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.

Scorn is why we can't have nice things.

The last time I felt as out-of-touch with other people's opinions as I do with Scorn, it was with Elden Ring. In some ways, the games are similar - and before you rightfully roll your eyes, I mean more in what it expects of and how it presents itself to the player. Both games drop you rather unceremoniously in a hostile, harsh world that you must then make sense of yourself. Both have combat that requires adjusting your expectations, and that punishes you harshly for trying to approach it like a standard action game. And neither explains itself beyond the bare minimum (AKA "doesn't hold your hand").

The difference is that one meanders for over 100 hours through copy-pasted content and elements cribbed shamelessly from previous games, while the other stays short and to-the-point, letting you explore a world quite unlike anything seen in game form before, full of twist and turns that are as revolting and horrific as they are fascinating.

Guess which one is the shoe-in for almost everyone's GOTY.

The complaints I've heard about Scorn are frankly mind-boggling. Maybe the most amazing one is that it doesn't explain who you are, where to go and what to do. Apparently, this atmospheric horror game should have opened with a long-winded monologue about the human condition and how the world became so fleshy and bleak. Personally, I found the game's tersness to be one of its best qualities. Every new twisted horror, whether a contraption, a monster or even a healing station, came by completely unannounced, making for some of the most effective and completely unscripted jumpscares I've witnessed in a game. There are no dramatic monologues by gigantic foes, no cards popping up with every new enemy telling you exactly what it is and how to fight it. Doom Eternal this is not, despite some people's strange expectations for an H.R. Giger shooter, and that is entirely to the game's credit.

This also applies to the mechanics, which I feel the need to remind people do not equal gameplay. I had to learn - on pain of death - how to manipulate not just Scorn's grotesque, fleshy machinations, but also its weaponry, its healing system, and even my inventory. I can't remember the last time a game required me to learn its mechanics on such a basic level, the last time I couldn't just assume R1 would be light attack, R2 would be heavy attack, and that I would be hit with walls of texts and prompts telling me to upgrade my abilities upon hitting the start button. It's amazing to me that anyone would consider this a criticism as opposed to being excited by it.

I've heard complaints about the lack of combat in the game, which is very strange to me because once monsters show up, they never quite go away, and the game ends with what I found to be an incredibly enjoyable, tense and stressful boss fight. True, this isn't an action game. There are no waves of enemies that you easily mow down with a machine gun. There are no multiple dragons who all behave roughly the same that you have to chase around an obnoxiously large map. But for a horror game, it provides the exact amount of danger so that it never bogs down the atmosphere, but still never lets you feel safe, like you don't have to worry about what might be coming around the corner, and pretty soon you learn to move slowly, observe, and only engage when you've got a handle on the situation.

While I loved Scorn a lot, I would never claim the game is perfect or lacking in jank. I did not mind the spacing of the checkpoints themselves, but I wish the game was more consistent in when a checkpoint is provided, or even just better at indicating that a checkpoint has been reached. And I did run into an irritating bug where camera sensitivity had to be adjusted on each startup, making it impossible to aim otherwise, and the same happened with some graphical settings as well. These are small complaints, understandable for a game in this budget range, but I would be remiss not to mention them.

Mostly, though, the thing I'll always find frustrating about Scorn is that I can't think about it without thinking about how utterly vapid a lot of the criticisms of it I've come across have been. This game has made it clear to me that all across games media, whether you look at outlets and critics more identified with the mainstream, or ones more progressive and more critical of the industry, there is still very little patience for anything innovative or unusual, still very little room for anything that's not either a Dark Souls clone, a shooter, or a bog-standard AAA open-world game. Anything that might require a bit more thought, a bit more adjustment, that asks a little more from players than to turn off their brains and hit the same old buttons, resulting in the same old actions on screen - anything like that is to be condemned as broken, badly-designed, and as a personal insult to the player, who did not receive their instant gratification right then and there.

Scorn is the best game I've played this year, and easily one of the best horror games of the past few years. And realizing that we will not see a game as brave and fresh as this anytime soon, let alone one that fleshes out (ha ha get it) its excellent ideas, because the spectrum of allowed mechanics and storytelling in video games is so, so narrow these days, possibly more narrow than ever before, under the new FromSoft-adoring mainstream - is possibly scarier than anything I've seen over the course of the game.

And this is a game that has you crush down a fetus into a pile of goo to make a flower grow out of a corpse's face.

Twice.