The fourth of my 2025 New Year’s Resolution games – Judgement – has finally been beaten. It took me about 40 hours of playtime – so now it comes to the question of what did I think about the game?

With Ichiban Kasuga’s Like A Dragon games shifting into something of a turn-based style after the beat-em-up action-RPG gameplay of the previous parts of the series (and moving away from Kamurocho), there was a little bit of a question about whether we’d still get beat-em-ups in the franchise. The answer (at least for the time) appeared to be yes, but not following the Yakuza. Instead, we had Judgement (or Judge Eyes in Japan) – which shifted the narrative away from a protagonist who was a member of the Yakuza, and who was instead a private detective.

Said detective is Takayuki Yagami – a former attorney who stuck his attorney’s badge in a drawer after a client he got acquitted for murder was convicted for killing his girlfriend. Said acquittal is an almost impossible task in the Japanese legal system, where prosecutors don’t bring charges unless they’re confident they have a conviction. Consequently, when they bring charges, juries and judges tend to be prejudiced in their favor. This is an actual problem with the Japanese criminal justice system, aggravated by police often getting confessions by coercion and without representation. When a serial killer starts murdering yakuza throughout Kamurocho, and their murders appear to link back to those two earlier cases, Yagami begins an investigation that will delve into institutional corruption reaching some of the highest regions of power in the Japanese government.

Tonally, Judgement is a much darker game than the Like a Dragon series. Those games still had some darker elements, but there was always a layer of goofiness over the top. Stuff like Kazuma Kiryu learning new techniques by taking photos and posting them on social media – that sort of thing. This feels like more of a hardboiled detective story, not just by the nature of the protagonist. Yagami runs into numerous roadblocks throughout the game related to institutional corruption in the Japanese government, both in general and in the criminal justice system. Some is due to deliberate malice or graft, some is due to a desire to preserve the status quo and not rock the boat, and some is out of a belief that, either intentionally or unintentionally, this corruption is leading to people doing the right thing for the larger whole.

Even the sidequests, which frequently are where the Yakuza games get at their absolute goofiest, feel darker. There are investigations of marital infidelity, a divorce attorney who is trying to pressure a couple into divorce instead of going into counseling. There are still some goofy quests (there’s a male idol whose toupee keeps getting blown away by the wind). However, even some of those on the goofy side are still rather dark – one recurring questline involves hunting down a quartet of sex pests with over-the-top gimmicks harassing women in Kamurocho.

The game’s combat is pretty much the same – with a couple additions which aren’t necessarily for the best. Probably the biggest one is “mortal wounds” – the idea that some weapons and attacks will deal damage that can’t necessarily be healed through the usual methods of energy drinks and food, limiting how much your health can be restored. That can be mitigated by either visiting the underground (literally) doctor, who can heal those injuries and sell you medical kits that will restore that damage in the field. However, all of that is very expensive. The other change, is certain weapons, like guns and swords, will break when dropped, so you can’t use exclusively deadly weapons on enemies – just ones that (theoretically) Yagami can restrain from doing lethal damage with. Of the changes, the shift with the weapons is more thematically appropriate to the change in protagonist – Yagami isn’t a gangster. However, the mortal wounds change is a pain – the doctor is only in one corner of the map – and while he’s close to a taxi fast-travel point, it’s still a trek. That, combined with how stupid expensive the medkits are (25K each for the small medkits), makes it tremendously onerous.

I did enjoy playing Judgement – however, unlike with some of the Yakuza games, by the end I felt like I didn’t exactly care about those other sidequests, and instead I just wanted to critical path the game to the finish, nor did I want to go back into the world after beating the main story to get the remaining side stories. I will get around to the sequel (which I own a copy of) someday, but for now I’m done with it.

Judgement is available on consoles (Amazon Affiliate Link) or on PC (Humble Store affiliate link).

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