I enjoyed Yakuza 6 way more than I expected to, mostly because of the characters and the story. Shoutout to the entire Hirose family and Someya for being amazing. The final few chapters of the game and ESPECIALLY the finale are super exciting and I enjoyed every second of it.

I haven't played much side content, so maybe I'll change this rating when I come back and play more, but for now I only have a few minor complaints. Dragon Engine combat stills feels a little rough even after upgrading my PC, but I had a better experience with it than I did with Kiwami 2 (I think mostly thanks to the performance improvement). I also thought it was kinda dumb that I had to sit through multiple occasions of the JUSTIS/clan creator side story interrupting the main story, but again just a minor complaint.

Seriously, the tension in the finale and the ending (which I imagine is controversial but I thought was great) make this 100% worth playing.

This game is ridiculously big. This is great in many ways - I loved having 5 cities to explore and piecing together how each character is involved in the overarching story. Unfortunately, it's hard to achieve this scale without some slow moments throughout the game. Saejima's section was particularly rough for me, especially at the start. I was also semi-disappointed by the ending, but I don't think it was particularly bad, just a little underwhelming.

Outside of the pacing, there's so much more to love about Yakuza 5. Playable Haruka and Shinada's character top my list, but I was also a huge fan of the friendship between Akiyama and Haruka. Doing more side content will be an enormous time investment, but I'd still like to come back soon and experience more from this game.

The main characters completely made this game for me. They all play completely different from each other, and it's really fun to take a different approach to combat depending on who you play as, even though it is all under the same system. Tanimura, especially, is super unique and I had a blast playing with him.

Unfortunately, I was not a huge fan of 4's story. It felt really confusing for most of the game as there are so many moving parts. I could just be dumb, but I would have preferred something a little easier to follow lol. I was kinda disappointed that there is no new map to explore, but there are many new areas of Kamurocho which helped a bit. Overall, good Yakuza game but far from the best.