I really wanted to like this game like everyone else does. The story is probably one of the best in the franchise up there with 0. Unfortunately, the gameplay sucks fat wieners. I often see this game brought up in how to make turn-based combat engaging but I fail to see how. It's like playing FF 3 or 5 but with paper mario timing QTEs. There are not enough jobs to play around with and having to go somewhere instead of being able to switch on the fly sucks. Game also falls into the problem of having a whole bunch of moves but none of them mattering, you will be doing the same old attack and heal you do in old FF games. I dislike how in jrpgs, tactics like taunting the boss to hit one of your dudes never works. I'm so confused why so many jrpgs just never let you status effect bosses, like who the fuck am I going to taunt if not the boss. So instead, it's just the same old attack up and defense down, unless you wanna play a roulette of wasting your turns to find out if any status effect actually works. There is also insane levels spikes which is part of the reason I hate the gameplay change. Hypothetically, in older yakuza games, if you were struggling with a boss, the option of "getting good" is always available. You could no hit bosses, there was no need for grind. It was a way for skill expression but now it no longer exists. During the Majima boss fight, Saejima will one shot you and it will target Kasuga every time so it will always be a game over, unless you level enough to tank it or use the sacrifice stone the game gives you at the start, which I did. The player is ultimately gated by their levels and thus prevents the skill factor from expressing its true potential. But to get back on track, the game is simply not engaging during its combat in the slightest, it has a good chunk of mechanics but so much of it is meaningless. My personal favorite rpg that isn't an action game is persona 5 and even that has more depth. Because the later encounters will force you to use the games mechanics on a high difficulty. This is a game like older rpgs where you suffer through the combat to get to the story. It's also strange how the game needs you to have party members but like halfway through the game, it just feels strange how these people in your party are still helping you. Like during these emotional moments like Kasuga confronting Ryo, and then Zhao is just staring at you in the background like this isn't some real personal stuff. The side activities are fine here, I feel like it's kinda tired at this point, like how many times can I sing baka mitai? Don't even bother trying not to do Ichiban confections considering there's a part in the game where it just tells you to get 3 mil, that was so fun (it was not). I've never skipped main cutscenes in yakuza until now, there's so much padding in the story that is just awful to sit through. Enemy encounters are not very diverse. There's also a lot of smaller issues that's too much to name. It does come off like I fucking hated this game, but I gave it a 6/10 so I do like it, it's just on the level of a game like FF8 for me, good but HEAVILY flawed.

This is where mainline Yakuza took a downward spiral for me. This game has so many glaring problems and I sometimes feel like I've played a different game than what others have been playing when I see such positive reviews for it. I was actually reminded of a lot of these problems when I was playing Infinite Wealth so I took a mental note of them again for a review of this. In a way, I think a lot of these overly positive reviews stem from what I like to call the "Persona 5 effect". It's no secret that this is an entry point for a lot of players new to the franchise who had no prior experience with the other games. And it's also no secret that this being turn-based attracted a new group of players that wouldn't have been interested in the brawler combat of the previous game. So when you have these players come in and see that there are social links, a job system, goofy enemies to grind in dungeons and funny side quests, all without the high school and god-killing tropes, they're bound to think this is a 10/10. As for those who played all the other games and then this one and still thought this was one of the top games, I can't comprehend their reasoning.

So what are the actual problems of this game? It comes down to both gameplay and story and how the two interact with each other. So I'll take it one at a time.

Combat: The decision to go with turn-based combat in this game was a really bad one. This isn't because turn-based combat is bad, but because the game isn't suitable for it. The moment I started the game, I could tell the combat was going to cause severe pacing issues with the story and I ended up being right. One of the worst pacing issues that's combat related happens in chapter 12 with the Majima and Saejima fights and then with the Kiryu fight after that. The game actually hints that you should just sit there in Sotenbori and grind before you progress in the story. This happens as the story has finally picked up and the player would be dying to see what would happen next, only to wall them and kill their interest with at least an hour of repetitive mandatory grinding. Previous entries never forced me to grind to overcome challenges in the story. I could always get good enough with the combat to win without having some skill unlocked. As someone who plays Yakuza games primarily for the stories, this was a huge issue for me.

The turn-based combat also creates severe tonal inconsistencies. The one rule all games in the franchise had followed so far was that the main story is always grounded and the "ridiculous" is reserved for the side content. They're now forced to destroy this beautifully constructed balance they had from before. Because turn-based combat in a way necessitates variety, we now have normal people on the street turning into human trash bags, gigantic pirates, men who do nuru massage on you, etc. to mimic other turn based games having monster variety like Pokemon, SMT, and the like. And then you have the job system where you start the fight against the man who killed your father and the next moment your teammate transforms into a dominatrix and hits the boss with wax play before Ichiban uses essence of Orbital Laser. The tonal whiplash is to the degree of being almost offensive. It also makes boss fights incredibly anti-climactic. Compare any of the boss fights in Y5 to anything in Y7.

But disregarding all this, the turn-based system isn't good enough to justify the change either. You have no control over your positioning and at some point it just becomes "use Essence skill to AOE all the mobs over and over". 99% of the other skills don't even matter and regular attacks in the late-game are just a waste of a turn. Buffs and debuffs matter so very little compared to a game like SMT4 where stacking the correct buffs and debuffs and team weakness composition is essential to not instantly dying to bosses. Bosses and even regular enemies become gigantic damage sponges that just serve to prolong the game for no good reason other than to stop you from moving forward in the story.

Story: It's one of the weakest stories for me. I really disliked Ichiban. I don't think he's a good protagonist and I think by now, I've seen enough class-clown-with-a-heart-of-gold-that-forgives-everyone archetypes in anime and JRPGs that I've had enough. Snow from FF13 is a much better character if I wanted this trope again. Nanba is really boring in the beginning, gets a bit more interesting and then does something so comically stupid, it makes him unlikable again. And I'm almost sure Nanba had his whole episode with Bleach Japan just as a device to push the whole Ichiban forgives anyone and trusts anyone trope. Adachi is alright. Saeko is alright. Eri is boring as hell. They brought Han Joon-gi as fanservice and made-up reasons for him to exist (they also set the horrible trend of bringing back characters we saw die on-screen and putting them in random substory roles). Zhao was a great character and probably increased my rating of the game by himself.

The story starts off with a decently interesting start. Arakawa has a good introduction and seems to be the Kazama equivalent for Ichiban. Then we have the time skip and Ichiban's release from prison. And then suddenly the story comes to a screeching halt after Ichiban is shot by Arakawa and the whole homeless saga begins with chapter 4. It's one of the chapters I hate most in any Yakuza games. It's so boring that it makes Yakuza 3's chapter 4 seem well paced in comparison. And then there's a whole stretch of some of the worst writing I've seen with the soapland and Nonomiya. This is probably one of the things that made me dislike Ichiban more with the way he responded to his teammates when they expressed their disgust at the idea of working for an exploiting scum like Nonomiya. I get that part of it is supposed to show how he's indebted to the man that acted as his father when he was growing up in the soapland, but the way the game itself outside of Ichiban's emotional perspective tries to exonerate Nonomiya after he's killed is just disgusting.

The whole story about the great wall of Ijincho wasn't interesting. I didn't find any of the gangs themselves interesting besides the 3 top dogs of each i.e. Seonhee, Hoshino, Zhao. Then we slowly got to the Great Dissolution stuff which felt like empty fanservice to have an excuse to show Majima, Saejima, Daigo, Watase, Kiryu. All we get is two boss fights with almost non-existent character development or any interesting changes in their personality ever since they've gone into hiding. No meaningful conversations between Ichiban and these characters. Kiryu randomly challenges us later after he shows up in the middle of the street to stop us from hitting some guy and then runs off to the wilderness immediately after the fight we have with him. Mirror face is probably the stupidest plot device Yakuza has used so far and it actually detracted from the story because in a way it also solidifies the idea that even the main plot in this game isn't grounded. Tendo showed so much promise to be an interesting final fight and the final fight is surprisingly very good with the best OST in Y7, but we got no conversation after the fight with him and nothing to peek into his character more. He had so much potential, but he was discarded the moment the fight result screen came up. How did mirror face suddenly teleport there and how can mirror face just instantly copy Tendo for this elaborate setup to trick Aoki Ryo? Who knows. It's not grounded anyway.

Which gets us to Aoki Ryo. A bland character with even more bland motivations. I think I was supposed to hate his guts but I just wanted him to get off the screen whenever he showed up. The theme of this game is the Whereabouts of Light and Darkness, which basically represents Ichiban as the light and Aoki Ryo as the darkness. Two pseudo-siblings, one brought up in the metaphorical darkness which ends up being the light himself, Ichiban, and one brought up in the light, inside the comfort of being an affluent child of a Yakuza boss, turning into darkness. If only Aoki Ryo was actually interesting though. Such a shame. I felt nothing when he died and the fact that Kume just randomly finds him out of nowhere actually made me laugh. The only saving grace of that scene is Ichiban's heartfelt plea to Aoki to live and Kazuhiro Nakaya's outstanding voice performance. But even then, I couldn't really go along with Ichiban's emotions because I find them genuinely disturbed and problematic. The game again tries to force me to think these problematic feelings he has are normal and good and wholesome, but I can't accept that. Ichiban was never Aoki Ryo's brother. He was treated like trash and he was a servant. The twisting of this abusive, dominating relationship into one of love is understandable from the point of view of the victim, but not when the game tries to rehabilitate such relationships for the player. Kiryu had one of these bad scenes in Y4 and it soured my experience of that game.

So after all this, do I hate this game? No. I think by itself without the Yakuza title, it's a good game. I wouldn't have platinumed this game if I wasn't having any fun. Even as the worst Yakuza game for me, this is still miles ahead of a lot of other titles. But I think it tries to be way too funny and plays into wanting to be shown as a meme on twitter to the detriment of its story. If they had excluded all previous Yakuza characters while keeping some minor references in the way the Judgment games did, I think it would have been much better off.