This review contains spoilers
God. Alright. Here I go.
I was worried about this one in a number of ways. The way people talked about 7 was like, oh yeah this one's 200 hours long. And I felt like turn-based combat could just make everything a huge pain in the ass that takes way longer. I felt trepidation! In reality this one took like 50 hours minus a bit to beat. That's way too much because games are too long but it's very normal for this series and genre at this point so I'm not bothered. The pace of the fighting was basically the same as in the action-based parts of the series so that was fine. The one thing that got me annoyed was that there are a lot more random encounters around town but you do pick up an equippable that just turns them off maybe two thirds into the game and I figured out that you can speed through the party convos with triangle and it was a little annoying but this isn't a deal breaker or nothin'. It's fine it works and hopefully they improve some stuff.
I do think that just having a level-up number changes the way one would play. You'd be in way worse shape if you were trying to stick to the main story here compared to a lot of other games in the series but those level dots are going a lot more to just having bigger stats and less towards "if you press triangle while dodging you do a flip" stuff. I played the game basically normally and the only time I wasn't overlevelled was just after the Sotenbori battle area opened up and I tried to go forward without it and got clobbered by Majima and Saejima. After I did the whole thing they were easy. So it goes.
That fight is actually the first time I'd describe the game as fighting back at all, in fact. It was still a more complex and interesting fight when I came back with more levels, I just didn't feel any pressure from it. This continued until the final dungeon when I was way overlevelled again and it was boring. This too is basically what a Yakuza game difficulty curve is like so. You know. It's not a bad thing! The game is too long to have difficult combat I couldn't handle that. I don't want to have to think about the 1000 dudes I punch on the way through the story. My brain is just a little kitty cat brain it will overheat.
The job system is maybe my favorite example of this since every character has an exclusive starting job that's usually quite good. Saeko is really the only one who needs to get moved off of it and Nanba and Adachi benefit. I gave Eri hostess for long enough to teach her a cold element attack but this was hardly essential. The way the job system works, where you can only change in one central location and it kicks your stats down to hell when you start a new one, really means you only need to extensively use it if you want to jack all of your stats into the stratosphere with grinding. It's breadth rather than depth. And that's not a bad thing! This is praise, if anything. It's like how you can uncap your stats in some of these and keep increasing your power until you knock out Amon with a single punch. I'm never going to do it and I'm glad I don't need to.
Alright, so the battle part of the game I've got covered. Cool. All the side stuff is basically standard Yakuza fare, right? I got more into the batting cage this time which was nice. There's no fishing minigame in this one which is FUCKED UP it's supposed to be an RPG. I basically did not touch the shitty Mario Kart because I've learned to love myself. I did not to any postgame super dungeon nonsense. Perfect, now I can talk about the part of the game that matters: the game lets you play Virtua Fighter 5 on New Years Eve, 2000, which is anachronistic and therefore the game is trash.
Okay no seriously no. A new protagonist was something Yakuza needed pretty badly, and even though they hedged their bets harder than I wish they had, it seems to have gone over well. Multiple people I know who never touched the franchise at all were charmed by Ichiban, the little man who played too much Dragon Quest and it rotted his brain and he thinks all the people who don't like him are like, vaguely offensive stereotype monsters. I also love Ichiban. I like how his special move is basically asking to speak to the manager. I love taht he's just fully stupid but in a new way that can give us some new stories.
I don't think the rest of the party is nearly so well fleshed out, and I was honestly surprised to see they're all coming back for 8. I figured we'd be in an Ys situation with all new characters because nobody in 7 felt like they had anywhere to go from there. It's Ichiban's story, and they're just living in it, often with little to no motivation for getting into fights with every single gangster in their city. I think a lot of this might be on the fact that the party-based combat was added later in development. You can feel it every time some of your pals are just not present for a major story scene for no reason. Nanba's whole deal gets focus in the midgame, and then he's just kind of there. You never meet his brother who forms his entire motivation, either, but I'm sure that'll change in 8. Adachi has a conflict in theory, but it's just a simple revenge narrative that's barely present until it's resolved suddenly and completely after the credits have already rolled. Saeko exists. Eri is optional and therefore exists in a pocket dimension for the entire game. Joon-gi has no personality to speak of. Zhao has plenty and I really want more of him, so that's something to look forward to.
I do like the party conversations a lot, but I just think a lot is lost by having everyone cease to exist during substories. In previous games with multiple playable characters we'd have gotten time to run around as these other people and I'd get attached, but it just doesn't happen in 7. Again, high hopes being stacked on the shoulders of Infinite Wealth for me.
The soap opera is pretty good, not the best they've done but it's generally at least servicable. The coin locker baby twist is both very predictable and bafflingly useless as a plot development. It changes nothing about Ichiban's relationship with anybody except Sawashiro, who immediately leaves the story. What it does do is give us the tantalizing possibility that morality in this world is like Harry Potter where your goodness is based entirely on how much your biological parents loved each other.
Just kidding I don't think you're intended to think Masato is evil because his parents were morons. I think you're supposed to think he's evil because he's disabled and got too sad about it. This is the game's main theme and it applies it pretty liberally during the game's designated "we're talking about homelessness now" chapter, which ends with Nanba explaining to Ichiban that all the homeless guys around are men with wives and kids who are not homeless but they can't get jobs because they're too sad and broken because something something. It's one of the most off-kilter things the series has pulled in a while, directly trying to distance itself from the idea that poverty is a result of 'laziness' while also not being able to comprehend a systemic issue at all so it just sorta flails around a bit. It absolutely rules when the antagonists are clearly a specific type of conservative moral panic type but the writing has no conception of that so they just get called "young people" and defeated by essentially rules lawyering and pointing out hypocracy, the liberal dream.
I actually really enjoyed the evil NIMBY guys as a plot point, actually. Kume is kinda cartoony in the right way. Just a dude you want to punch real bad when you see him. The biggest misstep is that eventually the Bleach Japan guys just turn into enemies that you hit with baseball bats which completely eliminates what made them narratively interesting. We were always due to have an evil politician in one of these games, and it was always going to end that way, sadly, because when the only tool you have is a melee combat system, all the problems look like nails. Or something.
Which brings me to Masato himself as the villain, who is... fine. I think we have the same problem here as the first couple games in the series where there just isn't enough of the bad guy to sell him to me. We need the Kiwami treatment where we see some scenes of him not being the world's biggest piece of shit so Ichiban trying to reach out to him stirs my heart at all because without that it doesn't entirely work. Everything about their final interactions is predicated on a long history that manifestly exists in the story but only through people telling you that it does. It's most of the way there, it's just that you don't always hit the exact sweet spot every attempt what can ya do.
Also, shoutout to the reveal that he's actually dead post-credits. They knew they'd pulled the fakeout death too many times I was just assuming he'd be okay. Good stuff.
Oh also shoutouts to "throwing a handful of thumbtacks" the most powerful ability for a good chunk of the game until I replaced it with a gun. I understand this is how warfare evolved in most societies.
I was worried about this one in a number of ways. The way people talked about 7 was like, oh yeah this one's 200 hours long. And I felt like turn-based combat could just make everything a huge pain in the ass that takes way longer. I felt trepidation! In reality this one took like 50 hours minus a bit to beat. That's way too much because games are too long but it's very normal for this series and genre at this point so I'm not bothered. The pace of the fighting was basically the same as in the action-based parts of the series so that was fine. The one thing that got me annoyed was that there are a lot more random encounters around town but you do pick up an equippable that just turns them off maybe two thirds into the game and I figured out that you can speed through the party convos with triangle and it was a little annoying but this isn't a deal breaker or nothin'. It's fine it works and hopefully they improve some stuff.
I do think that just having a level-up number changes the way one would play. You'd be in way worse shape if you were trying to stick to the main story here compared to a lot of other games in the series but those level dots are going a lot more to just having bigger stats and less towards "if you press triangle while dodging you do a flip" stuff. I played the game basically normally and the only time I wasn't overlevelled was just after the Sotenbori battle area opened up and I tried to go forward without it and got clobbered by Majima and Saejima. After I did the whole thing they were easy. So it goes.
That fight is actually the first time I'd describe the game as fighting back at all, in fact. It was still a more complex and interesting fight when I came back with more levels, I just didn't feel any pressure from it. This continued until the final dungeon when I was way overlevelled again and it was boring. This too is basically what a Yakuza game difficulty curve is like so. You know. It's not a bad thing! The game is too long to have difficult combat I couldn't handle that. I don't want to have to think about the 1000 dudes I punch on the way through the story. My brain is just a little kitty cat brain it will overheat.
The job system is maybe my favorite example of this since every character has an exclusive starting job that's usually quite good. Saeko is really the only one who needs to get moved off of it and Nanba and Adachi benefit. I gave Eri hostess for long enough to teach her a cold element attack but this was hardly essential. The way the job system works, where you can only change in one central location and it kicks your stats down to hell when you start a new one, really means you only need to extensively use it if you want to jack all of your stats into the stratosphere with grinding. It's breadth rather than depth. And that's not a bad thing! This is praise, if anything. It's like how you can uncap your stats in some of these and keep increasing your power until you knock out Amon with a single punch. I'm never going to do it and I'm glad I don't need to.
Alright, so the battle part of the game I've got covered. Cool. All the side stuff is basically standard Yakuza fare, right? I got more into the batting cage this time which was nice. There's no fishing minigame in this one which is FUCKED UP it's supposed to be an RPG. I basically did not touch the shitty Mario Kart because I've learned to love myself. I did not to any postgame super dungeon nonsense. Perfect, now I can talk about the part of the game that matters: the game lets you play Virtua Fighter 5 on New Years Eve, 2000, which is anachronistic and therefore the game is trash.
Okay no seriously no. A new protagonist was something Yakuza needed pretty badly, and even though they hedged their bets harder than I wish they had, it seems to have gone over well. Multiple people I know who never touched the franchise at all were charmed by Ichiban, the little man who played too much Dragon Quest and it rotted his brain and he thinks all the people who don't like him are like, vaguely offensive stereotype monsters. I also love Ichiban. I like how his special move is basically asking to speak to the manager. I love taht he's just fully stupid but in a new way that can give us some new stories.
I don't think the rest of the party is nearly so well fleshed out, and I was honestly surprised to see they're all coming back for 8. I figured we'd be in an Ys situation with all new characters because nobody in 7 felt like they had anywhere to go from there. It's Ichiban's story, and they're just living in it, often with little to no motivation for getting into fights with every single gangster in their city. I think a lot of this might be on the fact that the party-based combat was added later in development. You can feel it every time some of your pals are just not present for a major story scene for no reason. Nanba's whole deal gets focus in the midgame, and then he's just kind of there. You never meet his brother who forms his entire motivation, either, but I'm sure that'll change in 8. Adachi has a conflict in theory, but it's just a simple revenge narrative that's barely present until it's resolved suddenly and completely after the credits have already rolled. Saeko exists. Eri is optional and therefore exists in a pocket dimension for the entire game. Joon-gi has no personality to speak of. Zhao has plenty and I really want more of him, so that's something to look forward to.
I do like the party conversations a lot, but I just think a lot is lost by having everyone cease to exist during substories. In previous games with multiple playable characters we'd have gotten time to run around as these other people and I'd get attached, but it just doesn't happen in 7. Again, high hopes being stacked on the shoulders of Infinite Wealth for me.
The soap opera is pretty good, not the best they've done but it's generally at least servicable. The coin locker baby twist is both very predictable and bafflingly useless as a plot development. It changes nothing about Ichiban's relationship with anybody except Sawashiro, who immediately leaves the story. What it does do is give us the tantalizing possibility that morality in this world is like Harry Potter where your goodness is based entirely on how much your biological parents loved each other.
Just kidding I don't think you're intended to think Masato is evil because his parents were morons. I think you're supposed to think he's evil because he's disabled and got too sad about it. This is the game's main theme and it applies it pretty liberally during the game's designated "we're talking about homelessness now" chapter, which ends with Nanba explaining to Ichiban that all the homeless guys around are men with wives and kids who are not homeless but they can't get jobs because they're too sad and broken because something something. It's one of the most off-kilter things the series has pulled in a while, directly trying to distance itself from the idea that poverty is a result of 'laziness' while also not being able to comprehend a systemic issue at all so it just sorta flails around a bit. It absolutely rules when the antagonists are clearly a specific type of conservative moral panic type but the writing has no conception of that so they just get called "young people" and defeated by essentially rules lawyering and pointing out hypocracy, the liberal dream.
I actually really enjoyed the evil NIMBY guys as a plot point, actually. Kume is kinda cartoony in the right way. Just a dude you want to punch real bad when you see him. The biggest misstep is that eventually the Bleach Japan guys just turn into enemies that you hit with baseball bats which completely eliminates what made them narratively interesting. We were always due to have an evil politician in one of these games, and it was always going to end that way, sadly, because when the only tool you have is a melee combat system, all the problems look like nails. Or something.
Which brings me to Masato himself as the villain, who is... fine. I think we have the same problem here as the first couple games in the series where there just isn't enough of the bad guy to sell him to me. We need the Kiwami treatment where we see some scenes of him not being the world's biggest piece of shit so Ichiban trying to reach out to him stirs my heart at all because without that it doesn't entirely work. Everything about their final interactions is predicated on a long history that manifestly exists in the story but only through people telling you that it does. It's most of the way there, it's just that you don't always hit the exact sweet spot every attempt what can ya do.
Also, shoutout to the reveal that he's actually dead post-credits. They knew they'd pulled the fakeout death too many times I was just assuming he'd be okay. Good stuff.
Oh also shoutouts to "throwing a handful of thumbtacks" the most powerful ability for a good chunk of the game until I replaced it with a gun. I understand this is how warfare evolved in most societies.