TL;DR: This is a fun game, with a fun premise, that shoots itself in the foot at every single chance it has. If you don't care for the story of the series and just want dumb fun, it's great. but if you do, this will make you scream. This would've made a very fun movie, or an OK spinoff with new characters, but choosing to use majima for this was a horrendous mistake.
This game manages to look worse than assassin's creed rouge but struggles on lower end and midrange hardware, the ocean water is undetailed and bland, the islands while at sea look like reused yakuza 5 assets, the graphics on land have nearly no improvement from YLAD, if they don't look worse. i could run the game at high settings 60 FPS, which would be acceptable if the game looked better than kiwami 2. but it doesn't, it might be technically interesting, but it's styleless. It's like RGG took a look at what made judgement look great and fired all of the designers who worked on it.
The story is painfully short (Five chapters, as opposed to 12 or more in every mainline game), it regularly makes jokes out of characters who were taken very seriously in previous games (mostly saejima), and it entirely hinges on the premise that it's a good idea to realize a child's dream of seeing the world by taking them directly to "death island where you get killed and die"™. I understand the pivot to less grounded stories and ones that rely less on an understanding of japan, I understand that the lack of Yakuza in the real world makes it difficult to write stories about them.
But this series cut it's teeth on somewhat grounded stories about the clashing dreams and convictions of people who are on the edges of society, with wacky side content that gave it whimsy and character. This isn't that, this is Wacky nonsense all the way through. Ain't nothin' to chew on. there's a couple tearjerker cutscenes, but the payoff is relatively minimal.
Honest to gods truth, this series shaped a lot of who i am. It's embarrasing, but it seriously made me understand what i care about in this world and how i want to approach that. I care a LOT about this series and this game is a breaking point for me. It's been stripped down until there was nothing but what appeals to the biggest audience. It hurts to watch the fighters you loved, flawed as they were, become jesters. The characters who taught me to cling to my convictions, To live even in the face of despair, to show mercy to your rivals but still fight like a lion. The only characters who i could relate to enough for those to stick, reduced to funnymen who get their shoes peed on and summon giant monkeys with guitars... it's goofy as ♥♥♥♥, i know. but it means a lot to me.
the combat is extremely simplistic and easy, I will concede that the final boss is a great fight, but everything outside of that is a joke. Majima has far less upgrades than any character since ishin!. there are also no weapon upgrade mechanics. you deal truckloads of damage, opponent AI is very simplistic, and most fights can be won with a few hits of X-X-X+Y-Y-Y. Difficulty only changes by making opponents hit harder. Ship combat is similarly stripped down. You cant aim your guns, you can't brace the ship, you can't use mortars (but enemies sure as hell can!), and your steering and dodging is highly dependent on a boost mechanic with very little in the way of variance or upgrades. you sail in a circle until you can get to the back of a ship, disable it's rudder, then pelt it with cannon fire until it sinks. That sound ok to you? Wrong. There are gratuitous amounts of ship street battles and required arena content. You WILL get bored of it. Quick. The brawler combat is fun, but it's fun in the same way blowing up a bunch of nukes in gary's mod is. Big number ouch flashy heat action make brain go good. if you do any amount of the devil flags substory, you will be far too strong to need to strategize.
They massacred my boy. They made him into a dressup game with a kid's story attached.
Marasu's love journey is AWESOME though, biggest laugh i got in a while.
