One of the best things about Lost Judgment is being able to run around Yokohama without getting into random battles with magical chefs and sentient trash bags every 30 seconds. It was a great setting in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but the sheer number of enemy encounters made exploration a real chore. There are still street battles in Lost Judgment, of course. But there are fewer of them, they're easier to avoid, and even when I do get into one, I don't mind as much because the combat is excellent. I loved everything about Yakuza 7 except the turn-based combat, which makes the return to a more traditional form of beating up yakuza thugs in Lost Judgment a relief. I really missed actually punching someone instead of just selecting 'punch' from a menu.
In May this year, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio founder Toshihiro Nagoshi and Lost Judgment producer Kazuki Hosokawa told that Yakuza has "been transformed into a turn-based RPG." This suggests we may never see that familiar combo-based brawling in a Yakuza game again—and if that's the case, I'm worried about the future of the series. The problem for Yakuza fans like me, who did not enjoy this shift to JRPG-style combat, is that Like a Dragon was a smash hit. Speaking to Famitsu, Sega vice president Shuji Utsumi said it was the most successful Yakuza game yet in terms of international sales. So it makes sense that the publisher saw this and said, well, let's make more of that. But I don't want Yakuza to become a JRPG—I want it to be Yakuza.
I was cool with Like a Dragon being a curiosity: a one-off experiment to create a different kind of Yakuza experience. I didn't dig the combat, but I loved Yokohama as a setting, the lighter tone, the wild story, and lovable new hero Ichiban Kasuga, who is a more than worthy successor to Kazuma Kiryu. If it was just 'the weird JRPG one', I'd be happy with that. But if Like a Dragon has in fact set the template for the series going forward, my decades-long relationship with the Yakuza series may come to a grinding halt. Even though I was deeply invested in the story of Ichi, Nanba, and the rest of his motley crew, and enjoyed hanging out, drinking, and singing karaoke with them, the more hours I sunk into Yakuza 7, the more frustrating it ultimately became.
The turn-based battles are fun at first, with some wonderfully over-the-top special attacks. There's a breezy flow to the combat that is very entertaining—to a point. Eventually, after seeing the same animations over and over again, I became completely numb to them. Watching a flock of pigeons peck enemies to death was amusing the first five times—but 200 times later? Not so much. It's like someone tells you a joke and you laugh, but then they insist on telling it again, again, and again, and now you just want to punch them—and punch them properly, not through a battl𓂃e menu. Yakuza has always struck a fꦆine balance between funny and serious, but the clownish absurdity of the battles in Like a Dragon upsets that equilibrium a little too much for my tastes. These endless, repetitive battles made finishing the game a truly dire slog.
But it's the dungeons that really make me wary of Like a Dragon shaping the future of the series. These labyrinths of bland, identikit corridors are filled with unremarkable loot and non-stop battles, and mark a real low point for the series. I know the developer is paying homage to classic JRPGs, but that doesn't make them any less gruelling or tedious. If the next Yakuza simply must be an RPG, and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's mind is firmly made up about that, then the dungeon design has to improve. These sections of the game are in such stark contrast to Yokohama. The city is detailed, atmospheric, and lively. It feels like a place, while the dreary dungeons are more like a collection of boring prefabricated corridors someone has half-heartedly slotted together to make a level. The gauntlet runs in the other Yakuza games are sometimes guilty of this. But without the constant, fussy transitioning in and out of turn-based battles, the pacing is a lot faster, which means they don't outstay their welcome nearly as much.
Part of me does admire the Yakuza team for making such a seismic change to a series this popular and widely loved. More developers should show this kind of bravery and willingness to shake themselves out of a safe formula. It just didn't pay off here—for me anyway. I want more Yakuza stories, because they're some of the best in the business. No one spins an epic crime yarn quite like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. I just don't want to have to endure hours of tepid turn-based combat and dull, maze-like dungeons to be told them. Maybe I'm just stuck in the past and need to move on, but I fear Yakuza's possible turn-based future. I am thankful for the Judgment series, however, for still letting me pick real fights with shady gangsters on those crowded, neon-li♊t Japanese streets.