izigame.me

So after 60.5 hours I finally beat the main story so I figured I would write a review now that Ive experienced a great deal of the content. This review may contain trailer spoilers, but I dont want to talk about other main story spoilers because its best to experience it for yourself.
If you're reading this, you've likely already played some or all of the previous mainline Yakuza games, and as this is a sequal to Yakuza: Like a Dragon/7. I will assume you have already played that.
Story: I dont know if I would say this story is better than 7's, I would say they are hitting on different themes. In this game, Kiryu has been diagnosed with cancer and have only a short time remaining, and this is brought up multiple times through dialogue and story beats. Coupled with Ichiban's story of going to Hawaii to reunite with his long lost mother, and an interwoven crime drama makes for a interesting, albeit slow, story line. For about the first half of the game, Kiryu and Ichiban are together, but at around chapter 7-8 the two split up. With Ichiban and company staying in Hawaii, and Kiryu and his gang staying in Ijincho until premium adventure, with different chapters dedicated to the other party, like Yakuza 0 did. I have to admit that In terms of story, It was well done, though while writing this, I feel like there are some things that were sort of core to the story not being answered or left generally vague for both of the main protagonists. Again, Im going to avoid spoilers, but I think those that have beaten the game can understand where I am coming from.
Combat: The bread and butter of most Yakuza games, but especially the turn based ones. To sum it up, Yakuza 7 walked so that Yakuza 8 could run. Most every complain from 7's combat has been completely fixed.
In Yakuza 7, you carried over certain job skills permenently after getting certain jobs to certain ranks. Most of these were useless and just clocked up your menu. Now, there is a similar system. Instead of carrying over EVER skill permanently, your allotted a certain number of slots based on your personality attributes, so instead of having 30+ dead skills in your menu youll never use, now you can have (I believe) 10 skills of your choice, so that covers multiple attributes, weapon types, and buffs that you can have on your characters at your discretion. This also adds to Ichibans personality wheel, instead of just leveling these up to meet certain conditions for questions/money making minigames, or the ambiguous resistance to status ailments like in 7, we now get a concrete benefit by increasing the amount of skills that can be carried over across jobs
One main change from Yakuza 7 is how the jobs work. In 7, most of your main stats were tied to your job. You would gain stats from your character leveling, but they were a fraction of the job. This led to events where if you were level 30 in your main job, and you switch to another job thats level 1, not only would you see your stats tank drastically (losing several hundred life, majority of strength, defence, ect) you would essentially be left with a character with few useful stills at that point in the game and need to be carried by the rest of the team until they get somewhat decent stats. Now the opposite is true, most stats come from your character level, not your job, so switching jobs as you wish is much less debilitating.
The actual combat itself has also been improved. In 7, there were multiple issues, such as enemies being ragdolled down an alleyway and further hits just keep knocking them further back, causing allies to have to run further and waste time. Another issue was the lack of player control of the characters, or the inability for characters other than Ichiban to pick up items on the ground, or even just a lack of follow up attack options, with 7 only allowing AI teamates to occassionally kick enemies while they are down. All of these issues have been fixed, in most cases. charaters other than the main are capable of picking up objects and using them in battle, which is great because these items can have elements/attributes tied to them. Players are capable of moving within a circle allowing for better positioning of skills or opportune attack. My favorite aspect is the follow on attack which leads to some interesting events. For instance, a back attack (which are guaranteed crits) that knocks the enemy into other enemies, causing a bowling ball effect, damaging everyone they crash into. Or you can kick them into an ally, causing that alley to add an additional hit. AND then another ally can kick the enemy while they are down for additional damage. It makes for an interesting gameplay loop that never got old for the 60+ hours it took me to beat the campaign. I do find the dungeons somewhat lackluster, mainly because they are all procedural generated and all look the same, but the combat makes up for it.
Minigames/Side Content: If you know anything about Yakuza, you know there is a massive amount of side content, and this game is absolutely no different. You want a Psudo-Pokemon capturing and battling system that somehow plays and runs better than Actual pokemon? You have it. You want to play something akin to animal crossing but dont really want to play for a year switching time zones and staying up late just to catch that bug you missed last Winter? Theres a mode for that. You heard about the dreaded Mahjong meme about people who had no idea how to play getting addicted to it and wanted to give it a try, that game, and more are here. Ranging from darts, poker, karaoke, shogi, mahjong, blackjack, pokemon, animal crossing, golf, batting and more, there is almost certainly something in this game that you will enjoy and find yourself playing for hours.
Ultimately, I feel this game is a love letter to the series that came before. Learning from the previous games missteps and correcting most of them, I found myself playing this game for hours at a time and genuinely losing track of time, which was first for me, as I usually get bored or need breaks after playing just an hour or two. However this game had me playing for 3-5 hours straight on the lower end. I wouldn't be surprised if this game was a game of the year contender, just based on its polish and its addictive nature, but that will depend on the rest of the games released this year. However, after beating this game, I look to the next mainline game in the series. With any luck it will be released in 3-4 years, considering how well this game is slated to do, and I genuinely cannot wait to continue with this cast of characters.