This review contains spoilers
I am conflicted with this game. It does some things better than any yakuza game but at the same time it does some things so sloppy that I am not sure what they were thinking
Story
What it does better is main character. Whenever story revolves about the ichiban himself, story hits so damn hard your heart starts pumping. But rest of it... Feels like a bunch of unfocused ideas.
Corrupt friends, corrupt politicians, corrupt justice force, corrupt civilians, corrupt yakuza. There is a lot of ideas here and none of them are fleshed out other than ichiban the protagonist himself. One idea gets introduced then later it gets solved like nothing happened or story itself forgets about it until remembering and rushing it's conclusion to finish it. Almost feels like they tried to combine multiple yakuza games(especially 1 and 2) into a one game but end up unfocused as a result
I only heard pure good things about the story but unfortunately I don't agree with that sentiment. There is pacebreaker parts as much as good parts for me. To describe what I really meant is, I didn't enjoy any story chapter that doesn't involve the Arakawa storyline. I mean they weren't bad but they didn't support the main story nor connect it in any interesting way in my opinion. It's really easy to see that Arakawa family and Ichiban's relationship is the main dish. But the time spent on mostly separate side character's storylines somehow 2 times longer than that storyline and it just soured my motivation on following the story
Side content
There is dragon kart(mario kart), that feels weird to control and not so fun. Also once you realize drifting button is broken and you can hold infinitely to continue your burst, all the difficulty disappears.
There is movie sleep minigame. You need to press correct buttons to not sleep. Kind of like a harder karaoke game but ichiban's harsh comments about iconic movies really entertained me a lot.
Management minigame returns and it's the best evolution of it. Unlike the 0 incarnation, buying and assigning guards not enough. You can't buy places mindlessly because there is a limit. Every place needs a different kind of guard so you need to change your strategy in every buyout. Not just that, you can't spend your company money freely because this time your biggest enemy is shareholders and they want to big money to be happy. There is so many quirks to this minigame and that makes it so entertaining to play, so much so that it's the best part of the game for me. I had that much fun with it.
Karaoke also returns and it's still fun but... One thing kind of ruined it for me and that is how out of sync the karaoke is unfortunately It really bothered me to the point of leaving this minigame entirely unfortunately.
Side missions of course here and they are fortunately better then judgment games. But still... I can't say it's the best. Other than one substory(forget me not substory) most of them requires you to leave the area and return again and again and again maybe even more than 3 times and it's frustrating. Writing is fun but why the heck it doesn't finish right there and there and forces you to go back and forward multiple times I really don't understand! I didn't like this change so because of that I don't think substories are the best in this game.
Gameplay
Compared to the a lot of people I started pretty optimistic to this game's turn based nature. There were jobs(classes) to choose, magic to prepare, buffs and debuffs to throw etc. But unfortunately it's starts to lost it's magic once you realize the repetitive nature. Unfortunately combat is mostly surface level stuff, you: debuff-> buff-> attack-> heal, you repeat this order trillion amounts of times. Elements nor job systems doesn't change your experience that much, they only fasten your enemy beating time. You still repeat this order until the end of the game and nothing breaks this other than the boss before finale one(yeah that damn boss). Actually there is a lot of moves to spice your gameplay strategy but because of some problems that I will tell under this, they feel wasted.
First problem is big ranged attacks are pretty wack. They have a limited range and you can't even get creative with them where you choose to attack, because... you can't position your character. So you are up to the luck gods that gives you an enemy group that stays really close to each other so ranged attacks actually manage to hit multiple enemies.
Another thing I am not hot on is, you can't order your character to use environmental objects, you can only use them if they are super close to you. It's again, up to the luck gods that spawns you near an object at the beginning of a battle, otherwise you are out of luck.
Oh also, you can't change jobs freely in combat... That's not fun as well. Combine this with, sometimes only way to make enemies fall to the ground or stagger them is with a specific hard hitting or elemental attack. So... have fun with slowly doing chip damage hours and hours to some specific enemy types.
Last thing I didn't like the implementation of, is the environmental heat system. Only Ichiban's one job can do heat attacks and that job is the beginnner job. That's it. Feels like an afterthought to be honest. I think new summon system or job specific super attacks designed to replace the older heat system but I wish there was a way to use the old environmental heat actions more freely.
At least It was fine for me until... that sotenbori part... What killed this system for me is last quarter of the game ups the enemy levels at least 10-15 more than you. Even with doing every damn side content I found I was still underleveled, because they don't give experience that much for some reason. So, sudden level farming requirements with the repetititous gameplay managed to kill my enjoyment entirely unfortunately. I said Fu#k it! And opened trainer and selected immortality and exp booster. I don't have any shame because game forced my hand on this.
I have to congratulate for them tho. This game is probably the most difficult yakuza game compared to other yakuza games for all the wrong reasons. But also if they decided to continue in this bland/repetitious system without adding things to the combat system then I won't accept to play their game honestly anymore. Because repetitive gameplay with forced grind is a death sentence for this franchise fo me.
I can't portray my feelings enough about this part. I really really really hated that grind part and for that reason I probably never damn again replay this game. I would replay any yakuza game rather than playing this one again. Who the heck thought slowing the game to a halt was a good idea I really don't understand!
Pacing
It's not bad as Yakuza 5 but unfocused nature of it makes it frustrating to experience like lost judgment. Especially after the chapter 3, story completely stops and becomes mini stories collection and doesn't pick up where it stopped until last half of the game. At least when it's filled with character moments you have fun but that's only a part of it, it's not the whole story. Also couple of things make this worse. This game's full animation cutscene percentage is very. Very. Low... Most of the cutscenes are people standing still and only their mouths move like robots. This is in the every game right but this game have so much of it that it starts to wear down on you after a while and you start to get bothered from pacing more and more easily. So yeah, pacing isn't that great
So yeah It's a conflicting game for me. Emotional parts are so strong that it fills me with happiness, but lows are so sloppy that I never want to return to this game ever again.
Story
What it does better is main character. Whenever story revolves about the ichiban himself, story hits so damn hard your heart starts pumping. But rest of it... Feels like a bunch of unfocused ideas.
Corrupt friends, corrupt politicians, corrupt justice force, corrupt civilians, corrupt yakuza. There is a lot of ideas here and none of them are fleshed out other than ichiban the protagonist himself. One idea gets introduced then later it gets solved like nothing happened or story itself forgets about it until remembering and rushing it's conclusion to finish it. Almost feels like they tried to combine multiple yakuza games(especially 1 and 2) into a one game but end up unfocused as a result
I only heard pure good things about the story but unfortunately I don't agree with that sentiment. There is pacebreaker parts as much as good parts for me. To describe what I really meant is, I didn't enjoy any story chapter that doesn't involve the Arakawa storyline. I mean they weren't bad but they didn't support the main story nor connect it in any interesting way in my opinion. It's really easy to see that Arakawa family and Ichiban's relationship is the main dish. But the time spent on mostly separate side character's storylines somehow 2 times longer than that storyline and it just soured my motivation on following the story
Side content
There is dragon kart(mario kart), that feels weird to control and not so fun. Also once you realize drifting button is broken and you can hold infinitely to continue your burst, all the difficulty disappears.
There is movie sleep minigame. You need to press correct buttons to not sleep. Kind of like a harder karaoke game but ichiban's harsh comments about iconic movies really entertained me a lot.
Management minigame returns and it's the best evolution of it. Unlike the 0 incarnation, buying and assigning guards not enough. You can't buy places mindlessly because there is a limit. Every place needs a different kind of guard so you need to change your strategy in every buyout. Not just that, you can't spend your company money freely because this time your biggest enemy is shareholders and they want to big money to be happy. There is so many quirks to this minigame and that makes it so entertaining to play, so much so that it's the best part of the game for me. I had that much fun with it.
Karaoke also returns and it's still fun but... One thing kind of ruined it for me and that is how out of sync the karaoke is unfortunately It really bothered me to the point of leaving this minigame entirely unfortunately.
Side missions of course here and they are fortunately better then judgment games. But still... I can't say it's the best. Other than one substory(forget me not substory) most of them requires you to leave the area and return again and again and again maybe even more than 3 times and it's frustrating. Writing is fun but why the heck it doesn't finish right there and there and forces you to go back and forward multiple times I really don't understand! I didn't like this change so because of that I don't think substories are the best in this game.
Gameplay
Compared to the a lot of people I started pretty optimistic to this game's turn based nature. There were jobs(classes) to choose, magic to prepare, buffs and debuffs to throw etc. But unfortunately it's starts to lost it's magic once you realize the repetitive nature. Unfortunately combat is mostly surface level stuff, you: debuff-> buff-> attack-> heal, you repeat this order trillion amounts of times. Elements nor job systems doesn't change your experience that much, they only fasten your enemy beating time. You still repeat this order until the end of the game and nothing breaks this other than the boss before finale one(yeah that damn boss). Actually there is a lot of moves to spice your gameplay strategy but because of some problems that I will tell under this, they feel wasted.
First problem is big ranged attacks are pretty wack. They have a limited range and you can't even get creative with them where you choose to attack, because... you can't position your character. So you are up to the luck gods that gives you an enemy group that stays really close to each other so ranged attacks actually manage to hit multiple enemies.
Another thing I am not hot on is, you can't order your character to use environmental objects, you can only use them if they are super close to you. It's again, up to the luck gods that spawns you near an object at the beginning of a battle, otherwise you are out of luck.
Oh also, you can't change jobs freely in combat... That's not fun as well. Combine this with, sometimes only way to make enemies fall to the ground or stagger them is with a specific hard hitting or elemental attack. So... have fun with slowly doing chip damage hours and hours to some specific enemy types.
Last thing I didn't like the implementation of, is the environmental heat system. Only Ichiban's one job can do heat attacks and that job is the beginnner job. That's it. Feels like an afterthought to be honest. I think new summon system or job specific super attacks designed to replace the older heat system but I wish there was a way to use the old environmental heat actions more freely.
At least It was fine for me until... that sotenbori part... What killed this system for me is last quarter of the game ups the enemy levels at least 10-15 more than you. Even with doing every damn side content I found I was still underleveled, because they don't give experience that much for some reason. So, sudden level farming requirements with the repetititous gameplay managed to kill my enjoyment entirely unfortunately. I said Fu#k it! And opened trainer and selected immortality and exp booster. I don't have any shame because game forced my hand on this.
I have to congratulate for them tho. This game is probably the most difficult yakuza game compared to other yakuza games for all the wrong reasons. But also if they decided to continue in this bland/repetitious system without adding things to the combat system then I won't accept to play their game honestly anymore. Because repetitive gameplay with forced grind is a death sentence for this franchise fo me.
I can't portray my feelings enough about this part. I really really really hated that grind part and for that reason I probably never damn again replay this game. I would replay any yakuza game rather than playing this one again. Who the heck thought slowing the game to a halt was a good idea I really don't understand!
Pacing
It's not bad as Yakuza 5 but unfocused nature of it makes it frustrating to experience like lost judgment. Especially after the chapter 3, story completely stops and becomes mini stories collection and doesn't pick up where it stopped until last half of the game. At least when it's filled with character moments you have fun but that's only a part of it, it's not the whole story. Also couple of things make this worse. This game's full animation cutscene percentage is very. Very. Low... Most of the cutscenes are people standing still and only their mouths move like robots. This is in the every game right but this game have so much of it that it starts to wear down on you after a while and you start to get bothered from pacing more and more easily. So yeah, pacing isn't that great
So yeah It's a conflicting game for me. Emotional parts are so strong that it fills me with happiness, but lows are so sloppy that I never want to return to this game ever again.