I didn't like this game. What I thought had just been a slow first few hours ended up being pretty indicative of what the entire game had to offer: a lot of very dull waypoint-chasing mission design, a lot of unnecessarily grindy and clunky mechanics, and a surprisingly short story that still manages to feel poorly paced and only really gets going towards the very end. I don't know if this game just had a brutally low budget or if they gave it to an inexperienced team or what, but I just don't feel it's up to the usual Yakuza standard of quality at all. And, to be totally fair, you could level many of those same complaints at the main series, too, but those games punch above their weight, budget-wise, with enthralling stories, great character work and wonderful cutscene direction. I found very little of that here.
This game is 11 chapters long, and I feel like at least six of those are one-off, almost standalone episodes about a new bad guy coming to town, being dealt with, and then disappearing forever without moving the 'main' story forward. And basically every chapter follows the same pattern of jogging around the city talking to a chain of four, five or six NPCs to gather information before getting to the fight at the end. I lost count of how many times a character told me to go back to my hideout and rest until morning or night before I was allowed to go and talk to the next NPC in the chain. It's just so rote and unimaginative, and the mainline Yakuza games have been doing this so much better for years now. This game really felt like a step back in time to the Yakuza 3 era, or even the PS2 games, not only in terms of the mission design but also with complete lack of some desperately-needed quality of life features.
So check this out: there's a big ol' Wasteland to explore outside the city, and you get there by going to see your buddy Bat who takes care of your dune buggy for you. Talk to him and you'll spawn in your car just outside the city's gates. There's also a fast-travel system out there, accessed by going to see merchants standing by gas tankers out on the dunes; you talk to them and they'll haul your buggy to any previously-visited fast-travel point. Sounds OK so far, but here's where it gets maddening: there is no option to just talk to Bat and spawn at a specific fast-travel point. You always have to start from just outside Eden's gates, then drive to the fast-travel point that's right there. And you can't just drive up to a fast-travel dude and have him take you where you want to go; you first have to drive up and get out of your car (load time), then talk to him on foot, then he'll take you (load time), and then you have to get back in your car (15 second unskippable cutscene), and then you can drive wherever you want to go. And when you want to go back to Eden? Nope, you can't just fast-travel straight back there, you have to warp to the fast-travel point just outside the city, get back in your car (15 seconds), then turn left and drive towards Eden for five seconds before you're allowed back inside. It's just so cumbersome, with three extra steps and wait times for every little thing you want to do, and they're things you're going to be doing a lot (hence why I know the exact times for everything :P).
There's this part in the game where you have to go and find out where a big villain's lair is, and the usual string of NPC info-gathering sends you out into the Wasteland to find an old sage. You drive to the waypoint for 2-3 minutes, only to find that there's a big wall of boulders in the way. Drive back to Eden. There, Bat will tell you that you need a big ol' cowcatcher to mount to the front of your buggy to smash your way through the boulders, and he happens to have one for you! Ah, but of course you don't have the resources you need to mount it, so drive back out to the same area of the Wasteland (another 2-3 minutes) to farm those resources. Got'em? Drive back to Eden. OK, now you can mount the cowcatcher, and now you get to drive another 2-3 minutes back to the wall of boulders, smash through and go to meet the sage. This happens in CHAPTER 10 OF 11. Right at what should be the pointy end of the story, you're schlepping through fifteen minutes of absolutely mindless busywork that could be entirely avoided by having a character say "Oh, you're going to meet that sage? You'll need this cowcatcher to break through a wall of boulders on the way. Here, I'll fit it for you right now".
I feel like the classic Yakuza 100+ hour grind really hurts this game, too. It's not something I usually mind, because it doesn't usually get in the way of just casually enjoying the game, but here I feel like I'm missing out for not exhaustively ticking off everything on the checklist. The rate at which you can upgrade your way through the skill tree feels balanced for a much longer game, so if there's cool stuff waiting deep in there I'm probably not going to see it. There's a system for customizing your dune buggy, but you can't weld any upgrades on without a laundry list of resources for each individual piece, and I just never had enough so the whole system was lost on me. There's always an extra hoop to jump through, which makes it feel like they specifically padded the game out to hit that arbitrary 100-hours-to-100% mark rather than balancing the game for how much content they had. Would one RGG Studio game that only took 50 hours to 100% really be so terrible?
I mean, I don't want to sound too down on it, because when you do push through all the busywork and get to the nice pre-rendered cutscenes and the big flashy bossfights it still has moments of that good ol' Yakuza spark. Some of these hype-ass mid-fight QTEs are amazing, and the usual eleventh hour plot twists have been really fun. I really liked the new karaoke equivalent minigame, too, and of course the cabaret club. I just... I wish it was better, to put it bluntly. I enjoyed it more than Dead Souls, at least, but I don't think it's on par with any of the mainline games. I'll finish it off properly tomorrow and clear up whichever sub stories I can find that won't send me out into the Wasteland (oh how I wish they'd go back to just marking sub stories on the map), but I've really had enough of this one.
