good:
- graphics slay severely, they really put so much effort into those rain / water effects and it shows... i would use them for everything too after that it looks saur good... generally textures lighting etc all looks superb. wish women were allowed to have some skin texture though lmao, finally we get a milf other than yayoi and shes still barely wrinkled
- new fight mechanics are great! parries, mortal reversal, the entirety of snake style with scaring enemies and EX surrender, disarming foes, sky dancer... a lot of new additions that make everything feel more reactive and engaging. and they removed the mortal wounds system which was just an annoyance and not particularly interesting, and instead added the whole agony thing which still hinders you if you dont evade mortal attacks / makes guns feel dangerous but without irking you too much
- some boss fights have fun gimmicks Even if i ate shit the first time on that one fight in chapter 8 or so but i beat him the second time okay!!!! i almost got him the first time i just got too confident and didnt heal!!
- idc about tone clash i loved school stories those r my fawking kids... WELL i havent finished them yet but still i had fun!! looks like i have many more kids to adopt and minigames to look forward to so yay
- you can befriend cats and give them names. GOTY
- you can also walk a dog if thats your style. GOTY
- i honestly. was quite disappointed and unhappy with the story for most of it And i still think its quite mid but from chapter 10 onwards it really picks up and most of my complaints were solved so yay! new characters were given much needed depth, old characters got more involved and showed more of their skills, overall my impression was mostly positive
- the boss fights go crazy omg, the dynamic intros and fight cinematography with the cutscenes just improved tremendously, especially the final two boss fights like i was holding onto my wig with all my might... LOVE the locations too, they suit the characters so well, and the osts SLAP. really i think the ending is incredible, really fun to fight through, i had a blast playing it
- also this made me wonder if my copy of judgment was bugged somehow because hard actually feels a little challenging this time while i was beating folks bloody in judgment without even trying much. though you still get kinda way overpowered in endgame so the final boss fights still felt short to me. but idc it was very fun! i think my series-favorite final boss still is y3 but im admittedly very biased. but this came close especially thanks to the #cinema of the fight choreography. ah when will i get yakuza 3 kiwami . Wait this is a lost judgment review

bad... a lot of it hence the rating not being too good despite the pluses:
- dlc stuff is weird... at least on PC everything except kaito files is already included but its weird that girlfriend side cases werent part of main game theres just. one girlfriend without dlcs. and also i kept misclicking on the "download kaito files noewwww" button in the phone menu so that pissed me off. Im not paying so much money for a dlc unless kaito gives me the slopaga fuck you
- the one downside of graphics is that dialogue sprites appear with super pixelated hair. i got used to it p much immediately but it does look bad todd
- i experienced a number of issues i didnt really have with any other RGG games, namely stuttering during chases, enemies teleporting which made using crane style very unsatisfying, blocks sometimes work in mysterious ways like judgment was more responsive with leg blocks and such meanwhile these guys just stand with arms up and are immune to everything... This probs isnt a bug but a feature. but it sucked. what is this? blockuza 3? [canned laughter]. the game also froze a few times if i tried to take screenshots during battles but to its credit it never crashed at least </3
- skill bloat is disgusting. half of these should have been just one unlockable skill or available by default. why is unlocking movement and attacking for sky dancer separate skills? why are there SO MANY health skills??? literally no reason to have like 16 different health skills. half of this shit needs to be culled. also i still hate skill books and didnt bother getting any of them except those that u get through stories and a few from squirrels that i spotted. im lazy <3
- whoever made the QTE in chapter 10 needs to be shot. in general i think for accessibility purposes they should allow disabling QTEs entirely lol. at the very least just make them one button press again instead of stick movement puzzles. or make time limit longer and allow retries within time limit instead of just auto-fail. garbage
- they toned down lockpicking and i think removed thumb tack entirely which is... okay i dont really care but in their stead they got far longer and far more boring systems of parkour and stealth which are super limited and linear, serve no purpose, and suck. i wish this was like la noire so i could just fail a few times and skip instead of pretending that i find throwing a scripted coin and taking ppl down the same way everytime fun. you cant use parkour anywhere outside of story moments so that makes it worthless to me too lol. the mechanics actually arent too bad but like whats the point if you cant just use it for fun while roaming
- for that matter, substories this time are garbage too. half of them are the same substory where you have to use the new detector tool all the time. i cant think of anything more repetitive and boring. and it makes an infernal noise. i think gameplay mechanics need to serve the story instead of "story" being built around "pls use our new tool we programmed pretty pls" lol
- God and even the detector substories aside then theres the fucking kappa hunting like . WHO thought this was interesting? the fucking russian ninja cosplay girl was just so gross and unfunny too. i think most effort went into school stories instead judging by the # of substories, especially in kamurocho, and the general vibe of these substories. they feel so low quality... Not that judgment was any better tbh but at least there were like 4 cases i liked vs NONE here
- speaking of job request substories, WHY CANT YOU JUST ACCEPT THEM FROM THE PHONE MENU????? i guess the game has no way to check if you are alone or not but its still just so dumb my god

bad continued with heavy story spoilers:
- yagamis cutscene incompetence in this game is incredible. my poor boy sugiura getting the jump on by a bunch of civvies who have like 5% of a health bar when you get to fight them too. whoever on the development team thought that completing a fight and having the protags lose anyway, or completing a chase and having yagami get slapped once and it puts him out of commission, was Fun and makes the opponents seem strong is. dumb af. especially when i think it would have been easy to turn it into a fun fission mailed kind of sequences? we could have done a little trolling...
- i think the story of the game just suffers severely from having to follow a format similar to og judgment. the case within a case and cases intertwining worked in judgment because they were all in some way related to yagami. he had emotional investment in most of them, and it was fun to see pieces connect and unravel and give everyone involved closure. other characters also had direct involvement, like kaito and higashi w the matsugane or sugi and his whole deal. but lost judgment DOESNT have that emotional level. AND YOU KNOW HOW THEY DECIDE TO ADD IT. OF COURSE THEY DECIDE TO FRIDGE ANOTHER WOMAN!!!!!!!!! oh my fucking god i was speechless when it happened. and it just continues. she has no agenda because you know she DIED so yagami just keeps being her mouthpiece for what she wanted or justice for her or whatever and this being his sole reason for continue getting invoved is just so cheap. it sucks. i think they stuck the ending and generally like i mention in good, it improves from chapter 10 but goddamn getting there is like pulling teeth. and the ending is still funny bc its just yagami and kuwana speaking on behalf of women who arent there like KSDFKJSDFJ AKDJKASJDKA god not like i expect better from rgg but i do wish they would just hit japan with no women virus and only write male characters to spare me the misery
- it also sucks that yokohama 99 just feels like an excuse for yagami to go to ijincho. yagamis friends dont really have a life outside of yagami. at least they start pulling their weight after chapter 10 but its just sad to see how badly RGG continues to manage big casts. this is only the SECOND GAME and they already cant do it! this is a very worrisome precedent for like a dragon 8 that will have to deal w both kiryu saga and ichiban saga casts. poor higashi is still stuck managing his flop arcade and outright saying he is basically jobless and has nothing but time like its just miserable
- i enjoyed kuwana eventually and i think soma and akutsu became more interesting post-chapter 10 but prior to those reveals that contextualize their behavior and goals, they just dont have a lot to go on... and a lot of scenes with them feel like a retread of judgment. except hamura's unflinching violence worked and was interesting bc it was a juxtaposition to the old-timey but inefficient matsugane, and again, yagami higashi etc have a level of emotional involvement. soma at first just appears like a little freak which... is okay but... isnt much to go on? like i just didnt give a fuck about this guy kjksjdfs despite his design being very much my taste
- i also think its very goofy how these games continue having these "laws can be changed for better" etc themes while showing how rotten justice / police structure is at the core like itsj ust so funny hsdhfsdhf Not that i expect this to be a critique of prison complex or anything they had their chance with yakuza 4 and ignored it but its just sooo funny

okay this is really long i just have so many mixed feelings about this game i really wanted to LOVE it but. it just falls a bit short of what i hoped it would be. still had fun though so yay

Lost Judgment has proven to me, more than anything else, that I've been duped. For many years now I dismissed a lot of AAA game design as being generic, dull, rote, easy to see through and a complete waste of time and money. Who could still enjoy this? What can the 50th open-world action-adventure stealth cover shooter give you that the 40th couldn't? Imagine my shame upon realizing that my favorite series has pulled the exact same trick on me, and probably for longer than I realize.

Throughout my playthrough, I found it hard to ever put Lost Judgment down. I always felt the need to see what the next story objective will lead into, what new bit of the mystery of the Professor I will unveil by proceeding a given School Story (a sort of combination of Side Cases and Friend Events from the previous game), what new abilities I'll be able to unlock by getting a few more collectibles. It had me hooked - but, as I've come to realize, it only did so by repeating the patterns in my brain that have been so established by previous Yakuza games (and no, I am not going to start calling it "Like a Dragon", no matter what Sega's PR department tries to pull). When it came time for all of these promises to materialize, the results were, across the board, underwhelming.

Of all these, combat is probably the most interesting aspect of Lost Judgment. The responsiveness of the combat system has been much improved, including a much better system of style-switching, and to Judgment's Crane and Tiger styles, LJ adds a third style, Snake, which hits a midpoint in terms of DPS between Crane and Tiger, but adds the ability to deflect enemy attacks. It's a fun style, in fact, the only style I would have used - if LJ's convoluted experience system didn't highly encourage getting at least one knockout per fight with each of the other styles.

It's a baffling move that reeks of a lack of confidence, because realistically, Snake should have been what Yagami's combat is all about. Yagami is not a Kiryu or a Majima, not a brick wall that can annihilate dozens of normal opponents while barely breaking a sweat. Focusing on Snake would have really suited the more nimble, improvisational combat style that the games have established for Yagami. At the end of the day, especially on higher difficulties with increased enemy aggro, there's absolutely no reason to ever switch off of Snake. Much like with Crane in the first game, your combos are just going to constantly get interrupted. Tiger is sometimes good for a one-on-one, but it functionally does nothing Snake couldn't have done instead. Instead, with just one button for cycling between styles and an upgrade menu per-style, it makes the whole thing feel bloated and unsatisfying.

The detective gimmicks suffer from bloat in a different way. At first I was happy to see tail and chase sequences highly streamlined. They definitely function better than in Judgment on a technical level. But this is one of those where someone took something bad and polished it to the point where it was just mediocre. At least I felt the need to be awake for chases and tails in Judgment; here, these sequences are just as lengthy, just as needless, but now they are also very, very boring. To these old gimmicks LJ adds stealth sections and parkour sections, as if to truly belabor the point that the series is going the way of the most desiccated western AAA games. The less said about these dull and sometimes infuriating gimmicks, the better.

Other than regular Side Cases, LJ features a suite of what it calls School Stories - essentially an upgraded form of Friend Events from the first game. LJ's story leads Yagami to work as an advisor to a high school Mystery Club, which somehow also leads to him investigating a shady figure known only as The Professor, who is leading a number of students from the school astray. Uncovering The Professor's identity and motives requires Yagami to infiltrate several clubs both in and outside the school, including a dance club, a boxing club, and an e-sports club. It's a solid setup which essentially justifies Yagami participating in a wide range of minigames, from an incredibly fun dancing rhythm game and surprisingly deep boxing combat to an utterly insipid and disastrously bad bike driving game. The activities are, thankfully, mostly enjoyable. But since players can approach them at any order, at any time, none of the individual investigations can lead to any significant revelations, until the very end, where an unlikely and silly conclusion is dumped in your lap, culminating in a rather disappointing boss fight, with the entire sequence really having nothing to do with any of the activities you engaged in, save for characters from the individual storylines showing up to recite corny dialogue about friendship and believing in yourself.

The main story is set up in a similar way as the first Judgment, and is predictable in much of the same ways. A cop by the name of Ehara is accused of sexual assault; the act and his attempt to flee the scene of the crime are thoroughly documented from every angle and point in time, and forensic evidence leaves no room for doubt. As he is predictably declared guilty, Ehara reveals to the court that a man who has tormented his son for years in high school, driving him to suicide, has been murdered in another town around the same time of him committing his assault. Needless to say, it is utterly impossible for him to have had a hand in the murder, and don't you even dare dream that it could be otherwise. Naturally, it is otherwise, and most of the rest of the game involves Yagami and the Genda Law Office uncovering the vast conspiracy that almost allowed Ehara to get away with murder.

That this is all very, very predictable - and it is incredibly predictable, especially to those who've played Judgment - is not necessarily to the game's detriment. Yes, the setup is obvious, but it's the constant questioning of how it could be otherwise, what could have been missed, the timing of the various twists that makes it all even more strange, that makes you want to hit just one more checkpoint, just one more cutscene, hoping for some sort of resolution, some sort of satisfaction. Judgment did the same, but where Judgment's breadcrumb trail led to a mostly satisfying conclusion about the nature of political corruption and hubris - not the most cutting-edge material, but it was done well - Lost Judgment seems afraid to make any sort of point at all.

The story initially seems to focus on how destructive bullying is, and how it could be addressed socially. But before long, it shifts gears to a truly hazy scenario about anti-bullying gone too far, sacrificing one of the most interesting new characters to make some vapid both-sides point that is as unconvincing as it is unnecessary. LJ seems to acknowledge that the justice system has a hard time dealing with bullying, before hand-waving that fact away, promising that the system will eventually catch up, which seems unlikely given that bullying - a phenomenon rooted in social power imbalances and not simply in the whims of individual bad apples - has existed for literally millenia.

LJ has no answer to the criticism raised by its would-be villains, and at the end of the day is so incompetent at coming with any that it literally lets the most violent of them go free, leaving only the grieving parents of victimized children to waste away their golden years behind bars. When the most poignant line in the game's dialogue - "to overlook those the law won't judge is to abandon those the law couldn't protect" - is spoken by someone the game wants us to believe is morally reprehensible, how utterly have you failed to make any sort of coherent point?

This is not even addressing the most universally-condemned aspect of the story, that Ehara's sexual assault being fabricated sends a terrible message about sexual assault in general. Victims of sexual assault who come forward seeking justice already face a wall of disbelief and scrutiny that many prefer not to discuss it in the first place. Given these facts, picking sexual assault as the method by which Ehara sought to establish an alibi for himself - as opposed to literally anything else - comes off as truly hateful.

Whether this is intentional or not is impossible to establish, nor does it really matter too much. The point, at the end of the day, is this: Lost Judgment is all build-up, all promise, all potential. As such, it is spectacularly good at making players feel satisfied, feel like they are being told a compelling story, feel like they are enjoying a compelling combat system, etc. But when faced with any scrutiny, the whole thing - much like the preposterous anti-bullying conspiracy at the heart of the game - falls apart, leaving nothing to come back, nothing to learn, and nothing to capitalize on for future titles. Whatever the third Judgment game ends up being, it should strive to be anything but this.

But eh, Snake style is admittedly pretty fun. Worth playing once I guess.