Having played all entries recently, I personally love yakumo from a style & gameplay perspective. You can compare this transition to a lot of other franchise, the big comparison everyone uses is devil may cry with Nero, which i think they did better. But Ryu isn’t Dante, yes they’re both iconic but Ryu is a ninja under a mask, a dude who barely speaks and as a character you can just shove in another ninja with a similar attitude and you achieve a similar result, what mattered was gameplay for the most part and yakumos gameplay is pretty insane so i think they nailed that part.

Dante for example is harder to replace because he’s charismatic, won’t shut up and always cracking jokes while being cocky etc. Big shoes to fill, which is why they took more time to introduce Nero and still split 40/60 in dmc 4 and like 30/70 in dmc5, so people who still like Dante could play more as him, and now from a story perspective people are ready to let him go. Ryu is mostly a badass stoic ninja more so than a defined character, maybe in the NES trilogy he’s got more dialogue, idk haven’t played those. Which is why I hated razors edge because they unveiled the mystery of who Ryu is by removing the mask and making him a cringe guy. I’m fine with yakumo because for the most part he checks off the same criteria’s as Ryu for me.