Yakuza 7

Playtime: 17.2 Hours

Didn't get very far, I think I stopped near the beginning of Chapter 6 (Ignition), before exiting the Yokohama Underground. Only got halfway through that dungeon before getting completely burned out of the game, and at the moment have no interest in going back. Character levels are generally hovering around Lv.17, job levels around Lv.8 (secondary class). I've probably completed between 10-15 side stories, but haven't done much of the Part-Time Hero or Management stuff. Stuck with the first 4 characters currently (Ichiban, Nanba, Adachi, Saeko) - I like the dynamic well enough, my problems with the game lie elsewhere.

I wouldn't say I'm a fan of the Yakuza series; I enjoyed Yakuza 0 enough despite thinking the gameplay was quite clunky, but I found Kiwami to be aggressively mediocre at best and couldn't stand more than a couple of hours of it, even after giving it multiple tries. When I first saw some gameplay of Yakuza 7, I thought that it was much farther up my alley than the other Yakuza games and was quite eager to try it out, but at the end of the day I'm quite disappointed in my experience thus far, even if I don't regret the time I've spent. Similarly to how most other Yakuza tltles feel like a clunky budget version of a beat-em-up, or action game, or fighting game, this game feels like a pretty clunky budget turn-based RPG that tries to do a lot, but doesn't really nail the core mechanics down. However, it is still able to execute a few major things differently from most other RPGs that really give it a very unique feel.

To begin with, I quite like the characters and find their story very intriguing. The choice of older protagonists in this game in itself marks a huge differentiation from the rest of the genre; instead of a party consisting of naive high-school-aged characters, this older group who are still struggling to find their way allows for far more variance in their interactions. Ichiban has seen prison time and doesn't really know how the world works, while Adachi is a near-retired ex-cop, Nanba is an ex-nurse turned homeless man, and Saeko runs a bar in the red-light district. These characters can dig more into their pasts without running into the common ground of school life and childhood, though I honestly think their backgrounds could have played a little more into the game's story so far - Ichiban's and Saeko's knowledge has been pretty useful, but Nanba has only had a couple of opportunities to show his skill as a nurse and Adachi's ex-cop status is mostly leveraged for gags in conversations (since he spent most of his later years stamping licenses). The overarching plot also doesn't shy away from showing some grittier aspects of organized crime and prostitution, though their definitely is still quite a bias in the writing to make factions and morals more black-and-white in Ichiban's favor, which is consistent with the general tone of most other Yakuza games too. It is quite ironic, given the inclusion of the Bleach Japan goons in this game. Lastly, I'll also say that plenty of side stories have focused on older people finding their way, and I can appreciate how far this game goes to try lifting the stigma around the easy targets: homeless people, prostitutes, and even some petty criminals are portrayed as far more redeemable, honorable, and agreeable characters here than in most other games. Really heinous stuff like assassinations or extortion of innocents is still looked down upon, as it should; again, I think the tone of the writing is balanced a bit too heavily towards a positive outlook for seedy characters but it's not too egregious.

Unfortunately, even with the likeable characters and interesting story, the moment-to-moment gameplay is quite a slog. It is extremely evident that this is the studio's first attempt at a turn-based RPG, because the mechanics are extremely clunky by pretty much any standard. The battle speed is extremely slow in several ways - for every character's turn, having to watch slow movement and attack animations wastes an enormous amount of time. With random encounters frequently having between 5-7 enemies, one fight can easily take several minutes - and the experience/level pacing isn't really scaled to match these longer encounters. It doesn't help that there still aren't many useful AoE moves thus far - I'm not counting on the fights getting faster later if they drag on this long now. Skill and block QTEs contribute greatly to this bloat in time, and there is no option in the settings to speed fights up, either - in fact, the only selectable option is to make them even slower, which sounds like a nightmare. Also note that there are also no difficulty settings, which can be quite annoying for anyone who wants to play without doing at least some degree of grinding; I've noticed that most dungeons have me a little bit underleveled, usually starting at least 1-2 levels below the average enemy level in every area. While it isn't too horrible at the moment, I am aware of a particularly infamous point in the game later (Chapter 12?) with the Majima, Saejima, and Kiryu fights which all but requires 10+ hours of grinding dungeons to hit a high enough level to challenge on reasonable grounds, which simply sounds like irredeemably terrible game design. All of this is exacerbated even further with extremely awkward enemy balance and zoning in the map. At this point in the game, some regions of the map contain enemies that will keel over to any attack, while the spawn in the next block is 5-10 levels above my current party and is significantly harder for no good reason. All JRPGs will have zones, but since the map of Ijincho in this game is so small, each "zone" is only capable of holding maybe 1-2 groups of enemies maximum on a single street, and may even bleed into each other in certain areas.

Stats and jobs are also tossed around without any clear sense of care for balance; they tend to be all over the place. It's kind of funny how quickly Ichiban's legendary barbed-wire hero bat is supplanted by a random iron pipe (even with a +2 bat), and Saeko starts in a class that gets boosts to her magic stat with increased job rank, yet has almost no magic attacks or skills at all. It might be worth noting here that these stat boosts seem to go away when you switch jobs... which might create the absolute dumbest balancing decision I've seen. There seem to be a ton of elements in this game, yet none of the strengths or weaknesses seem to make any sense, and there are so few available moves to the player characters that lots of these elements only have a couple of attacks. Elemental balance is something that most RPGs have figured out ages ago, yet this one falls completely flat on its attempt somehow. I stopped paying attention to elemental affinities when using moves since they simply aren't well balanced in availability or utility; same with status effects, which are extremely arbitrary and rarely useful beyond some DoT or stun effects. Speaking of availability, the experience of trying to find good gear varies significantly per class - basic swords and canes are very common, but I looked around several shops and couldn't find any shields for Adachi, meaning that he is actually forced to use a 13-ATK weapon for multiple chapters until I can find a way to craft or buy one. Even after looking it up, it looks like I'd have to wait until midway into Chapter 7 to get any kind of upgrade. It's really funny how the game tells you to swap jobs frequently, yet gives you absolutely no way to get good gear once you do. That's not even to mention that the tank-type jobs that Adachi gets are simply terrible, as they have no way to consistently taunt or draw attention to do any actual tanking. There are plenty of other complaints I have about the class and equipment system in this game - too much to fit in this rant for now.

This game also suffers heavily from wanting to implement too many half-baked mechanics, which is quite honestly a staple of the Yakuza games. I feel like these games are almost meant to simulate an arcade of sorts, given that a lot of the side stories in each Yakuza game leads to some sort of minigame that you can continue playing persistently afterwards. Think Y0 disco, or pocket racer, or the trash kart and cinema rhythm sheet minigames here in Y7. These games almost universally mistake an equivalence of having lots of mechanics to having good mechanics. Yakuza 7 positively floods the gameplay with mentions of new mechanics and minigames - several sidequests unlock minigames with additional levels, there's a bond mechanic with each party member (though these are mostly just conversations, which is OK), the part-time hero tracker is an unnecessary tracker for all the dumbass menial fetch and kill quests you find in MMOs, which feels completely unnecessary given the number of actual side stories there are in the game. The management minigame feels like yet another tacked-on mobile game experience that gives you in-game bonuses later on. A common thread is that all of this side content generally sucks; like they couldn't get good gameplay designers to craft a well-tuned, balanced and fast turn-based RPG experience, so they decided to just hire a ton of aspiring mobile game developers to test their schlock here instead. None of it is relevant, the fun and funny factors die ignominous deaths immediately after the introductory side stories are over, and all you're left with is an uninspired piece of garbage that drew time away from a simpler and better experience overall. For being such a core experience of the entire series, it's definitely not right to say it should be removed altogether - at this point, it defines the series more than Kiryu or the beat-em-up gameplay does. But I think it's a clear indicator that the development of these games isn't focused on a refined core experience, so their games really aren't for me.

Judging by the rant above, it's pretty clear that my opinion of the game is honestly quite low. After actually listing down my issues with the game, I feel like my opinion has actually decreased even further - where I might originally have considered continuing this again at some point in the future, at the moment I don't really see myself playing any more of this, neither in the near nor distant future. I might still have some hope that another game in this style could learn from their numerous blunders with this one; after all, out of all their games, this still is the only one of this style. But given that their other games have all universally been very hit-or-miss, and they haven't managed to truly refine many basic things in all this time, I'm certainly not holding my breath. As I said at the start, I don't regret any of the time or money spent on this game, but it'll take monumental improvements for me to have even a ghost of an interest in the next one.