Lost Judgment

• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2058190/Lost_Judgment/
• Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Judgment
• Rating: 5/5 
• Posted: October 5, 2022

What makes a Yakuza game a Yakuza game?
To me, it's three things: the heart-wrenching story, the silly mini-games, and the general sense of hopefulness and goodness in humanity. This game has it all and even more.

Yakuza's main story has always have had serious tones, and this game is no different. The main theme of the game is bullying and how the law fails to protect and save the people it is designed to do so. You will feel despair, you will feel happiness, Yakuza games have never been shy from killing off both one-shot villains and characters that are important to the protagonist's growth.

Yakuza has always have had “good endings” for most of its side stories (you can also make the case that most main stories also have a good ending). This is what I mean by “a general sense of hopefulness and goodness in humanity,” in that the side stories make you feel good and hopeful, if not often laugh out loud at the silliness of it. I like a good story and if the story calls for a sad ending, I understand if that is the logical conclusion for that story, but at the end of the day we play games to escape reality, and isn't it better to escape into a reality that makes us feel happy?

The best thing this game did right are the School Stories: they have a satisfying conclusion that ties in all the individual steps made in-between, and they allow to live through that high-school experience one more time; for many folks, high school was the best time of their lives so I can see the appeal. I thought the advisor mechanism is a pretty smart story framing device in this respect.

Talking about finishing all sub-School Stories, the Robotics Club sub-story is extremely unbalanced; you will want a guide in order to finish it. Essentially, the strategy I went with was to ignore everything else and went straight for putting a block into opponent's home base. I got lucky with the final battle and finished it in only one try; for some of the previous battles, I had to try multiple times and got extremely angry when my own robots would block my path (I learnt to work around it), or when the opponents simply kept destroying my robot so I couldn't anything. Generally, when the game design takes the agency out of your hand due to RNG, it's not very fun.

The Boxing Club sub-story is a blast. It is challenging but not unbalanced (like the Robotics Club), and I don't think you can cheese this very much. There is no difficulty level in this sub-story, unlike the Dance Club sub-story that replaces the dancing mini-games Yakuza games are famous for. If you're not good with rhythm games, you will still be able to make progress.