Most of Judgment is very good, but we really need to talk about one part in particular.

Drone League is arguably Judgment’s premiere minigame (perhaps second to Dice and Cube, more on that later). For full completion of the game, you’re required to come first place in each of its ten races at their hardest difficulty, beat the time trial on each race, and craft nearly two hundred different drone parts in the Drone Lab. One prominent Ryu Ga Gotoku YouTuber says:

In my opinion, this is the hardest minigame in the series in terms of completion, and could possibly be the hardest non self-imposed Yakuza challenge ever.

Drone parts all have stats and a cost to them. The highest quality parts only fit within the highest quality frame, which has a cost limit of 300. The problem? It also has the lowest durability of any frame, by a huge margin. Its durability stat is 50, while the cheapest, default frame starts with a durability of 100. This essentially means you can only take about three hits when using the frame before automatically losing any race.

These parts (which are requisite to beating the challenges) send you careening through the courses at such blinding speeds that the most difficult part of any race quickly becomes avoiding every stray lamppost, store sign, and carefully navigating building interiors to keep from bumping into anything. Depending on your personal skill (mine being admittedly quite low), this can be a severely trying endeavor.

Making this worse is the fact that, when competing in the league, you are unable to retry any race - meaning you have to restart the entire ten course-long Champion League over again, or save and manually reload between each race.

There is no load option from the in-game menu, so after you fail a course, your quickest option is to close the game through your PS4, reopen it, wait to reach the main menu, load, wait through a loading screen, enter the race, wait through a loading screen, and race again. This takes over two minutes. I timed it.

Or, you can buy a bundle of four novelty frames, each with a cost limit of 300 and durability of 200 — four times higher than the one available in the base game itself. This DLC bundle costs $8 USD.

Meanwhile, in-game, crafting all the parts is a grind of its own. Every part costs money to build, and quite a lot. Single parts can cost more than Yagami makes in an entire side case. I’ve found money to be quite scarce in my game, as I’ve tried to stay on top of part crafting.

The best way to make money is Dice and Cube at the game’s VR arcade. To play Dice and Cube, you need Play Passes, with more rewarding courses costing more passes to access (and the most rewarding courses having to be unlocked through investment in the game’s Quickstarter app, essentially meaning they have to be purchased as an additional drain on your in-game wallet).

Play Passes come at a trickle, but don’t worry, they’re selling those for real money too.

It’s easy to see how the economy of the game has been built around these — call them what they are — microtransactions. Content like the Drone League and Quickstarter are arbitrarily huge money sinks, and the means to obtain more money is gated through consumable items you can purchase for real world currency. This is no longer game design for fun, it’s game design for profit. It’s grind, it’s needless, and it’s insidious.

Some apologists might note that you can eventually unlock an item to play Dice and Cube for free, making the Play Passes unnecessary. Two things about that: first, start thinking about the next Ryu Ga Gotoku game when we’re used to paying for Play Passes and they forget to include that unlockable item in the base game. Second, the way to unlock that item is by acquiring six different voucher pieces, one of which is only available after — you guessed it — completing the Drone League.

This is the first Ryu Ga Gotoku game to include a DLC banner ad in its main menu. Every time you pause or have to use an item, buy a skill, or check your objective, they’re trying to upsell you more content that could have been part of the $60 main game. It makes me very sad that this is a studio that put out complete works like Yakuza 0 within this very console generation, and is now scrambling to monetize the series in increasingly tasteless ways.

I own and have a platinum trophy in Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 6, Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, and Yakuza: Dead Souls. I own and have every Steam achievement in Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Yakuza Kiwami 2.

Judgment may be the first game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio that I can’t platinum, because I’m not skilled enough to finish the racing challenges given the arbitrary limitations imposed on the base game, and I won’t pay more to circumvent them. That’s really disappointing to me, and it’s something I wanted people to hear.