"I Don’t Have Friends, I’ve Got Family" Ichiban Toretto

11/10 pure kino, zenith of media, absolute number 1 (ICHI!). Afterall... Once you're at rock bottom, the only place to go is up...

This is an incredibly fun game,the mini-games themselves could be considered their own games imo.
Switched to Chef Ichiban when I could as I saw Damascus Ladle as an obtainable drop and thought the great boost to magic attacks would work well with the Orbital laser,while I kept everyone else on random jobs,playing the game blindly.
I spent most of my first 100 hours completing side quests and the main story,all the while replaying the dragon kart minigame for hours as I didn't think about looking at booster guides :D
Then levelled up my characters to lv80 by a little bit of grinding and went into the True Final Milennium Tower.
Got 'fodderized' on the first encounter,then realized that I actually have to play optimally to get the last achievement. Spent more than 40 hours grinding boosters in Sotenbori,grinding materials in Sotenbori Battle Arena,watching YT videos on phone while the Business Minigame played itself,levelling up everyone from job rank lv1 to lv100 (because I didnt have Ichiban as Hero since he hit lv20+Eri wasn't Dealer (due to the powerful dice debuff ability she has)+Joon-Gi wasn't Bartender (Zhao was the only one with the best job as he wasn't a party member throughout the whole game thus I didn't change his default job,which is his best job,so he was soloing fights for a while) and then stocking up on as many mana-healing items as I could and watching guides..only used around 20 healing/ressureciton items total,since everyone was durable enough to survive at least 2 attacks when I learned to parry their attack patterns. The only truly challenging part was the final boss but still got him in my first attempt (no revives,only used Ichaban's summons twice) since Ichiban had such high defense that he was able to tank attacks from 4 enemies in a single turn whille everyone else was either down or stunned. Moral of the story,spend a whole week grinding boosters to get the last achievement XD

i am a big fan of turn based combat, think fire emblem or xcom. Turn based combat is fun when there is tactical depth. Unfortunately, the turn based combat in this game completed missed the mark. there are no tactics involved whatsoever - the most annoying thing is you do not control character movement, and when you try to set up an AoE attack where you could potentially hit several enemies, the enemies would have already scattered about while the move animation was still playing.

The story is decent though and the atmosphere is great. i got to chapter 9 where the combat difficulty kinda spiked. I was under leveled but did not feel like grinding to level up simply because of how bad the combat the was.

It really surprises me why the developer did not just polish and improve the combat mechanics from the previous games.

This game is complete trash. You have to sit through about 2 hours of mostly watching movies before the intro is done. Then another 3 hours before you can start the RPG party side of things. And then 12 hours in you can start taking jobs and actually have the full game. That is absurd amount of time to drag before actually being able to play the full game.

Do you like the complex and mature personality of Kazuma Kiryu? Do you like the thrill of fighting powerful enemies in real time? Do you love the edgy and dark side the classic Yakuza series had alongside some humor? Then DON'T BUY THIS GAME! What to expect: 1) Kiryu replaced by a delusional idiot that spreads bluepilled BS and toxic positivity nonstop 2) Turn-based combat like in the most trite JRPG, forcing you to grind stats instead of relying on your own dexterity, and killing the momentum with the need to stop and max levels/get better gear before a battle that's crucial for the plot 3) Lazy and simplistic plot devices to justify the old protagonist "passing the torch" to the new one, randomly pushing an incredible character that made the series great aside in favor of an unvoluntary comedian who combs his hair with dynamite 4) 90% comedy and dead-boring grinding + 10% drama and action. Despite it being well made in its own way and genre, I HATE THIS GAME WITH ALL MY HEART and I wouldn't even recommend it to my worst enemy unless all they wanted was something ridiculous and completely unrelated (and unworthy of responding to the name of) the Yakuza series. If you loved the classic series don't make my same mistake: don't waste money on this. I wish I could get a refund, they literally destroyed a masterpiece of gaming that held a lot of meaning and was even inspiring to one's real life and turned it into some stupid and reassuring entertainment. NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!

P.S.: All the time I wished I could punch the protagonist to death instead of his enemies. Very telling. Why not make one of the other very solid secondary characters the protagonist instead of picking this clueless imbecile? I don't understand...

i thought i hate turn-based games but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Seriously didn't expect it to be my favorite Yakuza game.

Yessir, but that True Final Millennium Tower man....

Ichiban Holdings

small world - that's a minus, but story is hilarious and suprising. Gameplay is like any other turn based JRPG - but I liked it a lot. Totally recommended. It is also a cool way to learn japanese chess (shogi) :)