Yakuza 7, Like a Dragon

This title was bought on sale for roughly 49 USD.

This is my first Yakuza title, and it's certainly made an impression as an avid player of turn based JRPGs. Between the Urban setting and the higher age of the cast it's been quite a breath of fresh air. The story covers a lot of raw and down to earth themes and issues you just don't see often in not just JRPGs, but video games in general such as how the homeless and "undesirables" of modern society are treated and moving on from disaster.

There is also a large amount of small quality of life decisions they've made that is quite surprising for a first timer too. Almost every activity or collectable has some sort of list you can double check to make sure you got everything, and the game will signal if an enemy is weak to an attack you've selected.

The only big issues I have are performance, economy and difficulty. The game is CPU intensive and while mine is certainly older I don't feel it should cap out an I5 at 60 FPS but perhaps I'm over estimating it. Fortunately it's perfectly playable at 30 with minimal issues.

Money is super tight in this game. This makes perfect sense due to the plot, but it can be kind of frustrating at the same time when you see a weapon in a shop that costs a million yen and you can barely hold on to 20k. I'm told this becomes less of an issue later but we'll see.

Finally the game's difficulty seems to run on the lower side unless you accidentally walk into an area with enemies 5 or more levels higher than you. I don't mind it, but considering you cannot set the game to Hard until you beat it, I keep finding myself wanting more pushback to justify using more Crowd Control options instead of just trying to AoE everything down.

The last odd thing is that, for a PC port, it's generally pretty good but there is some weird Keybinding issues. There are some keybinds that have an odd overlap, and some you just can't rebind period that feel really weird to me such as tabbing through the skill menu in combat.

Overall it's pretty good, especially for a team's first JRPG.