As soon as work ended today (9/24), I started playing Lost Judgment, the sequel to Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s 2018 Kamurocho-based Yakuza-lite detective thriller, Judgment. Now, almost four hours (roughly one chapter) in, I have some spoilerific thoughts.
First, it’s official: the yakuza of Kamurocho are absolutely dead. The events of Like a Dragon (2020) have been solidified and by December 2021, when Lost Judgment takes place, the Tojo Clan are already a distant memory. Yagami and Kaito fight some pathetic ex-Yakuza remnants in the game’s prelude, and everything in this case – where a woman hires the pair to find out what her presumptive boyfriend, a gambling addict with a penchant for human trafficking, is up to – positively screams shoddiness. Literally, the big fight to end the chapter is interrupted by a phone call from one of Yagami’s buddies, the hacker Tsukumo, who started their own detective agency in Ijincho, Yokohama. Kamurocho is still a vibrant and interesting neighborhood but, just like with Like a Dragon, there don’t seem to be any more stories here to tell (for now). But even in Yokohama, the criminal underworld seems subdued. As far as I can tell this early in, neither the Seiryu Clan, the Liumang or the Geomijul have much of a presence in Lost Judgment, aside from maybe showing up as random street fights.
This is mostly fine, because the majority of chapter one consists of a lengthy tutorial on the many systems, new and returning, that have been baked into the game. In addition to the following/chase missions from the first game, Lost Judgment also includes stealth (in/exfiltration) missions and parkour. And of course there’s also fighting. As much fighting as you want. You even fight – and this will feel awkward – high school students. In fact, you have a whole new fighting style, snake style, to help you deal with weaker enemies, principally children, whom you don’t want to send to the hospital – even the shitheads – with contusions. You can parry attacks to rattle enemies and then do an EX-intimidate move to scare the literal shit out of them and force a TKO.
It should come as no surprise that the game looks and feels incredible. This is, for all intents and purposes, the ninth mainline game in RGG’s broader “ludic universe,” and at this point there’s probably no studio better at creating a virtual city as rich as Kamurocho or Ijincho. There’s one traversal element I’m not sold on: the skateboard. You can only ride it on streets, and actually doing that riding looks and feels like it just got copied and pasted from Kingdom Hearts II. I genuinely am not sure if getting around Yokohama faster is worth riding the skateboard. Maybe that will change 40 hours in.
For as goofy and ultraviolent as the Yakuza/Judgment games are, one of the things that makes me love them is their earnestness and their boldness in finding a social issue to (literally) tackle, whether it’s the pressures and pitfalls of toxic masculinity or the fascist tendency to “cleanse” society. The first Judgment surprised me with how dead-serious it was about the problem of dementia, and how hard it tried to get players to understand the position of anyone who could be making a drug that could do something as radical as cure Alzheimer’s. Much of the tragedy in Judgment comes from watching people with genuinely noble intentions try to justify horrendous and cruel acts as they slip further away from any kind of moral high ground, as power corrupts them and convinces them that any sacrifice justifies the end of curing this disease once and for all.
One thing I left Judgment feeling ambivalent on with regard to all this was the ending. After an incredible all-out brawl of a climax, the denouement felt rushed and more than a little cliched. Yagami basically looked at the camera and winked as it all but did an iris slow transition like a fucking Looney Tune. It was like, after all the work he and his team did uncovering what was essentially a massive medical industrial-government conspiracy, he learned and gained fuck all, and had no interest in further reflection. Maybe that’s an uncharitable read. Maybe what I saw as glibness was simply an attempt at ending positive? Regardless, the vibe carries over into the prelude for Lost Judgment as well. And as the main game’s story starts coming into focus, it calls into question Yagami’s “any job, no matter how dirty” mentality.
The political angle for Lost Judgment, a game where you fight teenagers and make them faint by almost-not-quite punching them in the face, is that bullying is bad. Which it is! Bullying fucking sucks, and especially the kind of bullying on display here – bad ol’ fashioned physical torment. As a player I am 100% behind this sentiment so far. But to combat this, the chairman of Senryo High School hires Yagami through Tsukumo’s detective agency, Yokohama 99, to put up hidden cameras around the school, unbeknownst to the faculty, staff and students. “There’s no perfect way to stop bullying,” the chairman says at one point during the mission, but I dunno… this seems like the furthest thing from perfect to me. Yagami even puts a camera in the boys’ bathroom, justifying doing so by saying, “If I just turn the camera away from the urinals…” as if there’s like a not-creepy place to put a camera in a bathroom! Like damn if just one (1) student finds any of these cameras, but especially that one? Bullying will probably be the last thing on the school administration’s mind! (Someone does end up finding a camera and catches Yagami fixing it, by the way, and this results in Yagami having to run around the school avoiding guards so as to not end up on a sex offender registry. Cool. Cool cool cool cool.)
Anyway all this weird shit pays off almost immediately instead of drastically backfiring, as they catch a group of kids pushing a girl around in one of the homeroom classes and writing “slut” on her arm in Sharpie. It’s only here that the extreme ethics violation all the adults have committed even comes up, as Kaito, Sugiura and Tsukumo all want to confront the bullies, but the chairman points out how parents, students and faculty will fucking riot if they find out they’ve been spied on in this fashion. So, Yagami puts directional speakers under the desks in the homeroom class, hoping to goad the bystanders in the room to stand up for the girl. And after all the fuckshit with the cameras this is where I genuinely had to go, “wait what? this is kinda fucking stupid.”
Yagami’s plan is to be a disembodied voice that turns the other kids in the room on the bullies. So when they return the next day to pick on the girl, he, Kaito, Sugiura and Tsukumo all take turns telling the bullies they’re full of shit. It apparently completely fools them, and spurs the other kids to stand up for the girl in a way they hadn’t done before; the end-result of intentionally gaming the “Bystander effect.” It’s interesting and emotionally affective, but as cathartic as this is, it turns out it’s likely based on junk behavioral science (and even called into question in the game’s opening moments).
There’s a lot of shit happening in Lost Judgment right now, and it will likely keep happening until it stops and the credits roll, but right now I’m worried that this game is going to lose some of what made its predecessor so good in the process of possibly proving that it isn’t a Yakuza game and can tackle other stories without being about the criminal underworld in some fashion. Keep in mind, I’m only on chapter 2 now. All of this could be dead fucking wrong.