What would someone recommend...Yakuza 7 or Lost Judgement? My interest in the Yakuza series has been mixed, I played Zero and Kiwami awhile back and while I did find it kinda grindy and the story kinda dragged on too long, I do enjoy aspects of the open world and all the side stuff you tend to do in them. I'm not super interested in doing any of the other Yakuza games, so I thought I might look at the newest one. Maybe it's wrong to compare them, but I think Lost Judgement is essentially what the regular Yakuza games are like right? You got your big serious story, but then you got an open world to explore and fight your way through and you got a lot of side quest stuff to do, some of it goofy...
I guess what I am asking is which game has the kind best city experience, if one is any better than the other, the side quests, anything to accomplish like buying business or collecting stuff, anything generally like that. Or if they are too similar other than the different gameplay styles, I guess I could see myself going with Yakuza 7 for how much more overtly wacky the game looks to be.
So yeah, you'll have to make your own decision, but Y7 is turn based RPG instead of beat em up action combat. You do have tons of side quests, business building stuff, and RPG style class system and a variety of characters.
Lost Judgment, which I just recently started as it just came out, I can only speak too much of. The game follows the combat style of Yakuza games, but it's a detective game, there are cases to take and solve, investigations, etc. It's a different kind of beast from Yakuza, Yakuza is just straight up fight fight fight, and Judgment does fighting, but they also do stealth missions, investigations, etc.
Regardless, if you think the story of Yakuza is way too long and drawn out and you just plain don't care for it... you're going to have the same experience with either Y7 or Lost Judgment. I personally get pulled into the story of these games, and while I know stuff is long and gets drawn out, I enjoy it. An example is I'm playing one of these games, I'm at the final boss fight, I'm like ok, I'll do the last fight and call it a night because it'll be the end credits... the end of the final boss fight to the end credits, is legitimately like 45 minutes of cutscenes...
Based on what you're saying, I'd be inclined to recommend you Y7 because A) it's cheaper (free on Game Pass
) B) different combat system and C) I know it has tons of side content that you're calling out for, I haven't played enough Lost Judgment to say what it does have, but I'm certain it's not as much as Y7 for what you're looking for.