After loving Judgment so much, I went into Lost Judgment with very high expectations. Yet, despite being, on a technical level, a more or less straight improvement on everything the previous game had, I couldn’t help but feel disinterested in most of its contents. Luckily, it’s still a very solid entry in the Like a Dragon series, at least mechanically. And with some good storytelling.
Just like its direct predecessor, Lost Judgment is an attempt to slightly tweak the Like a Dragon formula of beat ’em up action adventure in an open world into something that feels more like an investigation game. It’s still clearly divided into the adventure and action elements, fights can still be challenging and combat with randomly spawning groups of enemies on the streets continues to play a big part. But the adventure parts have more detective-y things than the typical Like a Dragon game. And Lost Judgment improves on basically every mechanic from the previous game, while additionally introducing some new ones. For better and for worse.
For example, detective Yagami still occasionally uses disguises and tails people, but tailing has been made far more freeform in the way it plays. I know some people disliked how the mechanic was overused in the original title, so the developers made it far more fun. Same goes for the chase sequences, how much more improved the sections of looking around in first person view are… You also get plenty new gadgets to play with in addition to the drone and even a dog that can be used to track smells. Oh and now we get stealth sequences too, which sound like something that fits the game perfectly… but mechanically they are some of the worst stealth segments I’ve played in the past 10 years, like they’re from the early 00s PS2 era of bad stealth titles.
And unfortunately, the mechanical improvements that I’ve listed often feel pointless. There are barely any tailing tasks in the entire game, for example, despite the great improvements, but you still have skills you can unlock for this almost unused feature. The drone is now almost never used by Yagami himself, despite the fact that instead of introducing new gadgets (and a dog) it would’ve made far more sense to put all of those features into the drone and make it more interesting and integral to your arsenal. The Chatter that you used to talk to people all the time in the previous game is now used for 4 contacts in total, only one of them writes you often and you never have any choices or abilities to contact anyone yourself… You can now do the word filtering process yourself, though, which was just a cutscene thing in the previous game. And it’s an amazing concept, yet, more often than not it’s so automated it feels like it’s underutilized. Oh and disguises are still almost never needed and when they are, it doesn’t matter what you use.
In general, Lost Judgment follows the same trend as a lot of Like a Dragon sequels in that it tries to do more of everything. You have more fighting styles, more locations, more mini-games, more skills, more stuff to do… And as it usually is with this approach, a lot of what made the previous game so great gets muddied and lost in the process. For example – the fantastic concept of Friends and getting to help the community from the first game, something that had a meaningful and awesome payoff in the end, is now entirely gone. Which ends up making the cities you explore almost irrelevant as locations. Apart from the school, all locations around Isezaki Ijincho (returning from Yakuza: Like a Dragon) and even Kamurocho have no meaningful interactions, form no emotional connections for the player. They’re just places to go to for stuff to happen. It doesn’t help that Isezaki Ijincho is a pretty plain location in itself, but if you didn’t play Yakuza: Like a Dragon previously, you’ll probably never remember anything about it apart from 3-4 landmark locations and even those barely.
The school interactions are seemingly introduced to replace the whole emotional core of the side content, but they feel so disjointed and so completely unrelated to Yagami as a character, that it’s hard to understand what the developers were going for here. To the point, where most of Lost Judgment, as far as the storytelling, the mood, the characters and especially side content goes, feels like a collection of 5 separate game ideas that were combined into one game with Yagami filling in the role of many unrelated characters. And as a result not feeling like he belongs to most of the game. Even for the main story until the last third of the game apart from several key narrative beats, it’s like you’re playing as a Main Character of a Video Game here to do what plot requires, not Yagami and his friends.
It does get better as far as the mood goes in the main story, but it still feels a bit too little, too late and somewhat bland at that. The topics that are brought up are impactful and there are good character moments and scenes. But again – it feels like this would’ve been better served as several unrelated games in Like a Dragon universe with separate focus and protagonists, rather than this one single title that ends up feeling shallow as a result. Because it cannot quite deliver on everything it opens up, while almost entirely losing all of the charm that the first game had.
The story DLC Kaito Files feels, in many ways, like a far better take on what original Judgment established and follows a simpler, but still surprising short story, where players get to play as Kaito. It does feel as a DLC, as it’s far simpler in many ways to the main game, but it has enough content of its own to feel really fun, it tweaks mechanics in ways that feel great. And in some aspects it even “fixes” the problems that the main game created.
Lost Judgment, despite being in many ways an improvement on the original game, is just so… disappointing. And, as I mentioned, it ends up feeling shallow and lacking a lot of the charm that the original game had. It has great moments, it is somewhat easier to play and even friendlier to newcomers than the original. And Kaito Files is a really cool short story. But I cannot recommend it to anyone who is not absolutely in love with the series and/or the first game. And even there, I feel like you might be disappointed as I was, depending on what you expect from a Judgment game. Of course, getting the title just for a DLC is also a silly idea, it’s not really worth it, unless you want to play the main game too. So, I can only hope the series do continue, but next time the game focuses on what made the first Judgment charming, wholesome, investigative and memorable in the first place, instead of trying to turn it into a jack of all trades. Unless, of course, we get to play as a different character who would fit that archetype.