IMPORTANT TIP: Before you go past that final point of no return, you're gonna want to complete the training sequences for Akiyama, Saejima, and Tanimura. Upon completion of each of these, you'll get a piece of armor. MAKE SURE you equip all three of them on Tanimura before you proceed with the finale. You'll thank me later.

Now that that's out of the way, I thought this was a pretty good game! For the first game in the series to have multiple playable characters, I think they pulled it off well. They're all pretty solid, except for Tanimura who, while still good, had some more annoying moments during his parts of the story than the other three (including what I referred to at the beginning; I just know it would've been terrible if i didn't follow my friends' advice). Also, as everyone else who's played has noticed, enemies grab pretty often in this game for whatever reason. It's nothing to worry about in most situations, but it can lead to some nasty combos in certain encounters, so be warned. Anyways, the story is pretty good too, but the twists do start to get kinda ridiculous. That aside, I think giving Kiryu a more minor role for the first time in order to focus on some new characters was a pretty cool choice, and I liked how their individual stories became more and more interconnected over time. I also felt like the OST was a bit weaker this time around too; still very good overall, but there definitely weren't as many standout tracks for me as there were in, say, Yakuza 0 or Yakuza 3. For all of those issues, though, I still think Yakuza 4 is very much worth playing if you've been enjoying the other games!

also they brought back the fishing minigame from the previous game and it still goes hard holy shit