Picked this back up after getting stuck before a wall of difficulty in Chapter 9. I heavily dislike grinding, so the fact that it feels like the pacing of the game has built-in sections where they expect you to grind up to 10 levels at a time (up to 5 hours of mindless gameplay) feels like straight-up padding. Which is a shame, because there's already so much quality here that there's no need to pad it out. This is my first Yakuza, so I have a feeling I'll like the original series a bit more if it avoids my primary qualms.