fly like a butterfly, fart like a dragon
it does take some balls to completely change your combat system from real-time to turn-based, and some moves you can acquire are funny and all, but that's about as far as I can go in complementing it
I may just not be a jrpg fan, but to my knowledge this isn't even a particularly deep system even by your regular jrpg standards, and in my experience is just very boring most of the time, you spam your most powerful moves, heal when appropriate, rinse and repeat, there's really not much to it and on top of not being very satisfying it also just...makes you feel like you're not the one in control, if that makes any sense, it feels like I'm slamming action figures against each other and making them fight rather than fighting everyone myself like I did in all the previous installments, which makes it extremely hard to make any fight particularly exciting
the music took a hit as well in my opinion, in its desperate pursuit to modernize the series it just takes away a lot of the memorable melodies and cool guitar riffs that one may be used to hearing in these games at this point in favour of trap-styled drums and wubbly almost dubsteppy synths, when I was finished with this game I could think of like 3 tracks (original to this game) that I liked
and speaking of modernizing the series, with the yakuza fading out of relevance in the real world, the same thing happens here, where it feels like the game doesn't know what to do with its lore anymore, the returning characters were nice to see but they might as well just not be in the plot at all, the game doesn't really know what to do with them anymore, it feels like
now that the complaining is out of the way (yes I know that was a lot), the actual story of this game is good! most of the new characters are charming, even if not all of them are incredibly deep, the weird party that forms around Ichiban is fun to hang out with, and the plot has a fair share of its good moments, and even if it feels like it doesn't quite want to fully commit to subverting expectations that were established by the games that came before it, it is still enjoyable
all this said, this was a fun experiment to bear witness to, but if this is the direction this series is sticking with for the foreseeable future, it's hard for me to feel excited about the next entry if its improvements on this new formula aren't gonna be substantial
it's a good game, just maybe not the best yakuza game
it does take some balls to completely change your combat system from real-time to turn-based, and some moves you can acquire are funny and all, but that's about as far as I can go in complementing it
I may just not be a jrpg fan, but to my knowledge this isn't even a particularly deep system even by your regular jrpg standards, and in my experience is just very boring most of the time, you spam your most powerful moves, heal when appropriate, rinse and repeat, there's really not much to it and on top of not being very satisfying it also just...makes you feel like you're not the one in control, if that makes any sense, it feels like I'm slamming action figures against each other and making them fight rather than fighting everyone myself like I did in all the previous installments, which makes it extremely hard to make any fight particularly exciting
the music took a hit as well in my opinion, in its desperate pursuit to modernize the series it just takes away a lot of the memorable melodies and cool guitar riffs that one may be used to hearing in these games at this point in favour of trap-styled drums and wubbly almost dubsteppy synths, when I was finished with this game I could think of like 3 tracks (original to this game) that I liked
and speaking of modernizing the series, with the yakuza fading out of relevance in the real world, the same thing happens here, where it feels like the game doesn't know what to do with its lore anymore, the returning characters were nice to see but they might as well just not be in the plot at all, the game doesn't really know what to do with them anymore, it feels like
now that the complaining is out of the way (yes I know that was a lot), the actual story of this game is good! most of the new characters are charming, even if not all of them are incredibly deep, the weird party that forms around Ichiban is fun to hang out with, and the plot has a fair share of its good moments, and even if it feels like it doesn't quite want to fully commit to subverting expectations that were established by the games that came before it, it is still enjoyable
all this said, this was a fun experiment to bear witness to, but if this is the direction this series is sticking with for the foreseeable future, it's hard for me to feel excited about the next entry if its improvements on this new formula aren't gonna be substantial
it's a good game, just maybe not the best yakuza game