Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
Yakuza games have always been dark, but Judgment takes it up to eleven with the dark criminal story it crafts.- The entire premise of the game. Yagami is trying to find a serial killer who has three confirmed kills under his belt by the start of the game, and all the corpses have had their eyes gouged out of their skulls. Thankfully, every victim has sunglasses over their eye sockets, so you're never exposed to what they look like gouged out, but it doesn't do much to mask the horror. As it turns out all the murders were due to human experimentation with AD-9, a drug that's incredibly lethal for humans. One can only imagine the horrors that Waku-san and the Kyorei Clan victims went through when they were experimented on; criminal or not, no one deserves that kind of horrible fate.
- Then you learn about the side effects of the drug: As Kido states, AD-9 causes the victim to develop a powerful headache, followed by their eyes developing a dark blue pigmentation, hence why the eyes were removed from the bodies. We get to see these side effects in action towards the end of the last chapter, when Shono injects himself with AD-9 in a desperate attempt to prove himself right, only to die horribly, screaming all the way. The last we see of him is his body on the ground, his eyes filled with the blue pigment, and his face contorted in an expression of pure agony.
- For that matter, Shono himself. While he may come across as a harmless scientist, that is just a facade to hide a more unhinged side that is obsessed with perfecting AD-9, regardless of the cost - he's willing to murder an innocent woman and experiment on Yakuza members for the sake of his drug, and he doesn't feel an ounce of remorse for his crimes.
- Yagami and Sugiura's trip down Shono's hidden lab is right out of a horror movie - it's a dilapidated underground sector staffed by very sadistic thugs. At one point, Sugiura is kidnapped and put in a noose while two thugs shock him with stun batons. If you don't take out the thugs quickly, Sugiura will actually suffocate to death. Then there's the inexplicable return of the Hangman from Yakuza 6 and all of the movie monster tropes attached to him. For even more horror, a trophy involves waiting until there's 10 seconds left on the clock to save Sugiura.
- The section where Yagami and Sugiura are chasing down Kuroiwa in the ADDC. Halfway through the chase, Yagami begins losing a lot of blood, and what was once a fast-paced, action-packed chase attempt soon becomes you walking through the halls of the ADDC in first-person, very slowly, as Yagami continues to lose blood and hallucinate incidents from the case that took place in the ADDC three years ago.
- After he reveals his true colors, Kuroiwa is so casual and efficient in his murder that it feels almost robotic. And then it's revealed that even that's just a facade when Yagami actually manages to go toe-to-toe with him, and Kuroiwa becomes an almost predatory psychopath. He has the highest on screen kill count of the Yakuza series to date at a brutal 26 kills, and that includes the rampage he committed to find Shono.
- The earliest instance of Hamura trying to have Yagami killed is quite chilling; having beaten Hamura's crew, Yagami sees Hamura emerge guiding Kengo's aim with a pistol, telling the young Yakuza to shoot Yagami in the heart, only to amend that to between Yagami's eyes when called out for his cowardice. The intent is clear, though; compared to the fatherly approach Matsugane puts across, and the decency that certain Tojo members seem to display to their families and the public, Hamura is a nasty piece of work who would not hesitate to throw one of his men under the bus to take the rap for him.
- Hamura forcing Higashi to kill Red Nose in order to prove his loyalty to him. Not only is Higashi scared shitless, but Hamura rubs it in by saying that he screams like a woman and that it gets him going.Hamura: Oh wow. You scream like a fucking whore. Kind of a turn-on, to be honest.
- Murase's death in Chapter 11 is downright horrifying, as the Matsugane thugs force a bomber vest onto him that blows him up as he runs back into Club Honmaruen.
