It's impressive. RGG Studios keeps one upping themselves every new game I play.
My favorite may still be Kiwami 2, but having just finished Judgment earlier today, I think that Like a Dragon and Kiwami 2 have a really good contender here.
Yakuza Kiwami 2
I loved the fluidity of gameplay on Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 6 thanks to the move to the Dragon Engine, but things have been taken two steps further with the gameplay here. It's so fluid and flows like water.
It's beautiful and addicting, and I've heard Judgment's sequel Lost Judgment is even better in this regard.
The graphics are also one of the most impressive I've seen come out of last gen systems so far. I'd say even better than Yakuza 6 and Like a Dragon.
Everything looks so noir at night and so vibrant during daytime.
The Dragon Engine was stretched to perfection here. The FPS may be targeted at 30 (and it constantly goes below that) but it still feels good enough, and with how pretty the game is and how the gameplay flows, the otherwise not so perfect performance can be excused.
I'm sure playing the remaster on newer systems at 60 FPS feels a lot better though.
The story here was also as incredible as the visual and audio presentation. With a plot that unfolds more and more the more you go along through the story.
You learn more, you get to make more guesses, you research, you investigate, after all, that's what detectives do and that's what the main character is.
The plot centers around a series of murders which all have one thing in common: The eyes of the victims are gouged out.
It's a simple premise, but there's so much that goes back directly to the main protagonist and the more you learn about everything that went down and how it all comes back to the protagonists, the more invested you'll be.
The ending has quite a twist and it feels like a complete logical conclusion to a great story.
Despite some flaws like the performance being a little shoddy and some annoying gameplay mechanics (such as having to tail NPCs), this is still a 10/10 game.
The Game is called Judge Eyes in Japan
It's currently on PS Plus Extra alongside its sequel Lost Judgment, also coincidentally being the first PS Plus game I play through completion. It's totally worth a shot before it leaves the service.
What a damn good game.
Thanks for reading!
Congratulations for finishing this one!
It does sound like a treat that SEGA kept giving players the Judgement spinoffs and Gaiden to keep the beat-em-up style living on after the seventh main game changed to the RPG gameplay, and the way you describe the story on the surface sounds like it was quite worth getting to the end after all.
Hope you get to enjoy Lost Judgement soon 😄
Hahaha I just started Lost Judgment, and damnn, the gameplay there is even better.
Judgment was a real treat, RGG Studios has to have brought up all their guns to impress me with Lost Judgment but first impressions are great.
And yeah, whilst I totally loved the RPG format, it's great that we're still getting beat em up's, specially since they seem to have absolutely perfected the formula. The "flow like" combat is soooo satisfying.