More Judgment and a step up in a lot of ways but not every way. I think the first game's story is better because it's not as messy, there are less elements at play, and it's way more personal to Yagami as a character. It's not a bad story by any means, but I feel like they could've removed some elements to make it easier to follow. I do really like how they treated the topic of bullying. It's handled with such reverence which is good. It's a topic that a lot of people will resonate with and it's good that it's not treated lightly. The antagonists were also very well written and it was hard to not empathize. Content wise, this might be the tightest RGG game yet. Every RGG game has a billion minigames but they dont do the best job at incentivizing the player to do them. School stories in Lost solves that problem. An overarching narrative surrounding the minigames is a great incentive. Judge Eyes did some different stuff from Yakuza in terms of side content and it's cool but overall there was a lot of padding to the side cases and friendships. Here they're just school stories and side cases that feel the same as substories in Yakuza. Less unique but still good. Overall, I do think I liked the first more. Lost is probably the better game but the first one's story was more intriguing of a premise and more concise, as well as the fact that it was coming off of Yakuza 6. It was so fresh for RGG games and that freshness isn't here sadly. Also the combat is super fun. I do think the styles have less utility than the styles in Yakuza 0 or Ishin but they're all super fun to use. The combat in Judge Eyes was tightened up immensely and its the best combat since they started using the Dragon Engine.

All that to say, I think this is one of the best games of 2021 and that I immensely enjoyed playing it. It's RGG at their best. Toshihiro Nagoshi went out with a home run.