The Yakuza Files: Yakuza 3

This took a lot longer to get to get to than I thought. I had planned to get this a month ago, but a lot of things happened and got in the way of it. But I’m here now to talk about the third game in the Yakuza series Yakuza 3. Which is also generally considered to be one of the weakest games in the series.

Which is a shame because this is the first Yakuza game I ever played. I bought the original PlayStation 3 version when it came out in 2008 and remember liking it quite a bit. Although now that I think about it, I never did get past chapter 4. That’s not a good sign.

Yakuza 3 is going to be a tricky game to review. Since I started this series with reviews of the Kiwami games, this means that we’re moving forward in terms of the plot, but backwards in terms of the gameplay. Yakuza 3 did not get the remake treatment the first 2 games got, instead it was remastered along with Yakuza 4 and 5 and released via the Yakuza Remastered Collection.

This was likely done to capitalize on the new western audience the Yakuza series got after the release of 0. And unlike the first 2 games which needed the remake treatment due to how old and clunky both were, 3-5 are still perfectly playable by today’s standards. Hence why those games only got the remastered treatment.

This does mean that Yakuza 3 misses out on a lot of the gameplay innovations and quality of life improvements of later titles, putting it in a bit of a weird position. Since the Kiwami games are the most accessible way to play through the first 2 games, a lot of the more dated elements of Yakuza 3 are only going to stand out more to a modern audience.

I know it’s unfair to compare this game to ones that came out after it, but a lot of people are going to have played those games first which creates a standard it cannot hope to match. But that doesn’t mean the game can’t still be fun. I like the first God of War despite its sequels being better. So, let’s dive into Yakuza 3 and see how it stacks.

I might as well get the graphics for this game out of the way. Visually speaking, Yakuza 3 holds up well even by today's standards. Granted some of the animations are a touch on the awkward side, and the NPC character models could use a face lift, but overall, it’s still an impressive looking game.

The remaster does a good job of making everything look all the crisper, though it does shine a light on some of the more dated elements of the game like the texture work. I'm not kidding, some of the texture work here is PS2 level, it’s worse than Final Fantasy VII Remake at times.

I’m not sure if it’s just my memory fucking with me, but the streets felt more populated than the last two games. This helps the game create the atmosphere of a bustling city street, even if it is obvious they copy and pasted NPCs to get that effect. That is one element of the Yakuza games I always admired, their ability to create an atmosphere and to make each city feel real and lived in. I already praised this in my earlier reviews, but even in these early stages it’s obvious this was something the developers excelled at.

Like Yakuza 2 and its remake, Yakuza 3 takes place in 2 separate cities, Kamurocho and Okinawa. Whereas Kamurocho is the same dingy hell hole we all know and love, Okinawa is a quieter seaside town with a more inviting atmosphere. It creates a good contrast between the two. Something emphasized by the fact that segments in Kamurocho mostly take place at night, while Okinawa segments take place mostly during the day.

I think the contrast between the two is handled a lot better here than in 2. Especially given how it ties into the story. Speaking of which, let’s go over the plot. Picking up shortly after the conclusion of Yakuza 2, Kiryu has finally had enough of this Yakuza bullshit and has decided to move to the seaside town of Okinawa to run an orphanage like his adopted father, Shintaro Kazuma.

Things are going well for a short time until he has trouble from a local Yakuza group, the Ryudo family. Turns out the orphanage Kiryu runs is on some prime real estate. The government is planning a joint resort and military base deal for Okinawa, and Kiryu’s orphanage is on the spot where they want to build the resort.

Kiryu is having none of this and tells them to fuck off when they try to buy them out. But when the adopted daughter of the Ryudo family patriarch, Shigeru Nakahara, is kidnapped by a rival Yakuza group, Kiryu rescues her and earns their respect. Shortly afterwards Daigo shows up and reveals that the group Kiryu just beat up is a subsidiary of the Tojo Clan and that they’ve been tasked by the politician behind the resort deal to acquire the land they need.

But since the Tojo Clan owes Kiryu big time for saving their asses twice over, they aren’t going to touch Kiryu’s orphanage and vow to leave the man alone. I don’t even know why the Tojo Clan would get involved with a politician since the last time they did the guy tried to take over the entire organization. Then again, the Tojo Clan isn’t in the best shape right now so maybe they needed the extra cash.

Things go quiet for a year, until Nakahara is shot and the deed to the orphanage is stolen. Shortly afterwards, Daigo is also shot by the same assailant. And the kicker is that the man responsible for both shootings looks exactly like Shintaro Kazama. Wanting to know why this happened as well as find the identity of the mysterious assailant, Kiryu travels back to Tokyo along with Ryudo captain Rikiya to find out what the hell is going on.

Now all of that is just the setup to the main story that happens over the course of the game's first 4 chapters. Like the first Yakuza game and it’s Kiwami remake, Yakuza 3’s story is a bit of a slow burn. But in the first Yakuza, once it got going it hit the ground running and never stopped. Yakuza 3, on the other hand. suffers too much from its slow pace and never quite hits its stride.

One of the main issues with this is the opening few chapters spend a lot of it’s time on establishing Kiryu’s relationship with the kids at the orphanage. A lot of the beginning portions of the game is helping the kids with their issues in a style similar to a slice of life anime. And a lot of this feels out of place and just gets in the way of the core yakuza story I would much rather be playing.

And I know why these segments exist, it’s so you care about the kids enough that you want to protect them, but a lot of the stuff with the kids feels like sub stories they made into mainline missions. I didn’t outright hate any of it. Some of the stuff with the kids is charming and innocent enough, but after a while it just becomes tiresome.

And it’s not just the opening chapters that do this. Late in the game you return to Okinawa to stop an assassination, but first you must once again deal with the kids and their bullshit. This is why I don’t plan on having kids. The worst part was that, by this point in the game, the plot was starting to get interesting, and they pull the breaks so you can twiddle your thumbs and play babysitter for an hour.

That’s the thing with the pacing in this game. Yakuza 1’s story was also a slow burn, but it felt like there was a gradual build up in the events. Everything felt like it was leading to something and it slowly built up momentum. Yakuza 3, on other hand, has several points where the plot grinds to a halt and several plot elements that end up not going anywhere.

Remember that politician that hired the Tojo Clan, he never shows up. They set him up as a major player in the story and he never does anything. There's a big rivalry between him and another politician but only one has any impact on the actual plot. They could have cut one of them out and missed absolutely nothing.

One of the major parts of the game is that there’s a traitor in the Tojo Clan who is trying to get the resort deal off the ground. The game establishes three suspects for who it could be, but two of them don’t end up contributing much to the plot despite being set up as major threats. Hell, one of them gets yeeted from the plot when you deal with the Chinese mafia group he sends after you, you don’t even get to fight the guy. Oh yeah there’s a Chinese mafia group in this game, because it’s a Yakuza game and that stuff tends to happen.

I think my main issue with the story is that it lacks a consistent main villain. Granted the main villain himself is great. They have a great backstory and an interesting motivation that’s built up well. My issue is that they don’t become the main villain until about halfway through the game. Nishiki and Ryuji were great, consistent threats because they were established as the villain early on. They may not have been the main instigator of the plot, but they were clearly the main threat you needed to take down.

Here it feels like the game can’t decide who the main villain is. There's just too many of them. I know previous Yakuza games have had a lot of villains, but those were so you could have boss fights and, again, those games benefited from having an established main villain early on. Without that it never felt like there was a clear end goal.

It doesn’t help that the story is a little convoluted. I know it’s a Yakuza game and they can get pretty crazy with the plot, but even among this series standard this shit is battier than Bruce Wayne’s wardrobe. The entire plot felt like it was made up as they went along. It just never felt like there was a clear direction for this one. The weakest story so far, at least in my opinion.

There were some parts of the story I did enjoy though. I liked a lot of the character interactions, and the new characters were a likable enough bunch. I recommend doing the sub stories that centre on the supporting cast because they give them more development, and they’re some of the more entertaining sub stories to do.

Sadly, I did find the sub stories to be a little weak in this game. There were some standouts though, anything involving one of the supporting characters is great, there’s one involving a female masseuse that I will dare not spoil, and one that’s a fun little murder mystery that might be my favourite sub story in this series yet.

But the sub stories in this game suffer from a few issues that prevented me from really enjoying them. For starters, a lot of them get repeated. I know that previous Yakuza games had sub stories like this as well, but here it feels like every other sub story has multiple parts to them which makes them feel a lot less varied.

Second, the pacing of some of these sub stories is way off. Take the murder mystery one I mentioned. You can begin the sub story as early as chapter 10, however, you will be unable to complete or even continue the sub story until chapter 12. And it isn’t the only one like this, hell it’s not even the worst example of this. There are several other sub stories that take playing through half the game just to finish. It's a good thing the game lists all the sub stories for you because I probably would have forgotten them by the time I could finish them.

It’s not just the pacing of the sub stories that bothered me, the way the game spaces out the sub stories makes the entire middle portion of the game feel bloated. There were some chapters that felt like they were nothing but sub stories, like they only existed just so you could do some of the side activities.

The sub stories themselves are also just not as interesting as they were before. They aren’t as funny and a lot of them are the tired old Kiryu getting scammed idea we’ve seen before dozens of times. A lot of them were stale and there weren’t many, “holy shit”, moments either. There's no equivalent here of the infantilism story in Yakuza 2, which is still one of the weirdest moments in any game I've played.

Full disclosure, I did not do all the sub stories this time around, mainly because some require you to do certain minigames that I ended up not spending much time with, I’ll expand on that later. Of the 119 sub stories in the game, I did 103 of them, so I still did most of them. And it wasn’t that much fun. Trying to do all these sub stories became tedious.

Now you may be wondering why I bothered doing them in the first place if I wasn’t enjoying it. After all they are entirely optional. Except, they kind of aren’t. You need to do these sub stories because it’s the only way you’ll be able to get the experience points needed to get any of the later combat upgrades.

The upgrade system is simpler than what we’ve seen previously. You have four categories you can put experience into that unlock skills in a linear fashion. You don’t have as much freedom this time. This isn’t a bad system, and I expected the upgrade system to be simplified given this is an earlier title in the series. It would be silly of me to expect otherwise, and it works well for what it is.

However, later upgrades get expensive, and the sub stories give out the most experience points. Random encounters and eateries barely give you anything, meaning the only feasible way you will get many of these upgrades is if you do the sub stories.

You could argue that this was the same in the previous games. And it was to a certain extent, but there’s just something about it here that doesn’t quite click with me. That’s the same with a lot of this game. It's the same Yakuza formula we know and love, it’s just not as polished or as refined. That's one of the problems with going back to earlier titles in a series.

I think I may be jumping the gun a bit here. I haven’t even talked about the main gameplay yet. And there is a reason for that, I've already talked about it in previous reviews. Here’s the thing with the Yakuza series, up until Like a Dragon which had a massive shift in genre, the core gameplay doesn’t change all that much from game to game aside from maybe a unique mechanic. Kind of like Pokémon, only it’s still good.

So going forward with this series, I'll be talking more about what each game adds to the formula. Yakuza 3 introduced a lot of new elements that would go on to become series staples. The biggest was the Red Heat system which gave you access to more powerful Heat Attacks. This game also introduced Super Finishers, special Heat Actions can be done on bosses to do massive amounts of damage and help finish a fight in style.

But the biggest addition Yakuza 3 brought to the table was a fully controllable camera. Yes, I am being dead serious. The original PS2 games used fixed camera angles like a lot of other Japanese titles did at the time. Apparently Japanese players took a while to warm up to a fully controllable camera. Yakuza 3 was the first game in the mainline series to incorporate this, as well as a first-person view.

Now that I think about it, you could make the argument that the Yakuza series as we know it today started with Yakuza 3. It introduced so many elements that would go on to become series staples and the engine used for this game would be used for every subsequent Yakuza up until Yakuza 6. Talk about getting your mileage out of it.

And while later games would go on to refine the gameplay, Yakuza 3 is still an entertaining game to play. The combat and exploration are as fun as they were in the first Kiwami game, and in some cases it’s better. This is mostly in the combat. Yakuza 3 may not have the variety of Kiwami with its multiple fighting styles, but I still found it a lot more enjoyable here mainly because it wasn’t as frustrating.

Oh, it has its moments where it cranks up the bullshit dial, but they’re nowhere near as frequent or as bad as Kiwami got. Yakuza 3 overall isn’t all that difficult a game. Though it still offers a challenge when it gets to the bosses. The bosses themselves were some of the better ones we’ve seen so far, they all felt different and were challenging without being cheap.

If you’ll recall my review of Yakuza Kiwami, you will know one of my main gripes with the combat in that game was that your main attacks did little damage on top of enemies constantly dodging and counterattacking every time you tried to hit them. Forcing you to use Heat Actions if you wanted to do any kind of damage.

In Yakuza 3, it’s almost the exact opposite problem. Heat Actions, at least when it comes to bosses, don’t do that much damage, and while enemies still block and counterattack, your parry is so disgustingly overpowered you can turn the tables on them easily. Seriously, master the parry attack. It makes most bosses an absolute joke.

Do not think this makes Heat Attacks worthless. They're still good at dealing easy damage and taking out basic bitch enemies with ease. In fact, I think there was a bit more variety in the Heat Actions this time around. I don’t know if it’s just my crappy memory, but it felt like there was a bit more environmental and contextual Heat Actions in this game which prevented things from getting too repetitive.

One of the features new to Yakuza 3 are the Revelations. You’ll run into an NPC called Mack a few times throughout the game, insert “Return of the Mack” joke here, and he’s a tourist looking for the “perfect shot”. What this boils down to is that he’ll send you an email from time to time of something weird going down. You go to the area he tells you about, find the thing he mentioned and pull out your phone to take a picture of it. This starts a short quick time event which rewards you with a new Heat Action if you pull it off correctly.

And yes, I said these were quick time events. This game has quite a number of them actually. They were in the last two games we looked at, but they were mostly relegated to bosses. Here they’re goddamn everywhere, when starting a fight, doing the Revelations, during one of the finishing moves, even Heat Actions have them to increase the length and damage of the attack. I personally don’t mind quick time events, but I know a lot of people despise them and the amount of them here might put some of you off.

The Revelations are worth going out of your way to get. Not only because the scenes are funny to watch, but also because the Heat Actions you get are some of the best in the game. There’s one you get late game that’s great for crowd control, if you can ever pull it off. The context for pulling off certain Heat Actions can be a little finicky.

Heat Actions are still as useful as before, they’re just not as powerful. You won’t need to rely on them too much anyway because your physical attacks should be more than enough to deal with any threat. In fact, once I unlocked double finishers which could break an enemies guard, I didn’t have much of an issue with the combat.

And if my normal attacks weren’t enough, I could just pull out a weapon. Yes I actually used the weapons this time. Not only do you unlock the more interesting weapons earlier on, but they were also a lot more durable and wouldn’t break as often. Even if they did, they wouldn’t cost much to fix, and one of the coolest features of this game is the ability to mod weapons to create even better and zanier ones.

A normal nun-chuck ain’t doing it for you? How about a wire hanger nun-chuck, it’s deadly to both thugs and unborn babies. You can make all kinds of crazy stuff in this game from a police stun baton to a frigging laser sword, it’s awesome. Don't do what I did and skip out on the video store though, I ended up missing a lot of designs because I forgot to check the place. Me and my big dumb caveman brain.

It’s not just weapons you can mod, you can do the same for equipment too. Although you probably won’t end up doing this since most equipment you can create really isn’t worth it. A bit of a disappointment there, but at least the weapons are cool. There is however one major flaw with the weapons and equipment in this game. The inventory management is fucking awful.

Yakuza 3 has a very, very limited inventory. Everything from your healing items to your weapons and equipment are all kept in the same inventory, and it becomes annoying to manage. Think about it, if you want to carry a full stock of weapons and equipment, you need to dedicate at least 6 inventory slots for them. And that’s assuming you don’t carry more weapons so you can swap them out like I did. And you want to leave some slots open because enemies give you items after defeating them and you don’t know what cool shit you’ll find or what you might need to buy.

The inventory in this game is such a hassle. It got to a point where the only healing items I would carry were Stamina’s because those gave health and heat back.

Another problem I have with the inventory is getting to a save point to store the stuff I don’t need. Mind you this isn’t so much a problem with the inventory as it is with the exploration. And it’s all down to one single issue, you don’t have a run button. Why? Why don’t I have a run button? This is a basic feature every open world game has, and for some reason this game doesn’t.

To be fair, you do move at a fairly brisk pace even without a run button, but it still feels so much slower than the other games. Honestly running around was a bit of a chore in this game because of how slow it felt. It's not like the maps are that large either because they aren’t, it just takes longer to get anywhere in this game because you can’t move at any pace faster than a light jog.

Now that I think about it, this is probably why I didn’t like the sub stories. Many of them involve you running back and forth, which gets tiring in this game because of how much slower it feels. Well that and the game not telling me where to go to complete the sub stories, except for the times when it does. Why are the objective markers not available for all sub stories? I wouldn’t mind it if they didn’t have them at all, but they do and it’s selective on when they show up. Why do that?

But here’s why the lack of a run button annoys me so much. You DO have a run button in this game, you just don’t have access to it in the main adventure mode. No, the only time you have access to a run button, is in the Chase Battles. These are an exclusive battle type to Yakuza 3, and they’re an exclusive for a damn reason.

Chase Battles are, well, chase sequences where you either chase down a fleeing suspect or try to escape from pursuers. Chase Battles are stupid. The idea sounds fun enough, but it’s just so boring in its execution. They all play nearly identically with very little variation, and there’s so many NPC’s that you're bound to run into one which causes you to lose health and fall behind.

I did not have any fun with these. There is a special training course you can do to make them easier, but by the time you unlock it your already done with most of them so what’s the point. You don’t even do them in the main story, most of them are relegated to sub stories. At that point you might as well have just made them a minigame.

And that’s the last thing to talk about gameplay wise, the minigames. A lot of these are going to be familiar because we saw many of the minigames in the first Kiwami game. In fact, this is where most of the minigames made their debut. Like I said, Yakuza 3 introduced a lot of things to the series that went on to be used in many future titles.

There are, however, some new minigames that we haven’t seen before. First up we have a golfing game. Granted Kiwami 2 also had a golf game but that was just a driving range challenge. This is a full game of golf with multiple holes and everything. It’s a good time, though it took me a while to get used to how it controls, you hold the x button down to set the power of your shots which isn’t how I’m used to it. I should also mention that this is the only minigame you play as part of the main story, everything else is 100% optional.

There's also a fishing minigame, which I didn’t care for personally. I didn’t like how this one controlled and could never get to grips with it. I might have put a bit more practice into it, but the only way to fish is to use bait which means you need to keep some in your inventory, and I already went over what a pain in the ass that is. It isn’t awful or anything, I'm sure people who enjoy this kind of game might like it, but it clearly isn’t for me.

As for minigames I actually liked, there’s a fun little 2D shooter you can play called Boxcelios. You can play it in any Club Sega arcade and it’s not bad even though it is as simplistic as it gets. Sadly, this is the only game you can play in Club Sega, no classic Sega titles here, and it will be some time before we see them again.

There is another new arcade style game in the form of Inner Fighter 7. Well, I say new but it’s a sequel to another minigame that appeared in the original Yakuza 2. I never played that though, so it is new to me. This is essentially a way to replay previous boss fights but with some new conditions like fighting three of them at once or swapping places with them every few seconds. These are ok, though the three on one fight was annoying as hell. I recommend doing these because you can get upgrades by completing them. It’s also run by this dude who looks like the Japanese Doc Brown, and that’s hilarious.

That’s it as far as new minigames. As some of the returning minigames, as I said most are identical to how they were in Yakuza Kiwami, so if you liked them there, you’ll likely enjoy them here. I will say that I do enjoy the darts and billiards a lot more since I've finally sussed out the controls. I still don’t play them that much, but I do enjoy them a lot more.

Some of the minigames aren’t as good as they were in Kiwami. The coliseum I found annoying because you need to play tournaments 3 times to unlock later ones, making the whole thing a tedious grind. I was planning on playing through every tournament, but I got tired of it and gave up. I didn't even get to try the tag team mode. Which is a shame because I usually love this kind of thing in games.

Then there’s the karaoke. It plays the same as it did in Kiwami, it’s just lacking when it comes to the number of songs. I am a bit more forgiving of this. It was the first game to have karaoke after all, of course it wasn’t going to have as many songs as later games.

Those are the only 2 minigames that are worse than before. Everything else is about the same in terms of quality. It's a decent selection of minigames overall and there should be something here that will appeal to you.

Ah, but I'm forgetting some of them aren’t I. There are a few more minigames that I haven’t mentioned yet, and I saved them for last for a very good reason. But before we get into that, let’s go over them real quick. The first is Aroma Massage, which is a button bashing mini game where you get a deeply sensual massage that also acts as a heal. I recommend doing this at least once if only to unlock the sub story about the masseuse. Trust me you want to see that one because it’s kind of hilarious.

The last two are related to hostesses. The main hostess minigame is here and it’s surprisingly more extensive here than it was in Kiwami despite this the first time it appeared. You’d think later titles would be more advanced, but not in this case. There are a few features here that weren’t present in that game like being able to find topics of discussion while exploring or staring at certain parts of their bodies. Why do these games want to make me a pervert?

There are also far more hostesses to talk to, 9 in total, and each of those girls have their own substories to do. And here’s where my issue with this minigame is, there’s too much of it. Maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time with the hostess stuff in the last game, but I just couldn’t bring myself to play much of this.

I did complete one of the hostesses and did their sub story, but after that I lost interest in it. I think I've realized just how much I hate dating sims. They just don’t do anything for me. This was why I didn’t complete all the sub stories by the way, I didn’t do any of the other hostesses' stories because I didn’t want to play any more of it.

There was one thing I did find funny. Some of the girls here were in the 2 Kiwami games, which released after Yakuza 3 but chronologically take place before it, and none of them know who Kiryu is. Some of them even worked under him when he ran that Hostess club in Kiwami 2, and they don’t recognize him at all. We’ve created a time paradox!

The final minigame is also related to hostesses. It's a hostess management game where you take one girl and try to make her the number one hostess of a small club. I hated this minigame. I utterly despised it. It might just be the worst thing I've played in this series yet, and that’s including that bullshit rail shooter stage from Kiwami.

The idea is that you scout the floor, see what the customers want and then play dress up with the girl to get something customers want. I'm dead serious, the whole minigame is just playing dress up, I could feel my masculinity evaporate when I was playing it. At least the management minigame in Kiwami 2 had an actual game attached to it. This is just boring.

What makes it worse is the trial and error involved in it. You need to carefully pick out what you want the girl to look like to match the customers preference, but every clothing affects the girls' stats in different ways and not everything goes well together. There were times where I thought I got what the customers wanted, only to see the girl alone staring at an empty bottle.

You need to get everything from the outfit to the makeup and hair down perfectly. If the colour of the blush is even slightly off no one will call for her. What the fuck is this? I’m a 28-year-old man, I don’t know anything about fucking makeup. How am I supposed to know what to do here?

And you need to buy the clothes and makeup too, with money that’s separate from the money you get from the main game. If you picked the wrong outfit for the situation, that’s money wasted, and it might be a while before you can get it back. This happened to me when I played it, I got stuck and had to reset my save and start all over.

Just do what I did and follow a guide and make the ultimate outfit that maxes out every stat. Yeah it’s cheating, but it’s the only way to finish it without wasting hours in trial-and-error dress up nonsense. And even with a guide, it still took an hour to finish the damn thing. This minigame blows.

But why did I save these for last. Because these minigames, along with Mahjong, Shogi, and 22 sub stories, were removed from the original English release. Mainly due to budget and time constraints involved with the translation. The first two games bombed hard in the west, and Sega didn’t have much faith in the series chances here. It was considered a low budget western release and the translators weren’t given the time or money to fully translate it. It was either cut out some stuff to save time and resources, or not release the game at all.

This ended up annoying what few Yakuza fans were in the west. Thankfully there was enough backlash that they never did this again. All future releases would include all the content from the original Japanese releases. With the one exception being Answer x Answer due to its questions being focused on Japanese history and culture. This is also the only thing that was removed from the remastered collection in both regions. Not sure why, maybe the questions were outdated.

It goes without saying but, if you’re going to play this game, play the remastered version. It's not only the best version to play, but also the most convenient as it is available on all modern platforms. It's even on Xbox Game Pass along with the rest of the series.

But is Yakuza 3 a game worth playing? Yes, but it is the weakest of the games so far. I won’t say Yakuza 3 is a bad game because it really isn’t. The core gameplay is still fun, and it still has a lot of content that will keep you busy for a good while. There's a lot to like about Yakuza 3, the problem is that a lot of the things it does right are done better in other Yakuza games.

And that’s the issue right there. Yakuza 3 isn’t a bad game on its own terms, but when you look at it within the larger context of the Yakuza series, it doesn’t do much the other Yakuza games don’t do a whole lot better. It has some things here that help it stand out, but those don’t always end up working out.

There are things about it that are exceptional. The soundtrack is awesome with the final boss theme in particular being an absolute banger. But the slow pacing and weaker story, make this a Yakuza game I'm probably not going to go back to that often.

I almost feel bad for Yakuza 3. It’s not a bad game by any means, it just has the unfortunate position of being sandwiched between the excellent remakes of the first two games and its superior sequels. It's like the awkward middle child of the series.

To end on a positive note however, since this is generally considered the weakest game in the series, that means it can only get better from here. Yakuza 4 is up next, and this is the first game to have multiple playable characters. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Although I’ve also heard that 4 and 5 are absurdly long. And considering it took me a while to finish this game, this could take a while.