Today's post is more of a first impressions and less of a review. At the time of writing, I have not completed the game yet. This post covers up to Chapter 9: The Weight of Guilt. I will avoid major spoilers and try my best to omit character names. Game titles will be abbreviated to initials for better reading.
Our favorite Kamurocho detective, Takayuki Yagami, is back again with another case and direct sequel to Judgment. Fans like myself really enjoyed the first game as it diverges from the main Yakuza series and can be played as a standalone game. Of course, if you are longtime Yakuza fans, playing all the games is a plus and adds to the experience for better immersion. In the timeline of Lost Judgment, events in Yakuza 7/Like a Dragon are canon. Ijincho is now an accessible map with the additional of Seiryo High School. Some areas and building previously accessible in Y7 are now blocked off as they do not pertain or add to the story of LJ. Less noticeable in Kamurocho, but Little Asia is no longer accessible. Those of you that have played Y7 know that Ijincho is a lot larger than Kamurocho so this allows for more exploration. I will give my opinions on most of the game mechanics.
Main Story and Characters
Since LJ can be played as a standalone game, the knowledge of Judgment's story and characters is not needed. LJ will briefly reintroduce key roles if needed without taking up too much time. This time LJ takes place in a school setting with many of the characters being students. It's very different from Judgment where characters were scientists, lawyers, and ministry officials. What I like about RGG studio is how they take a very relevant issue in today's world and weave it into a murder mystery. They always manage to provide many twists that'll leave you surprised about the outcome. I tried really hard to avoid reading anything before I got the game, but this time for LJ, I was unfortunately spoiled when scrolling through Youtube comments. A mistake I never learn from. Yet I was able to completely avoid it when playing Judgment.
LJ's story I feel is just as dark as Judgment's story. School bullying is just as bad and real as it gets. Sometimes as adults, we forget how we were as teenagers and teenagers can be just as savage. While LJ talks about bullying and student suicide within the realm of Japanese society, I feel that this can apply to other countries outside Japan as well. The game doesn't feed you an idea how one should act in this situation, but rather give you different characters where you can experience the outcome. Characters are very well fleshed out in this sense. For instance, Mikoshiba, a known bully, was murdered and we find out who did it. While the perpetrator had a very good reason to blame Mikoshiba for bullying, the game doesn't condone the act of murder even if the system has failed them.
As much as I am invested with the story of LJ, I was not a fan of the first few chapters. Maybe it's because I'm already familiar with the characters and premise, I skipped a lot of dialogue. To me, it was a lot of exposition that I didn't want to go through. While all information was important and relevant, I was anticipating something more drastic to happen other than traveling from place to place to listen to people.
Character Design and Graphics
With each game after the release of Yakuza 6, graphics on the Dragon Engine gets better and better. If I ever get the PS5, I can probably experience the speed much better, but so far on the PS4, I can see differences between LJ's graphics and Judgment. Textures are a lot more enhanced and cutscenes feel more natural. You can really see the denim folds in Sugiura's jacket and the sheen on Yagami's leather jacket. I like the additions to cuts and scratches on Yagami's face after boss fights. The different blood stains on his white T-shirt really adds to it as well. These little details don't disappear after the boss fight. If you proceed into a substory immediately afterwards, Yagami will still have these injuries until the next major story event. To add the realism, these injuries will heal over time, but are still visible as they do not fade after Yagami takes a nap on the couch.
The biggest improvement I see is actually to the new character designs. The only face scan characters in the main story are Yagami (Kimura Takuya), Genda-sensei (Akira Nakao), Jin Kuwana (Koji Yamamoto), and Kazuki Soma (Hiroshi Tamaki). Some of you may recognize Hiroshi Tamaki as Tatsu from the live adaptation of Way of the Househusband. They really cast the perfect man to be Soma. For the non-face scan characters, we already recognize our previous buddies from Judgment; Kaito, Sugiura, Higashi and Tsukumo. Let's not forget our lovely ladies, Saori and Mafuyu. It's the new characters that really surprised me, in a good way. I wasn't too sure at first whether Akutsu was a face scan character or original design, but he looks very believable. The little details like the veins on his face really add to it. Same goes for Tesso and Sawa-sensei. A lot of these recurring characters look very realistic compared to previous RGG games and it's not simply putting more work on textures.
Brawling Styles
I intentionally turned off Boxing Style for now and will explore it after I finish the main story or later in the game. In this post, I will go over the main 3. There's a lot of new additions, but also a lot of subtractions. I'm a little bummed that they removed my favorite heat action, Essence of Microwaving. It's always nice to see some thug get fried, but maybe the game developers thought it may be too extreme if Yagami used it on a delinquent. You earn SP through fighting and it breaks it down for you how much more you can earn. If you can achieve Legend of the Conqueror (defeat enemies using all styles), you are rewarded +50 SP versus defeating an enemy using only one style +10SP. There are more battle rewards and it overall encourages players to make use of all techniques.
Snake
Starting with the newly added Snake Style, this brawling style focuses on disarming opponents and is especially effective against those with weapons. This however is not good against bosses with weapons and it is not suppose to be. The disarming reminds me a lot of Tanimura's parrying style from Yakuza 4. Snake style is very fluid like the Crane style, but more elusive. With this style, some of your Heat actions can now defeat opponents using fear. Some users have noted that a certain Heat Action looks very Wing Chun inspired with its rapid punches. It's not as strong as Tiger and Crane style, but I like using it a lot.
Crane
Crane style went through a lot of changes and I'm really liking it. It is stronger compared to Judgment's Crane style and noticeably more effective against large crowds. Moves that you normally have to spend SP to unlock in the first game are now automatically available. Dodging with the Crane style is no longer done by side stepping. That is given to the Snake style. Instead you have this almost dance-like body twirl. The new Crane jump is very effective as another way to dodge and follow up immediately with an attack.
Tiger
The Tiger style is no longer as strong as the previous game. This is not to say that it's weak. While it initially felt like a downgrade, I think developers wanted players to be versatile in all brawling styles. In Judgment, most of us ended up using Tiger style for all fights and ignored Crane style seeing that Tiger was effective for both crowds and singular combat. So far I'm not feeling it as much, but perhaps after unlocking more abilities, it'll come together.
Health Statuses
For LJ, they removed the use of medical kits. You no longer get a decreased health bar after you get a severe injury. For some players, I've read that they disliked this as it lowers difficulty and sense of critical danger. I have a somewhat neutral stance on this. Since I've always been terrible at dodging fatal attacks (I'm looking at you Koga), the decreased health bar is a relief to me, but to make up for this, RGG has added health statuses. This means if you get stabbed by a knife, Bleeding will slowly decrease your health for a limited time. Stunning now takes longer to recover and this will put you in a bind during boss fights because you cannot consume any item to regain your health during this time. I've died too many times by not eating something in time. There's a new Health Status where you can be temporarily blinded. You cannot lock on to enemies and this makes disarming in my opinion more difficult.
Stealth, Tailing, Parkour
With the new added stealth ability, Yagami can sneak around. This is not something we can enable. Only when you reach certain parts of the story will this be available. I thought it was a very fun addition and was hoping to use it more, but here I am 9 chapters into the game and it's barely used. I heard that some people didn't like it that much. I just wished there was more of it. Same goes for the tailing. They changed the way how tailing missions work and I understand how some people don't like tailing at all. The difficulty for tailing has increased in my opinion, but sadly I was only able to experience it once so far in the main story. It felt almost as if the writers just forgot about it. Same with parkour. Yagami can now scale up buildings during certain parts of the story, but in total there's very little chance to use it a lot. I was really hoping for it "a lot" because the demo/Chapter 1 introduces all the things Yagami can do.
Skateboarding
As a detective, Yagami is equipped a variety of gadgets. One of the items he owns is a skateboard. It's fun to skate around Ijincho due to its vast space and it's also much easier to navigate on the skateboard compared to Kamurocho. In Kamurocho you end up bumping into people a lot because the streets are too narrow. Skateboarding is also the best way to get around town because walking takes too long and sometimes you don't want to board a taxi.
Dance Club
In addition to substories and side cases, there's a variety of mini games you can participate in. I haven't gotten a chance to dive into all the mini games like VR Paradise and Hama of the Dead. The one everyone is invested in is the Dance Club which is actually part of the School Stories collection. This is essentially the replacement for the missing karaoke mini game. Understandably, getting Kimura Takuya to sing is going to cost an arm and a leg. Having him as the main protagonist probably meant RGG shelled out a huge budget already. So the Dance Club mini game is similar to karaoke where it's a rhythm game. Unlike Yakuza 5, the Dance Club mini game is more intuitive than Haruka's Dance Battles. I wish there were more songs, but I think the studio was pressed for time and had limited resources. You get to see Yagami do all these cool dance moves and I have my fingers crossed for sequel where Yagami gets a dance style as a brawling style.
Music
How can we forget about the soundtrack for the game? Music is integral to games. LJ went with a more electronic and dubstep approach to its music similar to Y7's score. Some people don't like dubstep at all and find that they enjoyed LJ's soundtrack. I myself enjoy a lot of different genres of music and I am blown away by the music the composers make each time. Judgment had more jazzy elements to add to the detective noir themes. LJ takes a slight departure from jazz, but it's still there. Electronic becomes more of the main theme. I was really surprised when I heard "Liumang Chant" because they incorporated throat singing into the battle theme. You know what, it actually worked very well. The boss themes are great and so are the sub-boss/minor battle themes. It's a shame you hear them once in the game. The composers are not afraid to tackle different genres and combine them when necessary.
Other
I haven't ran into major bugs yet, but occasionally NPCs will fade away when Yagami is running towards them. This seems to happen to me when I run in the hallways of Seiryo High School. In one instance during an animated cutscene, one of the flaps of someone's jacket moved a bit awkwardly instead of staying still.
I might make a part 2 to this post as a followup and have it as a proper review. For now, I've been enjoying Lost Judgment a lot and I'm looking forward to see how the story pans out. Until next time!
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