The good:

-Combat is the best part of the game, it's so much fun that i literally always stopped to fight random encounters which is telling. The way the styles are all useful and they complement each others is wonderful;

-Story is really good in how it handles the contrasting beliefs of Yagami and Kuwana, they are compelling characters to listen to(muh Sawa-sensei aside);

-The sidecontent is great and varied, a lot of time to be spent here, boxing and robotics in particular were cool additions. I also felt like the side cases were better? Maybe it's just because there was way less tailing;

-The music is great as always.

The bad:

-Climbing/stealth/tailing are all so boring and they only serve to bring down some of the combat levels for me. They are an improvement over the constant tailing missions of the first game at least;

-Might be an unpopular opinion but i don't think this game has many good bosses, Kuwana and Soma are the only great ones, i don't like fighting Akutsu or Tesso very much and most of the game is filled with RK members with reused movesets disguised as bossfights. The same can be said about the long battles, only the final one was up to the standard of the older Yakuza games;

-They did my man Hoshino dirty, someone on the writing team really hated him or they wanted to make Saori look more competent idk but it feels like they shit on him the whole time. For a game that is so focused around stopping bullying, it sure didn't mind having Hoshino being bullied. Also it breaks my heart a little he and Saori never got together;

-Having two Saori sections, why? In the first game you also played as her twice but it was unexpected and kind of cool, you can't make it work every time, i just found it boring here.