Lost Judgment

Lost Judgment All right, next is Lost Judgment. This follows Judgment and takes place after Yakuza: Like a Dragon, so I would play those first. Its main case stands on its own, but the state of the criminal world gives away a major development from Like a Dragon. This post also gets into Lost Judgment's ending. The story deals heavily with bullying, abuse, suicide, and murder. Yagami and Kaito head to Yokohama to help Sugiura and Tsukumo with their new detective business. One job sends them into Seiryo High School to investigate bullying. Meanwhile, Saori is defending Akihiro Ehara, a police officer accused of groping a woman on a train. After his conviction, Ehara mentions the discovery of a body in Yokohama and identifies the dead man as Hiro Mikoshiba, the person he blames for driving his son to suicide. The problem is the timing. Mikoshiba was killed while Ehara was supposedly committing the other crime. The evidence that makes him guilty in one case gives him an alibi in the other. Ehara is practically announcing that he knows what happened. Yagami has to work out how the evidence fits together, who helped arrange it, and why Ehara wants the court to know it has been used. The investigation keeps returning to what happened before the murder. A child was being hurt. Adults had chances to intervene. The school and the legal process failed to give his family the accountability they needed. By the time Yagami gets involved, that failure has become somebody else's justification for another killing. Jin Kuwana takes that argument much further. He was once a teacher named Yu Kitakata, and one of his students, Mitsuru Kusumoto, was driven to a suicide attempt by bullying. Kuwana's response becomes a campaign against people who escaped punishment. He helps victims' families take revenge and forces former students into assisting him. Kuwana knows what it means for a school to fail a student. But he also uses other people to carry out his revenge. The families are grieving, the former students are being blackmailed, and the people drawn into the cover-ups do not all share his choices. Yagami has to defend pursuing the truth through a system that has already failed these families. Kuwana has seen that failure and no longer believes Yagami's approach is enough. Yoko Sawa is caught in the middle of this. She knows about the bullying, carries the consequences of having been pressured into silence, and becomes a target because of what she can reveal. Soma murders her. Kuwana did not personally kill her, and that distinction matters, but her death still exposes the danger of treating a revenge operation as something whose consequences can be contained. Yagami keeps bringing up Sawa when he confronts Kuwana. Her death doesn't answer every criticism Kuwana has of the courts or the schools. But she was innocent, and she died because she knew too much about what they were doing. Kuwana cannot keep calling his work justice while dismissing what happened to her. Reiko Kusumoto shows how far the consequences spread. She is both a grieving mother implicated in revenge and a public official whose position makes her useful to people with their own plans. Bando and Soma turn the secret into leverage. A private act of retaliation becomes a means of controlling someone in government. The final stretch brings those competing interests together around evidence that people want hidden or destroyed. Yagami has to keep the truth available long enough for it to matter. Beating Soma deals with one immediate threat. Fighting Kuwana settles neither their disagreement nor the larger problem that produced it. Kuwana walks away rather than being neatly folded into the usual ending where every major figure is arrested. The later discovery of the other victims gives the police more of the truth, but it doesn't turn the ending into proof that the entire system now works. There are consequences, confessions, and unanswered questions. Then the game returns to the students. Koda and the students who previously bullied her intervene when another girl is being targeted. That's a smaller action than exposing a conspiracy, but it shows something the courtroom and the final fight cannot accomplish by themselves: someone sees the same pattern starting and decides not to participate in it. The School Stories belong in that discussion too. Yagami spends time advising students, helping clubs, and finding out why people are getting pulled into trouble. Some of it is completely ridiculous. He can go from a murder investigation to practicing a dance routine, building a competition robot, or joining a motorcycle race. He also becomes someone these students can approach while there is still time to help them. Those stories are substantial. The Mystery Research Club investigation connects ten different groups and activities, and several have their own progression systems. Finishing a club's story and finishing every TownGo requirement for that club are separate jobs. Robotics, boxing, dancing, and the biker races all need more explanation than a paragraph saying to keep practicing. Yagami has three base fighting styles. Crane gives Yagami mobility and broad attacks for crowds. Tiger is useful when you need to break through one opponent. Snake adds parries, disarms, and ways to make frightened enemies surrender. The styles give you different answers to what is happening in a fight, especially once their upgrades start working together. Boxer is an additional street-combat style from the School Stories Expansion Pack. Boxing as a School Story is already in the base game. You can finish the boxing investigation without buying the pack. Detective work also has more equipment to account for: the Noise Amp, Detector, Buzz Researcher, drone, and Ranpo. They feed into investigations and the squirrel hunt rather than being isolated story props. Kamurocho returns, but Ijincho holds much of the new material, including the school and the relocated drone-racing and VR activities. The base game has 42 Side Cases, a full TownGo checklist, collectibles, skill requirements, and a Legend clear. None of the base-game trophy requirements are permanently missable. Finish the completion work on the original save before carrying your upgrades into Legend, because story and case progress reset in New Game Plus. The Kaito Files is a separate campaign with its own combat, abilities, and progression. Yagami's upgrades do not carry over to Kaito, and its trophies are separate from the base platinum. That campaign has its own write-up and guides.