Lost Judgement a Great Game

I was first introduced to the Yakuza game series on the PS3 by Yakuza: Dead Souls when it was on sale one day and I wanted to give it a go. After playing it, I looked up if there were more of the Yakuza games and noticed the entire series that were available at the time. As the years passed, I collected every game that the developers from the studio Ryu Ga Gotoku released in the United States. I didn't actually start playing them besides Dead Souls until they released Yakuza Zero. I played a little of Yakuza 3 and 4, but didn't go anywhere before Yakuza Zero released. After playing that, I moved on to Yakuza Kiwami and Kiwami 2 when they released. They eventually remastered 3 through 5 as well for the PS4 (That's what I played them on, but they are on PC as well I believe). After playing them all through Yakuza 6, Judgment was announced from their studio and I was definitely interested. There was a huge difference though. The main character of all of the previous games, Kiryu Kazama was no longer the main character. I personally was fine with this, but wondered if the stories would still be as good. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the story and the cast of characters were still great in my eyes. Yagami, the ex lawyer turned detective definitely was as good as Kiryu. Better? That's hard to say, but he definitely wasn't bad.

Yagami did odd jobs to make money as a detective, from finding lost cats to helping his old law firm with cases. He was eventually wrapped up in a murder case involving people having their eyes gouged out. The story is good just like the Yakuza games and Yagami had his allies like Kiryu had his. After completing that game and wondering when the next game would release, Yakuza: Like a Dragon was announced and was going to be a turn based RPG. I personally love RPG games, so that didn't bother me a bit, but another announcement was made around that time as well. Yakuza would be a turn based RPG and Judgment games would be the beat em up brawlers that Yakuza used to be. In my mind, that only meant that a new Judgment game was in the work. Out of nowhere, Lost Judgment was announced. When it released, I just had to get my hands on it. I played it early because of an earl access bonus and did not want to stop playing it. Yagami has a new fighting stance called the Snake which is more of a countering type stance. Along with his original two Tiger for single enemies and the Crane for crowd control. The first time you use the Snake stance is to stop some High Schoolers from harassing a store owner. The Snake stance allows you to fight without actually hurting the students. You can counter them until they become scared and then immediately use a heat move to knocked them out without actually hitting them. More of a scared them and make the pass out type thing. It's also good for avoiding attacks from weapons. You can actually still fight back with the stance too, so it's not all defense. Lost Judgment keeps to what made Yakuza the fun brawler it was and it still has the funny side cases and stories. You can always run around playing games in the arcade like Sonic Fighters, a crane game and others. I'm not really good at mahjong and other games like that, but they are there too. There is also a Master System in Yagami's Detective Agency you can play and find games for around the city.

I'm still playing through it now and may do a more fleshed out review in the future, but the game is definitely worth a play if you are into Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio games. Hope you enjoyed and thank you for reading.