Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio knows how to prioritize and save on not-so-important things: this is how it manages to release a new game in the Yakuza series about once a year, despite the fact that there is enough content in each for tens of hours. Mechanics, mini-games, even a setting wander from one part to another – but thanks to new characters and stories, the series does not get boring. And lately, she even decided on bold experiments: from the seventh part, the main line of Yakuza games became a turn-based JRPG, and the usual scuffle remained in the Judgment spin-off , dedicated to the investigations of a private detective. The studio’s new game, Lost Judgment , traditionally cuts corners, combining the mechanics of the first Judgment and the setting of last year Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
Kindergarten policeman
Takayuki Yagami is a former lawyer and now a private detective working in Kamuro-cho, Tokyo’s hottest quarter. He has few clients, so at the invitation of old acquaintances who have opened their own detective agency, he comes to neighboring Yokohama to help with the investigation. True, we are not talking about something grandiose like serial murders, but about simple school bullying.
Meanwhile, Yagami’s former lawyers are predictably losing their case in court. Their client, police officer Ekhara, was caught harassing a woman on the subway, and all the evidence points to his guilt. However, barely hearing the guilty verdict, Ehara challenges the justice system: he names a murder victim who has just been found in Yokohama and has not yet even been identified. The investigation finds out that the crime took place exactly on the same morning when the defendant was arrested in the Tokyo subway – that is, the guilty verdict became his alibi. But he also had a motive: a murdered young man in his school years brought Ekhara’s son to suicide. In addition, they studied at the very school where Yagami deals with the problem of bullying. It’s time for the detective to roll up his sleeves!
School is the only major innovation in Lost Judgment; the rest of the locations are already familiar to us
Yagami begins his investigation at the school – but first he needs to find an excuse for being within its walls. For this, he gets a job as a consultant for a detective circle; the weasel guiding him in search of intriguing stories pokes his nose into the affairs of all other hobby clubs, so Yagami has to be introduced as a double agent: work as an operator in a robotics circle, teach girls to dance … But the actor Takuya Kimura, who played the main role, will soon hit fifty dollars, so I can’t get rid of the association with the famous meme “ How do you do, fellow kids? “. After all, Yagami also rides on a skateboard in this part.
This is not to say that the change of scenery is very encouraging. In Japanese pop culture, school life is already given insanely a lot of attention, but here the emphatically adult franchise for some reason enters the plowed field far and wide. Because of this, the beginning of Lost Judgment sags a lot: while Yagami rushes around the school, figuring out who, whom and how he was bullied, playing is rather boring. It lacks the high stakes, dramatic confrontations, and intrigue that the Yakuza series has become famous for.
Fortunately, after a few hours, the story still leaves the school, and then all of the above slowly begins to return. The script, alas, retains the slowness and verbosity of the first Judgment: the characters retell each other all the details of the investigation dozens of times and spend a lot of time on empty everyday conversations, and the narrative is often stopped by petty tasks and unnecessary running around, without which one could do without.
But at the same time, the plot, when it finally unfolds to its fullest, turns out to be one of the best in the series. Many parties and characters are involved in the conflict, each of which has its own view of events – controversial, ambiguous. Yagami finds out the details of the crime quickly enough, but after that, half of the game cannot find a way to restore justice. After all, not all problems can be solved with fists.
Jack of all trades and feet
Of course, you still have to wave your limbs, but the scuffle here is not too difficult (at least on normal difficulty), and often far-fetched. Either Yagami turns to assault, just not getting along with the interlocutor, then he beats a dozen schoolchildren right in the classroom, and each time everything goes without any special consequences, as if in Japan it is customary to greet each other with a sole in the face.
Nevertheless, it is still very pleasant to fight. Yagami now has as many as three fighting styles: “tiger” with powerful blows that break through the block, “crane” with sweeping attacks and “snake” with graceful parries. Unlike the brutal Kazuma Kiryu from the old parts of Yakuza, Yagami relies not on strength, but on dexterity in battle, which is why even simple combos in his performance turn into spectacular pirouettes.
In Lost Judgment, the detective elements of the gameplay have also migrated from the previous part – but, fortunately, the game does not abuse them anymore. You do not need to control the drone according to the plot, you have to follow people literally a couple of times – from the annoying mini-games there is only a first-person investigation, during which you have to look for key objects (not always obvious) in the environment. This has to be done even more often than usual, because before each session of parkour, Yagami forces the player to find a convenient starting point: the barrel will not work, but the air conditioner is just right.
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And yes, parkour appeared in Lost Judgment along with stealth, but they are of no interest: everything here is linear and scripted. Yagami climbs pipes and cornices according to a strict route, and quiet penetration is organized and completely ridiculous: the hero sits down in a specially designated secluded place, throws a coin into the only accessible corner – and the stupid enemy immediately substitutes his ass. It’s good that this does not interfere with the passage at all, but in general the game would be fine without such primitive fun.
The game does not pose much of a challenge during the campaign, but more than compensates for this with an additional Gauntlet mode, which offers a number of challenges in all disciplines – from combat and chases to parkour and stealth.
But this applies to story missions. In side missions, Yagami can finally prove himself as a real detective: he learns about strange events from the local analogue of Twitter, filtering entries by keywords and using geolocation to establish the location of the incident. He intercepts radio signals with a special direction finder, catches sounds with a directional microphone, and a faithful dog helps to calculate a person by smell. Sometimes you even have to think with your head and present evidence – but, alas, not as often as we would like.
Plus, there is also a school in which each circle is represented by its own mini-game: dancing, capturing territory for robots, boxing, and tricks on a skateboard. And, of course, everything for which we are used to calling the Yakuza series a “Japanese simulator”: from numerous gambling games (not a bit, however, not changed over the past ten years) to arcade machines, which this time were replenished with fighting games from the mid-90s. NS. Content, as always, in bulk.
After the turn-based Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the action-packed Lost Judgment came in handy: we just had time to take a break from the vigorous massacre and miss the detective Yagami. This alternation of games is a great idea, and the news that the Judgment series is not coming to PC and may end prematurely is particularly frustrating. We hope that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio will find a way out of this situation – after all, its games only get better year after year.
