New apartment, Lost Judgment, same old Star Fox
*I own both Judgment games on anything that runs electricity at this point.
There’s something about summer that always draws me to Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. Maybe it’s because you can dip in and out of them so easily given all their side quests and minigames, complimented with their long winded J-drama-esque storylines. But usually when I have a hard time figuring out what to play to commence the summer, I always find myself back in Kamurocho.
Judgment (2019) is one of my top games of all time due to its high energy, hardboiled, neo noir story that has stuck with me to this day. But whenever I go back to it, I can’t but feel that its combat and gameplay lives in the shadow of its sequel, Lost Judgment (despite not loving the sequel as much as the first game).
Lost Judgment, I found to be less of a concise, high energy mystery and found it to be a much more convoluted slow burn of a story, but not without its own message. Over the years, I would go on to continuously think and dream about that first game as I deem it responsible for opening me up to the rabbithole that is Japanese detective fiction.
Galileo TV Series
Last year, I plowed through every Kosuke Kindaichi mystery (available in English) and devoured Keigo Higashino’s Detective Galileo series, along with its J-Drama adaptation which is just so over the top and ridiculous and I love it so much.
But after exploring more Japanese detective fiction outside of the Judgment games, I now feel like I am able understand and appreciate these games on a deeper level than before.
If Judgment (2019) was Toshihiro Nagoshi’s love letter to hardboiled Japanese cinema and Takuya Kimura’s career, then Lost Judgment is more of a love letter to the slow paced and convoluted mystery novels of Keigo Higashino (Devotion of Suspect X) and Hideo Yokoyama (Seventeen). With that context in mind, I can now love both of these games for their own distinct reasons now, having unknowingly consumed a lot of the media that ended up being Nagoshi’s influences for these games.
The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino
So if you’re like me and you liked the OG Judgment but found Lost Judgment’s story to not hit as hard, I highly recommend reading The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino just because it’s also become one of my favorite novels. Higashino as an author just loves putting on display a mental game of chess between detective and murderer while also telling a big mystery made up of multiple cases across different generations.
But sadly, I had to put Lost Judgment to rest as soon as I packed my TV away. But that’s okay, that’s where the 3DS came in handy.
We have sunlight now, would you believe it?
Our first morning there, my partner and I ate breakfast on the floor, and enjoyed Columbo before setting out to IKEA for a new couch. And just in case anyone is wondering, yes, you can fit an IKEA Ekholma couch into a VW Golf.
Anyway, our new place is coming along nicely and I can’t wait to show off more in future videos.
This is home now.
Right now, I’m thoroughly enjoying roaming through Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom with the company of Zelda Notes WAY more than I thought I would since the way the app connects to the game is scratching the Wii U part of my brain. But more on that some other time.
My partner makes her way through Deltarune (Ch. 5) while I start yet another file in TOTK.
I also stopped pretending like I didn’t want the new Star Fox and I was not disappointed with that game at all just due to how visually stunning and replayable it is with its different control options. If you want to know more about how I felt about it among other games I’ve been playing/replaying recently, feel free to check out my Backloggd (which has probably been more of my blog than my actual blog as of late).
My Backloggd: https://backloggd.com/u/nikgrgrio/
With that, I’ll see you all soon. Until then, stay safe. Don’t sell your video games. Use the public library.
