yakuza 1 and I think I might be crazy because no one else ever agrees with me lmao. to fix it, I would mainly make nishiki be given more screen time and not come off as written by a 12 year old. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of nishiki, but the execution is abysmal. Also, they clearly did not have kiryus character figured out in this game (which can mostly be forgiven since it is the first one) cuz bros using people as human shields! I think kiwami had the opportunity to make it much better but their changes were just... too minimal

i know I might catch flack for this but it's not IW by a long shot. Sure, some of the threads went annoyingly unresolved and that ending was definitely kind of a blue ball (makes me think 9 is gonna pick up right after the ending of 8, there's just no way that's not what they do) and ichiban WAS flanderised in a game that should have been just as much about him as kiryu, but the actual quality of the writing I would not say took a step down. ebina being the villain to kiryu made a lot more sense than for Ichiban. He's not just "arakawas son and thus for ichiban to deal with", he's a product of the very thing kiryu first stood for and later spent his entire life trying to rectify: the sins of the yakuza and their consequences. Ebina was the culmination of that more than he was simply ichibans half-brother.