I really like it but I definitely had to get used to the combat. The way they changed up Heat so that it's hard to gain but extremely powerful is a miss, in my opinion, and I think Agent style is a bit conflicted.

Like, Agent's moveset is great but its damage sucks ass, and the gadgets took me a while to really come to enjoy besides Spider (that one is awesome from the get go despite being useless for bosses). Still don't really like the drones tho, even if it's funny to summon 100 of the damn things at once when you have Heat Boost. Snake and Firefly combo well together and are fun to use in big group fights, so there's that.

Combat overall is a lot more fun than in 6 or K2, but nowhere near LJ's level. You get juggles like in LJ but they're only off certain fully charged finishers, so they're hard to pull off and, despite being fun, lack in damage compared to just busting out any Heat Action.

Anyway, I'm a side-content focused guy when it comes to the Yakuza series, and that pays off here because of how upgrades seem to be gated being doing side content. Which the game makes sure to try to get you to engage with, considering how they force you to do some of it. Nothing new for the series, though, and a non-issue for me, but I could see how people would get annoyed by that.

I did quite a bit of the Colisseum and got all non-Kiwami upgrades and pretty good equipment, and I still found the later parts of the game tough on Professional. If you were rushing through for story and didn't care for the side content, I could see why you would be suffering. But me, personally, I bought the thing almost entirely hyperfocusing on the goddamn Colisseum, tbh.

Sadly, though, no 100% from me yet. I always 100% before beating the story, but Infinite Wealth is coming out really damn soon and I wanted to catch up. I'll probably still get the 100% before IW comes out, but I wanted to enjoy my last weekend before IW by beating the story. Working chips away at my lucidity, which makes me not wanna do story content right after working, so the weekend was it for me...

Anyway, let's wrap up this long ass rant nobody will read. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are peak. The ending really fucking hit hard. I really liked the story and cast overall. OST is a banger other than Furioso (and the Yakuza theme absolutely shits all over the Agent one, but that's a cold take). I enjoyed this way more than I expected to, good times.

Lost Judgment still the best tho!