Judgment

Truly, SEGA’s Ryu Ga Gotoku studio is one of the very few studios that we can rely on to push narrative boundaries and really explore the potential for what video games can offer as a traditional storytelling medium.

Judgment is more than “more Yakuza”; it’s a markedly different beast that, despite using assets from Yakuza 6, re-introduces you to Kamurocho through a new set of eyes. Tak is brasher, smarter, and more inclined to use brains than brawn, and the characters he goes up against are surprisingly grounded. Altogether, it's a thoroughly delightful detective adventure.

While it largely follows the same general formula of the Yakuza games that came before it, Judgment's focus on playing as a detective and solving cases around the city of Kamurocho never once got stale.

A story that is engaging, intriguing yet thoughtfully structured, complete with another grand cast of new characters, even when it risks of becoming too pedestrian, Judgment predominantly finds the means to keep players fixed on the events unfolding. Fans of the Yakuza series may be quick to filter out what’s genuinely new from everything else, but for a game as packed and as entertaining as this, what it may lack in pure originality, Judgment more than makes up for with a game that is as fun to engage with as it is to just sit back and watch as the now-commonly bizarre antics of Kamurocho play out to delightful and convincing effect.

Judgment is very much a Yakuza game in detective clothing, but with some clever twists and a killer mystery at the center, it ends up feeling surprisingly distinct. While some of the detective-specific mechanical additions are a drag, everything else vibes really well with the familiar Kamurocho setting. It's easily the best of the recent line of Dragon Engine-developed games in the series—even without Kiryu Kazuma at the center, and even without a karaoke minigame.

There is much to be said against Judgment, a title in the vein of Yakuza that nevertheless fails to match its illustrious forebear. Clumsy and with a more choppy rhythm than ever, we still recommend it to lovers of police intrigue and Japanese detective stories. Thanks to a successful atmosphere and well-crafted plot, this new offering from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios often manages to make you forget the scattered nature of its gameplay.

Despite the fantastic story, Judgment stops short of being a must-play thanks to its shallow and unfulfilling crime-solving gameplay.

Tied with Yakuza 0 in terms of story, and it is not even a mainline game. Very fun beat em up style game.

+ Fun side activities. New additions include drone races and the VR board game. + Most of the residents' stories are also fun, and you can use them to increase the city level. + Special attacks in the most incredible places, e.g. on the zip line at the playground. + The usable extracts add spice to the battles. - The many missions are a bit confusing: main missions and side missions with different categories, so you sometimes lose track. - Certain game mechanics and stories seem incomplete or simply have no further use later in the game. - The game's ‘loka’ is insufficient. More is expected nowadays. Certain side missions don't make sense with the translations (only works with Google). - NPCs bug into each other, dissolve, turn around illogically. - The shadowing quests are monotonous. Overall Playtime Main + all Sides arond 50 hours

Le doy 7,5/10. Lo he disfrutado bastante pero se me ha hecho pesado tanto diálogo y tan seguido. Otro error en mi opinión es que la experiencia se consigue muy fácilmente, por realizar acciones absurdas. A favor: la historia engancha, el combate es fluido y hay variedad y entretenimiento de sobra en la ciudad de Kamurocho. Poder usar el dron es un puntazo.

This dev can't make games. The story seems great, really. Just for that I hoped to get through all the flaws, but I just can't. Menuing in this game is atrocious. Everything is slow, unresponsive, and generally vague. It's all dated. Combat doesn't flow. You can't turn while blocking, and you can't block in any specific direction. You face there - you block there. Lock on locks your character to a single enemy, but camera is still free to do whatever... A single strong punch is enough to put you on the ground and getting up is slow. There is button mash to get up, but I'm convinced it's placebo and only the last push does something. Side content is shoved down your throat while playing through main stroy. Genuinely unpleasant experience.

Hey, I've got an idea... what if we made a game which took all of Yakuza's problems but stripped out all the fun and goofiness that make the games so enjoyable, replacing them with a set of tedious "detective" mechanics which you can't possibly fail but which consume lots of time? If that sounds like a great idea then I have some good news: Judgment is that game. If it sounds like a terrible idea then I've got some bad news... Judgment takes us back to the same few blocks of Kamurocho that we know and love from Yakuza, now looking nicely shiny and HD but otherwise basically unchanged. It gives us a new player character, Ex-Yakuza, ex-lawyer private detective Tak ... great hair but zero charisma. Before long we're given a case to work, collecting evidence for the defence team in a murder trial. This mostly involves running across the city collecting clues, which the game leads you to and then pieces together for you. This is no puzzle game. Every so often you get into a fight where much like Yakuza you're fighting the camera and the finicky controls as much as the NPCs. In Hard difficulty these are either so easy they're tedious (e.g. any street encounter) or so difficult the only way to get through them is repeatedly hitting pause to eat sushi (e.g. first proper boss fight). I've only played about 6 hours of the game, so maybe it gets better, but since I haven't cracked a smile once in those 6 hours, or found any reason to care what happens, I can't see any good reason to keep playing on the off-chance it's going to improve.