A massive disappointment, in my opinion, Yakuza Like A Dragon manages to fall under every bad assumption the genre is known for and then some. Shallow mechanics, poor pacing, bad story presentation, and nonsensical difficulty progression, all plague yakuza 7. I’ll be going over the whole game in categories and trying to justify my views.

The Story
So, it starts off with the backstory of Masumi Arakawa (the patriarch of the Tojo’s Arakawa family/Ichiban’s father figure) and it’s incredibly engaging, gives us an idea of what he’s gone through and how it’s shaped him into the man that Ichiban admires so much. We then get thrown into Ichiban’s shenanigans where it establishes the characters he works/ hangs out with such as Arakawa’s son or Mitsuo (a fellow member of the Arakawa family).
Things kick into high gear when Ichiban is asked by Arakawa to go to prison in place of the family captain. Despite not being fond of the captain, Ichiban’s loyalty and love for Arakawa clear his path forward and Ichiban without hesitation goes to jail. After 18 long years, Ichiban eagerly awaits to see Arakawa behind the prison walls, however, there is no one there. Just a man who is an Ex-detective by the name of Adachi, he seems to have taken an interest in Ichiban and needs his help to take down a corrupt police commissioner.
Later, it’s revealed that not only has the Tojo clan all but vanished but that Arakawa’s family has turned traitor and sided with the Omi Alliance (rivals of the Tojo clan), it’s also revealed that Arakawa’s son has passed away while Ichiban was in prison. Determined to get some answers, Ichiban teams up with Adachi to sneak into a meeting and talk to Arakawa. Things go horribly wrong however, Arakawa ends up telling Ichiban that he must die for him before shooting him in the chest. The screen then cuts to black and Ichiban wakes up in a dump in a completely different city by the name of Ijincho.
NOW THIS IS AN INTRO! It is fairly well-paced, introduces us to some of the important characters in the story, and presents a strong motivation to keep going and figure out just what the hell is going on. So where does the game go from here? How do they follow up this amazing intro? Well, they don’t. That plotline is dropped completely, and we are instead introduced to a completely new plotline following Ichiban in Ijincho. WHY!? How could you create such an amazing intro, leaving players with such a strong sense of motivation and then just tearing it away from under them? Those personal stakes and emotions are just gone in favor of “haha funny Ichiban is broke he has to go to hello work like 5 times”. And then, Adachi comes in and I’m like “yes finally back to the actual story I care about” but no he’s fucking broke too and we need to go to hello work again, WHAT! This is the bulk of the entire game and not only is it incredibly dull and uninteresting, but it’s also poorly paced. You often find yourself running around the incredibly large map doing stuff of menial consequences as you slowly (and I mean slowly) learn more about Ijincho’s criminal life. The game does eventually rope the two plotlines together but by then it was too late, I had already wasted a good 20 hours exploring this boring and poorly paced storyline.
Lastly, I’d just like to go back to pacing for a second and talk about how the story presents information to the player a bit more, and as you’ve probably gathered, I don’t think it’s great. As I’ve said before the game drip-feeds information at an obnoxiously slow rate, but then suddenly you are thrown into a giant exposition dump of characters doing absolutely nothing but talking, explaining more in 5 minutes than what you’ve accomplished in 10 hours. This is how the game’s storytelling is handled for about 6 entire chapters, although this issue is practically nonexistent after the 2 storylines merge. This game also has a ridiculous amount of flashbacks, they never let you connect the dots for yourself, instead, they have constant flashbacks reminding you of the story that you SHOULD already be paying attention to in the first place. Not to mention there is already a nice summary option for every chapter in the party menu, so they could’ve just expanded on that and cut out on the unnecessary flashbacks. A lot of the times I also feel they use flashbacks to explain events that don’t NEED explaining, this didn’t happen very often, but it did bother me whenever it did show up. The player’s Imagination is a powerful thing, leave stuff up to interpretation, please.
The overall story they wanted to tell was fine enough, ignoring some dumb plot twists, there are some genuinely great character moments (especially near the end) here and I thought this had one of the series’ better antagonists. But the incredibly poor pacing really just makes it a mostly unenjoyable slog.

Gameplay
Let me just get this out of the way now, I didn’t care that yakuza was going to turn into a turn-based RPG. I thought it’d be a nice change of pace from the usual beat em up shenanigans, don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the beat ‘em up gameplay, but it wasn’t THE reason I played yakuza.
The combat system for this game is incredibly simple, not saying that’s a bad thing but at the end of the day no matter how much abilities I get, this combat system’s complexity doesn’t really change. But even the simplest of combat systems can be made engaging and thought-provoking when you force the player to squeeze everything they can out of them. That’s the magic word here, WHEN. Yakuza Like A Dragon, for the most part, is an incredibly easy game, I can only think of two occasions where I was even remotely challenged, one of them was because I was purposefully under leveling myself to make the game harder and the other…….we’ll talk about that instance later I promise you that. So what you’re left with is a simple combat system that the game can rarely force you to use to it’s fullest extent.
Nothing like an obnoxious encounter rate, I’ve already gone how the combat system is simple and how the game is pretty easy, but my annoyance skyrockets when it comes to the overworld battles. This genuinely might have one of the worse encounter rates in the series, second only to yakuza 5. So, what’s the problem? If you look at my page you can see that I love Yakuza 5, why does the encounter rate bother me so much in Like A Dragon? Because it’s a TURN-BASED RPG, you can’t throw in a similar encounter rate to the action yakuza games and expect everything to work out, NO! The pace of turn-based battles is so much slower than real-time brawls, running around the map and being forced to beat up goons is a lot more of a pace killer when you’re not fighting them in real-time and moving on, but selecting moves to execute of a list. There was always a question in the player’s head when it came to the action games “how can I end this battle as quickly as possible ?”, this usually involves a combination of heat actions, combos, grabs, and quick steps, It was something that the player had to execute in real-time and required at least a little bit engagement. This same question is in my head playing Like A Dragon, but somehow the turn-based RPG is more mindless than the action game in this regard because whenever encountering these weak goons my brain would go into autopilot and just use the strongest AOE move to kill everything. No player engagement just wasted time and MP.
Let’s talk a little bit about the map design and how it affects the rest of the game. Injincho put simply, is just way too fucking big. This map is about 3 times larger than Kamurocho and just about 3 times less interesting, as you might expect all the interesting locations are spread apart (not that they were that interesting anyway). This obviously means you’ll be spending a lot more time running around the map than you would Kamurocho, but this also affects so much more than the amount of time you spend walking, I’ll get to that in just a second. The taxi system has been changed for this game, now you can call taxis from anywhere on the map but the trade-off is you have to visit a taxi stop first before you have the ability to use it through your smartphone, a smart change for a large map like this, but it comes at a cost. Kamurocho was a densely packed city littered with things to do, I almost never used the taxis in Kamurocho because even though I could use them to get to my point of interest faster, walking wouldn't take that long and there were plenty of substories I could activate along the way. The distance from point A to B was short and had plenty of points of interest in it, so why fast travel right? This flow is completely gone in Like A Dragon, the map was so big that I would do nothing BUT fast travel. Substories are no longer a thing you stumbled into getting to your destination, they’re something you have to go out of your way for. And I think it’s very telling that I didn’t go after the side quests much in like a dragon (I’ll go over them a bit later). Basically, fuck Ijincho because I can’t go to the Ferris wheel in the background.
For some reason, the devs decided to add a social tree system that adds nothing of value to the overall experience. I really hate it in persona, and I hate it here, what the hell does this do besides lock me out of options? Ichiban isn’t growing or changing, an arbitrary number tied to him just goes up. It doesn’t even make sense here, at least in persona your character was meant to be a proxy and a reflection of how you’d act in the game world. Ichiban is an established character, and like it or not he’s going to act how he wants, this arbitrary social stat isn’t going to do anything. This system from what I've seen affects only the hero class for Ichiban, there were maybe 2 or 3 skills I unlocked from this system, but all of them were made obsolete by mid/end game. This system adds almost nothing and just serves as a way to lock you out of jobs the game doesn’t want you to access yet.
I don’t have much to say about the Job system, I love that it's here and it adds a good bit of depth to party customization. I just wish the game didn’t rob you of all the stats and almost all moves from the previous job when switching into a new one, it discourages experimentation. Just to specify you can carry over a few moves when switching classes but you can’t control what moves get carried over, missed potential to add even more depth I’d say. The job ideas themselves though, are pretty great, they fit the game's wacky tone and provide some funny animations. By the way, shout out to champagne cannon for being the best elemental move in the game (high damage and pathetic MP cost) even when I unlocked the “better versions”.
Let’s talk about chapter 12 (no spoilers story-wise), easily the worst chapter in the entire game. So as you go through the chapter and story beats, the game then halts you and says “no! you cannot continue the story until you’ve given me 3 million yen”. Since you get no money from fighting enemies, I decided to grind the business management minigame, I spent about 3 or 4 hours getting that money and I hand it off and continue the story. I was pretty annoyed at this point but whatever, the business minigame is a good bit of fun. Then not even a fucking HOUR later, the game has a HUGE difficulty spike on the next boss and makes you grind for hours, I swear I was cruising through the game at mid to low 30’s and these bosses were level 50! The worst part about this is that they fucking knew how bad of a level jump this was because they introduce a battle arena for grinding JUST before you face these bosses. And even after clearing this battle arena, I was STILL under-leveled and had to run through it a few more times. This chapter is padding at its worst and I wanted to tear my controller playing through it (the boss was actually pretty cool though).

The Characters
It’s kind of hard to go over why I love some characters without going into spoilers, but I’ll try my best. That being said, The characters are great and easily the best part of the entire game, they carry this game so hard it’s not even funny.
The show-stealer is obviously Ichiban and the legend who was his VA (JP), such a loveable goofball with an insane amount of loyalty and heart, some of his scenes (especially near the end) are great. He’s a great contrast to the previous protagonists, while Yagami and Kiryu were calm cool, and collected, Ichiban is loud, emotional, and most importantly a dragon quest fan.
The other highlight for me was Nanba, his character by itself isn’t all that interesting, but his dynamic with Ichiban (Especially when they’re alone in the beginning) is a lot of fun to watch, and they do give him a little more to do with the overall story than the rest of the cast.
The Rest of the cast isn’t nearly as interesting, Saeko is alright, she’s cute and the girl and has family problems, that’s about it. Adachi is probably the weakest link in the first few party members, he’s the old ex-detective who loves to drink and is broke. His character conclusion was also ridiculously rushed, which was odd since his character motivation was established before even Ichiban’s.
The rest of the characters honestly feel like battling allies first and party members second, they’re so uninteresting they’re not really worth talking about.
Arakawa is another great character, I do wish we got a little bit more of him, but the scenes we do have with him and Ichiban are easily among some of the best in the game. There are also talks of him being an infamous hitman but we never get to see any of that, a shame really.
Oh yeah, remember Mitsou? Ichiban’s best friend before he went to jail? You don’t? but he got his own title card and everything, He should be pretty important. The game doesn’t remember him either? What do you mean he only shows up in 2 other scenes to do nothing but move the plot forward? That sounds like a waste of a character, they wouldn’t do that.
There are little bonding events you can do at the Bar where Ichiban’s crew hangs out, but I honestly almost never did these. I did the first few and practically avoided them for the rest of the game. It’s just 2 characters sitting down and talking for 5 uninterrupted minutes. There’s nothing interesting here besides the cast bitching to Ichiban about their life problems and its always stuff you can pick up on within the first event, but each character gets way more than that and I just don’t care enough to see it through. Not helping is the fact that they cannot react to story events because you can activate these events at any time, making these bonding events feel even more disconnected and boring.

The Presentation
Visually, Like A Dragon is alright on ps4, it uses the dragon engine from the previous few games and produces some nice looking areas. I’d say it isn’t as pretty to look at though, Ijincho doesn’t have the nightlife that Kamurocho had. On the more positive side though, this is probably the best performing dragon engine game to date.
Dear God, this game and those automated robotic cutscenes! This is nothing new to yakuza, these were in the previous dragon engine games and they didn’t look great there either. The difference is their budget is spread thin across this 40+ hour game compared to a 20-hour standard yakuza game; this means this style of cutscenes plagues the entire game. Where the old games would use CG to present important scenes, here a lot of important scenes use this stiff robotic animation, and it looks like total garbage. And yeah, I get it, in a long game we got to cut a few corners somehow, but this didn’t HAVE to be a long game.

Substories
I honestly don’t have much to say about the substories, as I mentioned before, thanks to the bigger map I rarely went out of my way to activate them. I did a handful of them, and they certainly are substories. The wacky adventures that Kiryu has to suffer though, Ichiban has to follow through with as well. They’re a bit too similar though, there’s a haunting feeling of been there and done that when it comes to the substories this time around. It’s not surprising considering that this team has been pumping out so many of these games at such an incredible speed.
I was really disappointed that they axed the friend system from judgment, I thought a lot of quests were interesting as they focused more on the friendship between Yagami and the people of Kamurocho. They were great for world-building, and it’s something I feel yakuza 7 should’ve included to further expand Ijincho.

Music
The music in this game isn’t bad, not exactly one of the better soundtracks in the series though. There are a few good songs here like the occasional scenario battle but for the most part, the new compositions leave a lot to be desired, the Yokohama and Kamorucho battle theme in particular I thought were forgettable and not very fitting. Remixes of old songs fair a bit better in this regard, with some good remixes to fan favorites that I know will make a lot of people happy.

Conclusion
So, do I think Yakuza Like A dragon is a good game? Did you read the review? Nah not really lol. It’s not a horrible game but it is a deeply flawed game that’s just too much of a slog to get through. To be honest, I don’t see myself ever revisiting it. I hope if they do keep this RPG format, that it comes with substantial changes to the structure in the next installment.

My new go-to example of how badly padding can ruin a game, Yokai Watch 3 is a good 15-hour game stretched to about 35 hours.
The game at the start is split up between 2 protagonists; Hailey consisting of the old content from Yokai Watch 1 & 2, and Nate consisting of the new stuff. Nate's campaign starts off foreshadowing the main threat of the game while showing us how he's adapting to life in BBQ, a solid introduction for about 2 chapters. Hailey’s portion, however, has no story or foreshadowing to the main threat and consists of fetch quests that have you running around the map repeatedly. This isn’t helped by the fact that Hailey is a pretty unlikable character, compared to Nate who’s friendly and nice, Hailey is loud, annoying, and insensitive making the backtracking all the worse. Nate’s campaign begins to take a turn for the worse around chapter 3 when it takes a cue from Hailey’s campaign and turns into a mystery of the week type story. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the foreshadowing for the main story kept up, or if these mysteries tied into the main story, but they don’t. So, by now you’re about 25-35 hours in and all you’ve done are boring quests that contribute nothing to the overall narrative, now the actual story is about to begin.
After completing chapter 5 for both characters, the campaigns merge, the game opens up and the actual story begins. Yet you still solve these mysteries of the week quests that add nothing, only sometimes you’ll do something that actually matters to the overall story. And yeah, the story isn’t very good but I’d like the tasks I accomplish to mean something to the overall narrative rather than just being thrown away as a funny haha moment. So yeah the pacing is not great, but it gets so much worse.

The single biggest problem with this game is the side quests, or “key quests” as the game would call them. The game suddenly decides it’s not paced poorly enough, so multiple times throughout the adventure it halts story progression and asks you to complete a mandatory amount of side quests. This can happen multiple times within the same chapter and it keeps getting worse as the game progresses. It doesn’t help that as I mentioned earlier, your reward for doing these side quests is almost always a story event that doesn’t affect the narrative at all, complete these side quests to continue this side quest posing a story event essentially.
RNG is also something that this game reeks of, and sooner or later it’ll screw you over. The central mechanics of the battle system are built off RNG, when will your yokai attack? When it feels like it, will I befriend this yokai? If it feels like it, it takes away a lot of the depth this combat can have when a lot of it is entirely dependent on randomness. RNG also extends to world exploration, exploring at night? Hope a terror time portal doesn’t suck you up and wastes your time with awkward gameplay. The worst example of this has to be the final dungeon, essentially there are 24 floors, and what floor you arrive at is randomly spun on a wheel. The problem is that you have to land on specific floors to clear specific conditions and if you don’t land on those specific floors, you are stuck in a room and are forced to fight off the enemies to leave. And the amount of enemy filled floors vastly outnumbers the ones you need, awesome.

Not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. DQ2 is a solid upgrade from the first game, introducing RPG staples such as party members, sailing, and multiple enemies per battle. While the addition of multiple enemies and party members is nice, the battle system still retains most of its simplicity from the original DQ. This causes battles to feel longer and more drawn out in DQ2 rather than more interesting or complex. On the topic of battles, what is up with this encounter rate? It's so inconsistent, usually with random encounters in RPGs you have an idea of when a battle might start but in DQ2 it could be a single step from your last battle, or 2 dungeon floors later. Sailing in DQ2 opens up the entire world, and gives players the freedom to go where ever they desire. Sailing isn't perfect though, since the game doesn't restrict where you can go, every corner of the sea is filled with the same exact enemies. You are meant to fight these enemies for the rest of the adventure, so naturally, these enemies are much stronger than you when you first start sailing causing your ass handed to you. Overall as a sequel, Dragon Quest 2 feels like a natural expansion of the original Dragon Quest. It's ambitious at the cost of refinement but at the end of the day, I enjoyed myself.

Great action RPG with simple yet satisfying combat about reacting to enemy patterns, blood-pumping music, and some of the best side characters in a videogame. The game starts super strong, you find yourself on a mysterious deserted island, now you must gather up the remaining survivors among the ship they were on and build/expand your settlement until you can leave. I was hoping the game would expand and flesh out these ideas even more than it already had but to my disappointment, it didn't. The game instead focuses on Dana and the Eternians, and I don't caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare. Nothing is interesting about the eternians or Dana herself that compelled me to learn more, this is where the plot lost me for a bit. Speaking of Dana, they spend a lot of time focusing on her relationship with Adol, but the problem is that their relationship is non-existent. Adol is a mostly mute character that's supposed to represent the player's sense of adventure when playing, so they already shot themselves in the foot by centering a relationship around him and as I mentioned before, I don't find Dana interesting in the slightest. Luckily the end game plot scenarios are a lot more interesting, even if the ending sucks. Lastly, For a game with such strong side characters, I was shocked to see that the main cast was really weak and underdeveloped. I wish we got more downtime for the party to bond because while I didn't care for everyone, some relationships were really charming. Sahad and Ricotta's father-daughter relationship comes to mind. Anyways great game with a kinda sucky story.