Yakuza Kiwami (PS4)

Back when the Yakuza series began on the PlayStation 2 it only really seemed to achieve niche success, just enough that it continued to get sequels and releases outside of Japan but it never really seemed to be particularly well known. However, with Yakuza 0 on PS4, a prequel with refined gameplay served as a great jumping on point for many new players and Sega suddenly found the series to not only be much more beloved but one of their flagship franchises. Already they had been mulling over a remake for the then ten year old original title, and with Yakuza 0 propelling the series into greater popularity, they decided to give players a chance to experience the original with the polish of the newer games. And so, Yakuza Kiwami was created, and it serves as my own personal starting point for taking a look at this increasingly popular franchise.

 

Yakuza Kiwami tells the tale of Kazuma Kiryu, a well-respected and rather honorable member of the Yakuza who operates in the streets of a Tokyo district known as Kamurocho. Initially on the track to rise up to a top position in the criminal organization, Kiryu ends up taking the fall for a murder his friend commits and is expelled from the Yakuza for it. After ten years in prison he returns to Kamurocho to start life anew, but adjusting to how society has changed in the last decade is the least of his problems. His closest friend Nishikiyama has ascended the Yakuza power ladder in his stead and become more ruthless in doing so, the entire Tojo clan is in disarray after ten billion yen is taken from their coffers, and high profile deaths in the organization lead to a power vacuum the underbosses are all competing to fill. While Kiryu is no longer directly tied to the organization officially, he soon comes across an orphan girl named Haruka, a rather cherubic but surprisingly mature nine year old girl who seems to have ties to both the mysteries of the Yakuza’s missing money and the truth on what happened to Kiryu’s love interest Yumi. Simply trying to protect the girl leads to Kiryu once again embroiled in the powder keg that is the Tojo clan’s increasingly dangerous drama.

 

Kiryu’s status as an outsider works well for letting the player play the hero in a game focused on the often brutal life of Japanese mobsters. Before we ever see him do anything morally objectionable he’s forced out of the group, and his more honorable approach to solving things with vigilante justice helps distance him from the crime bosses and goons he goes up against during the game’s main story. Kiryu is a bit of a rigid character who navigates social situations clumsily, sometimes because he’s out of touch due to his incarceration, other times because his mostly stolid temperament makes him difficult to approach. Still, he steps up to do what is right and shows he cares in his own way, and while this may make it hard to mesh this softer side with his gangster background at first, when he comes across injustices, people being mistreated, or a group of men who need to be taught a lesson, the Dragon of Dojima comes out and he is willing to be extremely brutal in combat. The Kiwami in the title means “Extreme”, and the way he fights certainly shows that extreme part of his character as he bashes people against pavement, whales on them with anything he can get his hands on, and performs some frankly insane athletics in delivering moves that seem to be ripped straight from anime and wrestling when he delivers beat downs to those who deserve it.

The main plot thread of Yakuza Kiwami keeps its focus pretty close on the mystery of Haruka and the way it relates to the increasingly volatile Tojo Clan, Kiryu having to delve back into the criminal underworld to find answers and push back against his powerful enemies. The story does take some strange diversions such as a portion devoted to a helpful detective’s family life and a romance involving your main informant’s son with a mob boss’s daughter, but besides pulling a new main antagonist out of thin air pretty close to the game’s conclusion, it mostly can at least fit together on the idea you’re developing trust in this world of favors and uneasy alliances in between the more clear blows to the Yakuza hierarchy. Perhaps the best story-telling angle is one added into Yakuza Kiwami to make up for the original game’s poor handling of Nisihikiyama’s fall from grace. To kick off each new chapter for a while, the player gets to see Nishiki handle life within the Yakuza after Kiryu’s incarceration, the much less capable gangster finding the shoes of his old friend hard to fill. The gradual decline into the man Kiryu meets after leaving prison makes more and more sense and builds up excellently to when they start to interact directly and have their true confrontation, and developing other side characters like Kiryu’s former boss allows for more emotionally resonant moments on the path to the somewhat shaky conclusion.

 

One entertaining aspect of Yakuza Kiwami though is, despite portraying much of its main plot with seriousness and gravitas, there is a huge underlying level of humor to be found as you progress through the game. Much of this comes from the Kiryu’s eccentric rival Goro Majima, the eyepatch wearing gangster seemingly unhinged and hard to predict both in the moments he becomes deathly serious and brutal and when he’s simply messing with Kiryu to try and provoke the Dragon of Dojima into a battle that can properly push both of them to their limits. Since Kiryu doesn’t want to fight without good reason though, Majima begins to concoct pretty much any excuse he can to squeeze battles out of Kiryu, and these can range from something as simple as spotting him on the street and refusing to move or joining in Kiryu’s fights with other gangsters to incredibly elaborate scenarios and costumes. Majima can crop up pretty much anywhere you can go in the open streets of Kamurocho. Stop in for a snack at the Smile Burger and he’ll come in demanding that a fight with Kiryu come with his order. Go to unwind with the game’s ample minigames like bowling or slot car racing and he can pop up to challenge you. He might show up dressed as a policeman and say Kiryu is getting busted for carrying weapons or serve Kiryu drinks at the bar and force a fight by charging exorbitant prices, Majima’s constant desire to kick things off leading to plenty of hilarity as his methods get more and more absurd.

 

This Majima Everywhere element of the game isn’t just there to amuse the player either, as it plays into parts of the game’s combat system. Yakuza Kiwami is a 3D brawler where Kiryu has four different stances he can switch between to alter his fighting style. The ways your regular attacks, weapon usage, grabs, and finishing moves work change to the themes of your four stances, and their strengths and weaknesses are pretty easy to intuit. Rush is a speed focused setup where you can dodge and weave around attacks with ease and deliver a flurry of blows, but your defenses are low and you need to land plenty of hits before backing off to deal a decent amount of damage. Beast stance is the polar opposite, this slow-moving brutal mode giving you heavy swings and even the power to push through the damage you’re taking to keep delivering blows, but its slowness means you will struggle to avoid damage and its defensive mode is to just stand your ground and take the blows with reduced damage. However, Beast also has some of the most thrilling attacks in the game to balance it out, this mode allowing you pick up all kinds of environmental objects to nail foes with. While smacking someone with a sign, tea kettle, or other small basic object is possible with other stances, Beast lets you lift up motorcycles, sofas, and other huge objects to bash your enemies around with. Rush can still be exhilarating because of its speed, but if you need something less specialized, Brawler mode gives you good defense, strength, and speed so you don’t have to tread as carefully as you do with the more extreme styles.

However, I did mention there are four stances, and this is the one Majima is relevant to. The Dragon stance is meant to be Kiryu’s ultimate attacking style, dishing out heavy damage and having many of the perks of the all-around style of Brawler but turned up even more. The problem is, while the game starts you off with a full suite of attack options and fully upgraded stances, the time Kiryu spends in jail leads to his skills eroding, the player then needing to purchase upgrades across the course of the campaign to regain their lost power. Regular battles and completing substories will provide experience points you can spend on unlocking abilities, stat increases, and other perks for Kiryu and his battle styles. However, not only does the game do a poor job communicating that it took away vital skills like the flashy Heat moves you build up energy for so you can execute finishers or interrupt bosses as they regenerate health, but it makes Dragon stance nearly useless and hard to even level up since it is separate from the experience system. Encountering Goro Majima around town works towards restoring Dragon abilities, but it takes far too many encounters to even get it slightly usable, and Majima’s fights, while interesting with unusual lead-ins or new twists like Majima’s own different battle stances, become increasingly repetitive, especially when they’re just the basic battles in the street. Even if you commit to facing Majima as much as possible, he only appears so much until certain points in the plot, and other tasks like training under a martial arts master are necessary for restoring Dragon’s power as well, essentially making it so you can only reasonable get Dragon up to a good strength after you’ve already finished the plot and are doing optional content for clean-up.

 

Dragon’s failings are unique to itself as the other battle stances do a good job in keeping combat fairly interesting, although the random fights with punks and thugs while exploring the city streets start to feel like they’re not worth the time investment. If you do need to build up your strength outside of the main plot though, substories can crop up all over the city as you explore it, providing small self-contained plots that Kiryu can help with. Admittedly, many of them are fairly basic in concept, just some street tough picking a fight with Kiryu or some situation requiring him to step in and rough someone up, but there are a few funny ones to be found and ones with unique play styles. For example, one rather lengthy substory involves Kiryu reconnecting with his old love of slot car racing, and in doing so he learns that the announcer needs to find a successor. Kiryu must customize his RC car and win small races to try and help his announcer friend out in finding a worthy replacement, and this is hardly the only substory of this stripe. The player can get involved in arcade competitions with kids who are playing a video game where scantily clad ladies based on beetles wrestle, the player building a deck of cards with such women to try and come out on top. Most of your substories will just be light interaction or a single simple battle so the more involved ones are the exception rather than the norm, but the fact they tend to pop up while exploring the city without warning makes for a decent diversion that can sometimes provide interesting humor or a good fight when a bit of thought is put into their design.

 

Even if you aren’t searching for substories though, Yakuza Kiwami’s city hub has quite a bit to do in it. Healing can be done by dropping by restaurants, the player can go for a drink to help buff their stances, items can be bought so you can access healing and boosts during a battle, and you can entertain yourself with small diversions like playing cards in a casino or singing karaoke. Seeing Kiryu’s rather serious demeanor break as he gets into singing a sappy song or watching him get excited over a good performance at the batting cage and slot car track certainly helps to make him a more endearing hero, and with the game setting up small goals like hitting score benchmarks in side activities or performing certain actions across the city enough times, you will also be rewarded for taking the time out of your adventure to mess around and see what the city holds. The combat and crime drama will definitely make up the bulk of your experience as substories are dependent on your progress in the plot and the side activities like the batting cage are fairly simple in design. Some minigames even break the design standards of what you’d expect from them if they had been the main focus such as karaoke having a tempo change at the start of a new line of inputs but expecting you to press a button immediately as it happens. While they’re not all winners, the lack of commitment to them also means you can just as easily walk away and continue playing the action brawler side of Yakuza Kiwami instead if Shogi and darts aren’t really retaining your interest.

THE VERDICT: Yakuza Kiwami not only uses the neon-lit streets of Kamurocho as a good hub for the brawler action featured across its serious crime drama plot, but it builds a city with plenty of enjoyable diversions like minigames and small quests to pepper in between the action. The fights are still the highlight thanks to the stance system and Majima’s appearances continue to inject hilarious breaks between continuing the main plot, but the fighting certainly has its little missteps like some repetitive battles and the nearly useless Dragon stance. The mystery behind the power struggle within the Yakuza organization and how Haruka fits into it keeps the plot intriguing even during its odd diversions, and with that crunchy combat and plenty of side content to sink your teeth into, Yakuza Kiwami carries itself well and provides plenty of great ways to interact with its world.

 

And so, I give Yakuza Kiwami for PlayStation 4…

A GREAT rating. Yakuza Kiwami really feels like it fits the Great rating to a T. Its story has emotional beats, memorable characters, and can get you invested in the fates of Kiryu, Haruka, and Nishiki, but it loses some points for some of its weak diversions and the finale hinging on someone who is too fresh a face to the overall plot. The combat has a good mix of battle styles despite Dragon’s failings, with weapon and item usage leading to the environment lending an interesting hand and your attack options being varied and growing as the game goes on. However, you also get thrown into combat with random punks and Majima a bit too often and some ideas like the boss health regen are more irritating than a good way of making them tougher. The side content is definitely worth engaging with for its many interesting and amusing ideas for diversions, but you’re just as likely to find a brief event where you punch a few guys without the trappings being all that entertaining and the minigames are often simplistic representations that won’t hold a candle to truly devoted versions of their associated sport, board game, or other form of entertainment. Nothing in Yakuza Kiwami really comes off as really bad but it’s always easy to point at something that could be done better. It’s packed with excitement in many forms and a plot that carries its weight despite the frequent interruptions, so while you can see how it can grow, the suggestions come from a place of already enjoying what it offers enough to want to see it improve on its missed opportunities.

 

Yakuza Kiwami is able to shake off the sometimes generic feeling of crime dramas by embracing plenty of different approaches to play and storytelling. The tragedy of Nishikiyama is told in flashbacks as the mystery of Haruka pushes forward the current narrative of the Tojo Clan tearing itself apart, and Majima’s over the top personality and creative interjections into your play bring humor into the affair without corrupting the dramatic elements. Kiryu is basically given the means to live a life in Kamurocho, from needing to eat to keep his stamina up to the normal desire to find entertainment outside of required work. Yakuza Kiwami does a good job of fleshing out its setting and plot, and while the areas for improvement are easy to point out, I immediately knew on finishing the game I would want to play Yakuza Kiwami 2 in order to see both how it could hopefully make those changes while continuing the stories of characters I became invested in during this quality remake.