that’s 100% fair. there are games that I think are bad and I played and enjoyed, let alone games I played and enjoyed that someone else on the internet said was bad

My biggest gripe is that turn based combat games are fundamentally strategy games, as opposed to beat em up action games that the entire series was built up around. Now, I’m not opposed to turn based RPGs or strategy games at all. I love the both of them, the problem is that it ultimately it’s just not a good turn based RPG.

For the previous action/brawler games. There were upgrades and they were important, yes. But even the hardest, most difficult bosses of Yakuza 3 still felt beatable so long as I could learn my opponents attack patterns, move around them carefully, focus clearly. When I lost, it felt like my fault because I didn’t put enough effort or attention into it, and it was possible to win if I sat down and focused.

In other turn based combat games, it’s a game of strategy where you shield your party from the boss’s powerful attacks, dish out healing/revives where needed, keeping up buffs on your heavy damage dealers, hitting them with efficient but powerful attacks. In a well made turn based combat strategy game, there are many strategic factors in play that you can use to negate your subpar character stats. When I lost, I felt like I didn’t think my plan through clearly enough and I could win if I more carefully managed my moves

In Y:LAD, the only stat that really seems to matter are your character’s stats. Status effects and debuffs are extremely weak and last for far too short of a time to be worth it. This goes for both status effect on your team as well as the enemy. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve played but I remember getting hit by bleed effects and learning that the most effective solution was to just ignore them. They might hit your 200+ health character for 6 health a turn and it will be over in like 8 turns. Stat buffs/debuffs are in a far similar boat to where they don’t do enough or last long enough to justify even bothering with. Again, they fade away too quickly to matter and in no case did I ever find that they were worth using over just another big attack. The elemental status effect type damage was so poorly explained and difficult to even notice that I didn’t even know it was a thing until months after I closed the game for the last time (this one might just be because I’m stupid, I don’t know)

The end result is that when fighting a difficult enemy, the only reliably good strategy is: Use all the biggest damage moves you possibly can, burn through all your mana as fast as possible, spam out high end healing items to get them back up, repeat. This strategy doesn’t work if your stats aren’t good enough either, which means you have to go and grind out boring combat some more to bring your stats up and grind the farming mini game to get more healing items. When I lost, I felt like it didn’t matter what I did, I could only win if I ground more boring combat to get my stats up

that’s my main gripe with just the gameplay, anyway. there’s loads more I could get into regarding the narrative being so bizarrely split between “let’s do something new” and “let’s reference the old games”