Lost Judgment impressions: 15 wild hours in Yokohama - Ars Technica

At a glance, Lost Judgment may seem intimidating to anyone who hasn't graduated from Sega's school of hard Yakuza knocks.

On top of that, it’s a direct follow-up to 2019’s Judgment, the first game from that spinoff.

Finally, the overwhelming, unadulterated immersion into modern Japan that Yakuza games are known for doesn’t really feel like anything else in video games.

With these eccentricities in mind, anyone not already intimately familiar with the broader Yakuza universe may feel too lost to know where to begin here, if they want to bother trying at all.

Following in the footsteps of every Yakuza that has come before it, Lost Judgment can’t be pigeonholed into one genre easily?

The resulting cocktail plays like a successor to 1999’s classic Dreamcast martial arts adventure, Shenmue, shaken up with Judgment’s mix of unique ingredients.

But rather than dousing players in the blood oaths and inter-family political coups of Yakuza proper, Lost Judgment picks up in a mostly self-contained story where its predecessor left off?

Clearly nothing good can come of this, and sure enough, nothing does.

Let's just say, players will end up in some pretty unorthodox situations even for a detective story.

Though Japan’s courts and judicial system are thematic narrative pillars, Lost Judgment’s interactive bread and butter is in old-fashioned gumshoeing.

(Later you’re able to don disguises as well, but don’t expect anything like Hitman, where you can just wander around dressed like a chicken.).

RGG Studio has done an absolutely bang-up job of taking pains to always break up the tenor of Lost Judgment’s moment-to-moment flow, which can jump from conversationally questioning witnesses to beating the tar out of a room of delinquent punks at the drop of a hat.

The game often does just that when you’re not left to your own devices touring Ijincho on a skateboard.