Review: Judgment, Though Too Reticent, Is a Worthy Yakuza Spin-Off

Where the game goes in-depth, and where it clearly feels most comfortable, is in its omnipresent brawls.

Judgment
Photo: Sega

With Judgment, the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio turn their gaze elsewhere in Kamurocho, the fictional red-light district that serves as the stomping ground for their Yakuza series. Protagonist Takayuki Yagami (Takuya Kimura) isn’t one of the many manly gangsters who anchor the studio’s past narratives, but the current proprietor of the barely afloat Yagami Detective Agency and a disgraced former lawyer, having traded his businesswear for a punk jacket and a truly elaborate haircut that one guy alternately calls the look of a boy-band castoff or “a mop of pubes.” But if Yagami sounds like a big change for the series, fear not, as he has deep ties to the Matsugane Family, a knuckleheaded ex-yakuza of a partner in an exceptionally loud shirt, and an inexplicable mastery of martial arts that leaves him radiating red or blue energy just like any other Kamurocho tough guy.

There’s actual detective work in the game, to some degree. In his hunt for an eye-gouging serial killer, Yagami tails or chases suspects, questions witnesses, and even searches crime scenes for clues in a first-person spot-the-object sort of game mechanic. But Judgment never totally commits to these investigative wrinkles the way it does to the Yakuza series’s familiar combat mechanics, where each story thread tends to leave Yagami encircled by henchmen and where random punks roam open-world Kamurocho spoiling for a street fight.

Glancing around a crime scene is ultimately a simple matter of finding whatever you’re told to look for, and dialogue selections feel more like multiple-choice pop quizzes, the sort of thing a teacher might spring on students just to make sure they’re paying attention. Throughout the game, chase scenes are just auto-runners where you do things like press the triangle button to hop over a fallen bicycle, and the sluggish tailing segments prominently highlight whatever objects the player is supposed to hide behind. There are occasional glimpses of what might have been, when the game provides an objective that doesn’t outright tell the player where to go, or when it asks you to draw a logical conclusion instead of parrot information. It seems perfectly capable of taking these mechanics a step further, which makes it all the more frustrating to see Judgment so rigidly affixed to its investigative rails.

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Where the game goes in-depth, and where it clearly feels most comfortable, is in its omnipresent brawls. Yagami’s non-yakuza profession hardly reduces the number of besuited bad guys out for his blood, though he’s a more acrobatic fighter compared to Yakuza’s beefy Kiryu, leapfrogging over opponents with ease. If the detective kicks off a wall, he can catch some unfortunate soul between his thighs and propel them with a devastating throw, perhaps into a store window or a nearby koi pond. It’s familiar stuff, even with Yagami’s multiple fighting styles (“crane” for groups and “tiger” for one-on-one), though it’s easily the most polished mechanic in the game, still satisfying even after so much use.

Judgment’s central mystery, too, features some of the most engaging storytelling in a Yakuza game to date, and it’s freed from any bounds of continuity. The entirely new cast here—disheveled dirty cop Ayabe, the team at Genda Law Office where Yagami once worked, and any number of silly citizens, such as a potion-brewing hermit and a doctor whose office is in the sewers—retains the series’s gift for endearing characters. Their sincerity and determination drive a plot with twists that feel purposeful rather than perfunctory; Yagami’s investigation uncovers unexpected layers to an initially straightforward problem, leading him to medical research facilities, real estate schemes, and organized crime.

There are faint noir undertones here and there to complement the game’s private-eye POV, as in Yagami’s haunted backstory or the layers of corruption that seem to close in around him. But Judgment is simply far too fond of its gooey-hearted crime boys to ever dwell on the depths of despair and moral compromise inherent to noir storytelling. The twisting mystery posits the denizens of Kamurocho as lost souls who have no more than the city and, if they’re lucky, each other, yet the story does little to ever muddy their path; its characters are as warm as they are secure in their righteousness. Foregrounding detective work over the power struggles of crime families (which do still figure into the plot) does, however, lead the series to rely less on a xenophobic fear of thinly characterized outsiders, even if stepping beyond its favored patriarchal organizations has done little to change the largely peripheral inclusion of women in the story beyond punching bags or objects to be ogled.

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If the detective angle is little more than a mild seasoning sprinkled over the usual Yakuza beats, the two at least naturally complement one another in a thematic sense. Through its various side stories, the series has long emphasized the plight of everyday people as well as the empathy of stopping to help one another, and in Judgment, taking on such problems is outright Yagami’s job as a detective. The game even dots the main story with some of these side stories, which send Yagami after a lab coat-clad underwear thief called the Panty Professor or have Yagami’s partner, Kaito, babysit a kid who’s convinced that the burly ex-yakuza is secretly his favorite superhero, Captain Cop. Another mechanic encourages players to befriend various characters around town by performing small favors or just visiting them, and you get a little boost when greeting a friend on the street.

But Judgment is also a longer game than either of its immediate predecessors, Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and remake Yakuza Kiwami 2, which also have second open-world locations. In Judgment, almost all the action is confined to Kamurocho, where you’re often dropped on one end of the map only to learn you’re needed on the other. It all grows a little stale after a while, not just from repetition but from the knowledge that you can now interact (or are supposed to be able to interact) with the game in ways beyond simply throwing punches at a gaggle of yakuza goons. For as basic as the detective mechanics can feel, they actually harm the series’s reliance on various gauntlets of bad guys, because those fighting setups now signify the game avoiding other avenues of interaction in favor of what’s safe and familiar. Judgment suggests plenty of compelling new directions for the series to go, as well as an ultimate reticence to totally follow any of them. Yagami’s primary investigative tool is his fists.

This game was reviewed using a retail PlayStation 4 copy purchased by the reviewer.

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Score: 
 Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio  Publisher: Sega  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: June 25, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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