Judgment

this game fire

I just spent 179 hours 100% this game and I don't regret every second of it. BEST DETECTIVE GAME EVER!!!!!!

лучше якудзы

If you enjoy the Yakuza games you'll enjoy this I think. Slightly toned down in silliness. Also works great on Linux. Just ensure if you have more than one controller that only one is plugged in at a time, otherwise you might wind up with weird drifting/spinning controls.

ugh tak, you're back, it's good to see you 10/10

A spin-off of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, Judgment doesn’t bring many new or innovative ideas to the series but what it does do is give another refined gaming experience with one of the best stories told in the franchise, a return to truly satisfying brawler gameplay within the Dragon Engine, and possibly the most realized version of Kamurocho yet. Pros: - Excellent Story (albeit with pacing issues) - Gameplay - Side Content (I.e. Side Cases, Friendship Events, Dating, etc.) - Minigames - Bosses + QTE’s - Cutscene Direction - OST Mixed: - Detective Gimmicks (Okay at best, tedious at worst) - Some Aged Writing (I.e. writing when it comes to women + dating 2 women half of Yagami’s age) - 100% Completion (Not one of the worst in the series but it does get tedious) Cons: - One locale - Traversal stutter For positives, the game has a story that, while slow at first and has forced side quests that slow it down, has a very satisfying payoff and tells one of the best stories in the Yakuza/LaD series. While the series typically has good finales when it comes to gameplay, the finales can sometimes be messy or make very little sense but Judgment has a great one. The side stories and friendship quests are great as there’s enough variety and funny scenarios that keep them entertaining throughout, even if there may be a lot of them. The same can be said for the minigames, as most of the rough edges have been sanded off from previous games and most are fairly fun. Graphics look fairly good too and while some NPC’s and environmental signs can look low resolution, I’m a fan of how the game performs and looks with its filtering, character rendering, and lighting, particularly at night. Lastly, being essentially a sequel to Yakuza Kiwami 2 as the next brawler-type game in the series, Judgment ditches the weapon system of Kiwami 2 and goes back to the combat style system that Yakuza 0 introduced and it does it fairly well. Both combat styles feel great, useful in different scenarios, and feel mostly tight to use. While I do think Yakuza Kiwami 2 fixed most of the issues that Yakuza 6 brought to the table with the revamped combat system, it didn’t fix all of them, namely how sluggish you feel early game and the overly goofy ragdoll animations. Judgment reduces the ragdolling, gives good dodge distance + i-frames at the start so combat actually feels good early game. In standard Yakuza fashion, the combat gets more satisfying as you progress and you get many new moves to open up different ways to play. As for negatives, one thing in particular in Judgment that I didn’t like is that the main protagonist can date women who are almost half of the main character’s age. That, along with some writing choices involving women in the main story, felt off. Admittedly, RGG doesn’t normally write women that well but the studio does have a forward-thinking outlook in other areas. So, in this game in particular, I felt the devs could’ve handled some of those topics better, most notably forcing a woman to do something uncomfortable to get a laugh out of a male character or doing stereotypical ‘woman’ things. Moving on, the mandatory side cases embedded inside of the main story hurt the pacing. I mean it’s nice that it gives background for some of the major and minor characters but make it optional after receiving it, not mandatory since most of the time, it has no bearing on the main story. Also, I could never fully diagnose the issue but without changing any settings, sometimes I’d have no stutters when running around the city but other times, on the exact same chapter and time of day, I’d get frequent stutters every 10-20 seconds. I could not find any solution online as turning on/off FSR/DLSS didn’t solve it and nor did lowering frame rate/graphical settings. So, if you encounter that issue, just restart your pc or restart the game and it should fix itself. Next, 100%’ing the game is actually not that bad compared to the rest of the series until you get to Mahjong and Poker. If you didn’t already have a burning hatred for these minigames already, the devs want you to grind them both an insane amount which is terrible. At least the rest of the KamuroGo activities are reasonable. Lastly, having one city is nice in some instances since it centralizes everything you can do in the game but Kamurocho is Kamurocho; if you’ve played the other games in the series, you’ve seen it before and it would’ve been nice to have some place new. However, I do like how the city feels more alive than any other game in the series due to how a handful of systems in the game work in conjunction with each other, so there’s some consolation in that. Overall, I really liked Judgment with its higher emphasis on neater and more grounded story-telling compared to most Yakuza titles, the entirely new cast, likable antagonists, the amount of variety in the side content and minigames, and gameplay enhancements. It does feel lower-budget, overly familiar, and the detective additions don’t add much, but it’s a great title nonetheless. 8.5/10.