Probably the most overrated Yakuza game of all time. I took some time to think about the game after I finished to see if I'd like it more when thinking about it, but no it just keeps getting worse the more time I give it. I won't even mention the DLC nonsense they did with this.
I'll give it credit where it's due though: the combat is miles ahead of 7. Although they took out shortcuts from 7 and level-scaling is much much worse in this game, the overall casual experience in terms of difficulty felt much better. Removing the big level and money walls that 7 had is a great change and the fact that they give you a recommended level and equipment quality before you start a sequence is a change in the right direction. It also has some incredibly good boss fights. It genuinely has one of the best boss fights RGG has ever designed. The last boss felt appropriately "final" as well with a top notch theme to boot.
Dragon of Dojima style actually made the turn-based combat interesting to me for the first time (and it's also the only job that is tonally consistent with a Yakuza game). The game starts throwing you a lot of money after a certain chapter so making the best weapon isn't as much of an agony-inducing quest as it was in 7. So many quality of life improvements for navigating the map like being able to call taxis from the map and looking at the menu of restaurants and shop items on the map (although you can't view all the selection so this could be improved).
Now what are the problems with this game? I don't know about other players, but I play these games primarily for the story. And... it has one of the worst stories in the entire series. It's a mish-mash of a bunch of themes from previous games, but done 10 times worse in each case. Incredibly tonally inconsistent like Y7. I already disliked Kasuga's character in 7 (I've explained why in my review), and this game actually managed to make him a worse character than he already was. Incredibly boring villains with only one new non-party character that was genuinely well written. The ending was probably the worst Yakuza ending I've experienced considering its position in the story and the relevance that its ending has to the franchise. If Kiryu wasn't in this game and if we didn't have the Kiryu content, this would probably be at the bottom of my list, just barely above Gaiden, but the Kiryu content was good enough to elevate it quite a bit.
It'd be excusable if the story was bad with a good pacing, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. It has the absolute worst pacing in the series. Why did we have to replay Y7 for the first couple chapters and constantly repeat every plot point that happened in that game? It took me 10 hours of in-game time before the Y7 recap started to die down. There were so many times the game forced me into trash side-content I never wanted to engage with, while I was invested in the story and just wanted to move on. Why did I get dragged into dondoko island and forced to engage with it for so long before they let me go back? Why did I get dragged into sujimon battles when I was just trying to move on to the next story sequence? Why did I get dragged into a delivery game? Why are the poundmate tutorial fillers always this annoying and intrusive to the main plot? Imagine that one filler part you have to do with Saejima in Y5 but it's literally the entire game now. Even the substories have poor pacing. They are so unnecessarily long with very little interesting content. I think Y7 had way better substories. The only genuinely great substory in this one was the Let It Snow and the others were either too long or not interesting enough to engage with.
I felt the OST was much better in this one compared to Y7 and some of the boss themes are amazing. The final boss fight theme is one of my top Yakuza tracks of all time.
It is a genuinely good game, but it has so much bloat weighing it down and the story doesn't do it any service. If they at least stuck the landing with the ending, the 60 hours of painful slog I had to get through would have been worth it, but it wasn't. It's kind of weird that when rating this, I had to keep telling myself that I probably liked it more than Kiwami 1 and 2 to justify my rating, but I'm not even sure if that's true.
I'll give it credit where it's due though: the combat is miles ahead of 7. Although they took out shortcuts from 7 and level-scaling is much much worse in this game, the overall casual experience in terms of difficulty felt much better. Removing the big level and money walls that 7 had is a great change and the fact that they give you a recommended level and equipment quality before you start a sequence is a change in the right direction. It also has some incredibly good boss fights. It genuinely has one of the best boss fights RGG has ever designed. The last boss felt appropriately "final" as well with a top notch theme to boot.
Dragon of Dojima style actually made the turn-based combat interesting to me for the first time (and it's also the only job that is tonally consistent with a Yakuza game). The game starts throwing you a lot of money after a certain chapter so making the best weapon isn't as much of an agony-inducing quest as it was in 7. So many quality of life improvements for navigating the map like being able to call taxis from the map and looking at the menu of restaurants and shop items on the map (although you can't view all the selection so this could be improved).
Now what are the problems with this game? I don't know about other players, but I play these games primarily for the story. And... it has one of the worst stories in the entire series. It's a mish-mash of a bunch of themes from previous games, but done 10 times worse in each case. Incredibly tonally inconsistent like Y7. I already disliked Kasuga's character in 7 (I've explained why in my review), and this game actually managed to make him a worse character than he already was. Incredibly boring villains with only one new non-party character that was genuinely well written. The ending was probably the worst Yakuza ending I've experienced considering its position in the story and the relevance that its ending has to the franchise. If Kiryu wasn't in this game and if we didn't have the Kiryu content, this would probably be at the bottom of my list, just barely above Gaiden, but the Kiryu content was good enough to elevate it quite a bit.
It'd be excusable if the story was bad with a good pacing, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. It has the absolute worst pacing in the series. Why did we have to replay Y7 for the first couple chapters and constantly repeat every plot point that happened in that game? It took me 10 hours of in-game time before the Y7 recap started to die down. There were so many times the game forced me into trash side-content I never wanted to engage with, while I was invested in the story and just wanted to move on. Why did I get dragged into dondoko island and forced to engage with it for so long before they let me go back? Why did I get dragged into sujimon battles when I was just trying to move on to the next story sequence? Why did I get dragged into a delivery game? Why are the poundmate tutorial fillers always this annoying and intrusive to the main plot? Imagine that one filler part you have to do with Saejima in Y5 but it's literally the entire game now. Even the substories have poor pacing. They are so unnecessarily long with very little interesting content. I think Y7 had way better substories. The only genuinely great substory in this one was the Let It Snow and the others were either too long or not interesting enough to engage with.
I felt the OST was much better in this one compared to Y7 and some of the boss themes are amazing. The final boss fight theme is one of my top Yakuza tracks of all time.
It is a genuinely good game, but it has so much bloat weighing it down and the story doesn't do it any service. If they at least stuck the landing with the ending, the 60 hours of painful slog I had to get through would have been worth it, but it wasn't. It's kind of weird that when rating this, I had to keep telling myself that I probably liked it more than Kiwami 1 and 2 to justify my rating, but I'm not even sure if that's true.