eithersummer 最近的评测

I don't really think this is worth the money. If you want it, get it on sale. The game is technically fine and it has interesting mechanics, but some of the gameplay decisions are weird and the actual content does not enthuse me enough to believe that you should spend sixty dollars on it.

TECHNICAL

As far as I recall the game ran fine and did not have any glitches.

VISUAL/AUDIO

The game has too much bloom.

I did not play this game with the English dub. The Japanese voicing contains some recurring stars aside from what is obvious from the cover art. There aren't any groundbreaking performances but it works.

COMBAT

For some reason, there is only one heat bar that is expended in its entirely when you do a single heat action. You also can't heat action downed enemies. In general, it seems like there are fewer heat actions in this game than in other games in the series, which is a strange and unwarranted downgrade.

The game has two styles: Mad Dog and Sea Dog, with the former being the one-on-one style and the latter being a crowd-clearer with some ranged abilities. Clearly, more love was put into Sea Dog, as its moves are more interesting. It's fun to use a charged shot or to throw the swords like boomerangs. There is also not much incentive to use Mad Dog from the get-go because most fights involve large crowds in open areas. That being said, Mad Dog is still decently satisfying.

The "super heat actions" that were in Yakuza 5 return here. In that system performing heat actions charged a second meter that could be used for something special. Here, the "something special" for Mad Dog is summoning clones, which turn out to be extremely ineffective in the end game. For Sea Dog it is the ability to use a "dark instrument" which is almost always the better thing to do.

You get new abilities by spending both money and experience. I am not sure what this is meant to achieve, because many things which get you a lot of money also get you a lot of experience. I imagine it's meant to incentivize doing the completion list, which gives you experience, but you don't need to do all that much of the completion list to get a ton of experience.

You can also equip rings to get buffs. The rings are pretty cool as a concept, but there are so many slots (you have ten fingers, after all) that it is very easy to stack buffs and become a god.

PIRATE STUFF

The big draw of this game is the ability to sail around the seas and do ship combat. The long and short of it is that this is a good mechanic, but not involved enough to be worth sixty dollars.

Ship combat is decently interesting: you have to maneuver to fire cannons versus your machine guns, you can ram the enemy, and at the end there is sometimes a deck-boarding fight where you and a bunch of your goons get to fight people. With that being said, progression to the best ship is very linear and you can figure out what the best build is very quick. Ships can get status effects, but in my experience I did not gain much of an advantage using these over raw damage. You can also stop piloting the ship while sailing it to fix problems or to fire rocket launchers, which is decently interesting as well.

There are several "sea maps" each with islands where you can clear dungeons to get treasure. Most of these dungeons fall under exactly three formats: explore a cave with enemies, fight off 100 enemies, or fight off a small collection of minibosses. The dungeons are not that interesting in all honesty either in terms of layout or combat challenges.

The pirate stuff has a list of treasures, and it does feel satisfying to fill out the slots. Aside from rings, the treasures don't really do anything other than give you money and experience points, however.

There is a side plot associated with the pirate content. Like most big RGG subplots it is cheesy and unengaging.

OTHER SIDE CONTENT

Aside from Hawaii, there are two main "side maps," Rich Island, which is tiny and not really notable in any respect, and Madlantis, which has a coliseum and some other interesting things. You can wander around the map to find some treasure chests, and you get a grappling hook, but there are very few reasons aside from treasure chests to ever use it.

Much of the other side content in this game is recycled from Infinite Wealth. You have Crazy Delivery, Aloha Links, Dragon Kart, and so forth. The only things I noticed that is really new are the Batting Center, which is some sort of puzzle game, now, which is a little interesting, the "bounties," which are sometimes challenging and consist of you beating up the RPG enemies rather than the normal punks, and the cooking minigame, which is actually quite boring. Inexplicably, cooking's difficult barely scales with the dish and is mainly decided by the quantity of items you want to make. There are some mechanics to gather ingredients, like catching bugs and fish, or growing food, but these are very simple.

You can also befriend some animals, but the process of befriending them is rather tedious and an opportunity to organically engage in befriending rarely rears its head.

PLOT

I am unsure of why this is an RGG game. The plotline is totally incongruous with what RGG games are like and at the end of the day left me extremely confused as to what conceivable relation it has to the rest of the series, since it is apparently canon and not something like Dead Souls.

In addition, the plot is not particularly interesting. Most of the characters are rather basic and the plotline feels a bit by-the-numbers. The very last cutscene is rather inspiring, but feels completely unmoored from a game where the main character becomes a pirate captain and is on a quest for literal gold-and-silver-doubloons treasure.

The game is certainly the best mechanically, but the remaster leaves something to be desired, particularly as it seems to introduce some bugs and it looks a bit worse. The plot is more coherent, but ironically it seems that the writing suffered for it.

AUDIOVISUAL

The lighting has downgraded somewhat, not in its technical aspects but just in how it is used. The old version had a gritty look that fit its tone and what it was parodying better, and you can see some elements of that retained in the remaster, such as the font. The previous games' "comic" font is used for highlighted objects, however, which doesn't work too well with the rest of the style. There is also a new font used for highlighted "Max vision" objects, which actually fits quite well.

The most notable thing about the visuals is that Max is much more expressive than the prior two games, which is jarring, but certainly an improvement.

TECHNICAL

The game has a flaw I have never seen in any game prior: your computer can enter sleep mode while a cutscene is playing. This would not be such an issue if it were not for the fact that when the computer wakes up, the cutscene is frozen for a considerable amount of time. The game also seems to have trouble going from lengthy cutscenes to gameplay, again freezing when this occurs. I don't recall any other bugs.

GAMEPLAY

What chiefly distinguishes this game from the prior ones is the "Max vision" with the psychic abilities. That's interesting and implemented well; switching is quite seamless, though the first-person controls are a bit disorienting, and the psychic puzzles are decently challenging, though most of the ones that involve mind reading or "future vision" are very easy, especially since if you are like me and use the two on literally everything to see the gags.

The more subtle improvement to the structure of the game is that each episode features a unique puzzle gimmick. Episode 1 revolves around the usage of "future vision," 2 features a pseudo-time-travel mechanic, 3 focuses on shapeshifting, 4 mainly uses teleportation, and 5 is something else, to put it plainly and without spoilers. It's a far more coherent structure than the previous two games without being repetitive. The game is also good at focusing on a particular kind of puzzle for a period of time, such as episode 3, which has a special puzzle involving the dialogue wheel.

PLOT

The game, in sharp contrast to the prior two installments, has an actual coherent plot. It even has a narrator. The plot is mostly a pastiche of Lovecraft, the Twilight Zone, and other bits and bobs of horror. This means that much of the writing is narrowly tailored around that, so punchlines are less free-flowing. It feels at times, though, that the game does not take full advantage of the humor in the scenarios it presents and uses cliches too much. There were, by my memory, multiple jokes with the general format "[X] is crazy, but [Y that exists in the game] is normal." There was also a bit more gross-out humor. It sticks out that the game presents at least two scenarios involving human-nonhuman intimate relations.

It maintains the cleverness and quality of the previous game. The puzzles are more difficult but mostly remain in the "solvable with time" realm. There is greater variety in the environments.

TECHNICAL

The game slightly slowed down in the third chapter, as it features rain effects. I did not encounter any crashes, glitches, or anything of the sort.

AUDIOVISUAL

The microphones are more consistent, but not wholly consistent, with some characters having slightly worse microphone quality between lines. Aside from this the quality of graphics and sound is the same as the previous game.

GAMEPLAY

The puzzles are harder. A good portion of this is because some of them are "hunt the object" puzzles where the solution involves finding an obscure prop object. Some of this is due to legitimately requiring more thinking. I think each episode is also longer, but I don't know if that's a matter of more stuff to do or harder stuff.

Something interesting here is the presence of car minigames: one per episode. They aren't just there for puzzle purposes, but also to obtain optional collectables in the form of car decals. It's interesting as a concept but the games themselves are rather boring.

WRITING

The writing in this is a bit better than in the prior game, but the prior game had great writing, so there wasn't much to improve on. While the previous game had some distinctly 2000s jokes, this game is more timeless, though some lines can all but carbon date it. Aside from this, the only thing to note is that this game is slightly more politically incorrect, but I doubt it would actually offend anyone.

Like in the previous game, the overarching plot is nothing deep, but it seems that there was more focus put on creating something cohesive. There's foreshadowing for later episodes, for example.

It's a clever puzzle-adventure game with a few bugs in audio and graphics, but nothing that affects the gameplay. The puzzles are decent, but the real strength is the writing.

TECHNICAL

The game ran fine on my computer. The very first time I ever played this I had a small Thinkpad, and it had some lag, but if you have an at-home machine I expect this game to also run just fine.

I only ever encountered three glitches in the game, which were audiovisual in nature. In two instances the music cut off randomly and did not come back until a new part of the level was loaded. In a third instance a gun's muzzle flash persisted for around fifteen seconds after the gun fired. These obviously aren't frequent or substantial enough to make anyone mad.

AUDIOVISUAL

The graphics are meant to replicate a comic book or cartoon, and it does an acceptable job. At the very least it looks nice and better than the game it was remastering. Like most cartoons, you can understand what a character is all about entirely via their tone of voice, which I give props to the voice actors for, and that sort of thing is also used for jokes.

While nearly all characters' voice actors had a consistent microphone, Sam's audio quality was all over the place, with some sections of dialogue jumping between audio qualities from line to line. There was also sometimes a mic pop. This was a bigger problem for the first three or four chapters.

PUZZLES

I have played this game three times. The first time I was rather young so I wasn't all that smart. The remaining two times I therefore knew the answers to the puzzles, so I find it a bit difficult to make a balanced assessment. Viewing this from a detached perspective, I think that the puzzles aren't difficult to solve and require at absolute most 10 minutes of thinking.

However, I believe that some puzzles will be much harder and potentially unsolvable if the player is unfamiliar with American culture or if English is not their first language, as a few puzzles are a bit wordplay-based.

Aside from that, the only thing I found bad was that some tasks required some annoying backtracking. Every chapter has a particular structure to it, which you'll identify within two chapters, and sometimes following the structure creates that backtracking.

WRITING

The writing is chock-full of quips and punchlines, ranging from amusing to truly funny. I do admit that some of the references flew over my head (this game is a remaster of a game from 2007, retaining the dialogue), but as a whole I think most people will enjoy it. I wouldn't show it to someone who's too young for middle school, but it runs a fairly broad spectrum of humor and is self-aware to know when it's hitting the low-hanging fruit.

Some of the political jokes have the un-subtlety typical of George Bush-era left/liberal comedy, though tragically, some of the core humor is still resonant. The fourth chapter has the most of this, but it's in earlier sections too.

The overarching plot is insubstantial and rather contrived. This doesn't matter because the plot of a cartoon comedy video game is merely the shelf that gets stocked with the jokes.

tl;dr this is a pretty good entry in the franchise and is fairly dense with content. the combat system is quite novel and fun to play around with, though not much else is original and there are some flaws. it's 45 GBP which may or may not be a bit much for you considering that yakuza: like dragon is ten pounds more for more than double the stuff to do. the demo is pretty cool too.

TECHNICAL

Maybe my computer is getting old but it seems like this game takes a while to load things. Entering combat or a building causes a bit of lag. It also crashed twice during these "entering" situations. Maybe wait a while for some performance things to be ironed out if your computer is not so good. Aside from that you can expect typical Dragon Engine stuff to happen, for better or worse (for me at least the ragdolling is funny).

GRAPHICS/AUDIO

The game still has realistic models and buildings, it looks like how it would in Kiwami 2 for example. It matches Kiwami 2's appearance to the point where it has the same level of saturation and shininess to it that I don't like. I much preferred the look of Yakuza: Like a Dragon on that front.

VAing is of similar good quality to previous installments. Somewhat of a spoiler: Kuroda gets to flex his crying chops and does a good job on that end.

COMBAT

The combat system has a two-style system akin to Judgement. Kiryu has a hard hitting, slower Yakuza style that is better for one-on-one combat and a fast Agent style that is good at group fights and uses James Bond gadgets. I certainly think the system is better implemented than Judgement's was in that neither style is overridingly better than the other. Yakuza style uses a lot of moves from previous games and it's satisfying to kick a guy across the street. Agent lets you steal weapons, throw people, and blow them up; there's a drone move but I found no actual use for it.

In general, juggling enemies definitely seems easier than in previous games. I was able to get juggles off every combat and I'm a complete scrub at this sort of thing.

The leveling system is like Yakuza 4 with the lines of orbs. You don't really unlock anything incredible through leveling but it gives stat ups so you will need to level up.

SIDE STUFF

The game is set in primarily in Sotenbori, which is unusual but makes sense for a more compressed game. There aren't any truly new minigames other than one arcade game but there are innovations on existing ones. The cabaret clubs use FMVs with real people and are much shorter per hostess, pool got added back, as did Pocket Circuit, which had an overhaul to make it completely independent of money. I personally have never liked Pocket Circuit as it was effectively random whether you would fall of the track even with an optimal build, but it hasn't gotten worse.

There's a new "secondary city": the Castle, where you can do some cool things. You can change your appearance and fight in the Coliseum, an RGG staple. One of the funnier innovations of the Coliseum are team battles and the ability to play as non-Kiryu fighters. Yes, you can fight a hulk of a man in the arena while playing as some scrub you had destroyed in 30 seconds just prior, then recruit that same hulk and do it all over again.

Unfortunately, the substories have re-used the annoying system from Judgement where you have to go to your "office" to start any of them. It's even worse than in Judgement, actually, because in Judgement you could encounter a few substories on the street, but here you get every substory except for a specific sequence of seven via this office billboard thing. Another oddity is that almost no substory grants an item as an award.

Aside from substories there are also these miniquests you can do that are mostly either singular fights or fetch quests. They're pure filler if we're being honest, except for a few interesting ones that make you hunt for landmarks.

PLOT

Two things to note on the outset:

1. This game is only five chapters long, which is a half to a third of most RGG games. If that's too little story, get this game on sale (or don't get it). If it's not, then it's not.

2. This is not a game to introduce someone to the franchise with. If you don't want to play through the first six games, that's one thing and Gaiden would introduce you to the contours of Kiryu's story to some degree but the game has significant spoilers for Yakuza: Like a Dragon so it's not great as a primer for either main character's storylines.

The story's not bad but I was expecting a bit more on two fronts. The first is that the impression I got from promotion material was that this would be like a James Bond - RGG hybrid, but I would say that largely it's more of the latter than the former. Obviously having an RGG-type story is not bad in and of itself but the secret agent angle is not as prominent as I thought it would be.

The second thing is that I feel that this game's story exists to promote the upcoming game, Infinite Wealth, and therefore is a bit beat-by-beat by itself. The side characters for example were a bit undercooked and not exactly special. The main villain is honestly not all that great either and is someone we've seen before (not literally but also quite literally). Some of this may be the short length of the game: perhaps there was not enough time in the story to make them more developed. The twists in the story weren't great but I can see what they were trying to do with some of them: they were out of the blue but also not shocking on an emotion level either. The best part of the story was the absolute end scene, which is strange because it is one of the most emotionally impactful scenes in the series; the rest of the game shouldn't really be standing on the same podium as that cutscene.

I imagine that sometime down the line after Infinite Wealth comes out people will make the case that plot-wise, Gaiden should be considered by new players to be a supplement to Infinite Wealth and not something that is outstanding on its own except for the aforementioned cutscene. I assume that some but not all characters will show up in the next game: the yakuza characters will potentially be prominent but I cannot imagine a significant role for "Boss" who appears two times ever but has a trading card dedicated to him.

INFINITE WEALTH DEMO

I would venture that this demo accounts for a significant portion of the price. I didn't play too much of the demo stuff but what I see makes me optimistic. The map is packed, the minigames are quite fun, and the combat is expanded upon in a good way that leaves much less up to chance. There are a few iffy things like animation stuff and some strange audio effects in cutscenes - one of Ichiban's lines had a noticeable echo for example, but I assume by Jan 2024 this stuff will be fixed. The story demo makes me think that the writing will retain the quality from previous entries as well, even given the setting transplant.

I know there is some controversy over the English dubbing, but I don't usually play these games with dubbing anyways. It just seems strange in concept given that the past games kind of point against the main characters being perfect unaccented anglophones, you know?

Note that you have to beat Gaiden to be able to play the demo.

tl;dr this game is very good and you should play it unless you have a fatal allergy to non-dragon engine games. combat is excellent at its core but some of the things built around that core aren't great, side content is more or less what you expect in terms of RGG quality, story is good but crams too many characters in.

PREFACE:

I didn't play the original version of RGG Ishin, because I cannot read or understand Japanese. There are pretty substantial graphical and gameplay differences between the two. That being said, I don't think you can buy the original anymore on Steam.

GRAPHICS/SOUND:

Ishin's graphics look more or less like Dragon Engine graphics, though the animations are more like the pre-2016 games. Sakamoto's modeled after Kiryu, but not the Dragon Engine Kiryu, but that's the only real divergence aside from the complete model replacements. Some of the characters that were modeled after real people (and then some others) in the original had their models replaced with remastered versions of the post-2014 RGG characters e.g. Joon-gi Han, Jun Oda, the Dojima lieutenants (those are modeled after real people, but I assume their likenesses either didn't expire or were renewed because more people like Yakuza 0 than are familiar with the original likenesses). I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other, but I think it is sad that some of the obscure characters don't get to shine. Did they need to get rid of Hamazaki? Hamazaki was cool. He wasn't even that obscure, which sort of undermines that part of my point, but I think it still stands more broadly.

The soundtrack is good, as is usual. Get to the last part of the "Wanted Men" side content to hear a blood-pumping guitar song.

GAMEPLAY (COMBAT):

This is not a Dragon Engine game, so no physics and no running from combat. The gameplay is most comparable to Yakuza Kiwami, but they're hardly similar. Weapons play a much larger role in this game, for one. You have four styles, and only one is hand-to-hand, with that style being focused on Heat gathering and Heat Actions. The other styles cover a broad spread: a slow but heavy-hitting swordfighting style, a fast gun-and-sword style that requires you to dodge instead of block, and a gun-only style that is pretty intuitive: you shoot people. All 4 styles are a whole lot of fun and cater to pretty much every type of person.

Despite the centering around weapons, the number of actually good weapons in the game is very limited. The number of weapons in general is massive, but most of them are middling at best. The most expensive and difficult to obtain gun in the game, the Dragon Hawk, is almost certainly not worth the effort, completionism notwithstanding. The same is true for swords. There is no real "golden gun" equivalent (there is a literal golden gun and it is quite good but nowhere near the best).

Weapons can be upgraded via seals. Getting seals is a massive pain because they are obtained at random from crafting weapons and rarely from enemies. Applying seals has a chance of failure that can't be reset via loading which makes it even worse.

From what I can gather the old Ishin had the system from Yakuza 5 where eating food could give you buffs and a second health bar, and this was gotten rid of. I liked that system and the "trooper cards" that replaced it (at least regarding the health bar) are a bit of a needless overcomplication. Most of them (there are literally hundreds of unique troopers) do the same thing and I barely used them except for grinding.

Nearly every boss battle has a thing where the boss is capable of literal magic. I'm not talking about the heat aura thing, I'm talking about the bosses summoning fireballs and tornadoes like a wizard. It's so weird because there's not reason given for it and pretty much every RGG game has reserved this sort of stuff for side content, except for Yakuza 7, which has that whole "overactive imagination" thing going on for the main character. Also, you sometimes fight giants who are at least as tall as a bus. That's also weird.

Lastly, there are optional "battle dungeons" to grind materials and XP from. The menu makes it look like there should be more than 3, but there are only 3. They're nothing outstanding, just going through rooms clearing dudes, pretty standard.

GAMEPLAY (OTHER):

There is a thing called "Another Life" which is basically the game's way of introducing Harvest Moon-type stuff. You grow crops, fish, and sell the fruits of your labor so you can decorate your house. It's a good break from the other, fast paced parts of the game, and the crops don't grow agonizingly slowly like in Nier Replicant, so there's not much wrong with it.

Most of the minigames are unique to Ishin, such as buyo, but karaoke comes back, as does chicken racing.

PLOT:

It's a good old tale of honor, betrayal, and the dark side of patriotism. The only thing not to love is the game's overstuffing with characters, which doesn't seem to serve much purpose other than invoking nostalgia. There's a character who plays barely any role in the plot and doesn't even appear until the end, and when he does appear it still left me confused as to why he was even afforded an appearance. There's a guy who's revealed to be a spy for the enemy and gets executed. Does that matter? Not really. He's just a vehicle to cast doubts on the main character, meanwhile Mr. Spy's spying is never brought up in any real capacity again.

I think one of the good things the swapping of models did was give the opportunity to subvert expectations with the "casting" of characters. Even though Majima is Majima and Kiryu is Kiryu in this game, you get to see some interesting ideas like a calm "Kuze" and Machiavellian "Adachi".

tl;dr it's a real shame this is the only one of the DLCs that didn't come bundled with the port and the $29.99 price seems rather egregious considering that's more than half the price of the base game for way less than half the stuff. that being said it makes kaito's gameplay rather different from the base game and develops kaito's character further so it may be worth a buy on sale.

PERFORMANCE/GRAPHICS/TECHNICAL

There are no differences in performance or the appearance of the game between the Lost Judgment and this DLC. Anything that is true about Lost Judgment's performance or graphics is true for The Kaito Files.

COMBAT:

Kaito fights like Kiryu. Specifically, he has two styles, both of which are somewhat modified versions of Kiryu's styles in Yakuza 0. It's a pretty efficient way of giving depth to Kaito's combat without having to make a new style, and it's fitting with how one would expect someone with his physique to fight. Kaito has his own (smaller) set of skills to unlock and they are for the most part different than those Yagami uses. He even has his own secret superboss to fight at the end.

That being said, I thought his "Bruiser" style (Kiryu's Brawler) was considerably more useful than his "Tank" (Kiryu's Beast), by virtue of Bruiser being faster and the damage per hit not being significantly different. Also, Bruiser has the Tiger Drop.

EXPLORATION/SIDE CONTENT

Kaito cannot go to Ijincho. I suppose putting him in all of the Ijincho activities would be a massive doozy.

Kaito has his own set of collectables. He can unlock moves by looking at things and get items by listening for cats and sniffing garbage. It's basically the base game's squirrels.

That's pretty much it aside from the secret superboss I mentioned before. He can't do much else aside from a limited slate of minigames which is fine but not "30 dollars" fine.

PLOT:

The storyline is not as deep as the base game's and lacks most of the convolutions (not that it has an opportunity to get deep or too crazy - it's a mere 4 chapters long) but it touches on a somewhat similar theme as well as some themes more particular to the Yakuza series (not Judgment), especially 1 & 2, and introduces some new backstory and personality to Kaito. It fleshes him out massively compared to his treatment in the base game and Judgment.

That being said, this is very much a Kaito storyline and you will not see any of Yagami (aside from like 2 text messages). I thought that purely focusing the plot on him was a good choice and allowed the character to express himself independent of Yagami. If you wanted elaboration on the bond between the detectives you will not be the happiest of campers, however.

tl;dr: performance is not that bad but is not up to par with other installments, combat and general gameplay is vastly improved over its predecessor and resurrects some good ideas from other RGG games, plot is marginally more restrained than the typical RGG game and is better for it. there is a major spoiler for yakuza: like a dragon in the game's plot.

TECHNICAL:

I'm pretty sure the performance improved as I was playing the game by virtue of me buying the game on release and important patches being released within a few months while I was actively playing it. That being said the performance was fine but not good. You can obviously tell when a new area is being loaded because the game freezes for a couple seconds, and this was a thing until the very end of the game. Also, whenever you boot the game up, the first fight I would get into would have titanic frame drops. There were also a couple of crashes in the early and mid game but as said before this was probably because of things that were patched.

COMBAT:

The combat is way better than in Judgment. For one, Crane style has a reason to exist now due to various buffs and unique moves that Tiger doesn't have. Tiger was punched up a bit with some new moves, and a new style was added, Snake, which is throw and counter based, akin to how Tanimura would fight in Yakuza 4, except improved. Snake also has the bonus of having a set of "instant-kill" EX actions to compensate for its slower speed and middling damage output (compared to the other styles). This particular port comes with most (not all) DLC pre-packaged so you also get the Boxer style which I used maybe twice in the whole game.

Yagami can equip gear in this game, which is great. He still can't equip weapons or pick up guns, though, which is unfortunate.

SIDE CONTENT/EXPLORING:

You get to go to Ijincho in this game. It's not significantly different than it was when it was first introduced. Same with Kamurocho. The new area is Seiryo High School, which is obviously not a city but a campus you can walk around.

The bulk of the side content is in the "School Stories" which are in Seiryo High. Unlike substories/side cases these have overarching plot lines and unique minigames akin to the side stories in Yakuza 5. They vary in depth and quality: the Robotics Club has a massive slate of parts you need to build and a bunch of robot battles, and the ESports Club is just you playing one of the arcade games against a weak AI.

Minigames mostly are the same. Kamuro of the Dead is now Hama of the Dead and is set in Ijincho, the Drone Race is easier, and Dice and Cube is now a race against an AI rival instead of you wandering around grabbing money until you run out of dice.

The "Celios" in-universe franchise also returns after having been unseen since Yakuza 5. Aircelios is 90% not being able to see what is going on because enemies are indistinguishable for debris. Boxcelios and its spin-offs always were the arcade's weak points.

OTHER GAMEPLAY:

There's some story stuff revolving around tailing, parkour, and stealth. Tailing has some mechanical changes but it is still very boring to follow someone around for a long time with nothing else happening. Parkour and stealth are new. Parkour is not particularly in depth and the sections don't last very long. I wouldn't call it bad but I wouldn't call it fun either. The stealth sections are very restrictive; you have to go to particular spots to hide and throw things in particular spots or else you can't progress. It lacks any degree of choice and feels more like pushing a cart down an aisle than playing a game.

PLOT:

Remarkably, this game does not have a lot of insane out-of-the-blue twists. It's quite grounded even when the conspiracy plot engines start revving up. The plot has school bullying as one of its themes, which is certainly closer to home for many than the majority of RGG games. It seems that Yakuza: Like a Dragon has started a sort of trend within the franchise of more directly discussing and centering around specific societal problems.

Speaking of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, there is a major plot spoiler for that game within the first twenty minutes or so of this one, and mentioned several times after that twenty minute mark. It's an offhand remark but it reveals an integral twist. It's not avoidable, so if you want to dodge that spoiler you may have to hold off this game for a while. Some cameos and organizations also return from Yakuza: LAD but that's not a spoiler.

update: having played this game again on legend mode, everything i said here remains true and no patches appeared to have fixed them.

tl;dr i would hold off on buying this until some more performance patches are released. slowdowns, lockups, and crashes occur quite often and i don't think the game is good enough to make up for that. wait about a month or so and then buy. you could also get the game on sale if that occurs beforehand.

PREFACE:

At the time of writing this game has only been updated once. As the TL;DR indicates the technical complaints may go away in the future (hopefully) but as it stands right now this is my assessment.

TECHNICAL:

Out of all the video games I have ever played this one has had the most frequent technical problems. Every time a new area loads the game locks up for a while, sometimes a minute, and sometimes a "not responding" prompt from Windows even pops up. Very rarely the game shows mercy and instead lets the framerate drop. The game has crashed many times while loading new areas and there were two cases where a save file corrupted and caused an infinite loading screen. I believe my PC is good, and it was able to run Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which features a considerably larger map, with no real issues compared to this. The Drone Racing minigame goes to a black screen very often for some reason.

GRAPHICS/SOUND:

The graphics aim for realism and do it well. I'm pretty sure that most of the people in this game are modeled after real people. I don't think the soundtrack has as many memorable songs as some of the past games though. Overall there is nothing to think too hard about let alone complain.

COMBAT:

The combat is in general okay but a bit weird at times. Wall jumps can lead into attacks but these often cause the player to rocket off in a random direction and getting the aim right requires more finesse than should be needed for a game in which combat takes place primarily on narrow streets and indoors. The criteria for a wall jump is also inconsistent. Sometimes running at a wall does nothing and sometimes you can initiate a wall jump while standing still.

There are two styles in this game, somewhat of a return to form to 0 and Kiwami's style. Unlike in those games there are only two styles. There is the good style and the other style. The good style is called Tiger. It's the good style because it is faster, does more damage, and has unlockable perks unique to it, whereas the other style doesn't. The other style, Crane, is slow and if a hit is blocked, it stuns you for a second. The only reason to use Crane is to break up a crowd of enemies so you can switch to Tiger and start the real beatdown. I feel like the developers gave more love to Tiger than Crane which is quite sad because a crowd-control style was done quite well with 0's Breaker.

Thankfully, the Tiger Drop is shared by both styles.

Something I don't like is how items are distributed. There is only one variant of the healing drinks (e.g. there is Staminan X but no Staminan Spark) and you can only carry a maximum of six which seems like a bit of an unneeded restriction. There are medical kits that heal a lot of HP but only one guy sells them and it's very inconvenient to have to go to him for this basically essential set of items.

Medical kits also are important because some attacks leave "mortal wounds" that decrease max HP, and the kits bring it back to normal. The idea of enemies that could semi-permanently decrease max HP was cool when bosses and a few enemies with guns could do it, but it became very annoying once these gun-toters started showing up on the street because, again, only one guy in the whole map sells medical kits.

The last thing is Extracts. They're potions that cause various effects like making you fight better or reducing the number of enemies on the map. They're interesting as an idea but I didn't use them too often.

EXPLORATION AND SIDE CONTENT:

You are limited to Kamurocho in this game. You will not be going to Sotenbori, Onomichi, or any other district within urban Japan. That's fine because I don't think the plot gives any opportunities for that, and I don't know if this game could handle multiple cities with its technical performance. You have the typical minigames like batting, mahjong, and the arcade games, with some new additions like a rail shooter and a VR fight zone. This is the Dragon Engine, though, so no fishing.

There's a special important minigame called the Drone Race. You collect materials and buy parts for it and it's a big part of the side content. It's ultimately not too interesting however, because all you do is steer the drone around a route within Kamurocho and hit booster pads. It's not very involved and half of the tracks are literally the other half but backwards and with some changes to the booster pads.

Another thing that returns from 0 is friends you meet on the street. The benefits are a bit more tangible here, since your friends grant you access to rare items, new Heat (or rather, EX) Actions, and even come to your aid to fight on the streets, which is a real improvement. There are a few people you can romance as well, but unfortunately love has no gameplay benefits.

The system for substories is slightly revamped in that the majority of them are found by going up to someone who pulls up a list of substories for you to pick, similar to how you unlock a sidequest in the Witcher. It's a bit annoying because you will frequently check these rather than encountering the substories organically on the street (which still happens but at a greatly reduced rate).

The piece of side stuff I really don't like is the Keihin Gang. Every now and again you get a text message alerting you that the Gang is coming and then the enemy encounter rate quintuples until you find and defeat a bunch of street bosses who are all really far from each other or until you wait 20 minutes or so. There is no way to stop it and it gets very very annoying after the third or so time. It's like a bad version of the Powerful Foes from 6. At least the Powerful Foes only showed up one at a time.

PLOT:

The storyline follows a model set by some of the later Yakuza games, working with the ideas of vast conspiratorial webs incorporating politics, organized crime, and things that on the surface have nothing to do with either.

The difference here is that instead of seeing this through the lens of the criminal underworld itself you are a law-abiding (for the most part) detective, and hence this is more like a noir film than a crime drama. There is convolution but not a lot of it. It's interesting to see how the style of the previous games fits into this new skin and I enjoyed some of the hardboiled detective flairs they added. They even have an opening monologue ruminating about the city and its crime and all that. I enjoy it a lot and it gets real weighty at times but not soul-crushing, a balance Yakuza is good at striking.

Despite the stylistic similarities and a shared universe, you do not need to play any previous Yakuza/RGG game to follow the plot, and the game does not have spoilers for such.

tl;dr performance is good 95% of the time, gameplay is fun and emphasizes speed and/or stealth, plot covers interesting themes, artstyle is probably the reason you are looking at this steam page.

PERFORMANCE:

The game runs very well except for one level named Neuron Activator, where it lags considerably upon death. If there are too many people running around and it's messing with how the game runs there is a setting to reduce the number of civilians (there is obviously no setting to reduce the number of enemies)

GRAPHICS:

I do not believe for even a second that someone has heard of this game and is unaware of how it looks (literal word-of-mouth notwithstanding). There's a lot of hubbub about what the artstyle means or why it looks ugly or why it looks beautiful and so on. Whatever you think, the way the game looks is good at conveying information. Every gun looks different, regular enemies are distinguishable from civillians except in a panic state, the more unique enemies are impossible to mistake for another, when you can interact with something a hand icon shows up. Some mechanics that are unique to the game are also conveyed graphically as well, such as the border of the window indicating difficulty.

SOUND:

Sound is a bigger part of this game than you may think. Ammo count is indicated through sound and the UI, and enemies emit loud footsteps when they are running after you. You can also tell when you have shot an enemy or a civilian based on the death noise they make (there's no penalty, but it's a waste of ammo and alerts the enemies). The music of this game generally gets the same treatment as the graphics, but I will say that they convey the mood of the levels well.

There were two instances of dynamic music that I liked and I wish there were more of them. The first one was how in level 1 the music changes to something more intense when you get into combat, and the second was the music going dead silent in level 2 when entering dark basements.

GAMEPLAY:

The primary focus of a level is exploring a map, looking for a target/targets, killing them, and escaping. Only one level deviates from this. The hardest difficulty adds another target (in addition to more enemies), and there is a "chaos" mode that adds several more randomly throughout the level. Missions are ranked only based on completion time, from "S" to "C"

Gunfights in this game end very quickly, regardless of who dies. This is due to the fact that you are fairly weak health-wise and the majority of enemies are even weaker, or, if they are not, have a particular weapon that kills them near instantly. This favors either being able to dispatch an enemy quickly (i.e. accuracy in the heat of battle or having a super powerful weapon), or sneaking around and head-shotting enemies from afar. The fact that you could go from 100 to -35 health in only a few seconds by simply making a bad turn keeps you on your toes, combined with the occasional spawning of super-powerful enemies in inopportune locations (though most of the time enemies do not spawn randomly or respawn). The level design matches well with this stealth-speed combination by having multiple paths to funnel you to the target as well as being fairly short even if one takes the long way.

The upgrade system also has this in mind. Most upgrades are centered around making you get from point A to point B faster, whether it be a direct running speed boost, a double jump, a grappling hook, the ability to walk on walls, or fall damage immunity. The things that do slow you down (i.e. armor) are generally low-level equipment, with the most powerful armor types having drawbacks unrelated to speed.

Upgrades are either found or bought. The way you get money in this game is either completing missions or selling things. There's a stock market where you can sell organs from people you have killed (civillians and enemies alike) and fish, in addition to proper stocks. Prices fluctuate randomly, and sometimes are tied to plot (for the stocks. The prices of fish and organs are not related to the plot). There's even a weapon whose damage scales with your holdings in the market.

Most weapons in this game do something different. In addition to things like rocket launchers and assault rifles, there's a tranq dart pistol, a gas grenade launcher, and a pistol that instantly turns enemies into balls of immobile flesh, among others. The latter one was always my favorite. You get new weapons by taking them with you out of the stage. Combined with how you can only carry two weapons, it encourages experimentation and also adds tension; you don't know if the weapon you picked up is better than what you gave up to grab it.

There's a big variety of enemy types as well. In addition to "regular" dudes with guns, there are tiny worms with human faces that inflict poison, knife-wielders that explode into toxic gas, and dog-lamprey hybrids. That's only three. There are more variants.

Difficulty in this game works differently than other games. As said before, the border indicates your difficulty. You start on normal, and the difficulty decreases gradually to the easiest one depending on how many times you die. To get back normal difficulty (or upgrade to the hardest difficulty) you have to basically prove yourself either by discovering secrets or by playing through the game. You will probably get booted to the easiest difficulty early on, so it creates something to work towards, especially because every time you get sent to a lower difficulty you pretty much get told that you are spiritually deficient. As an incentive to actually try and increase difficulty, some story items and secret levels are locked behind a certain difficulty.

PLOT:

Aside from the mission briefings (which are more about the targets than the world), pretty much nothing is directly told to you, and you have to extrapolate details about the world and what you are doing in the long run through offhand remarks from NPCs, item descriptions, and the nature of the enemies and levels. This leads to some people saying the plot is incoherent, but it's comparable to how one deduces the lore of a Souls game. There are two things that I do think are worth mentioning, in my opinion:

1. Every enemy, human-looking or not, can drop human organs.

2. Several levels after "Apartment Atrocity" contain Cruelty Squad enemies (i.e. your coworkers). They shoot on sight like any other gunman.