It's really hard rating this game. I loved it a lot. I really enjoyed my time with it. I loved the characters. I loved Ijincho. I loved that Yakuza was willing to move on and create a whole new cast. It is their first try at an RPG, and it shows. It's not a great RPG system. But also, Yakuza wasn't a great beat em up. It's almost series tradition to have just passable gameplay, as that's not the point. The story was that of a soap opera in the best possible way. I loved all the twists and turns. I think it's gripping, and while it might be kinda cheesy, it's always fun and enjoyable. Ichiban also stands as one of the best RPG protags ever. Please play this game, even if you don't know much about Yakuza.

The leadup to Yakuza: Like a Dragon was utterly fascinating to me. The giant shift in combat felt daring in a way that you don't see every day in the AAA space. It was so exciting to me that it pushed me to play through the entire series up to this point, just to fully immerse myself in the context for this thing. To say I was excited would be an understatement.

Like a Dragon delivers on numerous levels. It looks and performs fucking great on Series X. The music is like weirdly super good at points? I usually don't notice Yakuza's music that much but this time felt different. The assortment of side-content is great this time around with a bunch of hilarious and memorable substories and side activities, even if Dragon Kart was kind of a disappointment for me.

Ichiban and the rest of the cast are fucking stellar. RGG has shown themselves to be very skilled at introducing and endearing you to characters very quickly and this game is no exception. The story takes them on some really unbelievable twists and turns and I honestly think that this game may very well have the series' best villain. It's amazing stuff.

However there's definitely still a lot of room to improve. Especially on the RPG side of things. The combat is good and has a lot of good ideas but the execution really needs work to get it to feel like it meaningfully stacks up to the visceral and kinetic combat system that came before. (No, it wasn't always bad. You guys just need to learn to chill with some fun crunchy combat lol.)

On top of that, the jobs feel too skewed toward damage dealing. It didn't feel like there was enough in the way of support classes, especially in buffs/debuffs. Also the difficulty has some truly incredible spikes toward the end. They're super manageable so it's not a huge deal in my opinion, but it IS a show of the RPG system not being fully tuned. Maybe by the time we get to Yakuza 8 or 9 the system will stand toe to toe with the greats of the genre.

The last thing I want to mention is that while this game is a great place to start, it definitely still is the seventh game in the Yakuza series. Not to spoil anything, but it does carry over some points from previous games and iterates on them, leaving them in places that'll be surprising and rewarding to people that have given those older games a look. If this is your first Yakuza, you will miss out on the impact of that stuff and that is kind of a shame. So I dunno, there's that.

All that said, I really loved this thing. Both as a fresh start for the series and as a follow-up to Yakuza 6, and I'm optimistic about the direction RGG's gonna take this going forward.

The localization of The Silver Case is one of the most important things to happen for Suda51's catalogue and a whole fanbase's understanding of it. This game is a sort of rosetta stone that lets us understand some of the finer nuances in Suda's longform Kill The Past narrative, a loose series of games about mystery, truth and self-actualization among other things.

It's through this familiarity with this early work that the reputation of The Dick Joke Weird Games Man kinda falls away and we just get a really well-written, bizarre art game that managed to be on some MGS2-level shit in its internet-focused narrative. The Silver Case is less a series of visual novel segments detailing interesting serial murder cases, and more a portrait of a society rapidly losing control of itself as a result of this new online frontier suddenly swinging itself open at the turn of the millennium.

The Silver Case is dense, and at times too dense, making it hard to parse. While that's part of the fun in discussing it with people online, it leaves for a conclusion that induces maybe a few too many head scratches than it should. There's also the prevalence of the ableist r-slur in the script, which is just plain unfortunate. An argument can be made in how it fits the characters speaking it, but these days it's a hard word to stomach, and the fact that the word is upsetting matters far more to me than whether or not it fits. It's there and it sucks that it's there.

This review only scratches the surface on the positive and slight negative things I have to say about this thing, but I'll leave it here. If you want a cool visual novel, play The Silver Case. If you want something a little different, play The Silver Case. If you like Suda51's work, you NEED to play The Silver Case. I think it'll be one I return to every few years.