Like a Dragon: Ishin! Review (Roberto)
Single Player game with single use P2W microtransactions
Remember a few years ago when Deus Ex tried to sell single use skill point microtransactions in a single player game and it went so poorly for them they never made another game in the franchise? Well here we have the same thing happening again but they're trying to keep it quiet to avoid the inevitable backlash. Just to be clear, it isn't single use per save. It's one use ever. The confirmation if you're still not sure
That alone isn't the reason for a negative review though it certainly puts the game in a bad standing. The fact they also increased the games price after release also doesn't help the game much when talking about the game's value.
If you haven't played all the other games in the franchise I would recommend literally any of them over this for the price to content/quality ratio. Also since this is a kinda fan service throwback game a lot of the references to characters will be lost if you haven't played at least the main Yakuza franchise without the spin offs.
Then you also have the stuttering and 30fps lock in cutscenes, boring repetitive substories, then incredibly grindy crafting mechanics.
Every new action requires the game to render the shader for the animation. (Not too dissimilar to the issues The Callisto Protocol had/has on release) This means the game will stutter every time a new animation is played for the first time. So every heat move, every unique boss battle, every time you use a new weapon with a new glow on it. The game can be running a solid framerate without ever dropping in gameplay but then stutters like crazy for anything new. It basically ruins any interesting boss battle. "Oh they're doing something cool... oh I missed it because the game was stuttering... I can only hope they do it a second time or I'll never know what happened." This also happens in the 30fps cutscenes... so playing it a second time for NG+ you won't have these issues but you also won't have any of the dlc you paid for (including what you got from the deluxe version.)
Then the lacklustre substories. At this point I've played pretty much every game in the franchise plus the spin off games and I honestly can't think of any game that had so many boring repetitive substories. So many are just you come across a person, they want an item, you give them an item, wait a minute later and give them the same item again, repeat 10 times and that's a substory complete. There's not even a unique interaction every time you give them something outside of the first interaction and the final item. This is the vast majority of substories. This isn't the maxing out a shop owner either, which feels like it takes a lot more transactions than it does in previous games as well. There are a few unique substories but they feel so rare. This makes the substory from zero about getting toys from the claw machine for the little girl look like a breath of fresh air since you actually have to do something before you return and do the same task again and again.
Then the crafting. Honestly playing on hard, just ignore it. The whole mechanic is so grindy for so little reward it isn't worth the effort. It feels like something that's there just for NG+ and the new difficulties that come with it where everything has it's numbers bloated. You can buy weapons very early on that are better than 3/4th's of the swords you can craft. Then you're given weapons through main story battles so you never need to craft anything yourself. It requires so much money to level up the crafting to be able to make something better than what you can already buy elsewhere then the costs to build stuff is crazy. You do get 200 ryo for completing the game which will offset a lot of the costs, hence it feels like a NG+ thing. Also I dread to think how much grinding you would have to do in the battle dungeons to unlock all the materials you would need to craft anything worthwhile.
All in all outside of the main quest and the minigames there isn't much in this game to recommend. In previous games the substories were some of the best parts. They were always so crazy and unique almost every time whereas in this they're all so mundane and they feel so copy and pasted in what you have to do. The game has performance issues which we're still waiting on getting fixed. Then the monetisation of the game is questionable at best. If you really want to play the game I would wait until a deep sale, maybe by that point the game will have it's performance patched so its enjoyable to play on the first run not just the second. Also if you do play I'd highly recommend getting a trainer, something like WeMod or something, in order to get what you would get from the paid consumable dlc for free. It would also remove the grinding if you really wanted to craft something for yourself.