I’ve spent the last couple of years steadily playing through and solidifying my love for the Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku series. I’ve been totally drawn in by the dense, immersive locales these games tend to be centered around, and I can’t help but love the high melodrama of watching big beefy dudes brawling to protect the things and people they love on a constant basis. It’s like watching pro wrestling but I don’t have to give Vince McMahon any money.
Judgment, from late 2018, isn’t exactly a fly in this ointment, but it did signal a change in the typical structure of an RGG-verse game. Rather than a dark urban fantasy where gods of the criminal underworld generate enough masculine energy with their flying fists to power Tokyo for a year, Judgment was meant to be more cerebral, starring a Sherlock Holmes type who happens to know Kung Fu and featuring a narrative that incorporated all the elements we’re familiar with – crime families, shady corporations, government overreach – in a new way. Judgment ended up being part legal drama, part noir, part thriller, with just a bit of room for the kind of beat-‘em-up beefy brawling we’re used to. I liked Judgment well enough! Well, except for the ending.
It’s taken me some time to get around to and finally beat Lost Judgment, Judgment’s sequel and the ninth mainline RGG-verse game, but I wanted to do so before Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name came out. Now that I’ve done that, the ambivalence I felt towards the end of the first Judgment game has only grown.
At this point, from an aesthetic and mechanical perspective, RGG Studio has this down to a science. Lost Judgment looks good, it feels good to play (aside from being heavily unbalanced in the player’s favor toward the end of the game), it sounds good… but it also felt fundamentally empty in a way previous titles didn’t. Neither Kamurocho nor Ijincho felt particularly accessible in the same way they’ve been across the series history. By this I mean, the game felt like it was almost rushing us past the neighborhoods themselves on our way to the story. There seemed to be less to do on average than other RGG games; side quests were sparse and a whole bunch of them were relegated to either the School Stories side-by-side DLC or to the “BuzzResearcher” in-game app. Those side quests that were there were entertaining, but nothing was particularly memorable in the same way previous side quests have been.
The main story was… almost exactly the same as Judgment, just centered around the social problem of adolescent bullying instead of finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. It even concerned the same government agency as in the last game. Things have changed — the yakuza has been fully dismantled at this point and so aren’t officially a factor, and the game primarily takes place in Ijincho, not Kamurocho, post-Like a Dragon — but otherwise we see basically the same escalation of stakes and clash of ideas between our master detective, Takayuki Yagami, and the villains he’s chasing. The similarity between the two games’ stories could be forgiven – it’s not like previous RGG titles have been markedly different from each other – if Yagami wasn’t a cross between a stuffed shirt and a wet blanket, personality-wise.
In Judgment, the thing that was appealing about Yagami was the fact that, despite going rogue and leaving his legal practice, he still retained a sense of integrity. He was the grimy underbelly’s detective with a heart of gold, someone who never charged his clients until the job was done, a force of nature who worked for the people where the law failed — and the law failed regularly. He operated outside the system, and sometimes against the system, but with a concrete idea of justice and what it should look like. At the very end, he reintegrates into the system, and in Lost Judgment that reintegration was allowed to complete.
Throughout the game, Yagami is confronted by a system on the verge of collapse: a school with a history of sweeping bullying under the rug desperately trying to put a stop to new cases; an active-duty cop transmuting a sexual battery charge against him into a murder alibi; a street gang made up of ex-yakuza working with the state and getting away scot-free with various crimes. And at every turn, Yagami has no answer. He fights his way through scores of Liumang, RK thugs and even cops, but can’t imagine a way to actually solve any of the mysteries or problems he finds himself trapped in, aside from merely exposing the corruption to the sunlight of media coverage.
Opposite Yagami is the Ijincho-based handyman, Kuwana, who approaches everything with a “do-it-yourself” attitude, for better and for worse. Kuwana is positioned as the Moriarty to Yagami’s Holmes, a former teacher who has fallen head-first into the Yokohama criminal underworld and who now uses his astonishingly wide network of connections and resources to be anywhere and do anything as needed. As Yagami struggles to piece together how his once-simple bullying investigation ties to the cop’s murder alibi and to the RK gang, Kuwana shows up at random opportune times to help or hinder him. The dynamic between the detective and the handyman really flips when a source of Yagami’s ends up dead at the hands of another villain, the leader of RK, while the gang was hunting for Kuwana. Suddenly, all of the moral quagmires and wicked questions about the shape of justice Yagami found himself in evaporate, and for him, all that is important is getting appropriate retribution for this single source – from Kuwana. His po-faced, single-minded vision engulfs the entire back half of the game, and unfortunately drags it down.
What’s so frustrating about this is that there are moments of brilliance throughout the game, mostly from the large supporting cast. We get to see glimpses of these characters’ personalities, and by and large they’re all more interesting than Yagami himself. Yagami’s associates, beefy ex-yakuza enforcer Masaharu Kaito, fleet-footed former thief Fumiya Sugiura and and tech genius Makoto Tsukumo, have genuinely wonderful comedic chemistry together, and they even spend quite a bit of time together – though never when Yagami, and by extension, the player, is present. Kaito in particular gets a vivid personality profile in the Kaito Files DLC (but we’ll get to that later). Main RK bosses Kazuki Soma and Daimu Akutsu are incredible in their roles as a sophisticated sadist with a secret and his musclehead right-hand man. The leader of the Liumang’s special ops group the White Masks, Tesso, is hilarious. Even Kuwana himself gets to portray his difficult position with so much dynamism. Yagami is the only character who doesn’t really get to grow.
I don’t want to play up my disappointment with Lost Judgment – it was more or less fine, just kind of wooden and one-note – but the gap in my enjoyment between the main game and its self-contained DLC story, The Kaito Files, is pronounced. The Kaito Files is like the video game equivalent of an EP, a small slice of a Yakuza-like that managed to be both fulfilling and thought-provoking.
Yagami’s associate investigator, Masaharu Kaito, takes center-stage in this four-chapter DLC. Kaito is contacted by tech CEO Kyoya Sadamoto with a plea to search for his missing wife, and in the process a whole heretofore-unseen side of Kaito’s past is revealed. The DLC feels a lot closer to Yakuza than Judgment, as Kaito tends to take big brawling swings like RGG protagonists of the past, and we finally encounter some of those patented Big Beefy Boys we’re all so accustomed to from the main series. This good old fashioned beat-em-up gameplay is garnished with a light dusting of Judgment mechanics, like stealth sections and exactly one tailing mission, and the balance is basically perfect.
There are little to no side quests in Kaito Files; but rather than being a problem like in the main game, here it lends to the small scope and sense of urgency the DLC story requires. We’re here for a good time, not a long time, and the game provides.
Ironically, despite that lack of side quests, Kamurocho feels more open and willing to be wandered around here. An appreciable chunk of the game is centered around poking through alleyways looking for cats who give us items, sniffing out valuable trash, and finding spots that unlock some of Kaito’s nostalgic memories (which in turn grant us combat skills). The combat itself suffers from the same balance problem as the main title, but it’s excusable again because of the brevity of the DLC – less time for us to ramp our power up, more of a need for big gains.
The story itself feels like a reflection on the success of the Like a Dragon series, and maybe even a little discomfort with some aspects of its fandom. When the child of the woman Kaito is supposed to be searching for, Jun Sadamoto, shows up on Kaito’s doorstep, we see that he’s a massive Kaito fanboy, having read all about him in his mother’s diary. He desperately wants to be a yakuza, despite the dissolution of both the Tojo clan and Omi Alliance and the increased strength of anti-gang laws, because to him it signifies a way to be identified as someone strong enough to take care of the people he loves. Kaito spends a lot of this DLC trying in vain to convince the teenager that the yakuza life is a broken life, and there are other ways to be strong that don’t have to do with the criminal underworld. It isn’t until the end – and all that entails – that this truth breaks through to Jun. The world he envisioned – and by proxy, the one we see portrayed in these games – is a fiction where musclebound demigods fight for big ideas like honor, and the reality is much different.
Lost Judgment and its DLC, The Kaito Files, feel like two opposing games smashed into one. While the combat feels good in both (if a little too frictionless at the end), the main game’s story is a bit too one-dimensional and leaves much to be desired from its main protagonist. The Kaito Files steals the show here, but doesn’t really get to be more than a footnote commentary on the legacy of two decades of Like a Dragon games and their fan communities.