would just cut randomly to black and white blinking for 5 seconds at a time or cut to a shot of a random wall instead of focusing on the characters, which sucks cause i already wasnt invested in these characters and then when they actually get character development the cutscene breaks and i cant see it or can only see it in chunks
this probably doesn't add much to the conversation but i’ve been thinking about it a lot since i finished playing and it will forever bother me how excited i was for this and how it turned out. i'm still holding hope for gaiden & rgg8 later this year and next, i'm just really sad that this didnt stick with me like it did for other people
edit: they've actually fixed a lot of the technical issues the game had when i reviewed it thankfully! it's reassuring knowing that they're looking out for problems :3
the story is a pretty simple revenge plot, but for those to be interesting i have to not see all the twists coming right away & i think the twists were especially bad due to character choices. im not going to spoil anything but there was quite a few characters who i knew were gonna be more important than they led on originally & cause some of them and their main series counterparts had extremely similar motivations, which i guess is kinda cool for a fanservice game like this but it ended up being a bad thing for me cause there was zero tension. the characters tend to be my favorite part of rgg games too but this one had like nobody i cared about at all, hijikata was cool & i love having more mine screentime but i feel like even he was pretty underdeveloped and i think that could’ve been fixed for him and the rest of the shinsengumi if this game had more content to get to know the characters instead of just sidecontent bloat
the combat is also really disappointing, i only have a few major things that bother me about it though. the game is very wild dancer centered, even late game when i had most of my trees unlocked. to be fair i didn’t do much of the class training either but i would be very surprised if that actually made a drastic enough difference. it felt like majima in yakuza 0, where all the styles are technically playable but in almost every single situation breaker was preferable. also the card system that you can supposedly just not interact with is a system the games bosses feel balanced around regardless of if you’re using it or not & speaking of bosses am i insane or was there only like 1 or 2 good fights in this game? yakuza bosses are very hit or miss and i rarely like all of them so i wasnt going in expecting a perfect group but only having a few that i like is very rare for me
i havent interacted with much of the side content in this game, but theres a lot of it as expected from the game that landed between yakuza 5 and yakuza 0, which are two of the longest games they’ve made. i really liked the minigames that i did play though! i think one of my favorite parts was them taking minigames that are very familiar to people who've played the rest of the games and turning them into something that actually fits into the era, favorite example being cannon coaching in place of baseball
this probably doesn't add much to the conversation but i’ve been thinking about it a lot since i finished playing and it will forever bother me how excited i was for this and how it turned out. i'm still holding hope for gaiden & rgg8 later this year and next, i'm just really sad that this didnt stick with me like it did for other people
edit: they've actually fixed a lot of the technical issues the game had when i reviewed it thankfully! it's reassuring knowing that they're looking out for problems :3