This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a shit-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a fuck-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that shitty final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowleging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-fuck sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make shitty jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.