Recent reviews by MigratingPidgeon

The lack of fishing mechanics is regrettable. There's even a river in the main location that would be perfect for it.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon or Yakuza 7 is effectively a reboot of the franchise. So players that don't want to deal with over 15 years of games can jump into this one with no prior knowledge.

There's also a departure from the beat-em-up gameplay towards a turn based JRPG combat system. The party members can change jobs and gain new abilities by leveling those jobs (on top of an overall character level), but instead of white mage and fighter you are a host or a foreman. And typical JRPG things like magic attacks are changed by drinking alcohol to breathe fire and throwing ice buckets.
This system works pretty well for the first time this studio has tried a turn based RPG. But some of the AOE attacks are unreliable since enemies freely move and it's very hard to know what you can hit with AOE attacks (like the aforementioned fire breath attack). And changing jobs is cumbersome since you have to go to the same location over and over to do so.

I also think the combat can do with a bit of speeding up, there's an autocombat but the current engine has the tendency to make enemies fly off for several meters. So if that enemy is also stunned you can spend a lot of time watching your party members run up to do their attacks. Later instances also have huge HP bags of enemies that can take forever to take down.

But these are minor issues and I still enjoyed the combat in this game. The real meat of course is in the highly dramatic main story and the hilarious side gigs and this is where I would give my recommendation to play it. The new main character Ichiban might not have Kiryu's stoic intensity but his outward enthusiasm with which he approaches every single distraction the game throws at you is equally infectious and hilarious.

So despite the lack of fishing mechanics I can recommend this game to anyone who is interested in JRPGs or the Yakuza franchise.

As of finishing the game (there's a credits scene but also an epilogue) I have 61 hours on this game.

The game uses the Greek tragedy and setting to create a refined end-product that can easily be played in smaller chunks (a run can go to upwards of 30-40 minutes depending on skill and/or distractions).

You play as Zagreus, son of Hades, as he attempts to reach the surface and escape the underworld.

This game is divided in a few heavily interconnected parts:

1) Roguelike hack&slash: the part where you escape the underworld with a randomized variety of enemies, satisfying weapons to use, powerups to collect and good bosses. This can all be affected with outside trinkets to equip or a pact of punishment that puts restrictions on you or increases movesets/change arenas of (mini) bosses.

2) The social sim: When you're not hacking and/or slashing you are talking to a wide variety of fully voiced characters, going from the Olympic Gods trying to help you escape the underworld, the Chtonic Gods of the underworld who view your quest with a range of encouragement, resentment or curiosity to tragic mortal champions forever trapped by the punishments laid upon them by the titular Hades and the consequences of their tragedies. An issue, if you can call it, is that you can only have one conversation per character per run through the underworld. So some progression gets throttled behind having to play the excellent hack&slash to go back and progress side-quests and personal stories. But only in the 'post-game/epilogue' did this become a problem.

3) Fishing, the only thing actually worth considering. Yes, like any good game this has a fishing minigame. After reaching the surface once you get access to a rod of fishing and the underworld spawns spots where you can fish. The fish you can catch vary on which layer of hell you fish in and are randomized beyond that. The mechanic for catching fish is a dedicated reflex-test that has an impact on the rarity of which fish will be caught. These fish can be exchanged for resources that help with side-stuff like social interactions/upgrading weapons.
Beyond that the implementation of the side-content as laid out in point 1 and 2 into the core gameplay of fishing is a bit lackluster. There are only two npc's that care about fishing, the head chef in the house of Hades that collects your fish and gives you resources, and Poseidon, the only God worth considering. Poseidon's last social interactions can be unlocked only after you catch every fish.
This brings us to the way the other side content interacts with Fishing. During the hack&slash sidecontent fishing spots only appear randomly (you can impact this a bit with items but those are random too), so you can have entire runs where you won't get to interact with the main type of gameplay.

All in all, this game has too much excellent gameplay and story, but not enough focus on the core fishing gameplay.

Game is pretty good to play with friends.

While the original soundtrack is decent the game excells when you put the great songs of the Russian Motherland on.

8/10
Vodka/10 with communist music

This is an excellent fishing simulator. There is a problem with the filler in between in which you have to kill monsters with giant explosions and excellent looting, it takes way too long between actual gameplay segments and only these "filler" segments scale with difficulty. There is really no difference between gameplay on the lowest and the highest difficulty. I feel too much went to perfecting this filler instead of the important fishing gameplay.