The rare example of a game that is worse than its predecessor, despite being better in every way.
You name the aspect when it comes to the act of playing the game is better--the combat is more fun, Hawaii is beautiful and incredibly fun to traverse, the minigames are as wonderful as ever in addition to bringing back most of the ones from the last game, the the ost has a bit more sauce to it, its just wonderful to play.
But, the word of the day is pacing. This game suffers heavily from poor pacing in every aspect just as well. You get your overarching objective early into the game...and it doesn't change until about 70% of the way in. It quickly gets tiring as you walk to another place so the bad guy there can tell you the princess is in another castle. Eventually it gets so infuriating that they have a random npc come out of nowhere to give you her to end the plot and start the endgame. The final boss comes out of nowhere and is generally completely uninteresting, they knew it too because they added other silly bosses in the lead-up to him then shunt you over to Kiryu for the "serious" finale.
This in itself isn't bad, but it just really makes Ichiban's storyline even more unsatisfying that it already is. Ichiban has no relation to this guy or anything going on, he's just Here To Beat Up the Bad Guy. The main antagonist faction is also kind of questionable from a sensitivity perspective--the obvious intention with them was to pull from the Unification Church and the Shinzo Abe assassination, but by transporting that to America and making them worship an indiginous religion it comes across in rather poor taste.
Kiryu's plot fares better--I have never played the old Yakuzas before 7, I don't like that sort of action game, but it definitely sold me on his character and history, and it got really emotional in the sense of a man looking back on his life. When it wasn't focused on the Big Conspiracy of the game, the small moments were really good and brought some of the humanity of 7 back.
The pacing bleeds into the gameplay too. The game has a really awkward difficulty curve, its never like too hard or anything, but you'll just randomly hit spikes after sometimes arbitrary missions where the level requirement jumps up by 5 or 10. And the way they pace your currency is the game is just poor, they went for a strictly tiered equipment system this time around, with each tier of equipment costing exponentially more than the last. But the actual tuning of money in the midgame is poor--the game asks for significantly more money than it gives you to keep concurrent with gear through the middle of the game, which just meant I sat there undergeared through it until we hit the lategame that showers you with infinite wealth.
Tying into it is an uninteresting and mostly just annoying upgrade mat system, with the capstone mats being gated by long grinds or doing the fishing gacha minigame for an hour.
They also don't unlock the job change system until like 50% of the way through the game, which is absurd and really only messes with the curve since you're already significantly into the game before you can play with the system. I really don't know what they were thinking here.
Altogether, the tedium of the story and pacing just really brought it down for me. It's undeniably a great game, but its less than the sum of its parts.
You name the aspect when it comes to the act of playing the game is better--the combat is more fun, Hawaii is beautiful and incredibly fun to traverse, the minigames are as wonderful as ever in addition to bringing back most of the ones from the last game, the the ost has a bit more sauce to it, its just wonderful to play.
But, the word of the day is pacing. This game suffers heavily from poor pacing in every aspect just as well. You get your overarching objective early into the game...and it doesn't change until about 70% of the way in. It quickly gets tiring as you walk to another place so the bad guy there can tell you the princess is in another castle. Eventually it gets so infuriating that they have a random npc come out of nowhere to give you her to end the plot and start the endgame. The final boss comes out of nowhere and is generally completely uninteresting, they knew it too because they added other silly bosses in the lead-up to him then shunt you over to Kiryu for the "serious" finale.
This in itself isn't bad, but it just really makes Ichiban's storyline even more unsatisfying that it already is. Ichiban has no relation to this guy or anything going on, he's just Here To Beat Up the Bad Guy. The main antagonist faction is also kind of questionable from a sensitivity perspective--the obvious intention with them was to pull from the Unification Church and the Shinzo Abe assassination, but by transporting that to America and making them worship an indiginous religion it comes across in rather poor taste.
Kiryu's plot fares better--I have never played the old Yakuzas before 7, I don't like that sort of action game, but it definitely sold me on his character and history, and it got really emotional in the sense of a man looking back on his life. When it wasn't focused on the Big Conspiracy of the game, the small moments were really good and brought some of the humanity of 7 back.
The pacing bleeds into the gameplay too. The game has a really awkward difficulty curve, its never like too hard or anything, but you'll just randomly hit spikes after sometimes arbitrary missions where the level requirement jumps up by 5 or 10. And the way they pace your currency is the game is just poor, they went for a strictly tiered equipment system this time around, with each tier of equipment costing exponentially more than the last. But the actual tuning of money in the midgame is poor--the game asks for significantly more money than it gives you to keep concurrent with gear through the middle of the game, which just meant I sat there undergeared through it until we hit the lategame that showers you with infinite wealth.
Tying into it is an uninteresting and mostly just annoying upgrade mat system, with the capstone mats being gated by long grinds or doing the fishing gacha minigame for an hour.
They also don't unlock the job change system until like 50% of the way through the game, which is absurd and really only messes with the curve since you're already significantly into the game before you can play with the system. I really don't know what they were thinking here.
Altogether, the tedium of the story and pacing just really brought it down for me. It's undeniably a great game, but its less than the sum of its parts.