Yakuza: Like a Dragon

When I saw this game came out on GOG I had to pick it up again. The story is amazing, although I found it to be a little grindy at times. Definitely worth it

I had a lot of fun playing Yakuza Like A Dragon. However, for every big plus there is a "but" - hence 4 stars and not 5. I really liked the story, but didn't really care about the characters. Not that they were not likeable, because they were. But I did not really feel connection with them. It was like... like hearing an interesting story about you distant cousin. Not sure what's the cause I liked the game mechanics, including combat system and jobs switching, but for my taste, this game is simply too long for JRPG. At some point, if you took care about the team synergy, you can spam powerful moves without thinking about strategy, and after a while combat becomes a boring interlude between story missions. You can turn on autocombat feature, but in my opinion this game would be better if it would be shorter. I guess that 12 chapters instead of 15 would be sweet spot.

Game shows "Real yakuza use a gamepad", but the game itself only had glyphs for Xbox controller, which is crazy. But it's fixable with patches. The game itself is super fun and cool, can't wait for Infinite Wealth to be available here as well

I didn't think the turn based combat would be good, but it is and it can be quite interesting with the different moves with some strategy invovled instead on mashing some buttons, in saying that I wouldn't like the series to abandon completely the normal fighting system either so maybe they keep both. The games story is one of the better written ones in the series, the english voice acting is good and for especially for the new characters, for the older ones it's quite strange to hear, but they done a great job for Goro Majima it sounds like what he would if he spoke english for the most part. The is a fair bit of grinding to level up at parts of the game or if you don't you and your team will not be strong enough to win certian battles. The graphics are good, AFAIK the game used the UE4 and has a unique art style which stands out, I was able to max out on an entry level gaming laptop with just putting shadows on medium and turning off AA with some drops below 60fps here and there but the average would be overall higher. The cast is great, Namba is the funniest without trying, kasuga is a good lead role and voiced well, Kouichi Adachi is brilliantly voiced for the english version and is also likeable character, however Saeko Mukoda is not so much likeable (she plays great with some really strong moves) shes whiny and seems very focused on beaten down the guys alot with men this, men that, all men are the same all men are bad kind of stuff, and do this and that, she comes across as a bit of a man hater to be honest, which makes me wonder why shes there to begin with. Eri Kamataki is a very likable character unfortnately her moves are not great, at least from what I have seen so far. I picked this game up in a sale but I would reccommend the GOG version at full price as you get a lot of stuff to in the game, theres even the arcade version for Virtua Figher 5 that you can also play with two players locally.

Funny and dept long game. And with a lot of references to Square Enix (more Enix than Square) in a SEGA game