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Superb Joe
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« Reply #111 on: September 28, 2019, 06:11:40 AM » |
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hello continuing my chronicles of playing yakuza games and posting about them, i recently completed Judgment and have some thoughts on it. it's very good, at times even great, but it plays a lot of notes that don't seem to strike a chord with me.
first of all, the yakuza games are clearly very formulaic and typically iterate upon a previous game in minor mechanical ways, with the only real major changes coinciding with the new engine. judgment has clearly tried to delineate itself from yakuza on thematic, musical, and mechanical levels. its success in those regards is mixed at best, and at worst actively detracts from the game. firstly, the mechanical additions almost all manage to achieve a kind of "subtraction by addition" that i've never experienced before.
one of the additions is these tailing missions, where you walk behind sketchy people who constantly turn around looking for someone following them, and a meter fills up as you're in their eyeline. it fucking sucks and is completely not fun or entertaining in any way, the cover system is bad and has little logical consistency to where you can hide, and if the meter reaches the top it's an instant game over and you have to retry these extremely slow and not fun segments. the game would be improved immensely if none of these existed. another mechanic is that you get "mortal wounds" from getting hit with swords, special boss attacks, guns, etc. it sucks shit, it just means you get a permanent loss on your energy bar unless you go to a doctor or use a medical kit, it adds nothing, just another simulation style level of abstraction that ultimately amounts to annoying busywork.
the fucking gang shit sucks. you get text messages with annoying frequency where the local gangs are running wild, which just means the random encounter rate goes up even more and there's these annoying, repeated boss battles at specific parts of the map. if you do this tedious shit you get given some items that i never ever used. just extremely not fun.
the other additions (qte on foot chases similar to yakuza 3) and first person detective stuff at crime scenes are both not bad, but the latter are quite often pretty strictly regimented "pixel hunt" style things which fall a bit flat. there's also some dialogue choice stuff where you have to form an argument or present evidence but for the most part there's little branching or interesting ways of using these, you just get funneled down a specific path. which is fair enough for a story based game but it feels like a missed opportunity.
musically it's pretty subdued compared to yakuza, there are some real standout tracks but oddly the ones that stick with me are less "big boss moments" and more "repeatedly chasing a bald man's wig". it has its own musical identity rather than being a continuation of the other games which is good, but most of it doesn't really stick with me.
the thematic changes are the most interesting part, because they intersect with all of the other aspects. even though there's a lot of recycled animations from the prior games, the main character is very definitely not kiryu. one of my favourite things about the yakuza games is the fairly frequent excursions to some gangland place where you go and singlehandedly beat the shit out of like a thousand dudes. yagami is very obviously not that guy, so these set pieces are often extremely scaled down and there's more focus on one on one boss fights, which unfortunately are marred by the yakuza 6 formula where you get them to a certain level of health and they start glowing and being impervious to most attacks and also hit you with their special attacks which do "mortal wound" damage which, again, is not fun.
however, i appreciate it. he's much less of a one man army and actually doesn't constantly come out on top. the scope and scale of his personal fight in the story is much more reined in than "i, one guy, am going to defy the entire thousands strong organisation to which i belong, by punching them until i win".
now of course despite that narrower focus, yagami still obviously gets caught up in a giant conspiracy etc etc, because it's a yakuza game just with a different spin. the cast is absolutely massive and if you play it inconsistently like i did sometimes you'll get a dialogue choice and not remember what or who any of this shit is about because there's like 50 characters important to the plot in some way. unfortunately none of them have even a fraction of the warmth or depth of the characters in its immediate predecessor, yakuza 6. the plot is for the most part competently written, but all of the actual courtroom stuff is bad. i don't know, maybe japanese courts are exclusively staffed by credulous morons, but it's a real swing and a miss. the story wraps itself up in a very sort of safe, tv procedural manner. it deals with some frankly unusual subject matter, the problems of an ageing society, but mostly just as the skeleton on which the meat is placed.
as a detective game, the plot is revealed to you in an outside-in fashion, so once you reach the end you can competently explain what's been going on in a clear and concise manner, but the route to actually get there is quite obscured and meandering. in that sense, it's a success. it has the usual conspiracy, mystery, and melodrama but it felt like it just span in a different direction compared to yakuza.
by the time i reached the end, the combat finally clicked with me, it's "kung fu" based so when you press a button you typically do multiple movie style steven seagal arm-bike attacks, which is really divorced from the immediacy of push button to punch. i didn't like it for a long time, but i eventually did. however it's great in the cutscenes, the fight choreography is really nice. anyway, at the end, everything coalesces into a synthesis of the stilted courtoom legal drama, the pay off of an actual long fight where you beat insane amounts and amplitudes of ass, and a good, climactic, atmospheric boss fight. it's the real high point of the game, but the actual ending doesn't really stick the landing and has zero emotional weight compared to something like yakuza 0 or 6. it's very predictable, safe, tv drama style stuff. and really with an ensemble cast sort of thing with a loose legal drama theme, i guess that makes sense for japan.
overall it's a game i enjoyed my 44 hours with, it does some things very well and others utterly incompetently but still manages to form a pretty satisfying whole. it tries some things to break free of its trappings and some succeed, others fail utterly miserably. if there were ever a sequel i would happily buy it. if there were never a sequel i don't think i'd mind. i find myself coming back to a tv analogy quite a lot, it's like a spin off series for a show you really love. it's nice and comfortable, does it's own thing, but ultimately it sits in a shadow.
in conclusion, listen to this cuphead ass music
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