🎶🎶 ITS KARAOKE TIME 🎶🎶

🎵 midnight shadow kirisaku accel kishimu highway city 🎵

🎵 joshuseki utsumuku omae no rouge iro no urei 🎵

🎵 toida knife no you na 🎵

🎵 ore o tsutsumikonda my sweet babe 🎵

🎵 hedo deru you na past ya future 🎵

🎵 Ore ga nurikaete yaru sa 🎵

🎵 ikou ze futari kiri no eden 🎵

🎵 ichi oku ni oku hyaku oku no kiss o abisete yaru baby 🎵

🎵 kono ude daite omae o nido to hanashi wa shinai 🎵

🎵 MACHINE GUN KISS DE JUST FALL IN LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE. 🎵

i like it "ryu go gotoku" (this is nihhon language for "like a dragon"

Good albeit very flawed game. Story/characters, mini-games, side stories are all great. One of the best in the series. But everything tied to RPG elements is either half-baked, half-assed or simply lazily made. Or it could simply be, as commonly known, JRPG. It's my first one and I might say I'm extremely impressed with the sheer idiocy of many of the RPG elements.

Combat.

The game is constantly straight up lying and deceiving the players. All these Medium/Heavy/Extreme damage values of skills are one giant BS. There are a lot of Medium skills that deal high levels of damage due to the way how animations work and scaling from Attack/Magic attributes.

Status effect skills are useless. Completely and utterly. Why bother with casting something and then risking the chance of missing/losing your turn when you can simply deal damage or debuff the enemy or heal/use an item? DoT builds do not exist here and bosses are pretty much immune to nearly every type of status effect. At least debuffs do work on all enemies.

After playing a lot of Western RPGs and especially Grim Dawn, Yakuza like a Dragon is pretty bad when it comes to build variety and itemization. Some of the jobs are pretty much useless. Higher difficulties make this too much apparent. The only purpose they might serve are passive bonuses and some of the skills which you share on your character regardless of the current job/class.

Probably 90% of the weapons might as well be deleted from the game. Even on normal, after Chapter 9-10 their damage and bonuses make fighing trash mobs/bosses an extremely painful experience. There is no way to upgrade them, no illusion system to at least make some use of all these weapons that are just sitting there in your inventory.

There is no item scaling. Enemies have insane HP values and you pretty much stuck with items which have values from normal diffculty. The only exception is one upgradeable weapon for each job/class.

Bullet-sponges galore, hidden values/penalties on skills or on trash mobs, make playing Like a Dragon a chore. On Legend, even if you have max level character some piece of trash level 10 mob is going to dodge not only your attacks but also your skills. Who the hell designed, coded and then playtested this?

Some of your attributes are also useless. Agility? A lot of mobs will go before you even if you have it in 600-700 range. Dexterity? I didn't notice any value in this attribute too. Critical hits are extremely rare and don't really add much damage. The best ones are HP, defense and magical damage. And of course, resistances. These are essential if you don't want to get one shot by some of the (mini-)bosses.

Speaking of bosses, their design is atrocious. Probably the worst in the whole series, considering all the idiotic design choices made by the devs. On higher difficulties they will dodge a lot of your melee attacks/skills, so you are forced to use the same ranged skills over, and over, and over again for 10-30 minutes straight (depending your upgrades/magical damage). Some trash mobs found in two last dungeons can one-shot your characters and then wipe the whole party in 2 turns (and, no. I'm not talking about melee mobs). Ask me how I know.

Last boss can one shot Ichiban regardless of resistances, poundmates or defence rating/HP, he just does. This is not a brawler, this is a turn-based RPG. And if you missed the window to use a skill from Hero job, called Peerless Resolve, go and pray to all RNG Gods you know that this abomination of a game design will not focus you two-three times IN A ROW. That's right. He can also go several times before you. And there are no checkpoints, if you die you have to pay money to retry. "And what if I don't have enough money?" Well, sucks to be you lol This was probabbly the devs line of thinking when they decided to design many of the boss fights this way. What's the point of autosave?

Movement during combat is pretty terrible with camera constant dancing around your characters and zooming in/out or getting stuck somewhere and you can't see anything. If you suffer from motion sickness DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. "Heat" skills which constantly require you to skip their animations manually. Blinding, white screens before some of them (Genshin Impact loading screen says hello). Just brilliant design choices.

If you think that's all, you are mistaken. RPGs are built on several pillars. Dungeons, epic loot (+crafting) and quests, combat and build variety. Well, LAD fails nearly in every single category.

Dungeons on Legend difficulty have the same loot than on Normal. Same garbage hats that you can buy for 10k yen in some Pawn shop are dropping from Silver and Gold safes. Crafting materials? Well, take this x1 piece of plastic (when you need hundreds of them to upgrade your many weapons). And the best part, enemies have 3-5 times more HP but your items don't scale. Is this an RPG or what? Where are my Legendary Soiled Trousers with max stats, devs?

The level design is also the most boring, lazy one you could ever think of. No secrets, no rare bosses which drop some great gear, no high payouts or tons of experience. Exception to this are some of the late game dungeons which, by the way, only small minority of players can even beat not even farm consistently. Great design strikes again.

Quests do not give epic loot or experience which you might expect from an RPG. The only way to level up your characters is to fight all kinds of mobs. The problem is that to level up after 40-50 you need a lot of experience. And there is only ONE place in the whole game that allows to do it. 400-450k of experience per certain fight, 4 fight in total. With experience giving trinkets it's slightly faster but not when you need to do it dozens, potentialy hundreds (yes, you heard me right) of times. My record was 8 minutes per run. Do the math. Or, you can be a smart fella and visit Nexus mods for some goodies that might help you with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ grind. You still need to waste a certain amoung of time to level up but it is nowhere near the amount needed when doing it the "people who like to waste their time" way.

Performance issues, pretty bad GUI for a game with dozens upon dozens of skills and visual artifacts are also present. At least the game doesn't crash. One thing that all Yakuza games have, they are extremely stable. I don't remember a single crash in any of the games I played.

"So, why the hell do you still recommend the game?". If you play on normal difficulty many of the things I mentioned can be (extremely) annoying, yes, but the enemy health and some of the idiotic design choices have some workarounds. If you treat the game like a visual novel, Yakuza like a dragon is pretty good. If you treat it like an RPG, everything falls apart. It's as if the game was made by someone who read about RPGs on Wiki and never played or seen them personally.