this might just be the worst rgg game to date. i've played every rgg game available in english, all of them to completion, and this is the only one that made me feel miserable playing.
(i'm sorry if anything in this review feels a bit out of place, i was writing and revising it whenever i decided to put the game down for a while.)
to start the review off, i should bring up the main focus of the game. the story is abysmal with too much of a focus on yagami hanging out at a high school to stop bullying. you go in expecting some murder mystery, but the game then spends 2 hours straight forcing you to walk around a highschool and watch cutscenes in a high school. the murder mystery is still there, but every time the game gets into it and you think you're done with the high school, you're back at the high school. also, the game doesnt open up until after about 7 hours of padded out cutscenes that go on and on and on, drip feeding you the actual story inbetween its nonsense that i just cant bring myself to care about. by the time i spent over an hour watching cutscenes in that fucking school with those kids and teachers i just did not care about, i started just barely paying attention to the cutscenes and quickly skimming dialogue just to get the school shit over with. no other yakuza game has made me want to skip dialogue on my first playthrough. not even yakuza 3 or 4 made me want to outright skip the story, despite those having without a doubt the worst stories in (mainline) yakuza.
the pacing in this game is just some of the worst i've seen in a game and does nothing but waste your time. and it doesnt help that the game barely gives you any battles in like the first half, so most the time you're just doing investigations, which were barely improved from the first game, you're still stuck in a small area forced to zoom in and find a tiny thing with vague hints and the worst fov youve seen in a game. the trailing missions were barely improved, its still some of the most bare bones stealth where you stay behind a guy, find cover and repeat for 5 minutes until the mission is over and thats just so infuriatingly boring, only now sometimes you can press triangle to hide in plain sight. the saving grace is it's barely used. theres also a new camera mechanic, but its just kinda nothing. this aint dead rising. theres also a dancing minigame... okay. a skateboard mechanic to make you go faster, but it triggers automatically when you hold run, and half the time you just end up tripping when you take it out either by the control change, touching a civilian or just getting on the sidewalk, and god help you if you let yagami have even a sip of beer. it just ends up getting in the way, at least until you get the board thats so fast that the faults no longer matter. even the substories are very nothing, lackluster, generic and boring. the combat is at least improved from the original judgment. crane style is mostly the same but less repetitive and button-mashy. tiger style is no longer "hold square to win" and actually expects you to actually play the game. snake style is the best one, you can counter things when you block at the right time and it allows you to do special moves that gets the enemy to surrender instantly, but it doesn't always work, at least in my experience. there are some good upgrades for the moves too, i particularly like the skateboard upgrade for tiger style. the combat is good, but its no tiger drop. all these fighting styles are fine no longer the brainless styles they were in the first judgment, however they're still not as good as mainline yakuza combat, unless you're genuinely the kind of person to go "yeah bro tanimura from yakuza 4, now HE had the best combat in the series".
another issue is how there are barely any substories that i've encountered. i said earlier that LJ doesnt really open up until about 7 hours in. thats kind of true, however, it doesnt open up much, you get probably 7 substories and a couple of other minor things to do, which seems like a good amount sure, but most of the substories were high school bullshit that went on and on and on, and the other half were just kinda nothing and forgettable. i've always held the belief that the substories are the meat of the yakuza series. but once you're done with those, you... dont seem to get anymore? so you go back to the story and watch more cutscenes that take their sweet time, for a story that you stopped caring about 4 hours ago, spend way too much time doing first person investigations which are just annoying and time consuming. like way too time consuming, you'll spend like 10 minutes looking for that magic pixel you missed, maybe you'll fight a boss if you're lucky, or you'll go back to the school if you're unlucky. and when you're finally thrust back into the open world... nothing. no more substories or anything, so you go back to the couch to rest till morning for the story, and still no more side content... this is the most linear RGG game, theres just no side content, and what little you do get is weirdly hidden behind finding "totally not twitter" posts talking bout a random subject then very slowly walking up and down a street using one of the new gimmick first person devices (or a dog you can walk) to find some arbitrary thing. its just not fun. it wasn't until i was in chapter 9 and 25 hours into that i actually decided to do the dancing minigame again, and thats when it hit me. all of the side content i thought was just missing or hidden, was at the fucking school there are entire substories and gameplay elements and minigames you would never even know about if you don't frequently go back to that school whenever possible. you see squirrel grafitti all over the place, but you cant do anything with them until you go check the squirel at the school at an arbitraty moment in the story way later than you'd expect, long after you've already marked the squirrel, and see a little girl (who is for some reason just randomly at a high school?) staring at the grafitti. theres the aforementioned dancing (which was better in yakuza 5, just sayin). there's skateboarding races, and a skatepark. there's a weirdly in-depth robot game where you try to capture the area with blocks and its actually really fun. there's motorcycle races which i didn't even know about until i was 35 hours in the game. there's more photography. there's dating bar girls (why is that tied to the high school...?), there's gambling (seriously why is that tied to the high school), and there's boxxing. there's also an esports club where you play virtua fighter 5, but vf5 is also in the sega arcade, so it's not locked behind doing high school bullshit. the question is, why do i have to do all that high school bullshit to do any of these minigames, some of which are kinda fun. but others arent.
why are they tied to this singular linear narrative about the high school mystery club? there's this fucking stupidly long side story in this game for some reason. now then, by this point i started skipping all cutscenes that weren't directly tied to the story, and even skipping everything, it took me 10 hours to do most of what the school has to offer, it's like a whole other game in that school with a whole other story. yakuza games have always had a lot of side content but it's never been as linear at this before. so for example, to even get anything else, you need to do the dancing minigame about 8 times, and occassionally going back to the mystery club room. then you get another story with the robots. you do some of that, go back and forth between the robotics room and the mystery room until you earn skateboarding. now then, this is when it gets annoying because the skatepark is outside of the school on the other side of the map so when you need to go back and forth, which thankfully isnt very often for the skaters, its annoying. then you unlock the esports missions. do enough of those then you unlock the gambling missions. do enough of those, then you unlock the boxxing minigame and heres where it gets really annoying because the game loves to constantly interrupt your boxxing after you finish a couple matches. sometimes after i fight, you'll need to leave the ring to get a drink with your opponent. sometimes you'll need to sneak someone around, fairly often you'll need to go back to the mystery club room (which is annoying since its another place thats outside of the school for some reason). do enough of that and you'll earn the photography missions, do enough of those and you'll get the bike missions (which are probably the worst of the school minigames and they go on forever), do enough of those and you earn the bar dating missions. all this content hidden behind whether or not you want to spend forever at this fucking school that you've no doubt grown to hate and do the dancing minigame 8 times in a row. it doesn't help that the school might as well be a maze, and the path your marker makes is always just awful and takes you the long way.
as for activities not tied to the school, there is a bit. you can gamble with koi-koi, oicho-kobo, mahjong, you can play darts, go to the sega arcade and play some games (mostly fighting), there's a working master system but it only starts out with alex kidd, theres a ufo catcher, there are drone races and there's a mario party board. the drone races are something i barely touched. i still have ptsd of the drone races from judgment 1. i don't have the strength to do more tournaments. and the mario party boards are a bit odd compared to the first game. there are now 2 players (one an AI) and a lot of the board spaces will now give or take away stars, which allow you to use certain skills like multiply your dice by 5, force p2 to skip his turn, give yourself 1-2 more spaces on your dice roll, deal damage to your opponent, heal, etc. you start out with very little though and the substory tied to the game is a bit of a pain because the ai will just abuse the system hard. it quickly turns into a game of "who can spam turn skip and get enough stars for the multiplier first". there's always frustration in mario party due to rng but adding these abilities is just awful. do em all and your reward is to see a middle aged japanese man say "oh, word?". the real pain in this minigame however is in its play passes. you need 3 to play and it still uses them up if you lose, but they're so rare that i only earned 9 in my playthrough before i just looked up how to get the free passes. and i waited a while, until like chapter 9. i understand that the reason is you earn so much money from it, averaging around at least 500 thousand yen on the shorter courses and 2 million on the longer ones, which is ludicrous, but i really don't feel like restricting the play passes so hard was an acceptable compromise, maybe earn less money and make it so you only need 1 play pass, that way they wouldnt even need to change the amount of passes and how rarely you earn them. it's not like money is a big deal in the game anyway, you get it like candy and don't have much to spend on thats important. it got to the point where i was buying 99 of every material just because i could. but there are also some staple activities that are just missing from judgment, activities that were some of the best parts of yakuza. no colesseum, no karaoke, no bowling, no pocket circuit racing, all the best minigames are missing and it sucks.
i did every side story in this game (because i believe that no yakuza game is complete until you beat amon) and for some of them, the requirements to get them is so... odd and unexpected. sometimes you need to do weird shit like go to random conversations marked on the map (not all of them though since some do nothing) listen in on them for 30 seconds or so, get a keyword out of it, check the keyword on not-twitter, find the cluster of people talking about the word on the map, then when i go to it, i can finally look around for the substory, which sometimes involves me getting my sound amplifier or tracker out, which is just a whole lot of extra steps for something that should be more straightforwardfor something that was so much straightforward in the other games, even before yakuza started marking the substories on the map for you. its just a whole lot of busywork to prevent you from getting to the good stuff. it doesn't help that there are so few substories. there are 42, which sounds like a good number, but few of the substories really felt special or memorable, so it still just leaves you wanting. once you do all the side stories, you get to fight amon, a staple of the yakuza series. a secret true final boss that tests your skill... but he's just cheap in this game. he restores his health to full every other time he hits you, he spams attacks that i swear are just unavoidable, whenever he does hit you, you get stunned and have to mash X to get up and even then he'll usually hit you with another move that stuns you and often just knocks you across the arena.
the main issue of this game in a nutshell is; too much school bullshit, an uninteresting plot that doesn't even try to get you invested until it's way too late, and everything this game does has been done better in almost every other yakuza game, and the game frequently wastes your time. i cant even see many positives of this game because whatever positives this game does have, has been done a dozen times before and a dozen times better in most yakuza games. if the judgment series is literally your entry point to the yakuza series, maybe you'd like it? but there are better entry points. its not a hard series to get into, dont let the sheer number of games overwhelm you. yakuza 1, yakuza 0, yakuza kiwami, yakuza 7, those are all better starting points and most of those are on just about every modern console nowadays, plus the ps2 yakuza games emulate well. just saying. maybe its unfair to judge a spin-off by the mainline series, but when the spin-off is so similar to the main series, just... worse, i think its completely fair.
oh and this is a bit of a nitpick, but this game has 3 fighting styles and you swap between all of them by tapping the down button, but the left and right buttons are barely used... why not just assign the fighting styles to different buttons? like come on. another nitpick, and this is a bit of a bigger one imo, but there are tutorials that just never go away. like you get these phone messages all throughout the game, repeating the same basic stuff like 'when to use snake style' or shit like that. theres also button prompts that just stay in the bottom right corner of the screen forever. iirc the first judgment had it as well, but it went away after a few chapters when the game assumed you had a grasp on the gameplay, but it just doesn't go away in lost judgment and honestly it gets grating after 30 hours and you're almost at the end of the game with the game still assuming you dont know what the X button does. and god forbid you have an OLED tv or something, get ready for the worst burn-in of its life.
oh and theres DLC for this game, which wouldnt be much of an issue, but some of it was day 1 for $10 and should have been in the game in the first place. theres also a $35 season pass, and you can really tell a chunk of the town was chopped out for dlc in yokohama. theres an entire area of the town from yakuza 7 that just has weird "under construction" shit in front of it, but all it really does is make you take the long way around some buildings and waste your time. it doesn't even cut off a significant amount, only like a small portion south and another even smaller part south-west and only in yokohama, there's no way it isn't just for dlc. it makes the game feel unfinished. well that and the fact that barely any side content is in kamurocho or yokohama, and its all in the fucking school, making the other places just feel barren at times. there are also things in this game that will clearly be expanded upon in dlc in the most blatant way. off the top of my head there's the motorcycle races which has next to no customization or upgrading, but its getting dlc. then theres the hostess dress up minigame which sort of was in the game for a minute when a certain character had to dress up, but that was an isolated moment and theres no spot in the game you can do more of that right now, but you can still buy the dresses and jewelery for when it'll be added as dlc. i know dlc has been a problem in games for over a decade now, but yakuza's always been safe from that for the most part. whenevever there was dlc, it never felt like a part of the game was chopped off or just left unfinished so that they could give it to us later. this game made me feel scammed. i didn't buy the dlc and the game isn't good enough to make me want it either. i aint paying $45 on a game i paid $60 on. a game i didn't even enjoy.
honestly i'm struggling, honest to god struggling to find any real positives about this game. i guess it looks nice, but even the first judgment looked better (unless you play it on ps5 via the remaster) and most other dragon engine yakuza games look as good if not better. i guess the combat is fine, with snake style being the best. as i said before, the combat is largely improved from the first game, but crane style still isnt very good, tiger style is fine and got a well needed nerf because of just how OP it was in the first game and snake style is a welcome addition, but frankly i still think the combat in most yakuza games is better. some of the school games are fun like the robots or the boxxing, but they require you to go through so much bullshit to even get them that honestly it isn't worth it. i guess the master system games are neat, but it doesnt have the best choices. alex kidd is the default and i guess thats fine, he was segas mascot before sonic came around. fantasy zone is an odd choice since you can literally play the arcade version in the sega arcade and its kinda better, but then you also got shit like quartet which just sucks. theres also the sega arcade with some returning arcade games from previous RGG games. but even the sega arcade doesnt have the best picks compared to previous ones. i guess if you really want to play the single player to fighting vipers, virtua fighter 5 and sonic the fighters, but i know fighting game fans and they say the single player is always the worst thing imagineable. me personally? i hate fighting games, so they mean nothing to me. fantasy zone, motor raide, space harrier and super hang-on are all fun tho, even if they're all returning games. the only new one is hama of the dead, which is sort of a rail shooter where you shoot zombies in yokohama, the area lost judgment largely takes place in (returning from yakuza 7). its more or less the same as the previous hama of the dead, but its still fun. theres also some gambing, but you dont get the good gambling games like poker and blackjack until you do side content at the school, all you have early on is oicho-kobo, mahjong and stuff like that. as you can see i'm really honest to god struggling to compliment this game, most of my positives just boil down to something that was in another game or being able to play old retro games. every day i'm considering just trading this in to gamestop and getting no more heroes 3 instead.
personally, i'm glad we won't get a third judgment game. much as i like yagami, the games have too many problems and just... arent fun. only at least the first game had an engaging story, lost judgment has nothing of value that literally any other yakuza game wont give you already (and better). at times it feels like i'm alone in thinking this game is terrible, but i streamed the entirety of it on discord to a bunch of friends (1-7 people depending on who was available), and got the same response out of all of them. they all hated it. some of them were fans of the series, some were new. the reaction was always the same. "this game blows". i'll say this, pc players aint missing much by not having the judgment games on steam.
tl;dr this game blows and i legitimately don't understand how anyone could like anything about this, it is one of the most vile game's i've played, and it didn't even have the decency to be fun
(i'm sorry if anything in this review feels a bit out of place, i was writing and revising it whenever i decided to put the game down for a while.)
to start the review off, i should bring up the main focus of the game. the story is abysmal with too much of a focus on yagami hanging out at a high school to stop bullying. you go in expecting some murder mystery, but the game then spends 2 hours straight forcing you to walk around a highschool and watch cutscenes in a high school. the murder mystery is still there, but every time the game gets into it and you think you're done with the high school, you're back at the high school. also, the game doesnt open up until after about 7 hours of padded out cutscenes that go on and on and on, drip feeding you the actual story inbetween its nonsense that i just cant bring myself to care about. by the time i spent over an hour watching cutscenes in that fucking school with those kids and teachers i just did not care about, i started just barely paying attention to the cutscenes and quickly skimming dialogue just to get the school shit over with. no other yakuza game has made me want to skip dialogue on my first playthrough. not even yakuza 3 or 4 made me want to outright skip the story, despite those having without a doubt the worst stories in (mainline) yakuza.
the pacing in this game is just some of the worst i've seen in a game and does nothing but waste your time. and it doesnt help that the game barely gives you any battles in like the first half, so most the time you're just doing investigations, which were barely improved from the first game, you're still stuck in a small area forced to zoom in and find a tiny thing with vague hints and the worst fov youve seen in a game. the trailing missions were barely improved, its still some of the most bare bones stealth where you stay behind a guy, find cover and repeat for 5 minutes until the mission is over and thats just so infuriatingly boring, only now sometimes you can press triangle to hide in plain sight. the saving grace is it's barely used. theres also a new camera mechanic, but its just kinda nothing. this aint dead rising. theres also a dancing minigame... okay. a skateboard mechanic to make you go faster, but it triggers automatically when you hold run, and half the time you just end up tripping when you take it out either by the control change, touching a civilian or just getting on the sidewalk, and god help you if you let yagami have even a sip of beer. it just ends up getting in the way, at least until you get the board thats so fast that the faults no longer matter. even the substories are very nothing, lackluster, generic and boring. the combat is at least improved from the original judgment. crane style is mostly the same but less repetitive and button-mashy. tiger style is no longer "hold square to win" and actually expects you to actually play the game. snake style is the best one, you can counter things when you block at the right time and it allows you to do special moves that gets the enemy to surrender instantly, but it doesn't always work, at least in my experience. there are some good upgrades for the moves too, i particularly like the skateboard upgrade for tiger style. the combat is good, but its no tiger drop. all these fighting styles are fine no longer the brainless styles they were in the first judgment, however they're still not as good as mainline yakuza combat, unless you're genuinely the kind of person to go "yeah bro tanimura from yakuza 4, now HE had the best combat in the series".
another issue is how there are barely any substories that i've encountered. i said earlier that LJ doesnt really open up until about 7 hours in. thats kind of true, however, it doesnt open up much, you get probably 7 substories and a couple of other minor things to do, which seems like a good amount sure, but most of the substories were high school bullshit that went on and on and on, and the other half were just kinda nothing and forgettable. i've always held the belief that the substories are the meat of the yakuza series. but once you're done with those, you... dont seem to get anymore? so you go back to the story and watch more cutscenes that take their sweet time, for a story that you stopped caring about 4 hours ago, spend way too much time doing first person investigations which are just annoying and time consuming. like way too time consuming, you'll spend like 10 minutes looking for that magic pixel you missed, maybe you'll fight a boss if you're lucky, or you'll go back to the school if you're unlucky. and when you're finally thrust back into the open world... nothing. no more substories or anything, so you go back to the couch to rest till morning for the story, and still no more side content... this is the most linear RGG game, theres just no side content, and what little you do get is weirdly hidden behind finding "totally not twitter" posts talking bout a random subject then very slowly walking up and down a street using one of the new gimmick first person devices (or a dog you can walk) to find some arbitrary thing. its just not fun. it wasn't until i was in chapter 9 and 25 hours into that i actually decided to do the dancing minigame again, and thats when it hit me. all of the side content i thought was just missing or hidden, was at the fucking school there are entire substories and gameplay elements and minigames you would never even know about if you don't frequently go back to that school whenever possible. you see squirrel grafitti all over the place, but you cant do anything with them until you go check the squirel at the school at an arbitraty moment in the story way later than you'd expect, long after you've already marked the squirrel, and see a little girl (who is for some reason just randomly at a high school?) staring at the grafitti. theres the aforementioned dancing (which was better in yakuza 5, just sayin). there's skateboarding races, and a skatepark. there's a weirdly in-depth robot game where you try to capture the area with blocks and its actually really fun. there's motorcycle races which i didn't even know about until i was 35 hours in the game. there's more photography. there's dating bar girls (why is that tied to the high school...?), there's gambling (seriously why is that tied to the high school), and there's boxxing. there's also an esports club where you play virtua fighter 5, but vf5 is also in the sega arcade, so it's not locked behind doing high school bullshit. the question is, why do i have to do all that high school bullshit to do any of these minigames, some of which are kinda fun. but others arent.
why are they tied to this singular linear narrative about the high school mystery club? there's this fucking stupidly long side story in this game for some reason. now then, by this point i started skipping all cutscenes that weren't directly tied to the story, and even skipping everything, it took me 10 hours to do most of what the school has to offer, it's like a whole other game in that school with a whole other story. yakuza games have always had a lot of side content but it's never been as linear at this before. so for example, to even get anything else, you need to do the dancing minigame about 8 times, and occassionally going back to the mystery club room. then you get another story with the robots. you do some of that, go back and forth between the robotics room and the mystery room until you earn skateboarding. now then, this is when it gets annoying because the skatepark is outside of the school on the other side of the map so when you need to go back and forth, which thankfully isnt very often for the skaters, its annoying. then you unlock the esports missions. do enough of those then you unlock the gambling missions. do enough of those, then you unlock the boxxing minigame and heres where it gets really annoying because the game loves to constantly interrupt your boxxing after you finish a couple matches. sometimes after i fight, you'll need to leave the ring to get a drink with your opponent. sometimes you'll need to sneak someone around, fairly often you'll need to go back to the mystery club room (which is annoying since its another place thats outside of the school for some reason). do enough of that and you'll earn the photography missions, do enough of those and you'll get the bike missions (which are probably the worst of the school minigames and they go on forever), do enough of those and you earn the bar dating missions. all this content hidden behind whether or not you want to spend forever at this fucking school that you've no doubt grown to hate and do the dancing minigame 8 times in a row. it doesn't help that the school might as well be a maze, and the path your marker makes is always just awful and takes you the long way.
as for activities not tied to the school, there is a bit. you can gamble with koi-koi, oicho-kobo, mahjong, you can play darts, go to the sega arcade and play some games (mostly fighting), there's a working master system but it only starts out with alex kidd, theres a ufo catcher, there are drone races and there's a mario party board. the drone races are something i barely touched. i still have ptsd of the drone races from judgment 1. i don't have the strength to do more tournaments. and the mario party boards are a bit odd compared to the first game. there are now 2 players (one an AI) and a lot of the board spaces will now give or take away stars, which allow you to use certain skills like multiply your dice by 5, force p2 to skip his turn, give yourself 1-2 more spaces on your dice roll, deal damage to your opponent, heal, etc. you start out with very little though and the substory tied to the game is a bit of a pain because the ai will just abuse the system hard. it quickly turns into a game of "who can spam turn skip and get enough stars for the multiplier first". there's always frustration in mario party due to rng but adding these abilities is just awful. do em all and your reward is to see a middle aged japanese man say "oh, word?". the real pain in this minigame however is in its play passes. you need 3 to play and it still uses them up if you lose, but they're so rare that i only earned 9 in my playthrough before i just looked up how to get the free passes. and i waited a while, until like chapter 9. i understand that the reason is you earn so much money from it, averaging around at least 500 thousand yen on the shorter courses and 2 million on the longer ones, which is ludicrous, but i really don't feel like restricting the play passes so hard was an acceptable compromise, maybe earn less money and make it so you only need 1 play pass, that way they wouldnt even need to change the amount of passes and how rarely you earn them. it's not like money is a big deal in the game anyway, you get it like candy and don't have much to spend on thats important. it got to the point where i was buying 99 of every material just because i could. but there are also some staple activities that are just missing from judgment, activities that were some of the best parts of yakuza. no colesseum, no karaoke, no bowling, no pocket circuit racing, all the best minigames are missing and it sucks.
i did every side story in this game (because i believe that no yakuza game is complete until you beat amon) and for some of them, the requirements to get them is so... odd and unexpected. sometimes you need to do weird shit like go to random conversations marked on the map (not all of them though since some do nothing) listen in on them for 30 seconds or so, get a keyword out of it, check the keyword on not-twitter, find the cluster of people talking about the word on the map, then when i go to it, i can finally look around for the substory, which sometimes involves me getting my sound amplifier or tracker out, which is just a whole lot of extra steps for something that should be more straightforwardfor something that was so much straightforward in the other games, even before yakuza started marking the substories on the map for you. its just a whole lot of busywork to prevent you from getting to the good stuff. it doesn't help that there are so few substories. there are 42, which sounds like a good number, but few of the substories really felt special or memorable, so it still just leaves you wanting. once you do all the side stories, you get to fight amon, a staple of the yakuza series. a secret true final boss that tests your skill... but he's just cheap in this game. he restores his health to full every other time he hits you, he spams attacks that i swear are just unavoidable, whenever he does hit you, you get stunned and have to mash X to get up and even then he'll usually hit you with another move that stuns you and often just knocks you across the arena.
the main issue of this game in a nutshell is; too much school bullshit, an uninteresting plot that doesn't even try to get you invested until it's way too late, and everything this game does has been done better in almost every other yakuza game, and the game frequently wastes your time. i cant even see many positives of this game because whatever positives this game does have, has been done a dozen times before and a dozen times better in most yakuza games. if the judgment series is literally your entry point to the yakuza series, maybe you'd like it? but there are better entry points. its not a hard series to get into, dont let the sheer number of games overwhelm you. yakuza 1, yakuza 0, yakuza kiwami, yakuza 7, those are all better starting points and most of those are on just about every modern console nowadays, plus the ps2 yakuza games emulate well. just saying. maybe its unfair to judge a spin-off by the mainline series, but when the spin-off is so similar to the main series, just... worse, i think its completely fair.
oh and this is a bit of a nitpick, but this game has 3 fighting styles and you swap between all of them by tapping the down button, but the left and right buttons are barely used... why not just assign the fighting styles to different buttons? like come on. another nitpick, and this is a bit of a bigger one imo, but there are tutorials that just never go away. like you get these phone messages all throughout the game, repeating the same basic stuff like 'when to use snake style' or shit like that. theres also button prompts that just stay in the bottom right corner of the screen forever. iirc the first judgment had it as well, but it went away after a few chapters when the game assumed you had a grasp on the gameplay, but it just doesn't go away in lost judgment and honestly it gets grating after 30 hours and you're almost at the end of the game with the game still assuming you dont know what the X button does. and god forbid you have an OLED tv or something, get ready for the worst burn-in of its life.
oh and theres DLC for this game, which wouldnt be much of an issue, but some of it was day 1 for $10 and should have been in the game in the first place. theres also a $35 season pass, and you can really tell a chunk of the town was chopped out for dlc in yokohama. theres an entire area of the town from yakuza 7 that just has weird "under construction" shit in front of it, but all it really does is make you take the long way around some buildings and waste your time. it doesn't even cut off a significant amount, only like a small portion south and another even smaller part south-west and only in yokohama, there's no way it isn't just for dlc. it makes the game feel unfinished. well that and the fact that barely any side content is in kamurocho or yokohama, and its all in the fucking school, making the other places just feel barren at times. there are also things in this game that will clearly be expanded upon in dlc in the most blatant way. off the top of my head there's the motorcycle races which has next to no customization or upgrading, but its getting dlc. then theres the hostess dress up minigame which sort of was in the game for a minute when a certain character had to dress up, but that was an isolated moment and theres no spot in the game you can do more of that right now, but you can still buy the dresses and jewelery for when it'll be added as dlc. i know dlc has been a problem in games for over a decade now, but yakuza's always been safe from that for the most part. whenevever there was dlc, it never felt like a part of the game was chopped off or just left unfinished so that they could give it to us later. this game made me feel scammed. i didn't buy the dlc and the game isn't good enough to make me want it either. i aint paying $45 on a game i paid $60 on. a game i didn't even enjoy.
honestly i'm struggling, honest to god struggling to find any real positives about this game. i guess it looks nice, but even the first judgment looked better (unless you play it on ps5 via the remaster) and most other dragon engine yakuza games look as good if not better. i guess the combat is fine, with snake style being the best. as i said before, the combat is largely improved from the first game, but crane style still isnt very good, tiger style is fine and got a well needed nerf because of just how OP it was in the first game and snake style is a welcome addition, but frankly i still think the combat in most yakuza games is better. some of the school games are fun like the robots or the boxxing, but they require you to go through so much bullshit to even get them that honestly it isn't worth it. i guess the master system games are neat, but it doesnt have the best choices. alex kidd is the default and i guess thats fine, he was segas mascot before sonic came around. fantasy zone is an odd choice since you can literally play the arcade version in the sega arcade and its kinda better, but then you also got shit like quartet which just sucks. theres also the sega arcade with some returning arcade games from previous RGG games. but even the sega arcade doesnt have the best picks compared to previous ones. i guess if you really want to play the single player to fighting vipers, virtua fighter 5 and sonic the fighters, but i know fighting game fans and they say the single player is always the worst thing imagineable. me personally? i hate fighting games, so they mean nothing to me. fantasy zone, motor raide, space harrier and super hang-on are all fun tho, even if they're all returning games. the only new one is hama of the dead, which is sort of a rail shooter where you shoot zombies in yokohama, the area lost judgment largely takes place in (returning from yakuza 7). its more or less the same as the previous hama of the dead, but its still fun. theres also some gambing, but you dont get the good gambling games like poker and blackjack until you do side content at the school, all you have early on is oicho-kobo, mahjong and stuff like that. as you can see i'm really honest to god struggling to compliment this game, most of my positives just boil down to something that was in another game or being able to play old retro games. every day i'm considering just trading this in to gamestop and getting no more heroes 3 instead.
personally, i'm glad we won't get a third judgment game. much as i like yagami, the games have too many problems and just... arent fun. only at least the first game had an engaging story, lost judgment has nothing of value that literally any other yakuza game wont give you already (and better). at times it feels like i'm alone in thinking this game is terrible, but i streamed the entirety of it on discord to a bunch of friends (1-7 people depending on who was available), and got the same response out of all of them. they all hated it. some of them were fans of the series, some were new. the reaction was always the same. "this game blows". i'll say this, pc players aint missing much by not having the judgment games on steam.
tl;dr this game blows and i legitimately don't understand how anyone could like anything about this, it is one of the most vile game's i've played, and it didn't even have the decency to be fun