Dude this fucking game...
What an absolute pleasure of a video game to have in my life.
The story and characters are pretty simple, but very very charming. It was confident with its humor and became infectious because of it.
The gameplay is just MWAH! This rhythm game meets character action is something I think always sounds cool on paper, but could never be executed well...
Until now apparently???
This is perfectly done. The amount of reliance on the rhythm game portion feels so balanced with your actual skills in reactions and movement. You end up getting into this zen, where you really do just "feel the beat".
And the attention to detail on every element of the game is stunning. All enemy animations, walk cycles, background elements; all move to the beat of the music. It creates this super natural ability to sync your brain with the game. It all comes so naturally. And feels amazing because of it.
The use of licensed music was kinda awesome. I know some can find it a little cheesy, but idc it was really cool and elevated the games vibes so well.
Speaking of; the aesthetics and tone this game goes for is so authentically inspired. It doesn't feel too referential or trite. It all feels like an team of artists making what they wanted to make. And that always makes the best video games.
The only gripes I have are the some of the skills felt useless compared to spamming the "call your friend in" button.
And the post game content I didn't care for. Basically is just "run through the levels again and find stuff". Could see the appeal in a repeat playthrough, but not a game that I felt a need to 100% at all.
Other than that, easily my game of 2023. Crazy how it just popped up outta nowhere.

One of the best games of all time.

This game is incredibly well made. Story, characters, music, sidecase's, school stories. I love everything about this game and will never be able to forget how much emotion it has.

Generally game sequels nowadays don't really add much to the previous entries but this game does it perfectly. Adds dozens of playable minigames, 2 extra fighting styles, so much content with school stories that is full of good story and characters with amazing development. I was in a trance when doing quest's because how well made they are and every story has a little message and it's really emotional. I cried so much, laughed so much and enjoyed it.

I think this is RGG studios passion project or something because they poured everything they learned over the years making Yakuza games and this is the what they can do with everything they got. I don't think they can top this game for a long time.

As for combat i don't think i will be enjoying other games for a long time because this game does it so perfect that i will compare it to every game and get disappointed. The juggles you can make in this game are crazy, i was beating a guy in air for 20 seconds and it was so much fun just switching styles and doing combos. Played it on Legend difficulty for the first time, it was hard at some specific fights but generally speaking perfectly balanced gameplay.

I will %100 this game in the near future, not a fan of playing koi koi tho.

Less tailing missions and more Saori-san onegai

Wow. After getting dragged by the entirety of RGGtwt and getting trashtalked for 4 days straight because I said the combat sucked after the first boss I have finally finished this and am really glad I didn't drop this.

First the story. One of the better written entries. It has really bad pacing issues even more so with the mandatory substories it has (which also really break the serious vibe of the main story) and at times feels way too slow or explains the same things over and over again BUT in the end it works. It's not anything groundbreaking but it's a simple detective story with a cool premise. Unfortunately doesn't really have any big emotional moments the main series has nor doesn't really connect to it in any way which is a shame.
I absolutely HATED the shit ton of tailing, chasing and searching missions paired with the dumb ass lockpicking. They were fun for a while but they got really annoying really quickly. I do have to say that the addition of different dialogue options was nice. The few court batttles the game had were really fun with this.

Second the sidecontent. There is probably the smallest amount of minigames in any entry. If you don't like Mahjong, Poker or any other similiar bs you're stuck with Darts, Batting Cages, Arcade and two new minigames in a form of drone racing (which is honestly kinda good but sadly doesn't have any sidestory around it) and VR which is basically only there to make you money. So yes, NOT EVEN KARAOKE. They do bait the players with Cabaret minigame a few times (which should be punished by death) but that also doesn't appear.
I really liked the new friend mechanic though. It gives a lot of life into Kamurocho and strikes a good balance between the difficulty of completing them and the enjoyment you get from them. The substories unlock a little late after like 4 hours of gameplay but are basically the same as any other entry except they are locked to reputation which does suck at times but apart from that good as always.
Hostesses were scrapped for new girlfriend feature which I probably enjoyed more than I should have. One thing to note is that it makes Yagami look like an absolute asshole and a creep since cheating is basically mandatory and you date sometimes even 20 years younger girls not to mention 3 of the 4 girls you date were almost raped or sexually assaulted.
There also were two substories with mahjong/poker which literally brought my migraines back after 4 years of being migraine free but I want to forget about them so I'll continue with the rest.

Finally the combat. Man is it sluggish. Dodges, style switching and recovery timings are just too slow and they really kill the pace of the combat. The timegap between walking and sprinting takes too long as well and sometimes certain sprinting abilities don't work immediately resulting in kind of awkward sitautions. The combat overall needs getting used to and you can fix a lot of the problems yourself with ExMode which is REALLY fun to use but you can use it only for a short duration and charging Ex gauge is really hard unless you overuse one overpowered ability.
Apart from that it has also other problems such as the encounters being way too frequent and impossible to dodge, enemies having too much hyperarmor and blocking completely stopping your attacks, the boss fights suffering from crowded small arenas and Mortal Wounds mechanic which either kills you in two hits or shortens your HP until you either visit certain guy or buy his pricey medkits.
I didn't also like how the skills were being unlocked. Half of the skills are either locked behind QR codes hidden around the map or skill books that are even harder to find and harder to get. Getting EXP is needlessly hard since you get almost nothing from fights meaning only good way to get EXP is doing sidecases, main missions and oddly enough, eating at restaurants (no really finishing one restaurant gives like 15x the EXP of one battle). In my case it was really hard to enjoy the combat without majority of the skills so I just cheated them after 10 hours of gametime with a mod but whether you commit or take the easy way as me is up to you.
There is also a thing called Keihin Gang event which makes the encounters increase tenfold and is always a pain the ass to clear and also you get arrested by cops if the fights take too long but I don't want to slander the combat too much.
Either way even after saying all this it still feels and looks good most of the time even though it's really frustrating at times.

Overall Judgment is a pretty good spin-off that feels fresh and unique, pleases the RGG niche and even though it doesn't hit nearly the same highs as the main series is still worth playing. Even through its many flaws its hard to not recommend it even more so when it only takes about 40 hours to complete everything. The sequel Lost Judgment is apparently the best RGG game so far (atleast the cockmunchers say so) so that's one more thing to consider.

7.5/10 - Good