I beat Yakuza: Black Panther a few nights ago using a Google translated guide and had a lot of fun, even if I couldn't understand the story or went as in depth with all the content because of the language barrier.
Thoughts-
-The combat- there's a lot of styles to use and it shines 1 on 1 (group fights were eh). I prefer the main game's fighting system's, but this was a nice change of pace and while I kept switching styles to max them out, I only opened a little over half of the 20 in the game. There's also a fighting master to learn more moves from. It's deep, but there's some long load times to get into battles.
-The motion comic art design grew on me, but the unskippable cut scenes, some that were 15 minutes plus, were a drag. You can tap triangle to fast forward a little, but skipping entirely isn't opened up until the post game.
-The jobs (Strip Club Bouncer, Ice Cream Scooper, Burger Restaurant Worker & Ramen Cook) are all simple fun and a good way to earn money which you use to level up your 5 stats.
-There's technically no coliseum, but there is an NPC that will let you fight 30 different enemies allowing you to move up the ranks and get some really good items.
-There's no locker keys, instead you listen for and collect cats to get a small discount on training to learn new moves. A bit of a let down as you don't ever see the cats during or after collecting.
-There's bowling, simplified old style batting cages, UFO catchers, but no darts, billiards or arcade games. The Karaoke is a short clip and all you do is mash the O button to fill a meter before time runs out. Bowling is the best side activity here.
-Items have a generic icon for each class they belong to, if you can't read the Japanese text, It's hard to tell what you have when you want to use it or want to buy or sell something. This was my main source of frustration as it made managing my inventory or healing in battle a pain.
-There's a few trailing missions and they suck with the fixed camera angles.
I ignored the Hostess clubs and casino, but did a number of the side quest's. 74% & 101 cats found in 22 hours. I'd give it an 8 out of 10 and it's too bad these games were never localized. There's some really nice production quality, lot's of voice acting, a good amount of content, and except for one late game fight (that has a frustrating conditional requirement) the combat is pretty good.
Maybe someday in the future I'll get my understanding of the Japanese language high enough (or someone picks up and finishes the dead/dormant fan translation) to play through it again properly and really go in depth.
