I love the new protagonist. Kiryu's stoic personality is so much less interesting than Ichiban's stubborn straightforward nature. The party members are fun. The story starts off really good. It kinda meanders for a while, but it massively picks up steam again for the final arc. Over the top cheesy drama like you'd hope from the series. Music is pretty good.
OK BUT. I don't hate JRPG combat, and I even love lots of JRPGs. This one is mediocre at best. Painfully slow combat animations. Extremely punishing job system. Horribly balanced classes. Later chapters need massive grinding. Enemies and bosses become massive health sponges. The 6 attack types are horribly distributed, with most attacks just being physical, and certain bosses resist that in order to ruin your fun. The dungeons are basically completely linear and you can't save in them. Fortunately I only died to a boss once. You can retry a boss by sacrificing half of the money you carry, or retry the entire dungeon. Luckily you can store excess money in an ATM before doing a dungeon.
I don't think Ijincho was as cool as Kamurocho, but it was cool that we visit Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Sotenbori all in one game.
BTW give the English voices a shot, I think the voice acting is great. My only complaint about English voices is a lot of random voice clips are not localized, so during battle you often get a mix of languages at once.
OH and. OK so how did I not mention yet? I want to shake the person who calibrated the SFX spawn rate. Battles are like a nonstop stream of every single character saying some 1-liner quip. It's infuriating. In addition to the combat not being fun, I frequently had the game on mute during the fights. It's absurd.
As usual for a Yakuza/LAD game, very few women, and the ones who do exist are generally sex workers / hostess club hostesses / moms. I think Saeko is great though. Eri is technically a party member but because she's optional she has no story presence outside of her silly capitalism simulator side quest.
OK BUT. I don't hate JRPG combat, and I even love lots of JRPGs. This one is mediocre at best. Painfully slow combat animations. Extremely punishing job system. Horribly balanced classes. Later chapters need massive grinding. Enemies and bosses become massive health sponges. The 6 attack types are horribly distributed, with most attacks just being physical, and certain bosses resist that in order to ruin your fun. The dungeons are basically completely linear and you can't save in them. Fortunately I only died to a boss once. You can retry a boss by sacrificing half of the money you carry, or retry the entire dungeon. Luckily you can store excess money in an ATM before doing a dungeon.
I don't think Ijincho was as cool as Kamurocho, but it was cool that we visit Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Sotenbori all in one game.
BTW give the English voices a shot, I think the voice acting is great. My only complaint about English voices is a lot of random voice clips are not localized, so during battle you often get a mix of languages at once.
OH and. OK so how did I not mention yet? I want to shake the person who calibrated the SFX spawn rate. Battles are like a nonstop stream of every single character saying some 1-liner quip. It's infuriating. In addition to the combat not being fun, I frequently had the game on mute during the fights. It's absurd.
As usual for a Yakuza/LAD game, very few women, and the ones who do exist are generally sex workers / hostess club hostesses / moms. I think Saeko is great though. Eri is technically a party member but because she's optional she has no story presence outside of her silly capitalism simulator side quest.