else I'll never catch up to the current releases.

That's the patient gamer lifestyle.

I would recommend to play all of the mainline story (Yakuza 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8). The story is a little stupid at times but overall it is good. And if you do all of them in chronological order it is much more impactful when you know the background of characters and their relationship with others.

I have to say that i played a lot more of the Judgement games. I haven't played the Ishin games and Dead Souls, i'm not that much interested to play them.

In my opinion, you shouldn't think like that. If you love the franchise, take you time and just have fun playing what you want.

I'm on Yakuza 3, and while it's a heartwarming story so far (I'm about halfway through), I think 0 is the only "absolutely must play no matter what." I'm probably going to play the rest of the series, but at least from what I've read/watched, they're not anything ground-breaking.

I've been playing one about every year or two, so I think I'm slowly catching up. I'm probably going to give it another year or so before I play Yakuza 4 because the gameplay is so similar between games that I want to give it a break so each title feels fresh.

But honestly, you shouldn't be worrying about "catching up," just play at your own pace and enjoy yourself. My understanding is that 0-6 are completely separate from the "Like a Dragon" series, so if you want to skip ahead, you probably wouldn't miss much (and of the 0-3 games I've played so far, they do a really good job of covering relevant plot points from prior games).

Extremely bare bones playthrough would be just doing Yakuza 0 and then 7. Those would give you an overview of the two main gameplay styles the series has to offer.

If you want to play more then you probably want to finish the brawler games first before moving on to 8 since it has spoilers for the whole series.

The Judgement games are also good so you might want to try the first of those to see if you like it. Story is completely isolated from the Yakuza games though so I'd investigate this at your leisure.

I've only played and finished 0 and 1. The first one I actually played was 5 because it was on ps+ back in the day but I loved it so much I knew I should start from the beginning. Few years later I saw 0 was on ps+ and my gf started playing it, so I decided to play that one as my actual first, then moved onto 1 when I felt the urge to play another Yakuza game. Eventually I'll get that urge again and I'll boot up 2, and so on. I'm in no rush to get to the latest.

Ishin felt like a stage play with all the characters you know playing different roles. It's great but not required Y all.