Judgement

To understand why Judgement is what it is, we need to take a step back and consider the state of the Like a Dragon [龍が如く] franchise in 2018, when this was made. The franchise had made it to its fifth game, Yakuza 5 [龍が如く5 夢、叶えし者], in 2012, and had done so with a considerable amount of sprawl - with five main characters, five different locations, and several different extensive minigame paths built around the main story, it was the peak of Yakuza at that point, but was also the beginning of the end in a way - look at the path the franchise has taken since, and it becomes clear that the writers didn't really know what to do with these characters after that. The games remained very good indeed, but they were looking backward, not forward; the prequel Yakuza 0 [龍が如く0 誓いの場所] was followed by a remake of the very first game, Yakuza Kiwami [龍が如く 極]. Yakuza 0 in particular jumped the series to a level of fame in the West that nobody could have anticipated, merely increasing the pressure. When Yakuza 6: The Song of Life [龍が如く6 命の詩。] finally appeared in 2016, it was radically scaled back. Several series mainstays were completely marginalised, with the focus purely on Kiryu Kazama, just as it had been when the series first started. Yakuza 6 sought to put a full stop on his story, and with it, Yakuza as a whole up until that point. It was clear that, once one further remake (Yakuza Kiwami 2 [龍が如く 極２]) was over and done with, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio though this whole franchise needed to be freshened up completely. So the map was ripped up and redrawn.

The end result of that has been the splintering of Yakuza into two separate series, each taking its own share of Yakuza staples and trying to build something new on top of them. The one that kept the name, Yakuza: Like a Dragon [龍が如く7　光と闇の行方], kept the general idea that these should be about the yakuza, kept the general outline of the way the stories in these games tend to go, kept the comedy, and kept a few key characters both expected and unexpected, but it ditched the gameplay completely, instead opting for an uninspiring, but functional, turn-based combat system. Judgement was given a whole new name and it overhauled the entire focus of the series by becoming a detective game, but bizarrely, it was this one that kept the combat and kept Kamurocho as a setting.

Both of these games have considerable growing pains in the early stages because of these changes. Like a Dragon comes off worse, for the simple fact that turn-based combat is awful when you're only controlling one character, but Judgement starts slowly and awkwardly too - walking around Kamurocho, a place I now know like the back of my hand, in the shoes of a detective rather than a yakuza was a bit like watching another family live in your childhood home, and being taught new controls for roaming these streets was like finding out they've put everything in the wrong cupboards. Once all the tutorials are out of the way, the key characters have been introduced, and the game gets properly going, that feeling does go away, but I still can't help but feel like a mistake was made when RGG Studio were deciding which game would get which features. Judgement doesn't actually need that much combat - the question 'why are so many randos in the street trying to beat up a detective' can only honestly be answered with 'because that's what happens in Yakuza games', but that feature doesn't make much sense when you're not actually playing a yakuza yourself, and some of the aggro visited upon the protagonist here feels invented for the sake of keeping that old gameplay alive (that whole Keihin Gang threat system, yeesh). Like a Dragon would have been a much better game if it had kept the real-time combat, and honestly, I think it would have been better if it was mostly set in pre-existing locations that we know to be yakuza hotbeds too. The yakuza themselves are ultimately fairly incidental to the way the story of Judgement plays out - it didn't need to be on Tojo Clan turf. The game even occasionally has to explain that the Tojo aren't really a concern any more, and every time that was mentioned, it made me wonder why they set it in Kamurocho. I'm pretty sure a new location with a total clean slate would have made for a tighter, more cohesive experience if it had been deployed here rather than on Like a Dragon, and it would have a lot less confusing for people if the game that had the word Yakuza in the title had actually played like a Yakuza game, too.

These are largely quibbles when it comes to this game, though (as my respective ratings for the games would suggest, all of this a much bigger issue for Like a Dragon than Judgement). The combat may be a little ill-fitting, but it's solid. The setting could have been better, but hey, it's still Kamurocho. What matters more is the additions, and while they're a mixed bag, there's much more good than bad. The new characters here are rock solid, from the main players down to the supporting cast; Yagami, Kaito, Ayabe, Mafuyu, Genda, Kuroiwa, and Hamura are all characters I just felt like I instinctively got, and others, like Saori and Sugiura, turned out to have surprising depth. None of them are iconic in the way that Goro Majima or Shun Akiyama were, or Seong-hui has the potential to be, but it might be the most consistent cast of characters any Yakuza game has had. And the story is one of the very best in the series - certainly the most focused and the least silly, and probably the one that stays the most gripping throughout. This is the first time I've ever accurately guessed what the big twists will be in the closing chapters, but when it comes to this franchise, that's unquestionably a positive - a lot of Yakuza stories are unpredictable because they wildly overextend themselves in their final moments, and a hell of a lot is often asked of the player's ability to suspend their disbelief. That's not the case here - it's a tightly written story with a sensible conclusion, acted out by a cast of players with clear, understandable motives. I will gladly accept a little bit of predictability if this is what I'm getting in return.

Sadly, not all of the additions are handled quite so well. The actual detective work, which should be the bread and butter of a detective game, is a little on the dull side; tailing people, inspecting crime scenes, and picking locks just feels like you're going through the motions, and the chase scenes are just glorified QTE sequences. The minigames aren't up to the standard of the series, but I don't particularly mind that - again, a whole hostess or fishing subgame would feel like the kind of thing the developers are only including because they think they're supposed to, and Yagami doesn't really feel like the karaoke type. And considering Yagami is a licensed lawyer who works closely with a law firm, and large chunks of the story revolve around this fact, it's disappointing that there isn't more courtroom gameplay. Even if Yagami as a character remains determined to stay out of the courtroom as much as possible and stick to his detective agency, Future instalments of this series could easily be improved by including sections where you play as Saori or Hoshino during trials, perhaps as intermissions to develop plot points between chapters.

Overall, though, this is a successful break from Yakuza tradition into something new for the series. If there are growing pains, then maybe that just shows us how much potential growth there is in the core concept of Judgement; it's not hard to imagine a game in this vein being a stone cold masterpiece.