Thursday, September 5, 2019

New Review: Disappointingly average and incredibly repetitive, Judgment lost my interest long before its conclusion

Well, here we go again.
Another year, which marks the release of another game in Sega’s long-running and tragically annualized Yakuza series. It was a series that burst onto the scene in 2006 as a unique fusion of GTA with beat-em-up elements, along with very strong storytelling, existing within a charismatic and explorable city. Though new entries release every few years which somewhat reinvent and revitalize the formula (such as 2018’s strong Yakuza 6) the rest of them very quickly fall into the trap of treading familiar territory, often to increasingly diminishing results.
Despite being originally positioned as a new IP, Judgment in practice makes no effort to differentiate itself gameplay-wise from the series upon which the majority of its formula originates. Even with a promising start and some gorgeous visuals, it by and large comes across as a lower budget spinoff. It has moments of strong storytelling, as Yakuza games often do, but Judgment is far too eager to stop its momentum dead in its tracks for tedious filler missions that have all the presentational flair of PS2-era side content. These missions however are required to progress the story, and though not difficult, as with the rest of the game, they bog the entire thing down whenever its narrative seems to be gaining momentum.
But let’s step back for a minute. Judgment stars new main character Takayuki Yagami, a former defense attorney who left that career to become a detective after a man who he successfully defended went on to commit another murder. Joining a law office in Kamurocho, Yagami becomes involved in the defense case of a Yakuza member named Hamura, where things reveal themselves to be not quite what they seem.
Yagami and his detective partner Kaito are both likable and compelling, and though Japanese voice acting is available, the English dub happens to be fantastic, and at the start, with the gorgeous visuals of neon-drenched Kamurocho, and upon seeing Yagami’s office-slash-apartment, I was initially very excited by the prospect of where my adventures in Judgment’s world would take me.
Unfortunately, you’ll get to experience almost all of this in the first couple of hours. The detective elements are incredibly shallow and follow one of only a small handful of different blueprints. There’s the “find the object” investigative missions, a mechanic that’s almost always the least fun element of any game that it’s featured in. There’s chase scenes, which are cool but grow repetitive as they offer nothing new as the game goes on, and then there are missions where you follow someone down the street, which similarly never veer from their pattern and stretch on for far too long. Drone missions occasionally show up, but feel like an afterthought, as they only offer more “find the object” gameplay, with you simply using them to scan the environments for whatever the game wants you to find. Aside from an under-utilized camera mechanic and the occasional need to pick a lock, Judgment simply recycles these same mission blueprints again and again, with nothing happening to spice them up or to provide anything beyond what you experience in their initial reveals.
Everything else is textbook Yakuza; you’ll wander the city, which is atmospheric but in this case very small, heading from point A to B and getting in random battles along the way. The combat system features two different styles to switch between, with one being good for one type of battle and the other being good for another one, though as the game went on I forgot about the other style entirely. A new feature requires you to seek out a doctor to heal yourself from “permanent wounds” from certain enemies; it’s different, but doesn’t do much either way for the game. Battles occur when exploring Kamuracho at an alarmingly high frequency, and avoiding them, while possible, is frustrating, as enemies will follow you seemingly across the entire map before giving up, requiring you to either engage them to get it over with, or to run a ridiculous distance out of your way in order to avoid them. Most of these types of enemies provide very little EXP for your trouble. As with all Yakuza games, the combat’s fun on a basic level, and there’s an okay amount of character customization, but battles in Judgment are mind-numbingly easy and straightforward, making their existence feel like nothing more than a rude interruption as you try to head from one place to another.
It’s this area too where Judgment disappoints, as the vast majority of the story is spent wandering back and forth between the same tiny selection of locations over and over again; Yagami’s apartment, a bar, the law office, and a hidden casino. The bulk of your experience in Judgment involves traveling from one of these locations to the other, over and over again, and it’s this repetition, which carries over to all aspects of this game, that sinks it. There’s very little to see here that you haven’t seen in Judgment’s first couple hours, and the game stretches its thin storyline across well over 20.
It doesn’t take long to discover how incredibly little Judgment has to offer. The explorable world is tiny even by series standards, and the side content available to you, in the form of side missions you can take on and Friendships and Relationships you can develop, is so boring that I almost recommend skipping over it entirely. Even cool features that the game teases you with, such as the ability to decorate your apartment and a number of records you can collect for your record player, reveal themselves to be laughably limited in scope, and you’ll exhaust those possibilities after just a couple hours of playing.
But Judgment goes on and on and on. Everything offered in the gameplay department is introduced up front, with the game repeating its shallow and limited mission types and battle sequences endlessly until you fight through its long-winded but unexciting final sequences. The plot does take you to some cool areas, and Yagami’s a great main character, but the bland filler missions kill the pacing at the worst possible times, presenting some truly lame attempts at humor and never managing to take the hint.  
As long as you’re not sitting through one of the many static, text box-ridden cutscenes, Judgment looks great and generally runs well, the occasional framerate hitches (on the Standard PS4) and odd pauses aside. The presentation’s slick, giving it the look of a current gen game, something the Yakuza games in the past have struggled with. But visual competency really only goes so far. With such tired, uninspired gameplay and a world that’s so small and limited, I find it hard to recommend this game to anyone. Yakuza fans I think would be better off waiting until next year, when the inevitable Yakuza 7 will release, and those new to the series would be better served by jumping in with almost any other installment. It’s a bummer, because Yakuza 6 I thought was such a promising comeback for what’s become an increasingly tired and predictable series.
Judgment, on the other hand, is another example of why I almost lost interest in it entirely. Great presentation and English voice acting aside, the game’s so incredibly, thoroughly, disappointingly average, and the sheer repetition of its gameplay wears out its welcome long before its forgettable conclusion.

 2.5/5

Note; this review is based on the Standard PS4 version.