god i wish i could write something more formative about this, but like,, just.. everything is so perfect :(

i've never felt more appreciated by a developer for being a fan of a series than i was when playing this game, fanservice can be hit or miss a lot of times and i know a lot of people hate it when devs seemingly try to make you point at your screen by making a reference and a lot of the time i do as well, but holy shit it was just so perfect here. everything from small references to older games, to fight callbacks, to long dead locations being used again, to seemingly forgotten side characters showing up after so many games, and of course to huge plot lines finally(!!!) being covered after years of nothing, just, aaaaaaa it was so satisfying

since i dont think i have the right words for all i want to say about this, i think the most important thing over anything i could possibly say is how well they treat kiryu, a character who’s so incredibly important to so so so many people, a character a lot of people look up to & a character who often puts on a guise despite dealing with so fucking much, i can only speak for myself but the moments where kiryu breaks that guise and shows his tender side are always my favorites, and now i have this, which is 10-20 hours of kiryu showing that side of himself, but even though the whole game had that softer version of kiryu that i love & adore at the front of it, the last 20 minutes or so was the peak of that & was the most satisfying and heart wrenching moment i’ve ever experienced in media. sitting at my monitor at 4am crying into my shirt using all the strength that i have to not start wailing, failing that, & crying until my eyes were dry is something i don't think i'll experience again for a really long time, and is something i don’t think ill ever forget, even writing this days after finishing the game, i still tear up when i think of the finale, and that's something really rare & special to me

i can't express how happy i am through just a review that this series is still in such good hands, made by people who still very much care about these characters and this story that means so much to so many people. thank you rgg

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

i finished this like a week ago cause after beating the main story i rly wanted to let this sit with me. after doing most of the school stories now, most of the side cases, & doing my legend playthrough i feel comfortable saying this is my new favorite game & definitely the best rgg game

this game improved on literally everything from the original judgment that i had problems with. the combat in this is flawless, every style is good and fun to use. mortal wounds is completely gone and replaced with deadly attacks/mortal reversals which are super satsifying to pull off even if the timing is forgiving & the keihin are used way better in this one

i dont know if i'd say the story is better or worse than the first game, they're about even for me but i felt way more connected to this one and i think its due to it being on a smaller scale than the first. the final chapter was so insane & the final boss has become my new favorite boss fight ever which is saying something cause i've never been super attached to the boss fights in these games, everything worked so well together, the fight itself, the music, the buildup, the cinematics, the emotions, just all so good

i do think the characters from the original got slightly overshadowed by the new characters like kuwana, soma, akutsu & tesso which sucks but its a sacrifice im ok with cause the new characters made this game. i also feel like this game didn't really add much to yagami as a character but i almost think thats fine? ik hes the main character and these are technically his games but i feel like i got to know him well enough in the first game to care about him & i dont feel like this games plot required him to have a ton of character development like the first game did. kuwana absolutely makes that all worth it though, he is this game, hes one of the best characters they've ever made & i wish we got more of him in the earlier chapters but i completely get why we didn't. also all the side characters you meet in the school stories are just like really fun, especially amasawa who i hope they do more with if theres ever future games

i just love this game so much, im so bad at writing down my thoughts on & talking about things im passionate about without sounding insane but its just the best time ive had playing a game in so long. it's emotional, its fun, its genuinely interesting and has some of the best characters i've ever seen. it's everything i love about rgg games and more & i'm so happy i got to play it

this has actually taken over my life since it dropped on pc and i've enjoyed every second of it, even the messy parts

this def felt like a yakuza game but it was just different enough to stand out as its own thing, i did love the little nods to the main series though. i thought the combat system was really fun even if i didn't utilize most of it due to crane being kinda bad and wall attacks being hard to pull off in most cases. the big thing that kept me interested outside of the main case was the characters. other than yagami & the mole (who is one of the best rgg villains btw), kaito, sugiura, higashi, hoshino & saori are some of my new favorites & i'm really excited to see how they're all explored in lost judgment and hopefully the third game if we ever see that

i think my only major complaint was how annoying the keihin gang system was, i dont feel like it added anything at all & i dont think any of the leader fights were that fun either

my first mainline smt so i might be biased but i had so much fun w this, the gameplay felt great & was definitely the highlight for me, might even be my favorite turn based combat system out of the ones i've tried so far

a few of the bosses were kinda boring & i didnt like any of the dungeons which is what holds this back from being perfect to me. also heard a lot of complaints about the story & characters not being fleshed out enough which i completely get, but those things weren't nearly as important to me as the music, gameplay, and atmosphere which were all great so i can overlook it