After hating 7 I went into this cautiously optimistic from their promotions of this game, and it is much better in a lot of ways. Directional attacks can still not play out how you set them up, which is incredibly frustrating, and the game is an intense grind, for some reason the devs always want you to grind 5-10 levels for the final boss and only the final boss. There is also an insane amount of story padding with minigames, which is a new thing in the series, but overall I was still able to enjoy the game. The cast is great, the story was mostly entertaining, and I do like how we got more Kiryu content ontop of Ichiban. There is stuff that was present in 7 that I never really gave it credit for, due to my initial frustrations with that game, that were brought back here, such as the drink links and character interactions in restaurants. Given that we have Judgement and Gaiden, I'm a lot more accepting of the series being turn based.