Talk about a school of hard knocks. Investigating a case involving a grisly murder and a subway groper, Takayuki Yagami follows the trail to a prestigious academy, where he discovers delinquent students are targeting a vulnerable classmate. Yagami’s solution to stopping the bullying is hypocritical, to say the least, as he throws one troublemaker over his shoulder, slamming their nose against the floor, before sliding across to another to knee them in the face. Still, you have to say these snot-nosed brats deserve their punishment: with their sneering jibes and casual callousness, they’re even more obnoxious than the lippy gangsters we’ve grown accustomed to brutalising in RGG Studio’s games.

Not that there are many of the old breed left any more. With the Tojo Clan having disbanded – although another group, known as RK, has formed in its wake – this spinoff series steps outside the Tokyo underworld. And, for that matter, Kamurocho: Kazuma Kiryu’s old stomping ground is still here, but Yagami spends most of his time in the Isezaki Ijincho district of Yokohama, which is largely as it was in last year’s Like A Dragon.

Now the main series has moved on from realtime fist fights to turn-based brawls, Lost Judgment feels like Yakuza without the yakuza: if the original Judgment represented a conscious choice to tell a different kind of story, this followup reminds us that old habits die hard.