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Judgement review: A flashy detective story that loses its charm far too quickly

By Tim Augustin - 5 Aug 2019

Let's talk about the story

Judgement is by the same developers who made Yakuza, or Ryu ga Gotoku.

Takayuki Yagami, like most video game protagonists these days, has suffered a loss. He was on the fast lane to becoming one of the greatest lawyers of his time, but all that ended when he took on the wrong case. He put his trust in a murderer who, once freed, continued to do a bit more murdering than Yagami would’ve liked.

It's characters like Yagami that allow Judgement to work so well. This is a game that is absolutely rife with problems, but they're ones you can’t help but forgive for all that this legal action-adventure does right. It's worth getting to know the lively city of Kamurocho and all its colourful inhabitants, and even if that fails you, there’s always the intriguing mystery that slowly unravels before you.

Unravelling the story

You'll learn to love Kaito. He's a cool dude!

One of Judgement’s strongest points is how it uses its main cast of characters. Initially, everyone comes off as a collection of tropes in human form. As the story moves on, however, you’ll realise there’s a whole lot more to these characters than meets the eye.

Take Masaharu Kaito, for example — Yagami’s partner in crime. What I first thought was your run-of-the-mill companion, merely here to support your random adventures, turned out to be one of my favourite characters by the end. Kaito is ex-yakuza, and that makes for an interesting dynamic between him and the gangsters that the duo constantly run into.

Make no mistake, this is a Yakuza story in everything but name. Everything kicks off when a yakuza member is found dead in an alley, leading the investigation to snowball into interrogating and then fighting various members of the criminal underworld. One small murder mystery turns into an enormous conspiracy spanning multiple government officials, court cases and bare knuckle streetfights.

One of the many Yakuza jerks you'll meet in this game — not all of them are nice!

Judgment's story is told in around 13 chapters, but this is where we get into the bad stuff. As interesting as the story can be at times, it never seems confident enough to present a cohesive package. Instead of letting you run through the whole story in a linear fashion, the game is constantly throwing compulsory side missions and endless filler at you every other chapter.

If you want to solve the main mystery then tough luck! The big reveal is 30 hours away, and you’ll have to grind through a bunch of weird, random story beats to get there. The game also gets really annoying with the story missions themselves, often telling you to kill time in Kamurocho before giving you the next thing to do.

This can suck, because you have pretty much no way of knowing when you’re getting the next story mission, having to do random quests you have no interest in until you can progress. It can especially suck if you’re like me and finished up all the good side quests the moment you got them, leaving you with nothing to do but run in circles for 10 minutes.

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7.0
  • Playability 7.5
  • Graphics 8
  • Sound 7
  • Addictiveness 7
  • Value 7.5
The Good
Strong cast of characters
Interesting story
Tons of stuff to do
The Bad
Missions are often boring and repetitive (tailing missions, for example)
Story is bloated, with bad pacing and a lot of filler
Combat gets old very quickly
Game forces you to wait in real time for missions
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