Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is able to prioritize and save on not too important things - this is how it manages to release a new game from the Yakuza series about once a year, despite the fact that the content in each is enough for tens of hours. From one side to another wander mechanics, mini-games, even settings - but thanks to new characters and stories, the series is not boring.

And recently, he even decided to bold experiments: from the seventh part, the main line of Yakuza games became a turn-based JRPG, and the usual muzzle remained in the Judgment spin-off, dedicated to the investigations of a private detective. The studio's new game, Lost Judgment, traditionally cuts corners, combining the mechanics of the first Judgment and the setting of last year's Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Kindergarten policeman

Takayuki Yagami is a former lawyer and now a private investigator working in Kamuro-cho, a hot neighborhood in Tokyo. He has few clients, so at the invitation of old acquaintances who have opened their own detective agency, he comes to nearby Yokohama to help with the investigation. True, we are not talking about something grandiose, but about simple school bullying.

Meanwhile, Yagami's former colleagues on the bar predictably risk losing their court case. Their client, an Ehara police officer, was caught molesting a woman on the subway, and all evidence points to her guilt. However, as soon as he hears the guilty verdict, Ehara challenges the justice system: he calls out a name that was just discovered in Yokohama and has not yet been identified.

The investigation finds that the crime occurred exactly on the same morning as the defendant was arrested in the Tokyo subway - that is, the guilty verdict became his alibi. But he also had a motive: the young man murdered during his school years led his son Ehara to commit suicide. Furthermore, they studied at the school where Yagami deals with the bullying problem. It's time for the detective to roll up his sleeves!

Yagami begins his investigation at the school, but first he must find an excuse to be within its walls. To do this, he gets a job as a consultant for the detective club; the diver who leads him in search of intriguing stories sticks his nose in the affairs of all the other clubs of interest, so Yagami must infiltrate a double agent: work as an operator in a robotics club, teach girls to dance... But the actor Takuya Kimura, who played the main role, will soon knock half a can, so from his head it is impossible to throw out associations with the famous meme “How do you do, other children?”. After all, Yagami skateboards in this part too .

This is not to say that the change of scenery is very pleasant. In Japanese pop culture of school life, an insane amount of attention is already paid, and here it is emphasized that the adult franchise for some reason enters the plowed field along and across. For this reason, the beginning of Lost Judgment falls very low: while Yagami rushes around the school, trying to figure out who, who and how to bully, it is quite boring to play. There aren't enough high stakes, dramatic clashes and complexity of intrigue, for which the Yakuza series was famous.

Fortunately, after a few hours, the story still leaves the school, and then all of the above slowly starts to return. The script, alas, retains the sluggishness and verbosity of the first Judgment: the characters tell each other dozens of times all the details of the investigation and spend a lot of time in empty everyday conversations, and the narrative is often blocked by petty tasks and useless rushes around, which we could do without.