I spent three hours playing Mario Kart to get a ladle for my chef.

There's many questionable design decisions in this game. The game expects you to grind more then once since there weren't enough required battles to be competently strong enough for the next story sequence. If you're not ready, you'll need to grind a hefty amount of money to progress. Enemies in combat get caught on terrain and aren't the brightest at moving around it. Same with your party. Many times have I had my characters running into a wall for 10 seconds, only for the game to just teleport them right next to the enemy anyway. You get so many job skills that are very quickly outclassed. The UI doesn't tell you enough information, such as how many hits does each skill do, the percentage of status ailments going off, the precise range an AoE is effective at, how much approximately does a healing skill recover, and so on. This is also a long, long game. I was seriously expecting it to end 10 hours sooner.
Honestly there's a lot more grievances I have, but the four stars at the top are telling me to get on with it already. Fine, the ending made me cry and Ichiban is a top-tier protagonist. He's not a protagonist whose likeable all the time, he's very stubborn a lot of the times. He does do stuff that makes you frustrated, but it's almost never out of character. He's a guy who lost sight of his life's goal and had no clue where to go after being in this world for over 40 years. Of course he's going to be irrational. Yet he's so passionate and kind, he does so much for others and is grateful for those who do right to him. And the moments when his perception of the his world is shattered are such a painful thing to sit through.
To go back to the gameplay, I will give props to many of the skills being incredibly satisfying to use. Likely comes from this being a series that was originally an action game, but boy are some these attacks extra crunchy. Sound design and animation can go a long way to making even the more basic RPG battle-systems still feel fun to play. I wish female characters had more jobs, but otherwise the job systems is a easy shortcut for me to grind in your game for an unnecessarily long time. Even if there's absolutely no need to.

The story does quite a lot of heavy lifting to make up for all this game's shortcomings, but I'm going leave it there. I don't like discussing stories in my reviews and firmly believe they should be experienced by playing it yourself.
All that said, this will be the only time I'll be this lenient of the messy battle system. Really hoping Yakuza 8 makes substantial improvements, otherwise they'll need to have a story with an even bigger gut punch then this one.