Finally played my first Yakuza game. Yakuza:Like a Dragon

So to preface this I have seen streams of Yakuza games so I didn't go into this completely blind. I knew, or at least thought I knew what I was getting into here. I'll also add that while I rank many western RPGs among my favorite games of all time I'm not too fond of JRPGs (yeah I know Yakuza aren't really JRPGs in the traditional sense).

With that out of the way I decided to dive into Yakuza because I just finished another game and didn't know what else to jump into. I've completed it after about 45 hours and it's been quite a ride with both good and some bad.

• Main Story/Writing: The main story and companion stories were what kept me hooked to this game. Ichiban as a character was written so well because on the surface his character seems so one note. He is so positive and so endearing despite all the tragedy he goes through that if he wasn't handled right I could totally see a scenario where he comes across as boring. The rest of the companions are also just great characters to get to know over the course of the game and a big regret I have is that I didn't understand the bonding mechanic early on so I made it about halfway into the game before realizing how to do the companion side stories. They really did a good job at making each of the main cast likeable but with their own unique flaws and issues that made them feel like real people and not just stereotypes. Also they handled the previous characters in the series really well. Even for someone like me who doesn't know all the history they introduced Majima, Kiryu, Daigo, etc in such a way that you knew these guys are big fucking deals.
• Combat: The combat system was pretty fun overall but I have two gripes with it.
  1. One is that like 99% of this games main story combat is so easy that I had like 0 reason to experiment with other jobs until I hit a literal brick wall called Kiryu. Up until I hit that road block I had only really tried like 1 or 2 jobs on each character because I never had a combat section that I struggled to beat. But then I get there and find that basically every job I had leveled up he was resistant to. I'll also say that some enemy attacks seem really overpowered. Ishioda for example had this gun attack that could just one shot Nanba no matter what I tried. And constantly being forced to revive party members because the AI just RNGs the same attack on one character several turns in a row was a drag. At that point I had to go back and spend several hours just grinding jobs and even then, some bosses at the end of the game just felt like I was praying for good RNG to have an easier time with the encounter. Game balance could definitely have used more work as the game swings wildly from very easy to wtf I'm getting one shot every turn by the end bosses.
  2. The other gripe I had was that the weakness/resist system is not explained well at all in game and to this day I don't understand why an attack with for example a knife symbol in one job is strong against an enemy but the same knife symbol on another job's attack isn't strong against that same enemy. Maybe I just missed something or didn't understand the system so I guess this could be my fault. At least the elemental attacks seemed consistent across jobs.
• Graphics: Loved the games art style and thought the enemy designs were unique and interesting throughout the entire game. No complaints here.
• Music: So I'm going to be honest here the music was whatever. By the end of the game I was tired of the same battle music for 99% of the battles and was finding the sad music that plays at every emotional scene cheesy.
• Side Content: So here is where I'll probably piss off Yakuza fans. After about the first 20 hours I ended up just skipping the side content dialogue and cut scenes as I found the majority of them boring and nowhere near the quality of the main story or companion scenes. I don't find absurdist humor funny so the fact that so many of the side quests rely on some absurd twist happening probably had a bit to do with it. I will say there are a few outliers here I enjoyed like the Ichiban Confections storyline which I played to completion. But the majority I just found to be whatever and then basically just stopped going out of my way to do them. I also just didn't engage with a bunch of the minigames like the dargon karting and test taking one after the initial intro quest to them as I didn't find them fun.

Overall the game was what I would call a good experience and despite me not enjoying some things I can totally understand why people love these games so much. You can really feel the passion this dev studio put into this game. I think I'll end up trying Infinite Wealth at some point down the line.