Never played a full Yakuza game, but I have played Judgement.

[Gluuten]

As the title says, I have never played a full Yakuza game, but I have played Judgement. Should I still pick this up, or go play Yakuza 0 or Like a Dragon first?

[Cooperal]

From a story standpoint this is probably the last game I would suggest as a starting point. Especially as a recently released game where it is full retail price despite kind of being like a short story. You really need to play Y6 or YLAD to have any frame of reference for why anything in either the early or late game matter.

Either of those other games you mentioned are a good starting point. Yakuza Like A Dragon makes itself welcoming to newcomers by placing you in the shoes of a character who has a good reason for not knowing what happened during the previous games.

But actually, Yakuza 0 is just a special game. Just start there. I picked that up in 2018 and it was probably in my top 3 games of the decade. I can't fault a single thing about it. As a prequel to the first game in the franchise it was a great starting point.

Something else that might be worth mentioning is that you can also access every Yakuza/Like A Dragon game that has been release for PC via game pass including this one. I mean it would take a heck of a lot of months of subscription before you spent the same on buying all of the games.

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by Cooperal:

But actually, Yakuza 0 is just a special game. Just start there. I picked that up in 2018 and it was probably in my top 3 games of the decade. I can't fault a single thing about it.

I'll fault one thing about it and that's the fact that QLOC did the port to PC and apparently they've never heard of ethernet.

While the problem likely didn't affect everyone, for those whom it did, you'd get a massive, half-second stutter every 30 seconds on the dot. I personally shut down every Windows function one by one until I finally determined that what the game didn't like was ethernet. Playing the game while on wifi would sidestep the issue. I still get thank-yous to this day for discovering the workaround to this ridiculous bug, which also affected at least Kiwami.

[Zombine3D]

Start with 0, work up to 6, play Judgement, then LaD(7), Gaiden (this), Lost Judgement and then LaD Infinite Wealth. It will take you about a year to play all the games.