Super super fun game!! The plot starts off by not taking itself too seriously (as suggested by the name itself and it being a Yakuza/LaD game) but ends up becoming quite touching and emotional near the end. I love the crew dynamic and, this being my first Yakuza game I played in the English dub, I absolutely loved the voice acting and how close it made all the crew feel. While it took some getting used to, I'll absolutely be using the dub for any future Yakuza games I play from now on!
This game takes Majima, a character I love so much anyway, and gives him some brand new depth to his character that we've not had the opportunity to see in previous games, including Yakuza 0. And, while the story is simple, I found myself dropping my jaw and laughing in excitement alongside him at points.
The combat's a lot of fun. The game features two styles - one which fits Majima's existing "Mad Dog" moveset seen in other games, and the other with a much more pirate-y moveset featuring boomerang cutlasses, a charge shot pistol and a grapple hook. I found myself frequently alternating between these styles (something I didn't really do very frequently in Yakuza 0 or Yakuza Kiwami) because, in addition to the pirate moveset being better at crowd control while the Mad Dog moveset is better for damage output on one or two enemies, they're both just so enjoyable and satisfying to use.
I wasn't particularly sold on the pirate-y aspects of the gameplay, however. Exploring islands for treasure is a lot of fun, but sailing the ship around and engaging in ship combat wasn't very fun. The ship feels sluggish and it takes forever to get somewhere you don't have fast travel for. And the combat doesn't require a whole lot of thought - just get the enemy ship to your side and blast them with your cannons or lasers or whatever. Plus, unless the game is running at 60fps, the game CONSTANTLY crashes during ship combat. The number of crashes I experienced during my playthrough is definitely decently into the double digits. Eventually I found out decreasing the frame rate would fix it and I started doing this when I knew I was going to get into ship combat but, still, damage was done to my impression of this style of combat and I found myself never finding much enjoyment in it.
Overall, in my opinion, this game is crazy fun in all aspects besides the ship combat. Definitely a must play for any Yakuza/Like a Dragon fan!!
