Originally published March 2018

So far, 2018 has already been the year for me to finally explore some video game franchises that I've always had my eye on, but never quite had the motivation to start playing. For example, I started playing Bloodborne, finally. I've played a little bit of Sniper Elite 3. I've been playing Monster Hunter World. And, I've finally tried out the long-running Yakuza series for the first time with Yakuza Kiwami. What makes it all better, is that I've really enjoyed what I've played in all of these games. They each fit their own playstyle and mood, but the one that has been the most joyfully entertaining is Yakuza. Don't get me wrong, Bloodborne is doing a lot right and fills that Dark Souls void, while still being rather new, but Yakuza isn't nearly as masochistic and it's far less depressing.

I'm very thankful that Yakuza Kiwami came out last year. One of the main reasons I'm so grateful is that Kiwami is actually a remake of the original Yakuza game that came out on the PS2, ten years ago. It has given me the opportunity to start the series from the beginning—a series that I have long been eyeing. It's had a significant graphical overhaul by bringing it up to the latest Yakuza game engine. It looks great and it's given me a chance to finally see what the series is all about on a console that I actually have plugged in. Having made my way through it, I can tell you right now that I intend to play a few more of the sequels and prequels because I just can't get enough.

The Short of it

What I've Played

The main storyline to completion
80%+ of the side quests
Explored all the mini-games to a certain degree

Pros

Majima
Majima; again. He is perhaps one of my favorite side characters in the history of video games
Never a shortage of things to do
Combat is surprisingly deep and satisfying if you can avoid its frustrations
Legitimately funny at times
Some interesting plot arcs and sub-plots
Tone is intentionally all over the place, making it impossible to predict what will happen next, but in a good way

Cons

If you don't like the combat of the game, well, that's too bad because there's a lot of it
Some of the combat can get out of hand very quickly and there's not much you can do about it
Not all of the story arcs are interesting
The game doesn't always do a good job of explaining mechanics
There's a lot of running around and fetch quests
Some outdated gameplay mechanics are still present

The Rest of it

Story

To my knowledge, the Yakuza franchise mostly follows the life and actions of Kiryu Kazama, a hard-headed man with a heart of gold who is constantly ebbing and flowing his way in and out of the criminal underworld of Japan. Though the premise of Yakuza is that you're playing as a member of a yakuza family—aka the Japanese mafia—Kiryu is somehow this honorable, kindhearted dolt who wants to be a hero in a world of villains. If you sit there and think over all the different characteristics or morals that Kiryu has, it doesn't really make sense that he's in the mafia, but that doesn't really matter much anyway because the rest of the game is all over the place. In most cases, I'd be annoyed if a game or movie couldn't decide on what it wanted its characters to be, but here it feels pretty deliberate, as though you're supposed to acknowledge Kiryu's attitude and conflict of interest right away. There are plenty of places in the game where his behavior doesn't match what you'd expect of him, or any protagonist, so it makes sense in the long run.

Regardless, the character conundrum doesn't really last long anyway, as the developers probably understood this paradoxical predicament. The main story begins in the 1990s, when Kiryu is a well-respected lieutenant of the Kazama "family" and acts as a last-resort enforcer of the mob and their rules. Kiryu is so well-respected that there is a lot of talk about his imminent promotion and his own "family" of men underneath him. Kiryu is mostly uninterested in the prospect but more than willing to take command from his superiors like a good dog. His best friend Nishikiyama has a small tint of envy but is mostly happy for his friend's success. The two friends, along with Nishikiyama's sister(?), Yukiko, whom Kiyru secretly sukis (likes), are all having a great time in the ‘90s. So you know this goes bad at some point.

On the night that Kiryu is supposed to receive his promotion, the patriarch of Kiryu's family abducts Yukiko and sexually assaults her. Since he's several layers higher in the pecking order, Kiryu is not supposed to interfere. For the most part, he doesn't, because he doesn't get the chance. Nishiki, in a fit of rage, kills the patriarch. Kiryu, being the honorable bro he is, takes the blame for it and is sent to prison. Flash forward 10 years, Kiryu is out and the real game begins. From this point on, the main storyline follows Kiryu's attempts to reconnect with the world he left behind to try to unravel a mystery involving the assassination of a high-ranking yakuza official, the link between a young girl and several billions in stolen yakuza money, and how Nishiki simultaneously rose to power and fell from grace into becoming a cruel and dangerous yakuza boss.

There is some interest in the main plot, which has a few moments of intrigue with some twists and turns. In some ways, it reminds me a little of Alfred Hitchcock's mysteries, blending and leading into each other. That being said, I don't think the main plot of Yakuza is so inherently interesting that it will immediately grab you if you don't also enjoy a bit of Japanese melodrama. There's a lot of screaming, emotional overacting, and archetype spring-boarding that has characters behaving like what you might expect of a live-action Japanese drama.

This also applies to the various side-stories of Yakuza Kiwami. There are dozens upon dozens of side-quests for you to complete in the game, from the most mundane act of finding a person and clicking the X button a bunch of times until their dialogue is exhausted, to the more bizarre quests of stopping a romance cult from taking over the town. Not all of them are interesting, but there are a few surprisingly entertaining ones sprinkled about, which is enough to keep me curious.

Uh... how many more photos you got? — Image: Sega

Gameplay

If the mysteries, the main characters, and the side quests aren't enough to keep you going, there are still plenty of gameplay mechanics that should motivate you to continue, as well as a particular "ace in the hole." Before we get to that ace in the hole, let's focus on the main thing that kept me going in Yakuza. The combat.

Combat & Progression

There are certain things about the combat in Yakuza that I don't particularly enjoy, like the somewhat stiff controls and the wonky targeting system. However, the adventure of unlocking a new fighting technique and super moves is extremely enticing when it comes to fighting in Yakuza. Kiryu is a force to be reckoned with, as he has a multitude of options when it comes to dealing with enemy encounters. I admit, I was quite surprised at the depth and effort that was paid to the combat of Yakuza. After playing it for a good 10 hours, I was still discovering new things about what I could do in a fight. This was partially a flaw in the tutorial of the game when it came to instructing me in certain ways, but it gave me a similar feeling to a Dark Souls game in which I was discovering tactics on my own that worked for different situations.

While the opening section of the game lets you try out his styles with all the abilities unlocked until it takes it all away during Kiryu's time in prison, you're probably not going to see much of what Kiryu can do until you've played a good portion of the game and unlocked more of his abilities. Kiryu has four different fighting styles at his disposal: Brawler, Rush, Beast, and Dragon of Dojima. Brawler is an average, all-around style that provides some simple, basic combos to allow Kiryu to move quickly and deal some damage, along with some basic interactions with weapons. These weapons range from a simple dagger, to the stray bicycle, to a store's sign; basically, a weapon is any object Kiryu can get his hands on. Rush is a boxer-style beatdown stance that is all about dodging attacks and getting in close with some rapid attacks and quick strikes to build Kiryu's special-move meter. Beast is the slow-moving, high-damage stance that allows you to charge up your attacks and deliver devastating blows in your combos. Beast stance also has the added benefit of making Kiryu automatically pick up any interactable stray object within his proximity and swing it like a weapon, making any encounter in a room full of chairs an easy and quick one. Finally, Dragon is the stance that blends all the other three together with its own unique combos and moves. In some ways, it stands out for being the end-all-be-all stance, but, with how the progression works in Yakuza, it will probably not be as useful as the other three until the end-game.

The first three stances are upgraded through traditional means of using experience points. These points are earned by doing practically anything in Yakuza, such as eating food, playing mini-games, fighting dudes in the street, completing side stories, etc. The Dragon stance, however, is upgraded through encounters with specific characters. The process of unlocking abilities and improving Kiryu's stats is a little confusing at first, due to the fact that the ability upgrade menus do not line up completely. For instance, there are four progression wheels, but only one of them is completely dedicated to the Dragon stance, which you cannot change or adjust on your own. Meanwhile, the other three wheels all have different nodes of improvements for Kiryu that apply to the different stances, depending on the circumstances. One wheel is more focused on special attacks, one is more focused on passive stats and abilities for Kiryu, and one is focused on building new combos. It's a little odd that they broke it up this way, but once you figure out the stances you like and your priorities, it begins to make sense. I mostly focused on improving Kiryu's stats and abilities before improving his special attacks and "Heat" meter.

Heat is Kiryu's combo-superpower juice. Connecting multiple strikes, taunting, or dodging attacks at the right time can fill up Kiryu's Heat meter. This mechanic is crucial to what makes Yakuza's combat so satisfying. If there were no Heat meter, and thus, no Heat attacks, the combat would get stale pretty quickly. Kiryu would just have the core attacks of his different stances and little else. These core attacks are fine, and having four different stances helps keep it all fresh, but it's the special moves that Kiryu gets while in Heat mode that give the combat the extra touch of charm and action.

Essentially, while in Heat mode, Kiryu can execute a special move that deals a significant amount of damage and looks brutally badass. In some ways, these moves remind me of John Wick, and other movies that involve professional fighters or assassins using ingenious improvisation during a brawl to win. How these special moves are executed depends on how much heat Kiryu has at any given moment. It also depends on what the enemy is doing and what is present in the environment. Pressing the same button while holding on to an enemy can result in a much different and more powerful move if the enemy is near a wall or environmental hazard. Likewise, it matters if Kiryu is holding a weapon or the stance that he's in. The same button with different specific circumstances can lead to Kiryu delivering a simple punch combo, or grabbing a dude's face and shoving it into a trash fire, or dodging a punch and throwing the guy into a wall, or whacking a guy with a tea kettle and pouring hot water on him. With all the different objects in the environment and special moves to unlock for each fighting style, there's a lot to discover and experiment with, which keeps the combat fresh and exciting.

Mini-Games

If you need to take a break from the combat or the story, you can jump into the plethora of different mini-games that Yakuza has to offer. When I first heard of Yakuza, it was regarded mostly as a GTA clone that takes place in Japan. I would say that the analogy isn't very accurate except for the amount of effort the developers have put into the mini-games that are available. There are card games. There is Majong. There are different types of billiards games. There are darts games. There's bowling. There are rhythm games with Japanese karaoke, which include some hilariously distracting background videos while Kiryu stretches his voice out. There's pocket car racing. The list is impressive, and while not every one of these games tickled my fancy, they were all worth a try.

Of the various mini-games available, I'd say billiards was the one that felt the most like it could have been sold as its own game. If you had never heard of this game and just walked in the room while I was playing, you might have been convinced I was playing a game that was specifically about shooting some pool, just from the way everything played and looked. Likewise, bowling feels very much like some real effort was paid to making sure the mechanics looked and felt right, though bowling is a little bit tougher to control.

By far though, my two favorite mini-games are the Mesuking card game and pocket car racing, simply because of how ridiculous they both are. Mesuking is just nuts. It's essentially a game of rock-paper-scissors, dressed up as a battle card game, like Pokemon, for instance. However, rather than having you watch people place cards on a table, the special moves of each card are shown in action and you get to see them take place in a battle arena, much like how it happens in Yu-Gi-Oh. What's more, the creatures that are battling are not your typical monsters. They're bugs, according to the cards, but they're really just very under-dressed women, with bug-shaped hats, who wrestle each other and perform outlandish special moves for your entertainment. The gameplay of Mesuking isn't really great, since it's merely a guessing game of rock-paper-scissors, but the presentation is pretty hilarious—though, I'm sure if a third-wave feminist or Anita Sarkeesian saw it, they wouldn't be laughing much. To top off the presentation, at the end of the match, some lady reads a haiku that has something to do with bugs. It's great.

Likewise, the pocket car racing is one of my favorites, not because of how it plays, but because of the presentation. Pool and bowling were by far the most fun to play, but Mesuking and pocket cars had the most ridiculous moments. In fact, pocket car racing isn't really much fun because it has some significant trial-and-error mechanics that suck up a lot of time. Essentially, you're playing with Hot Wheels cars that you can customize before racing them on a track. Once the race starts, you don't have much control over the car anymore, you just have to watch it go along the track. Since each track is different, with jumps, loops, and turns, you have to constantly re-customize your car for each race. If you don't, there is a very likely chance that your car may not have the necessary parts equipped to keep up with the rest of the racers, or that your car may be too fast and unstable for the track, causing it to fly off. Thus, you need to keep getting new, better parts and equipping them to your car to win the race so that you can unlock more car parts.

When it comes down to it, Pocket Cars is a very hands-off mini-game. It's a whole lot of setup. Then, you just have to let the car do the rest unless you're willing to risk it all and hit the boost button but be prepared for your car to fly off the track. Why would I have played so much of it and liked it if I didn't think it was that much fun? Well, for one reason, there's a side story that requires you to race a lot to complete. For another reason, it's the absurdly great presentation with the various facial expressions and poses of Kiryu, who takes this mini-game super seriously. The intense pose he makes before a race (as seen in the main image of this review), his smug satisfaction from a victory, and the dejected horror on his face when his car flies off the track are all great moments. The presentation alone makes it worth my time. If that doesn't sound like a good enough reason to play it in Yakuza, there's one other reason to visit the pocket car course: to continue the growing love story between Kiryu and Majima.

Majima

You might be wondering, "What's a Majima? Is she a pretty lady Kiryu is after?" Nope! Goro Majima is a male character, who starts out as that cliché anime Joker type of sadomasochistic psychopath: the type who likes pain and excess a bit too much and does a lot of screaming and laughing as he beats up his subordinates. I definitely didn't think much of him in the opening section of the game where he was being introduced. However, he quickly became the most interesting and entertaining character in the game. In fact, he's one of the primary reasons I continued to play Yakuza.

There are various factors that make Majima so special. For one thing, there is a whole mechanic around him as a character. Since his whole schtick is that he wants to fight Kiryu and test Kiryu's strength and prowess as a fighter, he is constantly on the prowl in the streets looking for him. It starts out as him just wandering around aimlessly, looking for a chance to chase you down and fight you, but it soon escalates. He starts wearing disguises that aren't effective at disguising him. He starts hiding in trash cans and the trunks of cars, to spring out at you. He even performs several dances in front of Kiryu to seduce/capture his attention. Majima and his deranged affection for Kiryu is hilarious. Practically everything he does and says makes me laugh.

What's more, is that he tends to show up in surprising places. Even after you expect him to jump out of a sewer manhole, or a giant traffic cone, he surprises you and shows up in line at a fast-food restaurant. Or, even better, he shows up in the pocket car racing arena and quickly becomes addicted to the game because of how much he wants to spend time with Kiryu.

Even if you don't find this blossoming love story between two yakuza enthralling or funny (because you have no soul or sense of humor), there is still a good reason to interact with Majima. He is tied to an entire skill tree of Kiryu's abilities: the Dragon style. The more you interact with him, the more moves you unlock in the Dragon skill wheel. By the end, Majima was proving to be a real threat in fights and was often a lengthy boss battle, but I didn't mind too much because he was just such a satisfying character and the true highlight of Yakuza Kiwami.

Presentation

The opportunity to play a decade-old game with brand-new graphics and modern updates is a welcome one, considering I never got the chance to play the original Yakuza. There are obvious areas where the graphical detail isn't the best, and there are dozens of characters in the game that are lacking in detail, but on the important characters, like Kiryu and Majima, you can see pretty much every pore on their face. Both men need to use some face cleanser and exfoliating brushes, by the way.

The narrow streets are alive and well with numerous NPCs walking to and fro. Ambient noise provides the expected sounds of a city, though there are plenty of sound effects and dialogue snippets that repeat a bit too frequently. Likewise, while the music is good, overall, it could have used a few more tracks. Considering how often you'll find yourself locked in battle with some thugs and hooligans on the street, it would have been nice to have more than 2 possible songs playing each time a fight started; I was getting Final Fantasy flashbacks with how often I heard the same battle music.

All in all, the world and the characters look pretty good for a remake. It's using an engine that has already proven to look good on the PS4, but that doesn't make it any less pleasant to look at.

Lastly, I have to call out the stellar localization. I'm not sure how much of the original game's text was changed for Kiwami, but I can't recall the last Japanese game I played that had localization of this quality. There are genuinely funny lines, delivered by people who weren't just automatically hilarious. The localization manages to capture the time period in which the story takes place, the attitude you would expect, some solid slang, and clever discourse between characters without losing any of the Japanese charm and melodrama. Plus, everything Majima says is great.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

I've always been interested in trying the Yakuza series. I was worried that I had missed my chance, now that they had gone so far as to make a prequel along with 5 sequels, but I am glad I waited so that I could experience the original game through the Kiwami lens. Yakuza Kiwami has blown me away with its stiff, but satisfying combat, its intriguing mystery, and one of the best side characters in video game history. My biggest problem now is deciding whether I want to play the other Yakuza games I've already bought to follow this up or wait until Yakuza Kiwami 2 comes out.

Image: Sega | I'll just wait patiently for the next one.

Do you agree or disagree? Tell me in the comments!

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Yakuza Kiwami - Review