maybe the most i struggled to push myself through a RGG game, tbh. the school story structure sounds cool in concept, but in the end it means you start out with a world much less dense in activity than usual RGG fare until you decide to engage with school minigames. the number of micromanagement minigames increases once again, with the robotics as a particularly negative standout. very transparently offers DLC items to lessen the minigame frustration.

main plot is done a bit of a disservice by how disconnected it is from the main group of the first game other than yagami. found myself enjoying it much more when the group dynamic that made the first game stand out was at play, which is sadly pretty infrequent until the very end. thankfully yakuza 7 carried that torch well. other than that it's kinda clumsy, kinda well-meaning ripped-from-the-headlines stuff, the usual fare you'd expect from the series

in the end it's a yakuza game so it can only be so bad