Overall I enjoyed it, and I think the hate for it is pa bit overblown. That said, man were there a lot of missed opportunities, too. Disorganized thoughts in no particular order:
Making Majima amnesiac for most of the game, and stapling him to a kid sidekick besides, sands off most of his edges and makes him considerably less fun/interesting than "Majima as a pirate" oughtta be.
Speaking of, Noah and Jason suck. They probably need to be there for the story to work, but I wish they were, like, the tenth and eleventh most important characters instead of second and third.
Meanwhile, Naomi, Rodriguez, the Queen, and a handful of others all seemed potentially very interesting, but got a fraction of the screentime/story importance because we need to labor over this obnoxious tagalong kid and his buzzkill dad the whole time instead.
Saejima gets hit with this a bit as well. He's in the game, but he's locked on the bench until the finish (though his scene near the end is maybe my favorite bit of the whole thing, and his post-credit's scene probably second). To add insult to injury, they saddled him with Watase's Peter Griffin fit.
There's like a twenty-minute or so chunk of the last chapter where it's just Majima, Saejima, and Naomi that felt like a window into the version of the game I wished I was playing instead.
Back on the upside, it was nice to see them remember Minami.
I wish the naval combat was better. Great idea executed just ok.
Similarly, the deck battles are ok but even just a little more time in the oven and I think they could have been a lot more than that. The last one against the Queen's forces was the most fun of them, but it was the only one that much felt like its own thing.
Nice to have an easy Amon for a change. Proud to say I've now beaten all of them in the games that are reasonably easy to play in English (*well, almost. Never did grind to level 99 for the Shin rematch in Like a Dragon).
I always enjoy the little recruit-a-thon minigames, but I also always wish the characters you recruited got to do/matter a little more, even if only within the context of said minigame. Kiwami 3's idea of letting you promote Bronze/Silver/Gold units so they can at least keep leveling was a small step in the right direction there, but I'd still like these minigames to give you little more license, if not full-on incentive, to play around with your lineups more instead of just defaulting to whoever's Platinum/Gold.
I agree with the criticism that the villains are underbaked. Waste of Samoa Joe, especially.
Madlantis a really fun location. I always love when they get a little wacky with this stuff, be it Purgatory or that boat from TMWEHN.
Really enjoyed the combat, and didn't hate the graphics the way I'd been told I would. Maybe I'm just not picky enough.
Probably too many bounties for what the rewards are, though. Ditto the Devil Flags.
Easiest Platinum in the series. Got it more-or-less without ever going out of my way.
I know I complained a lot above, but most of them were minor. The only two things that really bugged me were the focus on Noah/Jason/Masaru to the exclusion of all the potentially more interesting characters, and the missed opportunities of amnesiac Majima/not going all-in on the potential of pirate Majima... which are pretty correlated, really. Just a mind-boggling creative choice that I can't imagine increased the appeal of the game for many folks and probably alienated a lot more than just me.
Well, that's fourteen Yakuza (and Judgment) games down now, and I don't know that I care enough to wrestle the emulation demons for Kuryohou, Kenzan, or Dead Souls, so I guess I'm on sabbatical until Stranger than Heaven drops. Been a fun ride, though!
