![]() The setup for the story is strong, and the narrative follows the typical Yakuza formula of starting off with a bang and then slowing way down to spend several chapters developing characters and establishing a framework for the larger tale that’s about to unfold. The only way he could know is if he had committed the crime himself, and yet he has the airtight alibi of already having been in police custody, and so Ehara’s defense lawyers from Genda Law Office enlist the help of Yagami and his partner Kaito to investigate the mystery of how Ehara could have killed Mikoshiba, who Ehara also reveals is the man who drove his own son to suicide years ago through relentless bullying. Where Lost Judgment is really trying to push into bigger things is in its story, which opens with a big moment in a Tokyo courtroom, where a disgraced police officer Akihiro Ehara accused of groping a woman on the subway waits for his conviction to be handed down to announce to the world that the body of a man named Hiro Mikoshiba has been recently discovered, providing his exact location and circumstances of death, baffling everybody in attendance as to how he could know any of this after having been in isolation for weeks. ![]() One of the immediately beneficial side effects of this is that there’s significantly more game area to explore, and the offering of side activities and side cases is robust enough that it’s safe to say there’s more meat on the bone in Lost Judgment, and plenty of cases for Yagami to solve. The game takes advantage of work done for Yakuza: Like a Dragon, using both Kamurocho and LAD‘s new Ijincho region to tell its story across two cities in an effort to increase the scope and gravity of the narrative. Lost Judgment pulls few punches in its attempts to amp up the qualities of its predecessor, and it succeeds in fleshing out its world in many ways. ![]() It’s a curious sequel in that it follows the traditional arc of a follow-up to a successful first go, but is somewhat inconsistent in the ways that it tries to go bigger. If the first Judgment was a demonstration of what other stories from this universe could look like, and what the potential of this specific franchise could be, Lost Judgment wants very badly to demonstrate that the franchise can stand on its own and that it is deserving of your time and attention. No longer burdened with having to prove itself and its cast as a viable contender, and riding on the recent surge in popularity of the Yakuza series in the west, Lost Judgment sets its sights high in an attempt to deliver a story and world far bigger and richer than on its inaugural outing. ![]() This is, of course, all in a day’s work for Takayuki Yagami, Lost Judgment‘s protagonist and primary player character, who makes his return after the initial success of 2018’s Judgment, the risky but spirited spinoff of the core Yakuza series that focuses on telling a noir-inspired private detective story and exploring the world of Yakuza from the opposite side of the law, and all of the ways in which both the criminal and legal worlds are intertwined. As you give pursuit, it sees you and takes flight, hucking its organs at you in an attempt to slow you down as it dives through windows, hops fences, and takes evasive action, and all the while you’re wondering to yourself if any of this is actually happening and how you even got mixed up in this mess to begin with. And so here you are, walking the eerily quiet buildings in search of what has to be some kind of prankster, when suddenly… you watch dumbfounded with your own eyes as the body model crosses the end of the long hallway. It sounds too absurd to be true, but far stranger and graver things have been afoot at the school of late, and you have to chase down every lead to uncover the truth. You’ve heard the rumors for days in the dark of night, after all the students have gone home, the model of the human body from the science classroom awakens and stalks the halls of Seiryo High School.
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