Why am I reviewing a game that is now four years old in 2025? Let me explain, and I’ll also explain why this game is VERY relevant in the current gaming culture/environment.
I didn’t buy Ghost of Yotei. I was interested in the game right up until the story trailer dropped of a girl on a revenge mission. Urgh. Can’t PlayStation come up with a more original idea for a story than that? Why are all game stories these days so bland, simplistic and, frankly, boring? So, saving myself £70, I thought, “Let’s see what’s in my backlog of games and play that instead,”. Up popped Lost Judgment, which I’ve had sitting there for a couple of years.
I’ve played the first game, Judgment, and nearly every other RGG Studio game, so I know what I’m roughly getting into. I’ve been really struggling of late to enjoy the part of gaming I really come here for: the stories. Well, more to the point, gripping stories.
Reviews of Lost Judgment had me a little perplexed. Some said it was amazing, while others scoffed at the scatterbrain story with pacing issues. What was I about to get?
Something I never saw coming, that’s what! One of the most gripping, thought-provoking crime stories I’ve ever played. I’m going to have to go into mild spoiler territory to explain, but I won’t give the entire story or its surprises away from here on out.
You play as Detective Takayuki Yagami, who is asked by Genda Law Office to look into a series of bullying incidents at a school in Yokohama. What starts off as seemingly a simple a school bullying case turns into something far, far more sinister and, frankly, very gruesome.
To start with, the father of a child who committed suicide at that school gets convicted of sexual battery, but upon being sentenced to prison for 6 months, he declares that in a warehouse there is the rotting corpse of the person who bullied his son. Not long after, a video appears online of the father torturing this person and then killing him, right where he told the court the body would be.
The problem is, at the same time the video of him killing the bully was recorded, he was also recorded in another part of town committing the sexual battery crime that he was convicted of earlier?
How can this man be in two places at once and also commit two crimes at two different locations at nearly the same time on the same day?
THAT is when this game really kicks off.
I played the main story of Lost Judgment straight through with barely any time spent on side missions or many of the other activities you can take part in. Doing this still meant it took me around 30 hours to finish the story. Playing this way also, I feel, is where the game shines but also why other reviewers struggled with this game.
You see, even fully concentrating on the main story and nothing else, there really was a lot to take in, but I’m glad I did. If you get sidetracked by everything else the game has to offer, it’s very easy to lose track of what’s going on and why in the main story.
But, yes, this story. WOW! This story is a far cry from anything I’ve ever played. The story’s amazing depth, acting, narrative, and detail are incredible. It makes other games with just skin-deep layers, like The Last of Us Part II, look absolutely pathetic.
It’s one of those game stories that highlights just how amazing and fascinating the medium of gaming can be. It is a proper adult story, with adult content, that needs your full attention, and if you do nothing else but play the game the way I did, with no distractions, the story will stay with you long after the final credits have rolled.
The reason for this is that the theme dabbles in some very grey, very dark places that really make you think, especially about the issue of bullying and, more specifically, the consequences of that bullying on the victim. The moral ambiguity stems from the fact that the real-world law in Japan, as well as here in the UK, doesn’t have anything in place for people who bully someone to suicide. Should the law have something for that? If it doesn’t, what effect would it have on the people who knew the suicide victim? What lengths would that injustice of no consequences for the bullies lead them to?
So, no, as you can see, this is not just another “Yakuza” game from RGG Studio. This is something far, far more deep and meaningful. This is the type of game story I want to play. Something that hits really hard and something that is really rare in the gaming industry these days, that being a story that is of the real world and interesting!
The next thing I have to mention here is just how sensible and sensitive RGG Studio have taken such a dark subject and turned it into something incredibly relatable. You, as the player, feel a real sense of outrage just as Detective Yagami does in the game. The quality and production values of the stunning cutscenes, as well as the overall presentation of the game, are amazing. You could serialize the cutscenes and put them on Netflix, and you wouldn’t really know you weren’t watching a high-end crime drama series.
It beggars belief to me that the video games industry awards gloss over games like this one by studios such as this. To tackle controversial themes like this in such a classy way is simply a stunning achievement. The writer and director of this game is Toshihiro Nagoshi. This man is a GENIUS.
Lost Judgment was released in September 2021. The game had an average score of around 7 to 9 out of 10 on most review outlets, the majority of which were 7s. This is not a 7 out of 10 game. Let me remind you, the Game of the Year Awards that year not only left out Lost Judgment, but these were the nominees for best narratives:
-Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
-It Takes Two
-Deathloop
-Life Is Strange: True Colors
Lost Judgment didn’t even receive a nomination. That, to me, now that I’ve played it, is shocking.
I digress a little. Back to this game.
What score would I give the game? Personally, I would have given it 10/10 for the story alone. There are literally tens, if not over a hundred, of hours of gameplay in the side content I’ve not even really touched or opened yet. There are lots of other in-game stories to uncover too.
My only gripe with the game, really, was its combat. The combat is absolutely fantastic, but the issue is that Yagami has three fighting styles to use. Unlike previous Yakuza games, I didn’t feel that the different styles of fighting felt that much different from each other, so I stuck with the new style, “Snake”, for the entire game. Because of this, combat didn’t quite have the variety I would have hoped for, but it was still awesome fun to play.
Aside from that, the rest of the game is fantastic. One other standout (again, not mentioned in the Game Awards, that I’m trying not to get angry about) are the game’s graphics.
Walking around the two cities at night in 60 fps is absolutely jaw-dropping! The visuals of the nightlife, neon signs, the hubbub of the daily bustle, look stupendous. The rendering of the surfaces on the ground and buildings is especially fantastic and lifelike. I’ve said it many times before, but the reflection of neon lights in puddles off the street surface, distributed as you walk through those puddles, is gob-smackingly realistic.
So, RGG (Ryu Ga Gotoku) Studio. There is a reason I have an RGG sticker on my PS5. I think they are one of the best gaming studios ever. Everything they make is of such amazing quality. I’ve played 13 of the 15 current PS4/PS5 gen games, with only Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii left to go. The thing about that studio that really stands out for me is their ability to tell a story. They really are the true masters of video game industry storytelling, and it’s about time they got the recognition they thoroughly deserve.
The reason I feel this game is relevant in 2025 and beyond is because games that tell stories like these in such a masterful way are becoming so rare. Thought-provoking, uncomfortable, real-life issues we can all relate to. This, to me, is what the medium of gaming should have more of, not boring revenge stories. I can’t wait to see what RGG Studio have up their sleeves in 2026.
