I like the part where the rolling eyes fell and the ruling died out. In all seriousness, though, this game is pretty awesome considering when it released. Story is, uh, well it's pretty alright. I wouldn't call it bad, but it's not really amazing. The main cast of characters is pretty good at least. Coming back to this original game after playing pretty much all of its successors and its remake comes with a pretty strong feeling of... incompleteness. This game is a little raw. The combat system's extreme jankiness displays this. It feels light, but your lock-on is really finicky, you can get turned around really easily, and the game balance really doesn't feel sensible until you unlock Finishing Hold, which is the final skill in the 技 skill tree which you'll probably only unlock at the very least 2/3 of the way through the game. This shit is RAW.
Once you get used to the jank and technical faults, though, you can see that this game really set the foundation for everything that would come after. It's really neat to behold the (somewhat) quaint beginnings of this monumental series... even though, at the time, this game was a monumental undertaking on its own. Fully realizing the entirety of Kabukicho in a PS2 game and letting you roam (mostly) freely around it and enter a wide variety of areas, most of them being one-offs in the story, is honestly kinda insane. You gotta respect it. Even if it feels like it's gonna blow up your PS2 sometimes.
Overall, I'd call this a 7.5/10. It's missing a little je ne sais quois, but it's a marvel on its own.