Or, Judge Eyes. I've not played much (am only up to chapter 3), but so far?
I like the story and the characters. They've got the exact same kind of charm and ludicrous larger-than-life personas that you'd expect. Unsurprisingly, with it being a game about organised crime, and your main character being an ex-lawyer who treads areas of patchy morality, there's still plenty of tough-guy yakuza for you to both befriend and beat down on. The story's smart enough to surprise you on the regular, and there's plenty of bigger plot points they're setting up already that I'm wanting to see pan out. Kamurocho, as ever, is also great fun just to be and hang around in. Particularly so if you're familiar with it - I find it's quite a satisfying feeling when someone tells you to go somewhere, and you immediately know not only the place, but what street it's on, and how best to get there.
Where I'm struggling a bit are with the changes and additions to help differentiate the game from Yakuza. This should be the bit I'm most excited about, and I've seen some people say the encounter rate is lower, but it still feels fairly high to me, and much less fitting. I'm finding the range of other tasks (essentially: mini-games) that are dropped in to add credence to the 'private detective' label to be a little jankier and more cumbersome than I'd hoped. Investigation scenes are clunky and a little more frustrating than is welcome, tailing people is about as fun as you'd expect, chase scenes have some amazing cut-scene action but little else going for them, lock-picking is... you get the idea. I'm really hoping that things improve on this front.
In short: if you're wanting a totally clean break from Yakuza, this is probably not it. It's still following a lot of the same beats, and some of few things they've made integral to the game to build some distance aren't the clean breaks you'd want. If you did want more Yakuza with a slightly new lick of paint, then hey! You're in luck. I'm still enjoying it a lot, but it's also not quite filling out the big boots it came in wearing.
I like the story and the characters. They've got the exact same kind of charm and ludicrous larger-than-life personas that you'd expect. Unsurprisingly, with it being a game about organised crime, and your main character being an ex-lawyer who treads areas of patchy morality, there's still plenty of tough-guy yakuza for you to both befriend and beat down on. The story's smart enough to surprise you on the regular, and there's plenty of bigger plot points they're setting up already that I'm wanting to see pan out. Kamurocho, as ever, is also great fun just to be and hang around in. Particularly so if you're familiar with it - I find it's quite a satisfying feeling when someone tells you to go somewhere, and you immediately know not only the place, but what street it's on, and how best to get there.
Where I'm struggling a bit are with the changes and additions to help differentiate the game from Yakuza. This should be the bit I'm most excited about, and I've seen some people say the encounter rate is lower, but it still feels fairly high to me, and much less fitting. I'm finding the range of other tasks (essentially: mini-games) that are dropped in to add credence to the 'private detective' label to be a little jankier and more cumbersome than I'd hoped. Investigation scenes are clunky and a little more frustrating than is welcome, tailing people is about as fun as you'd expect, chase scenes have some amazing cut-scene action but little else going for them, lock-picking is... you get the idea. I'm really hoping that things improve on this front.
In short: if you're wanting a totally clean break from Yakuza, this is probably not it. It's still following a lot of the same beats, and some of few things they've made integral to the game to build some distance aren't the clean breaks you'd want. If you did want more Yakuza with a slightly new lick of paint, then hey! You're in luck. I'm still enjoying it a lot, but it's also not quite filling out the big boots it came in wearing.
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