This isn’t a game I expected to review at this point in time, but I ended up beating during a hiatus from other antics I have to routinely follow through on. This game took me around 40 hours to complete, and a grand majority of that time was spent scratching my head like a simpleton wondering what the fuck even happened.

Every moment feels like 40 people were in the director’s seat all pulling the game in different directions, and none of them even knew what a video game was or how to turn on a computer. Lost Judgement--as a game, product, anything you’d like to label it as--is so painfully mediocre in almost every way, that it’s almost saddening to see.

The game opens with a man molesting a woman on a train, then cuts to his court hearing. During which, he stands and informs the judge that a student who drove his son to suicide has been murdered, and gives out their exact location. This amazing hook is of course followed by the game’s protagonist, Takayuki Yagami, being hired as a detective to investigate whether or not bullying is taking place at a school. This leads into the aforementioned topic, as this is loosely related to the student who was driven to suicide, but quickly devolves into 20 hours of talking to students at said school, and asking the same 4 people the same questions over and over again until the writers remembered that they actually have to do their jobs every so often.

real dialogue btw

Once the plot finally picks up, the story of Lost Judgement starts bloating itself with so much information that frankly wasn’t necessary and didn’t serve any narrative purpose outside of attempting to mimic other narratives in the mystery genre. So many details start getting thrown at you which are quickly abandoned, or are meant to be saved in the back of your head until hours later in which they’re finally recontextualized, and the payoff is never worth it.

Kojima Hideo--back during his work on the earlier Metal Gear entries--was a master at flooding the player with information at such a rapid pace that it simulated this idea of very simple ideas being more complex than they appear, and instilling this notion of helplessness and confusion over the player. Lost Judgement seems to try its hand at something similar, but without any of the nuance and grace you may or may not expect from Kojima’s work.

The aforementioned court case is eventually shown to serve as an alibi for a murder case, and was generally all put into play in order to shine a light on the incompetence of the Japanese legal system, with the murderer conspiring with a serial killer (named Kuwana) specializing in killing students who drive others to take their own lives, with Yagami attempting to shed light on the truth, and bring justice to those who’ve taken the law into their own hands and attempt to bend the will of justice.

Yagami and Co. rarely act in line with how you’d assume they would given their previous experiences and established character from the first Judgement game: Yagami spends a great chunk of the story conspiring and working alongside Kuwana, even though he knows he’s the mastermind behind a huge conspiracy, multiple murders, and admits he will absolutely kill again.

There’s an attempt at portraying Kuwana and Yagami as two sides of the same coin, with both failing to follow through on a major event in their lives which led to the death of an innocent person, but it’s just hard to swallow considering how vile and disgusting of a person Kuwana is: blackmailing and murdering people without a care for who’s caught in the crossfire, and who walks away with their lives ruined.

As things unfold, you learn that Kuwana is being hunted by a faction named RK (the replacement for the Yakuza in this game, as the yakuza was dissolved during the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon), which is being puppeted by Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency because according to them, it’s easier to maintain the peace when a giant faction is terrorizing the people of Japan [sic]. They want Kuwana because he’d previously worked with a now high ranking Japanese official, and intend on blackmailing her into giving them access to 170 trillion yen to gamble with in order to restart Japan’s economy, which has been stagnant since the 1990s.

Yagami works alongside Kuwana in order to protect him for some reason, assumingly because of the 170 trillion yen detail which he doesn’t learn about until the last two chapters of the game, and also spends the entire game chasing Kuwana and trying to talk him into turning himself into the law, even though it was already established that he’ll be immediately shot in the back of the head by the MGS2 patriots if caught.

All this game needed to be about was about a man, his conspiring with a serial killer in order to expose the legal system, and Yagami’s journey to talk down those who bend the law to their will. RK and Public Security aren’t inherently unsalvageable players in the story, but as they are, all they contribute is bloat to the story, and a higher number on my playtime.

While Yakuza games are known to eventually engulf the player in stories of government meddling and power creep, this is not a Yakuza game, and Judgement’s plot made it very clear that this spin-off was going for a very different type of story, so it’s a shame to see it crawl back to the Yakuza storytelling format, and fail so badly.

Speaking of failure, remember when I mentioned Yagami working in a school at the beginning portion of the game? When I play games in the Yakuza franchise, I tend to try and do as much side content as possible, as long as I don’t have to go overwhelmingly out of my way to do so. So much side content in Lost Judgement is locked to this school and it’s stupid ugly fucking students, which wouldn’t be a problem if Lost Judgement didn’t abandon the school and cease giving you reasons to go there once you reach the Chapter 8 mark.

The school’s Mystery Research Club holds a significant amount of side content, with a lot of the other chunks of substories being pretty easy to miss or annoying to undertake, especially with two massive cities to explore. After a certain point, you need to draw a line in the metaphorical sand and decide if you’re going to just immerse yourself in the plot, and stop checking off side content because it wouldn’t make sense for Yagami to play master detective for freshmen while chasing a murderer attempting to escape the country, OR you decide to just stop giving a shit about the plot and go do the dancing and VR dice minigames for 30 hours.

i don't really have a reason to use this picture here i just wanted to put it in

I normally have completion marks in the 60-70% range when I play through these games, which speaks on the ability of previous entries to interweave narrative and side content. I never felt like I needed to absolutely drop what I was doing in order to enjoy some more light-hearted content, I could just stumble into one every 10 minutes of exploring Kamurochou/Ijinchou, even in entries after the massive difference in feel once the games entered the Dragon Engine (Yakuza 6 and onward) didn’t suffer as hard as this game seems to.

One of the seemingly most controversial things I may say in this review is that Lost Judgement’s combat is fucking terrible, and so is the combat in every single Dragon Engine entry. Other games and their general flaws won’t take up any time in this review outside of this sentence acknowledging it, but let my stance on it be known: Yakuza combat was at its absolute best and peaked at Yakuza 5, and Yakuza 0.

You can go on any yakuza thread on /v/ and eventually, like clockwork, see tons of losers arguing that the combat is actually fantastic in this entry, and they’ll usually accompany this with a 5 minute long webm of a youtuber doing a really long combo that looks really stiff and unsatisfying, even if it is impressively executed. Allow me to give you the only opinion that truly matters: mine. This game feels like shit. Judgement felt substantially worse, don’t get me wrong, but this game is barely an improvement.

Even the most generic of goons can still decide at any time to block 96% of your strings, forcing you to rely on the same boring openers and heavily limiting flexibility and expressiveness with your fighting style, combat is slow, weightless, and everything feels stiff. Yagami feels like he can barely even deal damage until you reach the last fourth of the upgrade trees, and the exact opposite problems starts to form and you start 3 shotting everything.

The three style systems of this game work like this: tiger is strong and meant for one on one fights, swan is weaker but excels against groups of enemies, and snake style is a revised version of Tanimura’s combat style from Yakuza 4--based around parrying, disarming opponents, and deflecting oncoming attacks.

There’s also a secret fourth combat style--released at a later time--in the form of DLC: the boxing style. This style is unique with how it’s upgraded, as you need to go to a specific gym to unlock the privilege of spending your skill points on moves for it. These styles all work as advertised, and are effective enough when the time comes, but they’re also just as effective at putting me to sleep and making me wanna turn the fucking game off. Snake tends to be the strongest style overall, which is nice because I’d argue it’s the most fun style to play with.

Due to how incredibly slowly you unlock XP, you really don’t have access to a lot of your moveset until the final chapters start to draw near . However, even with everything unlocked you’ll still feel overwhelmingly limited due to a narrative push for Yagami to be less of a violent thug than his predecessors. His moveset--while still very violent and flashy, like previous protagonists--lacks a lot of the brutal variety and effectiveness of his predecessors.

this genuinely took like 40 hours of playtime and it still feels like shit

Even toward the end of the game you’ll only have access to a handful of heat actions, all of which are under pressure of a staleness mechanic to counter spamming, and weapons are barely placed in your fighting grounds.

You can still find a lot of style and grace in Lost Judgement, though I can’t help but wonder how much more you could’ve squeezed out of the system if Ryuu Ga Gotoku Studio allowed Yagami to go berserk against his opponents. It’s not like a detective beating the shit out of students is any more believable just because Yagami cracked their skull against the pavement with his bare fists instead of a baseball bat.

The game also struggles quite a bit with dated UI and regressive button mapping. This game features 3 (at launch, 4 in modern releases) combat styles, much like Kenzan, Ishin, and Yakuza 0 before it. All of these games mapped multiple styles to the four directions of the D-Pad to allow for convenient, and precise swapping. Lost Judgement instead decides to abandon this, instead choosing to map 3/4 styles to a singular D-Pad input, likely a carry over from the original Judgement, which didn’t suffer from this design change due to only having 2 styles. The other three D-Pad directions are reserved for hotkeying consumables.

Trailing missions with all the same horrendous flaws as the first game make a return, but they bring with them really shallow lockpicking and awful ubisoft tier stealth levels, so we’re supposed to clap our hands together and be thankful for the privilege of slogging through what wasn’t acceptable in 2012 and sure as fuck isn’t acceptable now.

Absolutely nothing is more infuriating than realizing I need to throw a stupid fucking coin at a designated spot (you don’t even get to choose where the coin goes) in order to walk behind an enemy and press triangle to watch Yagami do his singular 20 second stealth animation. You want to rush things along and just run behind the enemy? Sorry, the game will either lock you to the object you’re hiding behind until you throw the coin, or just tell you you can’t take down the enemy who hasn’t noticed you yet and has his back to you.

I have no fucking idea what they were thinking when they designed anything in this game that isn’t raw combat or dialogue focused cutscenes. Looking for clues is marginally improved by allowing you to look over non-clues for a tad bit of flavor text, and picking the wrong pieces of evidence to show off during interrogations has new offers as well, from unique information on a topic depending on what the character knows, or a fun piece of dialogue. I’m generally happier with the improvements made in this general department (that is to say, filler) but overall I’m still wishing they just cut a majority of these segments, or automated them into cutscenes.

This is my wife btw ignore all the evil horrible things she does lol

Lost Judgement also fails to really hype a lot of big story moments up with its soundtrack, which is more EDM slop that’s plagued the Yakuza games since 0. I know music is very subjective, so take this with a grain of salt if my staunch criticisms slice deep into your heart, but I really didn’t feel invigorated, or any emotions at all, really, throughout the entirety of Lost Judgement’s runtime. Outside of select tracks (Green Vibes, Unwavering belief, In The Groove) everything felt boring, uninspired, and meshed together into one pile of Cassio keyboard loop sounding slop.

It’s such a shame, because I’m still humming Funk Goes On and Intelligence For Violence all these years later; music is one of my favorite aspects of prior entries. I won’t touch on music or general sound design further, as discussing them in great detail over text is a fools’ errand.

To end the review off with a positive note, Lost Judgement includes Virtua Fighter 5, Sonic the Fighters, and Fighting Vipers--all accessible at the main menu without any need to unlock--and have 2 player support regardless of platform. To my knowledge, these are also the first time you’ve been able to officially play Sonic the Fighters, and Fighting Vipers on your PC without the means of emulation, which is fantastically strange and always a good addition, given SEGA’s usual notion of pretending these games don’t exist. Lost Judgement has a multitude of improvements over the original, but all of those improvements are unfortunately only one or two rungs above what I’d have expected from a brand new entry in the series.

Overall, I give Lost Judgement 6 shitty awful mario party knockoffs out of 10

this part actually was kinda sweet