After seven mainline games in the Yakuza series stretching back to the PS2, all following the same criminal underworld legends vying for control of a few paltry square blocks in Japan, one can hardly blame Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio for wanting to shake things up. So far, they’ve put the series’s framework and mechanics to different use across a number of spinoffs, among them the hyperkinetic Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which takes place in a world ravaged by nuclear apocalypse, and the detective simulator Judgment, which was released in 2019 in the West and has now been supercharged for the PS5.
Judgment’s flaw, if one can call it that, is that its most engaging elements aren’t distinct enough from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s work on the Yakuza main series, despite the developer setting up a plum opportunity to really go off script. For the first time, we get to experience the city of Kamurocho from the other side of the law. Our hero, Tak Yagami, is a disgraced former hotshot lawyer turned private eye who gets dragged into the criminal underworld when he’s tasked with helping a yakuza boss arrested for a series of murders where the victims have had their eyes gouged out. It’s all played relatively sober and straight in the early going, and that’s maybe the biggest departure from the Yakuza games, which let you know what kind of wacky hayride you’re about to go on from the start. The story is a well-written, sturdily executed piece of legal pulp fiction, and it’s nice to have a Yakuza narrative not centered around the Dragon of Dojima. But that premise creates expectations in terms of how the game approaches its subject matter, and Judgment isn’t quite so ready to put away childish things.
Investigation in Judgment isn’t far removed from your average Phoenix Wright game. The player scans environments and examines anything with an interaction icon over it until Tak gets the information he needs, at which point the narrative moves forward. Interrogations do grant bonuses on whether you ask a subject the right questions and avoid the less useful ones, but the game’s definition of a vital question doesn’t exactly line up with common sense; typically, all your options are useful questions to ask of a suspect. That said, the penalty for screwing up isn’t great enough to give the mechanic any sort of tension, and often these conversations are too self-serious for their own good. And Judgment feels especially lazy whenever Tak has to trail a suspect; they’re short sequences, but Assassin’s Creed has long since proven how uninteresting this type of busywork can be. At least the segments where a suspect makes a run for it and Tak has to chase them down on foot do fare a lot better, playing out more like the breathless, pulse-pounding chase sequences in Sleeping Dogs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best parts of Judgment are the ones that make you feel like you’re in a Yakuza game. The little tweaks to the series’s signature formula are mostly welcome. Tak can wall-run during combat. Sidequests lean heavier on the dating-sim aspects of making new friends and allies. A Mortal Wound system that means getting shot or stabbed semi-permanently lops off a portion of your health, which can only be restored by special health kits, or visiting a black-market doctor living in a sewer. The central mystery here is slightly more grounded than your average Yakuza game, but it still goes in wild, convoluted directions, playing out like an anime adaptation of The Fugitive. And all that’s on top of the typical collection of minigames and old-school arcade games scattered throughout Kamurocho.
Judgment comes off more like a flex of creative muscle than anything else. It’s an example of a studio proving that they can do something new within the confines of their usual wheelhouse rather than advancing the genre they’re playing in. Oddly enough, there’s a rather underdeveloped niche for a private detective game that takes place in the modern day, sans any fantastical, supernatural, or sci-fi elements, where putting together a legitimate case for the prosecution is the goal. As diverting and fun as Judgment can often be, it’s clearly the product of a studio too wild to fill that niche and keep a straight face.
The game was reviewed using a code provided by fortyseven communications.
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