Yakuza 5 (PS3): This Blog Has Finally Come Full Circle

Way back in 2011, there was a guy who had an assignment in one of his graduate college courses. The assignment basically wanted this guy to create and make a post on a new blog. That student decided since all he really did with his free time was play video games, he would make his blog about game reviews. And for the first review he did, he decided to do it on a highly under-appreciated gem on the PS3. A game by the name of Yakuza 4.

That was five years ago. I have been basically barfing text onto this thing for minimal traffic because it was a great way to put my thoughts on games into words. Some of you have stuck around from the beginning. A couple of you might be newer readers, and the other 97% of you are google bots clicking my images. Either way this blog has finally come full circle. After years and years of begging, emails, and tweets (that I didn't do) the west finally convinced Sega to release this installment of the game outside of Japan. Three whole years I waited for it, and now I have it. Let's get to it.

YAKUZA 5 (PS3)

As has become the norm, the story of the Yakuza franchise has been broken up in multiple chapters divided up amongst longtime protagonist Kazama Kiryu, his adopted niece/daughter Haruka, Yakuza 4 returning cast members Taiga Seijima and Shun Akiyama, and new character to the series Tatsuo Shinada.

Kiryu is currently living away from the sunshine orphanage he runs and is working as a taxi driver in the city of Fukuoka. After a less than chance meeting with current Tojo clan head Daigo Dojima, Kiryu learns that the leader of the Omi alliance is on his deathbed, and when he passes war will break between Tojo and Omi once again. Dojima looks to build his strength to prepare for the coming war, but inexplicably goes missing. Kiryu is once again yanked into the affairs of his former clan to try to set things right.

No matter what Kiryu does, he just can't seem to stay out of things.

Haruka has also left the orphanage in Okinawa after being scouted by a talent director by the name of Mrs. Park. She currently is living by herself in Osaka and is working and training to become a pop idol. She is gaining in popularity and has been making a name for herself in a televised idol show called the Princess League but the road has not been easy for her as she is trying to juggle training for stardom on top of adapting to a new school with none of the people she knows and loves around her.

Seijima has willingly surrendered after the events of Yakuza 4 after having his previous prison sentence commuted and is currently serving a two year prison sentence in Hokkiado. He is nearing the point of his parole for good behavior, but life inside prison has been difficult as groups appear to be out to get him, and nearing the end he hears some troubling news about his blood brother and friend, Goro Majima.

Akiyama is still the eccentric proprietor of Sky Finance money lending. Giving out exorbitant sums of money with no interest or collateral in return for it, and instead forces people do seemingly odd challenges or tests to earn their loan. He arrives in Osaka on business business trip to open up a new branch of Sky Finance, when he receives word that one of his clients with 300 million yen loan has turned up dead.  Being in town, he goes to investigate the circumstances behind the death.

Shinada is an adult entertainment writer who is basically scrapping a living. He lives in a shack, is behind on his rent, and is in some serious financial debt with a shady lender. His real problem is he is serving a lifetime ban from professional baseball for gambling and game fixing. He only played one at bat where he hit a game winning walk off homerun, and immediately took the fall for cheating. Now a mysterious client is willing to pay him a significant sum of money to try to learn the truth behind what really happened that game. 

Shinada is one of the more sympathetic characters in the Yakuza universe.
Just an honest guy caught up in a bad situation.

So obviously, the zombie infested events of Yakuza: Dead Souls clearly were not considered canon, so the game picks up a few years after the events of Yakuza 4, although in this installment we actually have the story take place in a number of different locations over the course of 5 cities. That's actually a pretty significant jump in space from Yakuza 4 which was held specifically to Kamurocho. The good news is despite having more characters to control all with different motivations, the story in this one felt a lot less convoluted. They pretty much punch out why each character is motivated in a single line: Kiryu is trying to stop a war, Akiyama is investigating a murder, etc. etc.

At its core Yakuza 5 doesn't shake up the the formula of its base gameplay if you are a regular fan of this franchise. It plays as kind of this hybrid of an on foot Grand Theft Auto style sandbox game fused with elements of JRPG styled "random battles" with a 3rd person brawler style of combat. If you have played any of the previous Yakuza games outside of Dead Souls this won't come off as a radical change of pace.

Yep, Seijima's insane superhuman strength is still on display.

But at the heart of Yakuza game is its ability to cram as much different possible shit into its package, and its even done so more here. I think I have discovered the proper way to explain this. The Yakuza franchise is like a Sega singularity. It is a swirling vortex at the center of the Sega universe and any game that exists under their fold eventually has bits and pieces forcibly drawn into the Yakuza games to contribute some of its own to the new iterations. In short, there is even more off the wall shit that you have to do in Yakuza 5. Some of it story related, some of it optional.

To give you a brief rundown, here are some of the things I have done in the first 40 hours of play: beat the shit of a lot of people, played Taiko Drum Master, worked as a Taxi driver being scored by my ability to obey the laws of the road, lost 50k on a pachinko machine, drag raced against a gang of sexy female street racers, broke out of prison, eluded my pursuers while riding a snow mobile, played Virtua Fighter 2, got into a fist fight with a grizzly bear, hunted for deer, took part in a comedy troupe audition, guest starred on a tv variety show, performed a j-pop rhythm game concert for a crowd of screaming fans against a rival act who performed simultaneously, went bowling, shot pool, threw darts, participated in multiple handshake events, received beauty tips from a transvestite, dance battled strangers on the street, swung someone by their shirt collar spine first into a light post, and a shit ton of other things I am not remembering.

You seriously fist fight a goddamn bear.  Seijima is a bad dude.

Yakuza 5's ability to cram so many different methods of gameplay into a single game is mind blowing to me. The only comparable game that I can think of that does that much is obviously Grand Theft Auto but even that franchise doesn't put in other games from its parent company within its own game. Honestly it makes reviewing a game like this difficult for me because I like to go into detail on how the game plays and how well it works, which I can't really do with Yakuza 5 because the game is constantly throwing so many different elements at you, you are constantly learning new controls. There is almost too much.

So lets focus on the main mechanic of the game: the fighting. This was always the Yakuza games bread and butter and for the most party it hasn't changed here. You get jumped by some random shlub on the street and the pass pedestrians for a ring for your and your attacks to fight in. You get a series of Light and heavy attacks that when pressed in certain order execute different move types, you can lock on and block, you can dodge, there are weapons scattered about the street that you can pick up and wail one you opponents with. Essentially the core of the Yakuza fighting engine hasn't changed.

All of the characters have unique tricks for fighting, but none of them slug it out better than Kiryu.

Fighting charges up your heat gauge, and when you hit a certain point you and you are in the situation that fills certain conditions, you and nail a heat move for big damage. I will say that the visceral of the heat moves do feel like its been somewhat turned down, but not a lot. Make no mistake about it, there is nothing easy to watch about a guy pinned on his knees and getting repeatedly kneed in the face before taking a massive kick in the neck. (But somehow also always fun to slam a bicycle on someones chest and jumping stomp on it.). I think its the lack of blood or teeth flying out of a dislocated jaw that was so prevalent in Yakuza 4 that is making it easier to stomach.

There is now also an additional red heat gauge that gradually builds over the course of several fights. This can be used for a big essence attack that usually can bring down a group of baddies (or a single enemy depending on who you play) for massive damage. There are also a few little tweaks to the combos which give you a little more to try out, but if you have played the Yakuza games before the combat doesn't change all that much. It doesn't have to because its works.

Which is funny when I think about it, because when I compare the button layout to the recently reviewed Senran Kagura: Shinovi Vs I find myself wondering what is it about that game that made the combat feel a bit more bland, while Yakuza's feels so much more skillful. Perhaps because Yakuza's is a bit more precise. Blocking takes effort, and you can't really mash at random to pull off the more damaging combos, and the multitude of different heat moves you can do the punish your opponent makes the game's combat blow open even more. Perhaps it felt like I was just performing the same combo in Senran Kagura over 15 characters, and I feel like I'm mixing them up more in Yakuza 5.

People still attack on the street for some of the most ridiculous reasons and they are just as hilarious this time around as well, but I think they got the sense that they were getting annoying to some people because now a number of them just transition right into the fight sequence without hearing Johnny Nobody explaining his imagined slight against you.

Way back when I wrote that first review for Yakuza 4, I had one major "complaint" about the game, and that is was that seeming out of the blue in this convoluted story of seedy gangsters betraying each other I had to break in the game to make a girl looking for a major loan play pretty pretty princess dressup at a hostess club 3 tortuous times. I suppose it gave context to how Akiyama does things, but it was insanely out of place and took a bit longer to do than I cared for. I couldn't blame anyone if they stopped playing the game because of it.

You may not run them anymore, but you can still go to hostess clubs to go on dates.

Yakuza 5 steps it up a notch by giving you a whole new insanely out of place chapter. Now lets be clear here, Haruka has been around since the very first game of the franchise and she deserves to be a part of the narrative as much as any other character does. But she's not a grizzled veteran of the yakuza, she's not a debonair bad ass money lender, she's not a thuggish ogre who took out 16 people at once, or any of the other character types that have graced this series. She's a young girl growing up.

So I guess the play to make her relevant was to send her down the route of a pop idol. So while she does have some major events that happen with her that do pertain to the story, all of her missions involve game modes that are a major departure from the combat. For lack of a better way to explain it, it seems like Haruka's chapter is a means of getting the player to try the minigames Yakuza 5 has to offer. Some of them are original just to her like all the dance performances, TV appearances, and so on. But some of them are just ways to get you do things you could already like shoot pool or throw darts.

Who am I kidding? I am a sucker for a rhythm game....

It's almost as if Yakuza 5 is afraid you might miss all the extra stuff you can do in the game, so it gives you Haruka's chapter to make sure you don't miss any of it. That being said, I didn't feel it was as much of slog to get through than the hostess club thing was. And its actually in Haruka's chapter that kind lays the whole foundation for why Akiyama gets involved, which of course ties into Seijima's chapter and... well you see how this works out. Yakuza is always pretty good at weaving together a compelling narrative.

Naturally, as with any game there are a handful of things that I didn't much care for. Most obviously in the case of Yakuza 5 is how fucking long I had to wait to get it. THREE YEARS! Come on Sega! Sonic is a dead horse that does not draw appeal anymore. Give it up. Please start localizing the quirky and different, the tired and overused just leads to disappointment.

Accurate depiction of Sega western localization announcements. 

I mentioned that this installment of Yakuza felt like the combat is less visceral. And while yes I felt it made the combat easier to stomach and get through, it was that sense of violent uncomfortableness that kinda made it original. It made the actual combat feel like it had some weight behind it. To give an example, say you play God of War: from the press of the start button your gutting and disemboweling people pretty much at the moment you take control of the game, and inside of minutes you become desensitized to it. The weight is gone, it becomes meaningless because that's the norm.

Now say take a take a game like Heavy Rain: there is some violence, but virtually no combat. Only on a few pivotal scenes you're character takes excruciating damage, and he reacts accordingly. Its absolutely brutal and almost impossible to watch. Because you barely see it. I feel that's the balance Yakuza 4 had managed to strike. The combat is regular, so you wail on baddies and its not unsettling because its what you do, but those finishing heat moves are cringe worthy because they are a quick snap of brutality in an otherwise "video gamey" fight. I dunno, This is just a personal nitpick.

This might be the first time I've said this but I think Yakuza might actually be trying to do too much now. I love how much extra stuff they put in these games and it really is become a bit of a staple to the franchise. But I like them more as extras. When you try to put them in as required story mechanics, it feels like you are trying to pad out the playtime. You are building this really interesting narrative of betrayal and impending gang warfare, so I feel the grizzled battle hardened Yakuza member doesn't really need story segment where he needs to fish for trout. Let me know the extras exist, but don't force me to put off the story to do it.

This is why this review has take so long to put out. I had the game purchased and was playing it way back in October or November of last year. At time of writing I've got to be close to 60-70 hours of play time, and I am still working my way through the final chapters of the game. Unless I make a conscious effort to skip side missions, the progress has been slow. And slow progress is big reason games get put down. A game should never feel like a slog to complete.

Yes, I still make time for bowling. Shut up. 

Being digital only kind of sucks. I prefer a physical release with case and instructions but at this point I was willing to take this game in any iteration I could get my hands on. Unfortunately even with my download speed, a 60 something GB download is a bitch and a half to wait for to download and install. My heart goes out to those with slower download speeds and god forbid data caps/overages.

While the story is less convoluted, some scenes do run longer than I feel they need to. This has always been a bit of an issue with the Yakuza games because there are so many repeated points and pauses for reaction when they could be getting to the point. There is a particularly tortuous scene near the end of Shinda's chapter where he's basically held at gunpoint for no joke 10-15 minutes. It drones on forever like a scene out of Metal Gear when the point could have been made in a few lines. But then again, if you have played any of the previous Yakuza titles this will not be something that surprises you.

I very much enjoyed the story, but a little editing down couldn't have hurt.

The game eventually brings you back to Kamurocho, which has been the main location for the most of the Yakuza series and honestly, I was kind of  disappointed when it did. When I was playing at all these new locations it felt like the story was evolving. But finishing here makes me feel like I'm playing Madden: Yakuza Edition. The city hasn't changed, everything is where it was. I've been here for 3 games now. I was kinda enjoying having new maps to learn. It just kind of makes the game feel like a copy-paste after such a strong start. So when I finally got back to Kamurocho, I just skipped all the sidequests because I just wanted to finish the game.

This continues to bug me, but for some reason I never feel the character models look good for the average. All of the man characters look very human and realistic. Yet any somewhat major NPC for the story just doesn't look natural to me. For lack off a better of a better explanation they feel some what slapdash and quickly put together. I guess on the whole its not too much of an issue, but when you are doing romance missions at a hostess club, its in full frame and just looks bad. Now, I know they are actually interviewing Japanese hostesses for later installments of the game, so maybe this will be fixed in the future.

Obviously, Haruka doesn't fight. So the game has dance battles to give you conflict when wandering.

Handshake events just feel like the worst thing in the world.

So I guess the ultimate question is, did it live up to 3 years of expectations? Well, yes and no. Did it provide me a new Yakuza storyline with new characters, locations, and plot twists? Yes, it certainly did on that front. Did it give me new gameplay mechanics: Yes, it added it multitude of different things to shake up the regular sandbox play. Did I get my money's worth? I would say 60+ hours is money well spent for a video game.

But at the same time, the longer I played it, the more it felt like I've played it before. It probably would have had more punch if the play time was shorter. There are lots of new minigames, but they feel shoehorned in. It didn't feel like it changed enough. I think I would have really liked the not localized Yakuza Issin because that turns the game into a period Samurai piece. That would have shaken up the whole formula and made it new and interesting. I would have been into that. But continuing the modern day narrative requires more change to keep it interesting. It started stronger but had a weaker finish.

That being said, Yakuza 5 is another satisfying installment to this series. The game is still very good despite starting to feel a little repetitive. It has no shortage of different mini games to play so there are a lot of different distractions. But I do think the game is going to need to change soon lest it wear itself out for future installments. Fans of the series will play it. I enjoyed and recommend it, but you could get a similar experience from Yakuza 4 for 20 bucks.

T-Set, you were horrible twats. I will never forgive you.