As leaked yesterday due to the rating published by the ESRB, SEGA is announcing and releasing Judgment and Lost Judgment on PC today via Steam. The games in the Yakuza spin-off series are already available on platforms like PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Google Stadia (only for the first installment), and Amazon Luna, so it was really only PC and Nintendo Switch gamers that had been left behind.
Luckily, that's all in the past now for PC gamers. SEGA shared the pricing structure, too:
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Includes Lost Judgment and School Stories Expansion Pack
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Judgment and Lost Judgment Digital Deluxe Bundle - $98.87
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Includes Judgment, Lost Judgment, School Stories Expansion Pack, and The Kaito Files
- The Kaito Files can be purchased separately for $29.99
We've got our hands on the games' PC ports before release. To begin with, we were greeted with the following splash screen upon loading: the developers are warning users to use a gamepad.
That's not to say the mouse and keyboard combination doesn't work, of course. It does, as it should in any self-respecting PC game. That said, the combat system is really best enjoyed with a gamepad or controller of your choice.
Here you can take a look at the display options available. Unfortunately, a bug currently prevents the usage of full screen resolution, so we were locked to borderless. You can either set a limit to your frame rate or just select unlimited FPS, and it is also possible to significantly enhance the Field of View (FoV).
The Judgment and Lost Judgment PC ports have a fair amount of graphics settings, such as texture filtering, shadow quality, geometry quality, real-time reflections, motion blur, screen space ambient occlusion, volumetric fog, and depth of field. You can manually tweak the render scale resolution below 100%, but we don't recommend doing that as both AMD FSR 1.0 and FSR 2.0 are supported with their own sharpness sliders.
We selected FSR 2.0 Quality mode, of course, which provided a 20-30 FPS boost on our test PC (12700KF, RTX 3090) at 4K resolution without introducing any noticeable graphics issue. You can check out our gameplay capture below. As a side note, neither of the games support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays, nor do they take advantage of Windows 10's Auto HDR feature, sadly enough.
As to the quality of the games themselves, you can refer to our earlier reviews, where both entries starring Takayuki Yagami (played by renowned singer and actor Takuya Kimura) received very favorable marks.
Judgment is an excellent Japanese adventure that feels incredibly familiar, yet engrossing all the same. With Judgment, RGG Studio has managed to create an excellent entry point for the Yakuza series, and a fantastic standalone adventure. While it's familiar to myself and Yakuza fans, if you're new to the series this might just be the very best place to start. A wonderful, though sometimes slow, adventure from beginning to end.
Lost Judgment (9/10, Francesco De Meo)
With its excellent detective story, extremely likable characters, and welcome improvements to combat and investigation mechanics, Lost Judgment won't disappoint any fan of the original, of the Yakuza series, or anyone looking for a very mature story. The game doesn't try to shake up the original formula, which may definitely put some players off, but this is hardly a problem when quality is as high as it is in the latest game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
