After spending much of the past two years wandering through the endless sprawl of the Yakuza Remastered Origins bundle, let me just start by saying it was a real thrill to finally return to the Kamurocho of Yakuza Kiwami 2, awash in neon lights, overwhelmingly high resolution advertisements that hint at a Metaversian confluence of real and fake, full of dense infrastructure and a far too common propensity for truly epic brawls. I'll come back around to that latter bit, because much to my surprise I wound up enjoying the combat far more than any previous Yakuza game. In a game that spotlights combat as often as Judgement does (the street fight slider feels as much as 50% more aggressive than those PS3 titles) that's no small thing.
In my roughly 30 hours with the game, however, I found that Ryu ga Gatoku Studio had either lost some of what made Yakuza's unique blend of melodrama and slapstick cohere or, even worse, found a clever excuse for a dumping ground to wrap various mini-games cut from the Yakuza series over the years and have a little fun with it. About half way through the game I'd realized that the latter might actually be a more charitable take than the former. If that's confusing, think of it this way: through one lens, Judgement is a fun brawler you mostly ignore in favor of side stories and awful mini-games. Through another, it's like listening to a b-sides collection in an anthology, and that's not so bad, right? Who'd listen to the b-sides if they didn't already like the band to begin with?
Judgement really doesn't do itself a ton of favors off the bat, though. For one thing, Yagami is a total mess of a character. At his most abstract, he's essentially a blend of two classic Yakuza protagonists packaged in a mashup of a couple previous side characters. The honor of Kiryu married to the aloofness of Akiyama while slipping in and out of the cop world like Tanimura via the underworld lens of Shinada. There's a version of this on paper that works, but in practice he's a nearly impossible character to get a read on. I was always pretty taken aback by the Yakuza franchise's ability to keep introducing new characters that were neither caricatures nor hard to find the motivation for, but Yagami is kind of a generic superhero archetype. His motley crue of buddies feel similarly market tested, particularly the mysterious masked teen that's been ubiquitous for half a decade at least. Contradicting what I'll argue later, at least the yakuza dudes continue to contain layers that feel as personal as they do burdened by plot or screenwriting.
Some could argue, probably rightly, that Kiryu has the same problem as Yagami generally. But if Kiryu at his core is always wound tight and prepared to spring back to a stoic scold at any moment, Yagami seems too prepared to adjust to the moment. Sometimes he's a hard drinking party guy, sometimes he's practically a clergyman, and his role in the story stumbles around in much the same way. If you're the sort of person that every so often while playing a Yakuza proper found themselves wondering, "why is this character being allowed to live right now?" - keep in mind that the yakuza of Yakuza spend about as much time discussing the operational restrictions of suboordinates as they do actually killing people - Judgement can only amplify that effect.
This is where I spend a little time talking about all the ways that even such a subtle shift as yakuza protagonist to civilian protagonist upsets the balance of the franchise a bit. Whatever the reason may be, Judgement is by far the horniest game in the series. The side missions are full of stalkers, perverts and outright predators (remember, in Kamurocho stalking is a kind of clumsy, nerdy behavior but not actually that worrying) while a key plot point of its middle third involves a She's All That sequence surprisingly had the potential to be more than a "wow, she took her glasses off" trope but air balls the hell out of the shot. All too often are conversations about sexual abuse and coercive sexual conduct met with a comedy soundtrack, or a camera panning up and down the female body, or just otherwise inundating the game.
The Yakuza series has always had a problem with that stuff, but it was a problem that it seemed to be commenting on within Japanese subcultures as a whole. While never outright excusable, these moments were sparing in the grand scheme of each game and the joke was always on the perp. Somehow, in 2019, that no longer always feels like the case, which is what makes it so shocking when you spend a brief mid-game sequence playing dress up with a friendly, helpful, named cast woman like a child's doll only to then inhabit her as she walks down the street, gawked at and cat-called on the way to the next waypoint.
It's simple, and the second time the player is put in this character's shoes neither the effect nor the scenario is nearly as surprising, but as I'll keep exploring this is a game that could've really been onto something if it had just focused more on its core competencies: small claims cases and sexual lunatics.
While it makes sense that a private eye would come across, or be asked to uncover, plenty of lewd moments in the Kamurocho underbelly, there's something about the frequency of it here, let alone the sloppy way most of it is played for laughs rather than any real cause for concern, that exposes Judgement's main flaw: the involvement of the Yakuza at all. As it turns out, when you aren't approaching the streets of Kamurocho from the perspective of a shot-calling wiseguy a lot of these smaller tales from the common people being thrust into the spotlight makes it all feel weird in a bad way rather than a little lark.
Similarly, while the yakuza characters allow for the game to track similar plot details as, well, every Yakuza game in the series excluding Zero and Kiwami and go all the way to the top of the political food chain...it doesn't allow for the player to really get intimate with another side of Kamurocho life in the way this game often suggests. From its "previously on..." stylized recaps to the shockingly dense business and hospitality districts, heavy emphasis on getting to know your local service workers and of course Yagami's position of P.I., Judgement teases a ridiculously enticing pivot for the franchise and it's a real shame RGG either didn't see it the same way or couldn't bring themselves to take such a risk.
And look, I get it. For all its groundings in the real world, the Yakuza franchise is all this studio knows and in many ways the comic book characters that help them get away with the luxurious bullshit they're known for. But from the chapter structure to the severe reduction in the dramatic needs of the protagonist, I had this strange feeling of being let down the more interesting the story became. Initially I figured this was because the story itself was, however relatively ambitious for a video game, quite stock for a noir-adjacent corruption story - though the Resident Evil reference was appreciated when it barged in. Near the end of the game I'd realized that what I was actually bemoaning was that Judgement hadn't fully invested in that zoomed in vision of Kamurocho nor the gimmickry of its nods at procedural television. Who wouldn't want a series of Murders of the Week from RGG Studio, their sort of take on LA Noire's desk-based progression?
Let me step back from that train of thought a bit, because this was ultimately a game I quite enjoyed. In the most basic ways, Judgement knows its way around making a combat encounter shine in their next-gen Dragon Engine. Whether its offices full of desks, chairs and other ephemera, street fights surrounding by glass for the breaking or backyard brawls with water features to duel in, creating moments on par with some of the cutscenes' more clever set pieces has never been easier. Of particular note is a fight at the batting cages in which characters can spill out into the parking lot or a few areas with fish ponds. It's never quite as polished as what you'd see in a Rockstar game from an experiential standpoint, but then Arthur Morgan never leapfrog threw a street thug through a plate glass window like a ragdoll Shane MacMahon, either.
As I got into the later stages of the game I definitely was grateful to have purchased some kind of special edition during a PSN sale, as I had a trio of flaming fists, explosive ground pound and perpetual healing extracts that never left my side from the very beginning. I suppose this means I never fully explored the fighting system, but that's always been my M.O. in these games. My experience with the weapons manufacturers, for example, basically begins and ends with the side quests that unlock them. That was again the case here with the medicine man, but I can see some potential in that whole system being fun in a more concrete, less excessive aspect than the arms of previous games. It's the most Game Ass Game concession the Yakuza franchise has ever made to players who might find its core brawler both too simple and too cheap. Especially if you're in my position and are granted a number of infinite stones that may as well by cheat codes. Anyway, back to the complaining - Kamurocho is showing its damn age.
For what it's worth, Judgement doesn't always look at its play space the same as a Yakuza game would. Several of its missions amount to little more than going to work, heading to the bar for a little R&R then heading home for bed.
Similarly, the side missions are often far lower stakes than those presented in the Yakuza series, to the point that many of them simply revolve around frequenting coffee shops or setting characters up on dates (in a strange twist, you usually don't even accompany the clumsy teens to offer your virginal advice about flirting). Unfortunately, for me this exposed that I've spent the better part of five years indulging in this game world and yet I could turn off the GPS and get you from Armadillo to Valentine in Red Dead Redemption faster than I could Shellac to Ebisu Pawn. A slight exaggeration, but adding all these interiors and businesses into the same square mileage more often just makes this confusing rather than feel more lived in. Yakuza characters may wield fascinating turns of phrase, often strange day jobs and at the top level some of the best variety of face scans in all of gaming, but even in 2019 nobody could excuse them of being all that emotive and the city itself flows from that core robotic state.
Which is to say that by nodding to the bigger ambitions of the modern world's open world game designs, whether that's a sprawling map, a quest log that never quits updating, zoomed in and slow paced interior infiltration types of missions or just hanging out on a date, playing a Yakuza release that's practically contemporary for the first time one can't help but notice how slapdash its approaches to these open world staples is. Likewise, Judgement's base charms can't really distract from the fact that RGG have never so much as teased they could crack the code of narrative pacing in a world where the player could just as easily fuck off and play Fantasy Zone for five hours. Especially in the last three acts of the game, there are all kinds of urgency stacked onto the player from death sentences to members of the party's own desire to see things end quickly. The cumulative effect is a game that feels like its trying to do a little too much both in the stereotypical way all modern video games do but also simply a project of this scope and story of this ambition.
The thing that really, really hurt my time with this game however and had me worrying this might be the absolute worst RGG product I've played was Judgement's pacing. While this is clearly a procedural at its core - again, see the "previously on..." segments and first ten or so hours of the game - the bulk of its storytelling is quite serialized. Unfortunately, this means roughly 65% of the conversations you'll be watching in this game are little more than recaps of the information you'd acquired before. Accompanied by a ripping, endless heavy rock guitar line, most of Judgement's most fraught scenes are little more than Yagami and a character he went on an adventure with explaining what they did and learned to the other characters who weren't there, spiraling their way towards an idea for what to do next. Not only that, the player character often interjects with a blue-coded inner-thought that both accidentally implies the player is an idiot who can't follow along AND stops the flow of conversation until you press X alongside an annoying chime noise.
Quick tangent: musical cues are an entire other gripe with this game, whatever positives the soundtrack might have to offer is far outweighed by the looney tunes way its spare number of themes are employed throughout the game. It's so rarely comedic, or dramatic, that the times they do feel sympatico with the cinematography it feels accidental. This chime, likewise, highlights a pointless aspect of the game that in attempting to be "detective-y" just slows things down. I won't even get started on the whack-a-mole interrogation or crime scene investigation scenes, let alone the dreadful tailing (scored by the game's standout track no less, a beautiful little acid jazz cut reminiscent of Final Fantasy VIII's Deling City theme among others) sequences that do little more than insult everyone's intelligence and suspension of disbelief.
If this seems like a lot of complaining, it's only because Judgement has made a bunch of problems for itself at the exact same time that it solves the franchise's longest running flaw. The combat is still mindless, of course, but it seems ready to accept that and stop throwing enemies with specific attack patterns, cheap weapons, aggravating special tactics or any other cheap bullshit at you. We're a long way from the Blockuza meme of Yakuza 3 and while I'm quite sure there are those who wish Judgement weren't so easy to mash your way through I'm personally ecstatic. Y'all mad men and women can have your Amon pit fights; I just wanna mash my way to the same basic EX move cutscenes for dozens of hours and watch a soap opera on the side.
Finally, generic as a quality doesn't necessarily condemn a story, and Judgement comes out the other side just fine on that front. When suspicious characters aren't telling you the full story of a photo you and your friends already sussed the details of 10 minutes prior, it doesn't necessarily matter that Judgement is using the same story agriculture as previous Yakuza games. There's just enough of a sense of audacity in the fire at the center of it all that, for whatever reason, the incessant pauses to explain why a bad dude isn't all that bad, really, other than how bad he is of course that the core charm of the franchise can still shine through. I liken it to boys playing with new action figures - sometimes there is a bit of Marvel-esque creep into these characters, especially Sugiura and Kaito, that feels threatening - in the same corners of the room they always have.
Clearly I found much - MUCH - to dislike about this game, but I also found its 30 hours to be pretty breezy and cordial, completed in about three weeks despite everything weighed against it. Sometimes, I couldn't help but wonder if I hadn't been making my way through this series in as short a time as I have if some more of that RGG charm could've made up for the complaints.
As it stands, it was nice to spend some time in this world that wasn't quite as intensely splayed out as Yakuza 4 or 5 and also take a break from some of the more byzantine paths Kiryu and Co.'s lives have gone down. And I can't stress enough that however annoying the frequency of the combat can be in this game, the fact that the GAME bit of a Yakuza game is the most successful aspect is a minor shock and went a good way towards Judgement not joining Yakuza 3, or in some ways 4, as a bad game propped up by compelling characters and bonkers translations. Judgement is sparingly good, often bad, and far more mediocre in the middle than you'd like...but this is still a world in which you'll have an actual belly laugh every hour or so. That's not nothin'.
And for what it's worth, I'm not even necessarily opposed to a beelining of the NG+ save with the English voice acting at some point, just to see how that feels in a Yakuza setting.
But it'll probably be quite a while before I look into whether Lost Judgement sorted all of this out. I heard something about a high school...
In my roughly 30 hours with the game, however, I found that Ryu ga Gatoku Studio had either lost some of what made Yakuza's unique blend of melodrama and slapstick cohere or, even worse, found a clever excuse for a dumping ground to wrap various mini-games cut from the Yakuza series over the years and have a little fun with it. About half way through the game I'd realized that the latter might actually be a more charitable take than the former. If that's confusing, think of it this way: through one lens, Judgement is a fun brawler you mostly ignore in favor of side stories and awful mini-games. Through another, it's like listening to a b-sides collection in an anthology, and that's not so bad, right? Who'd listen to the b-sides if they didn't already like the band to begin with?
Judgement really doesn't do itself a ton of favors off the bat, though. For one thing, Yagami is a total mess of a character. At his most abstract, he's essentially a blend of two classic Yakuza protagonists packaged in a mashup of a couple previous side characters. The honor of Kiryu married to the aloofness of Akiyama while slipping in and out of the cop world like Tanimura via the underworld lens of Shinada. There's a version of this on paper that works, but in practice he's a nearly impossible character to get a read on. I was always pretty taken aback by the Yakuza franchise's ability to keep introducing new characters that were neither caricatures nor hard to find the motivation for, but Yagami is kind of a generic superhero archetype. His motley crue of buddies feel similarly market tested, particularly the mysterious masked teen that's been ubiquitous for half a decade at least. Contradicting what I'll argue later, at least the yakuza dudes continue to contain layers that feel as personal as they do burdened by plot or screenwriting.
Some could argue, probably rightly, that Kiryu has the same problem as Yagami generally. But if Kiryu at his core is always wound tight and prepared to spring back to a stoic scold at any moment, Yagami seems too prepared to adjust to the moment. Sometimes he's a hard drinking party guy, sometimes he's practically a clergyman, and his role in the story stumbles around in much the same way. If you're the sort of person that every so often while playing a Yakuza proper found themselves wondering, "why is this character being allowed to live right now?" - keep in mind that the yakuza of Yakuza spend about as much time discussing the operational restrictions of suboordinates as they do actually killing people - Judgement can only amplify that effect.
This is where I spend a little time talking about all the ways that even such a subtle shift as yakuza protagonist to civilian protagonist upsets the balance of the franchise a bit. Whatever the reason may be, Judgement is by far the horniest game in the series. The side missions are full of stalkers, perverts and outright predators (remember, in Kamurocho stalking is a kind of clumsy, nerdy behavior but not actually that worrying) while a key plot point of its middle third involves a She's All That sequence surprisingly had the potential to be more than a "wow, she took her glasses off" trope but air balls the hell out of the shot. All too often are conversations about sexual abuse and coercive sexual conduct met with a comedy soundtrack, or a camera panning up and down the female body, or just otherwise inundating the game.
The Yakuza series has always had a problem with that stuff, but it was a problem that it seemed to be commenting on within Japanese subcultures as a whole. While never outright excusable, these moments were sparing in the grand scheme of each game and the joke was always on the perp. Somehow, in 2019, that no longer always feels like the case, which is what makes it so shocking when you spend a brief mid-game sequence playing dress up with a friendly, helpful, named cast woman like a child's doll only to then inhabit her as she walks down the street, gawked at and cat-called on the way to the next waypoint.
It's simple, and the second time the player is put in this character's shoes neither the effect nor the scenario is nearly as surprising, but as I'll keep exploring this is a game that could've really been onto something if it had just focused more on its core competencies: small claims cases and sexual lunatics.
While it makes sense that a private eye would come across, or be asked to uncover, plenty of lewd moments in the Kamurocho underbelly, there's something about the frequency of it here, let alone the sloppy way most of it is played for laughs rather than any real cause for concern, that exposes Judgement's main flaw: the involvement of the Yakuza at all. As it turns out, when you aren't approaching the streets of Kamurocho from the perspective of a shot-calling wiseguy a lot of these smaller tales from the common people being thrust into the spotlight makes it all feel weird in a bad way rather than a little lark.
Similarly, while the yakuza characters allow for the game to track similar plot details as, well, every Yakuza game in the series excluding Zero and Kiwami and go all the way to the top of the political food chain...it doesn't allow for the player to really get intimate with another side of Kamurocho life in the way this game often suggests. From its "previously on..." stylized recaps to the shockingly dense business and hospitality districts, heavy emphasis on getting to know your local service workers and of course Yagami's position of P.I., Judgement teases a ridiculously enticing pivot for the franchise and it's a real shame RGG either didn't see it the same way or couldn't bring themselves to take such a risk.
And look, I get it. For all its groundings in the real world, the Yakuza franchise is all this studio knows and in many ways the comic book characters that help them get away with the luxurious bullshit they're known for. But from the chapter structure to the severe reduction in the dramatic needs of the protagonist, I had this strange feeling of being let down the more interesting the story became. Initially I figured this was because the story itself was, however relatively ambitious for a video game, quite stock for a noir-adjacent corruption story - though the Resident Evil reference was appreciated when it barged in. Near the end of the game I'd realized that what I was actually bemoaning was that Judgement hadn't fully invested in that zoomed in vision of Kamurocho nor the gimmickry of its nods at procedural television. Who wouldn't want a series of Murders of the Week from RGG Studio, their sort of take on LA Noire's desk-based progression?
Let me step back from that train of thought a bit, because this was ultimately a game I quite enjoyed. In the most basic ways, Judgement knows its way around making a combat encounter shine in their next-gen Dragon Engine. Whether its offices full of desks, chairs and other ephemera, street fights surrounding by glass for the breaking or backyard brawls with water features to duel in, creating moments on par with some of the cutscenes' more clever set pieces has never been easier. Of particular note is a fight at the batting cages in which characters can spill out into the parking lot or a few areas with fish ponds. It's never quite as polished as what you'd see in a Rockstar game from an experiential standpoint, but then Arthur Morgan never leapfrog threw a street thug through a plate glass window like a ragdoll Shane MacMahon, either.
As I got into the later stages of the game I definitely was grateful to have purchased some kind of special edition during a PSN sale, as I had a trio of flaming fists, explosive ground pound and perpetual healing extracts that never left my side from the very beginning. I suppose this means I never fully explored the fighting system, but that's always been my M.O. in these games. My experience with the weapons manufacturers, for example, basically begins and ends with the side quests that unlock them. That was again the case here with the medicine man, but I can see some potential in that whole system being fun in a more concrete, less excessive aspect than the arms of previous games. It's the most Game Ass Game concession the Yakuza franchise has ever made to players who might find its core brawler both too simple and too cheap. Especially if you're in my position and are granted a number of infinite stones that may as well by cheat codes. Anyway, back to the complaining - Kamurocho is showing its damn age.
For what it's worth, Judgement doesn't always look at its play space the same as a Yakuza game would. Several of its missions amount to little more than going to work, heading to the bar for a little R&R then heading home for bed.
Similarly, the side missions are often far lower stakes than those presented in the Yakuza series, to the point that many of them simply revolve around frequenting coffee shops or setting characters up on dates (in a strange twist, you usually don't even accompany the clumsy teens to offer your virginal advice about flirting). Unfortunately, for me this exposed that I've spent the better part of five years indulging in this game world and yet I could turn off the GPS and get you from Armadillo to Valentine in Red Dead Redemption faster than I could Shellac to Ebisu Pawn. A slight exaggeration, but adding all these interiors and businesses into the same square mileage more often just makes this confusing rather than feel more lived in. Yakuza characters may wield fascinating turns of phrase, often strange day jobs and at the top level some of the best variety of face scans in all of gaming, but even in 2019 nobody could excuse them of being all that emotive and the city itself flows from that core robotic state.
Which is to say that by nodding to the bigger ambitions of the modern world's open world game designs, whether that's a sprawling map, a quest log that never quits updating, zoomed in and slow paced interior infiltration types of missions or just hanging out on a date, playing a Yakuza release that's practically contemporary for the first time one can't help but notice how slapdash its approaches to these open world staples is. Likewise, Judgement's base charms can't really distract from the fact that RGG have never so much as teased they could crack the code of narrative pacing in a world where the player could just as easily fuck off and play Fantasy Zone for five hours. Especially in the last three acts of the game, there are all kinds of urgency stacked onto the player from death sentences to members of the party's own desire to see things end quickly. The cumulative effect is a game that feels like its trying to do a little too much both in the stereotypical way all modern video games do but also simply a project of this scope and story of this ambition.
The thing that really, really hurt my time with this game however and had me worrying this might be the absolute worst RGG product I've played was Judgement's pacing. While this is clearly a procedural at its core - again, see the "previously on..." segments and first ten or so hours of the game - the bulk of its storytelling is quite serialized. Unfortunately, this means roughly 65% of the conversations you'll be watching in this game are little more than recaps of the information you'd acquired before. Accompanied by a ripping, endless heavy rock guitar line, most of Judgement's most fraught scenes are little more than Yagami and a character he went on an adventure with explaining what they did and learned to the other characters who weren't there, spiraling their way towards an idea for what to do next. Not only that, the player character often interjects with a blue-coded inner-thought that both accidentally implies the player is an idiot who can't follow along AND stops the flow of conversation until you press X alongside an annoying chime noise.
Quick tangent: musical cues are an entire other gripe with this game, whatever positives the soundtrack might have to offer is far outweighed by the looney tunes way its spare number of themes are employed throughout the game. It's so rarely comedic, or dramatic, that the times they do feel sympatico with the cinematography it feels accidental. This chime, likewise, highlights a pointless aspect of the game that in attempting to be "detective-y" just slows things down. I won't even get started on the whack-a-mole interrogation or crime scene investigation scenes, let alone the dreadful tailing (scored by the game's standout track no less, a beautiful little acid jazz cut reminiscent of Final Fantasy VIII's Deling City theme among others) sequences that do little more than insult everyone's intelligence and suspension of disbelief.
If this seems like a lot of complaining, it's only because Judgement has made a bunch of problems for itself at the exact same time that it solves the franchise's longest running flaw. The combat is still mindless, of course, but it seems ready to accept that and stop throwing enemies with specific attack patterns, cheap weapons, aggravating special tactics or any other cheap bullshit at you. We're a long way from the Blockuza meme of Yakuza 3 and while I'm quite sure there are those who wish Judgement weren't so easy to mash your way through I'm personally ecstatic. Y'all mad men and women can have your Amon pit fights; I just wanna mash my way to the same basic EX move cutscenes for dozens of hours and watch a soap opera on the side.
Finally, generic as a quality doesn't necessarily condemn a story, and Judgement comes out the other side just fine on that front. When suspicious characters aren't telling you the full story of a photo you and your friends already sussed the details of 10 minutes prior, it doesn't necessarily matter that Judgement is using the same story agriculture as previous Yakuza games. There's just enough of a sense of audacity in the fire at the center of it all that, for whatever reason, the incessant pauses to explain why a bad dude isn't all that bad, really, other than how bad he is of course that the core charm of the franchise can still shine through. I liken it to boys playing with new action figures - sometimes there is a bit of Marvel-esque creep into these characters, especially Sugiura and Kaito, that feels threatening - in the same corners of the room they always have.
Clearly I found much - MUCH - to dislike about this game, but I also found its 30 hours to be pretty breezy and cordial, completed in about three weeks despite everything weighed against it. Sometimes, I couldn't help but wonder if I hadn't been making my way through this series in as short a time as I have if some more of that RGG charm could've made up for the complaints.
As it stands, it was nice to spend some time in this world that wasn't quite as intensely splayed out as Yakuza 4 or 5 and also take a break from some of the more byzantine paths Kiryu and Co.'s lives have gone down. And I can't stress enough that however annoying the frequency of the combat can be in this game, the fact that the GAME bit of a Yakuza game is the most successful aspect is a minor shock and went a good way towards Judgement not joining Yakuza 3, or in some ways 4, as a bad game propped up by compelling characters and bonkers translations. Judgement is sparingly good, often bad, and far more mediocre in the middle than you'd like...but this is still a world in which you'll have an actual belly laugh every hour or so. That's not nothin'.
And for what it's worth, I'm not even necessarily opposed to a beelining of the NG+ save with the English voice acting at some point, just to see how that feels in a Yakuza setting.
But it'll probably be quite a while before I look into whether Lost Judgement sorted all of this out. I heard something about a high school...