SPOILERS. THE ONLY HONEST REVIEW ON THIS GAME. DONT LISTEN TO THE REST THEY DONT HAVE A CLUE. As a huge fan of this franchise this was the ONLY one that let me down this much. Huge downgrade from Yakuza 7/LAD in gameplay,story,difficulty and characters. Ichiban is just made to look like an idiot at the last scene of the game,ruining his obvious potential relationship with Saeko. Bryce and the boring cult is the worst main antagonist in the series and the party characters (one which includes a V tuber just to make it worse) are really bad. And the lack of difficulty spike made the battles pointless as it was never a problem to squash enemies and bosses. Really bad levelling pacing. How this is a sequel to the goated 7 is something I'll never understand I'm not even gonna go into the stupid Kiryu got cancer angle either, what a waste of everyone's time. If this was the last Ichiban game then I wouldn't be suprised,was just boring and easy.

I really wanted to love this game since I'm a big Yakuza fan, but despite my best efforts to just try and enjoy it, this game continuosly wastes my time with entire 2-3 hours chapters where there's nothing really going on. The story would have been so cool if they just cut it down to just 6-7 chapters and threw away all the useless parts. Gameplay wise it's fine I guess, but I'm not particularly fond of this new rpg style for the yakuza series either, gets boring pretty quickly when you can't take a step in the city without being harrased by some random thugs (in older yakuza games it was much more bearable since you could just punch them a few times instead of having to wait your turn). Overall the game is ok but far from the golden age of yakuza imo

Absolutely do not understand the glowing reviews from everywhere. Graphics are basic af, like it was created in the early 2000s. When people say it's good graphics, it's good graphics for a YAKUZA game, not good graphics for 2026. And tons of weird conversations and moments between the characters. The dialogue window that pops up at the bottom feels like it's Pokemon all over again. Completely archaic. Japanese games sure have not evolved over the years. Cutscenes. Omg. I think i was just watching the cutscenes 80% of the time for many many hours over actually playing. Did i buy a movie or a game? If the movie was good at least it's ok, but it's cringey af in so many ways and feels like a movie I can't leave. So unnecessarily drawn out every one of them. Voiceovers are also so awkwardly American despite it being a Japanese game through & through. Script is also so bad. It seems like it can't decide between wanting to be serious or funny or lame. Conversations are so mind bogglingly lame. And what's with all the guttural sounds. The whole game's in excess of them. The developers of this game also seem to have a personal vendetta against pickup artists making them all look like gangsters and losers. Pathetic. And every few metres of walking there are gangsters or ruffians looking to fight u. Wow it becomes really **** irritating after awhile. And it's always the same type of fights over & over again with the same audio. So so repetitive and boring. How good looking every character is is so so cringey as well. And was it Hawaii or Japan? So many characters are Japanese despite it being in Hawaii. Such a joke. And suddenly being transported to an island where u have to collect trash & not able to return to Hawaii if u wanted? That was where i stopped playing.I came to this after completing Ghost of Tsushima, paid slightly more for this game even, but I'm completely astounded as to why people even think it's good. Have they not played games like Ghost of Tsushima? Crazy wayyy better graphics + open world. Like a dragon feels like it's worth only $10 to pay for in comparison to games like that. Basic game development, clearly low budget. Yet selling for same original price as Ghost of Tsushima and the like. I really pity all the monkeys out there who just because others say it's good, that they also say or think it's good. Or, it could be diehard fans of this series. As an outside observer who has played a ton of actually really good immersive games, this is definitely not in the same category. The amount of dopamine i got playing this game is the same as if I were to do work on my laptop. Complete baseline. They say the game gets better after the cut scenes slow down. Nahh. It stays the same. Equally **** game tries really hard to be a Japanese GTA, but fails terribly at itI rate this game 3 out of 10. Complete waste of money this. Completely not a modern AAA game. I really pity the people who actually think this is good. Probably super new to the world of games or don't know what makes a game good. How many good reviews this has gotten online makes me wonder how much the developers of this game paid off all the reviewers