I guess I should start with my history with the Yakuza (or I guess it uses the Japanese title “Like a Dragon” now). The first one I played was 0 when it launched in the West in 2017 and since then I’ve played all the mainline games including the original ps2 versions of 1 and 2. Last year I played 3-5 in a row and then 6 and 7 a little later. Judgment is easily the best of all the Dragon Engine (6 and everything afterward) games and possibly even the ones before.
Unlike the past games which were crime thrillers where you play as a gangster, in Judgment the MC is Takayuki Yagami. A Private Investigator who’s investigating serial killings in Kamurocho, a district of Tokyo where most of the games take place. I really like that it keeps references to Yakuza to a minimum and doesn’t feature any of the same characters since this is a new series (MGS for example had a big problem with this in its prequels) and shouldn’t be piggybacking off of the main franchise. It’s kind of hard to go into detail about the plot without spoiling which I don’t want to do since I know people who want to get into this series so I’m going to mostly be listing things I like and don’t like.
Combat
Judgment’s combat is nearly identical to Yakuza 6’s system but a lot better since EX Boost (or Extreme Heat as it’s called in 6) isn’t insanely overpowered. It still retains all the good aspects of 6’s combat like being able to damage the environment which I LOVE, limits on how many recovery items you can carry, and the fact that it’s actually hard. From Yakuza 3 and onward most of these games are too easy on Normal so I play all of them on Hard and Judgment is the first one in a while to actually have some challenge. I don’t really like the “Deadly Attacks” that bosses have which can kill in one combo but other than that the difficulty is very fair. Style Switching also returns from 0 though there’s only two instead of three which is honestly all the game needs, one for fighting groups and another for one-on-one fights. The biggest problem (at least with the PC version) is that the game gives you right off the bat a bunch of extracts (think of them temporary power-ups) that have infinite use and several of them are based around instant-killing an enemy.
Real Actors
There’s two characters in Judgment who are voiced and modeled after real life actors. One of them is the player’s character; Takayuki Yagami played by Takuya Kimura and Kyohei Hamura who’s modeled after Pierre Taki. I generally don’t mind having popular actors in video as a principle and it’s not the first time this series has had them as Yakuza 6 starred Japanese cinema legend Takeshi Kitano. However it seems like it causes problems down the road if the game needs to be re-released. For this game in particular the PC port didn’t come out until this year because Sega and Kimura’s talent agency couldn’t come to an agreement because the latter owns the rights to his image which even put the entire series in jeopardy since it would prevent Kimura from appearing in any future games.
About three months after Judgment was released in Japan Pierre Taki was arrested for possession of cocaine, this caused Sega to pull it from online and physical stores and later patch his appearance and voice out of the game and replace him with a generic character model and his voice lines redone by Miou Tanaka who’s known for voicing generic grunt characters. Again I don’t dislike actors in games because they’re actors but because it’ll cause licensing and other issues later. Especially if they’re going to be main characters.
Detective-ing
I’ve only played two other games I can remember where you play as detectives which were Deadly Premonition and Condemned: Criminal Origins. I do wish Judgment played more in to the detective angle with the game mechanics since most of what it involves is tailing (ugh), lock picking, and looking around an area in first person for clues. I understand Yagami is a PI who can barely pay his rent but they could’ve at least had some cool detective tools like Condemned used with the special lights and cameras that show liquids on the ground and stuff. I’m glad the chases are back for the first time since Yakuza 5 but the tailing missions really suck, even if they’re not that common in newer games they’re just not fun in this. Possibly even worse considering how long they take.
One cool thing Judgment does is at times there won’t be a quest marker telling you where to go next, requiring you to look through evidence you collected earlier, like having to check a business card someone gave you to find a kidnapped woman. That’s severely missed in modern open world games.
Main Story Distractions
The Yakuza series has always had a few mandatory substories that were played in between the main missions but they were usually just there to introduce a new mechanic or character. Judgment has several of them and a few of them do neither. The one where Yagami investigates Kaito’s shady childhood friend had some good character development but I don’t know how finding out who ate Saori’s cake and the following Ace Attorney parody has to do with finding the Mole. Other than those the side cases are pretty fun and I like how they tie in with the reputation mechanic since in past games once you finish a side quest it’s the last you’ll ever see of that character. Also this game literally has Virtua Fighter 5 inside of it but Sega still won’t put it on PC.
The worst of these is the Keihin Gang, every once in a while a Korean guy will text Yagami about gangsters terrorizing the streets which causes increased enemy encounters until you either beat up all of the leaders or wait them out. Having to fight the same mini bosses again with more health and higher damage got old fast.
Conclusion
This may have come off more negative that I actually feel about the game but I really enjoyed and highly recommend Judgment. You don’t need to play any of the Yakuza games to enjoy it (and thank god because there’s so fucking many now). Have fun trying to find the Mole.