The Yakuza Files: Yakuza Kiwami

After the thermonuclear disaster of a year that was 2020, I think most of us could do with a fresh start. It felt like every time you would get used to whatever 2020 could throw at you, it found new and exciting ways to knock us down and kick us in the nads. So you know what, I’m not going to let it get me down any longer. 2021 will be a new beginning for me. I’m putting more focus on this site and I’m going to do my damndest to update it with new content as often as I can. Bring on the new year.

But this new drive also provides me with a convenient excuse. I’ve played a lot of games over the years and have become a huge fan of many franchises, Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, Ace Attorney, Soul Calibur, these are all franchises I hold near and dear to my heart. But, given I have a finite amount of time on this spinning cerulean death orb, there are some series I haven’t given their proper dues. There are some franchises I’ve been meaning to try out that I haven’t been able to for various reasons, either because of time or just a general lack of interest. One such series, being Yakuza .

Yakuza has been a popular series in Japan ever since it debuted on the PlayStation 2 in 2005, but it wouldn’t truly breakout in the west until Yakuza 0. Since that games release, the series has gained more and more notoriety with a new generation of gamers trying out the series for the first time. I do find it interesting when an underground hit becomes a massive mainstream success. Look at Final Fantasy for example, up until 7 it was a decently known but still fairly niche series in the west. Post 7, it became a global phenomenon. This is probably why, despite it underperforming in the west for years, Sega still kept releasing the series in western territories. Maybe they had more faith in the series chances in the west than we credit them for.

I’ve been aware of Yakuza for a few years now. I played a little bit of Yakuza 3 back in the day and really enjoyed it but never gave the rest of the series a shot until now. This is the Yakuza files, a little miniseries where I plan on looking at every mainline entry in this celebrated series and see what I’ve been missing out on all this time. But the problem with starting a new series is choosing where to start, especially with one as dense as Yakuza. Not only are there 8 games in the main series but the games themselves can also take a long time to complete. Just looking at how long it takes to complete some of the later games make me nervous. These games are longer than an audio book of The Silmarillion read by Slowpoke Rodriques. So it’s a bit of a daunting task.

But I’m always up for a good challenge and if we are going to start anywhere, it’s usually best to start at the beginning. We’re going to kick things off by looking at the very first game in the series, or rather it’s remake Yakuza Kiwami. Sure, I could start with Yakuza 0, what with it being a prequel and all, but I don’t like starting with prequels since you have to have some prior knowledge of the series to get the most out of it.

And if I’m being honest, Yakuza Kiwami is probably the best game to play if you want to ease yourself into the series. Yakuza is kind of famous for being very goofy and over the top. While the series always presents itself as a serious crime thriller on the surface, they also have plenty of over the top, batshit insane moments on top of that. By comparison, the story of the first Yakuza, and by extension Kiwami, is a bit more subdued than many of the games that would succeed it. Oh, it has its goofy moments, like a secret hobo town that hides a secret underground red-light district that houses an underground surveillance network, but for the most part the story is a fairly straight forward crime drama.

The main plot centers around Kazuma Kiryu as he tries to stop a civil war within his former Yakuza organization while also trying to help a young girl look for her mother. That's a super abridged version of the plot. A lot happens in Yakuza Kiwami, backstabbing's, betrayals and shocking revelations are revealed as you progress through the story. It's a testament to the games writing then that everything is so well paced. Even the slower, more exposition heavy moments are helped along with good dialogue and decent cinematography. It's not as stylish as later games, at least from what I can see based on my research, but I shouldn’t hold that against the game since it was the first in the series, and they were still figuring everything out.

Most of the drama comes from the character relationships. Kiryuu’s main rival in the game is Nishikiyama, a man who used to be his best friend but now wants to beat him to prove his superiority. Nishiki has some additional scenes in Kiwami that delves more into why he betrayed Kiryu. They are nice additions, but they do highlight how little of a presence Nishiki actually has in the story. He is one of the driving forces behind the events of the plot, but he doesn’t have much actual screen time.

It’s a shame too because he’s a more interesting villain than the actual main bad guy of the story. The main villain is just your typical power mad politician, he’s boring and the only thing I remember about him is his irritating laugh. Thankfully the game doesn’t focus on him too much. Instead it focuses on the other characters and their developments. There's a detective that helps Kiryuu in the game called Date and he gets some decent development in regards to his relationship to his daughter. That seems to be a key theme in this game as it puts a lot of focus on building up the relationship between Kiryuu and Haruka, the girl looking for her mother.

Kiryuu becomes an adopted father to Haruka which becomes a major point of his character development throughout the series. In this game he’s sent to jail when Nishiki kills his boss to protect Yumi. A childhhod friend of the two that both are in love with. Kiryuu take the blame which is one of the reasons Nishiki ended up turning heel, well he was already a heel since he was a Yakuza but, you know what I mean. When Kiryuu gets out he becomes wrapped up in a case involving 6 billion stolen yen and finds out the people involved are after Haruka, hence why he's protecting her.

Normally I hate love triangles in stories. They just seem like a cheap source of melodrama to me. I know the Yakuza series thrives on melodrama, but I do have my limits. At least the whole love triangle thing isn’t focused on that much, it’s only important at the beginning and the end. And at least the love interest is actually proactive in the plot as she is the one that kicks off the events of the plot and she ties into Haruka’s story as well, but that’s going into spoiler territory.

All of this is held together by Kiryu, the most stoic of stoic badasses. He almost never shows any emotion and yet he’s also one of the most caring protagonists I’ve seen. He protects a puppy for god's sake. One of the problems with stoic characters is you can often make them too emotionless which makes it hard to care about them. Jotaro from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure suffers from this in my opinion, I like him but he’s not my favourite Joestar in the series, that’s Joeseph. But then you’ve got characters like Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, stoic badasses who will beat their enemies mercilessly but have those moments of genuine human compassion that make them more interesting.

Kiryu follows in the Kenshiro mould, which is weird since the Yakuza team would later go on to do a Fist of the North Star game. He will beat punks that get in his way, but he also has a strong sense of honour, something he even had as a Yakuza which the villains in the game think is ridiculous. When you think about it, Kiryu isn’t too far off from a Shonen protagonist. The dude fights to protect the people he loves. It's corny, but I kind of like that about him. It makes him kind of endearing in a cheesy sort of way.

Here’s the thing with Kiryu, while he appears to be a stone-faced bad ass, he’s actually kind of a dork. One moment he’s cracking the skulls of some random jackasses unfortunate enough to piss him off, and the next he’s playing a children's card game that features half naked women dressed as insects, because Japan. That's the thing with Yakuza Kiwami, the tone is all over the place. Granted if you only play the main story it does keep a consistent tone, but if you decide to indulge in one the games many sub stories the tone can vacillate wildly from serious crime drama to outright comedy.

But that’s part of the fun with Yakuza. It has a main story that’s usually entertaining, but you can ignore it entirely and just goof off with one of the many side activities. Sure, your friends might be kidnapped and in severe danger but, fuck them I want to play some blackjack. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even talked about the game proper yet.

Yakuza Kiwami is a hard game to categorize. It has a little bit of everything, it’s got RPG elements, open world elements, even some adventure game elements. But at its core, what Yakuza Kiwami truly is, is a beat-em-up. Oh, it’s got way more bells and whistles than your typical beat-em-up but if you peel away all the excess and dig into its core that’s precisely what it is.

It isn’t just all fighting though. In between fights your free to explore the city of Kamurocho at your leisure. Buying stuff in one of the local stores, partaking in a short round of bowling, eating at one of the many fine establishments or even just going to the bar and getting blind drunk. The level of detail in Kamurocho is impressive. You can go into a corner shop and just look at the magazines, all of which are actual magazines you can buy in Japan. That's such a small detail that most people will miss but it helps make the world feel lived in.

That's what impressed me most about the world of Yakuza. While the core gameplay is as gamey as you can get, the world feels fully realized. You can go into a store and can buy tons of different food items, most of which have no practical application, but their presence helps make the world feel all the more real. Even going to the eateries is pointless after a while but their presence helps make the world more believable. Also, the food looks damn delicious too, I defy you to play this game and not get hungry. I don’t like to use the word immersive because I think the term is rather silly, but it’s hard to argue against using it here. I’ve heard people argue that Yakuza is a spiritual successor to Shenmue given the amount of detail in the world and I can see where they are coming from, but I happen to disagree,

Mainly because there’s an actual game to go along with it. Yakuza’s combat is simple, you have a normal attack, a heavy attack, a grab and a dodge button. That's it. Combos in the game are done by hitting square a number of times and then hitting triangle. It sounds simplistic, and it is, but there is still some depth to the combat system.

If you don’t fancy taking on enemies with your bare hands you can instead use one of the many different weapons the game throws at you. There's a good selection too, from baseball bats, nun-chucks and stun guns, to shotguns, knuckle dusters and a cannon in the shape of a sword fish. Yeah, the weapons can get very wacky but don’t rely on them too much. While they pack a punch, they have the durability of a toothpick. After a few swings they will break, so it’s best to save them for when you need them.

I personally only used weapons when I could do one of their Heat Actions. What's a Heat Action? Glad you asked. As Kiryu attacks enemies he will build up his Heat Gauge. When it’s filled up enough, he will enter a powered-up state and gain access to new attacks and buffs. He will also be able to perform Heat Actions, cinematic attacks that deal massive amounts of damage. There's a lot of different Heat Actions you can pull off depending on the situation. It is fun to experiment and see what kind of Heat Actions you can pull off and you’re encouraged to do so for bosses as using the same Heat Action over and over will diminish its power.

The Heat system is where Kiwami’s battle system gets most of its depth but there is one more element to the fighting that was added to Kiwami, the multiple fighting styles. Technically this was introduced in Yakuza 0 but it was implemented into Kiwami as well, since most of it is built from 0’s assets. But we’ll get to 0 itself in due time.

You have 4 styles you can swap between at any point. The Brawler style is the most balanced, the Rush style is all about quick hits and ducking and weaving between enemies, Beast lets you swing around like a mad man and then there’s Dragon, the combat style from the original Yakuza game. I like this system, being able to swap between styles on the fly adds an extra spice of variety to the fights. My main issue with it, in this game at least, is that you only end up using two of the four styles by the end of the game.

See early on the Dragon style is basically useless, it’s just a worse version of Brawler. But by the time you start getting upgrades for it, it becomes the only style worth using. Granted the other styles still have their advantages, Brawler can counter-attack and Beast is great for dealing with crowds, but more often than not I was using Dragon throughout the latter half of the game. Well that and Rush but I’ll get into why later.

What helps make the combat enjoyable is how heavy your attacks feel. There is some jank in the combat, especially when it comes to the physics, but your attacks do have some weight behind them which helps make the combat satisfying. I wouldn’t call the combat deep or intricate, but since when did beat-em-ups need intricacies to be fun. They just need to make hitting dudes feel satisfying and I think Yakuza Kiwami succeeds in that.

One major problem with most beat-em-ups is how repetitive they can get. Luckily, Yakuza Kiwami manages to avoid this issue thanks to the large amount of down time between fights. You will get accosted by roving gangs of assholes on a near constant basis while roaming the dingy streets of Kamurocho, but you can avoid them just easily enough that they aren’t that big a nuisance. But when you aren’t avoiding these fights you’re taking in the sights and sounds of Kamurocho or taking part in one of the many different side activities and mini games.

The amount of stuff you can do outside the main story is insane. Take the sub stories for example. These are short mini stories you come across as you explore the city. How many of these are there? 78! Some of which are multipart quest lines. Jesus, do you think that’s enough. What's funny is doing them all wasn’t even worth it since all you get is an annoying as hell super boss but, I still did them anyway because of how surprisingly well written they were. Plus you do occasionally get money and items out of them which makes them worth doing.

But maybe you don’t want to do that. Maybe you want to play some bowling, or have a round of Mahjong, or hit a few home-runs at the batting cages. There is so much to do in Yakuza Kiwami it will give completionists a run for their money.

Here's the thing with Yakuza though, I feel like it’s best played by not going for full completion. Not just because it’s a huge pain in the ass, but because not every side activity is that fun. Most of them are fine but some of them I just couldn’t get into either because I didn’t like the controls or because I’m not a fan of it in general. I keep giving Mahjong a chance but I just can’t get into it.

Most of the side activities are fine, though most are little more than a fun distraction from the main adventure. There are a few of these side activities that have a bit more of a storyline behind them. First there’s Muso King, that weird card game I brought up before. It’s meant as a parody of a popular line of Sega games called Mushi King, which is about actual insects fighting and not sexy women dressed as them. I actually played a spin-off of Mushi King called Dinosaur King years ago, so I was a little familiar with prior to playing this. It's basically just a really elaborate version of rock, paper, scissors. It's fine for what it is and there are plenty of cards to collect, but I never played much of it beyond the initial story.

Another minigame side quest is Pocket Circuit. This is another new addition that first debuted in Yakuza 0, even the story surrounding it acts like a continuation of the story in that game. It's a type of slot car racing. You're giving a car that you can customize with different parts with the idea being to build a car best suited for the race. It's a fun game but it does rely a bit too much on trial and error.

Then there’s the hostess minigame. It's a dating sim style mode where you talk to one of two hostesses and try to convince them to go on dates. I’m not into dating sims so this didn’t do much for me. It is good if you like that sort of thing, you can even unlock some sexy videos through them. I don’t know why you’d bother when internet porn exists but it’s there.

I should also mention that a few of these minigames can also be played in multiplayer. No online unfortunately, just local but this is still a nice bonus. Most of these minigames are harmless enough. They aren’t necessary to complete the main story and they can be fun in short bursts. And even if there’s one you don’t like, they are completely optional and aren’t required for progression. But there’s one side activity I’m not a huge fan of that does impact progression. Let's talk Majima.

Majima is a crazy Yakuza obsessed with fighting Kiryu. He’s a character who would have a much more prominent role in the series but in the first Yakuza game he’s a minor antagonist. For Kiwami, the developers decided to expand his role and added an entire side quest centring around him. Likely because he had been a main playable character in Yakuza 0 which boosted his popularity. Enter Majima is everywhere.

Here’s how it works. Majima will hunt you down in the streets of Kamurocho. As the name suggests he can be pretty much anywhere, sometimes he’s out in the open, sometimes he’s hiding in giant traffic cones or he might just try to ambush you, to name a few examples. Whenever you run into Majima you will have to fight him. Majima does have different forms he can take, based on the fighting styles he had in 0, which does help prevent things from getting too repetitive. That being said, you still fight Majima a lot and after a while the fights do become tiring.

This on its own would only make Majima is everywhere a mild annoyance, but there are a few other factors that make it, in my opinion, one of the weakest parts of the game. From a story perspective, Majima is everywhere doesn’t really gel with the actual main plot. Yakuza Kiwami sticks very close to the script of the original game, which includes Majima’s depiction. See Majima in the original Yakuza is depicted as a total psychopath, he’s perfectly willing to beat his own men to death if they disobey his orders. But the Majima depicted in Majima is everywhere is more in line with how he’s depicted in later Yakuza games, as a wild and carefree individual who likes to get into fights. Because of this there is a bit of a disconnect between the Majima you meet in the side story and the one you meet in the main story.

It also kind of lessens the impact of the main story fights when you fight this guy all the time. There's even a plot hole it creates and then lazily patches up. You fight Majima 3 times as part of the main story, during the second fight, Majima is very badly stabbed and when he reappears again Kiryu mentions how he thought Majima was dead, obviously in reference to their last encounter in the original game. But this doesn’t work when you’ve been fighting him constantly throughout the game, in fact being stabbed and losing a ton of blood did little to affect him. So they added an additional story fight where Majima is randomly shot so the dialogue would still make sense. It's kind of amazing how sloppily added this feature is in regard to the story.

But what makes this feature worse is, you have to do it in order to level up the Dragon style. See your other styles are levelled up through experience points that can be used in one of three skill trees. It's a time-tested system and it works, but I guess because the Dragon style is a little overpowered, they wanted to make it trickier to upgrade. Thus, the only way to upgrade that style is to fight Majima. This wouldn’t be so bad but there’s one small problem.

Remember how I said Majima had different forms he can take. Well, here’s where that comes back to bite you in the ass. Some of the attacks in Dragon style can only be obtained by fighting a specific form of Majima. The thing is, what type of Majima is currently roaming town is decided at random, meaning if you are trying to get one specific type of Majima to show-up you have to keep going in and out of buildings and pray that version spawns. This is a state I like to call RNG hell, a miserable place where you are at the mercy of the RNG gods, and they never play fair. You never want to get stuck in RNG hell; you can never have fun in RNG hell.

Then there are the minigames. Majima will sometimes show up to challenge you to certain minigames. On its own, not a big deal, except there are certain moves that require you to beat Majima in certain minigames to get them. The game doesn’t do a good job of conveying this. It took me until the end of the game to finally get those moves because I didn’t know that’s what I was supposed to do.

So yeah, I’m not a big fan of the Majima is everywhere mechanic. It just drags the game to a screeching halt whenever he shows up. To be fair, I do enjoy some of the scenarios Majima pops up in as they can be entertaining, but that doesn’t stop the fights from getting repetitive. You know what doesn’t help with this, the fights are too long. Early on they aren’t that bad, but as you progress Majima’s health bar gets increasingly bigger to the point where it takes a few minutes to take him down. This becomes especially annoying when you end up in a Majima fight you can’t avoid, nothing is worse than going about your business and then being dragged into a boss fight you didn’t see coming.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s talk bosses for a second. To be blunt, they suck. Not because they’re hard because most of them aren’t. It's not hard to stock up on healing items and dodging their attacks isn’t too difficult either. The problem is that, while it’s easy enough to avoid their attacks it’s also too easy for them to dodge your attacks as well. It is impossible to get a full combo on these guys, even if you land the first hit you aren’t guaranteed to finish it without them blocking or dodging out of the way. No joke, I saw them dodge out of the way of a combo despite suffering from hit-stun, it’s bullshit! The only way to reliably get a full combo on bosses is to hit them from behind and even that only gets you to fifty-fifty.

It got to the point where there was only one reliable strategy to deal damage.

Step 1: Use rush mode to build up the Heat Gauge, told you there was a reason to use this.

Step 2: Use Heat Actions.

Step 3: Profit!

Once I adopted this strategy I barely had to worry about the bosses anymore. Some of them were still annoying but nothing too tough to handle. Though I did on occasion have to use an item to build Heat since getting hit decreases the Heat Gauge, but I had plenty of those to spare. After a while I wasn’t really struggling with the combat, but there were a few difficulty spikes I encountered that just pissed me off.

The first happens very early on. During a brawl at a funeral, because this the kind of series where that happens, you have to fight this fat bastard called Shimano. Dude is slow but built like a brick shit house. It takes a while to take him down, especially since it’s early game and you don’t have many upgrades. To add insult to injury, one of the upgrades you get later on is something you need for this fight. When you deal enough damage to a strong enemy they become stunned and get an aura surrounding them. What you have to do is switch to the form that matches the colour of the aura and perform a powerful Heat Action called a Kiwami. But when you first fight Shimano, you don’t have this ability yet and can’t take advantage of it. Oh and did I mention that they regain health when in the stunned state, because that’s a thing they can do. That's not unfair at all!

The next difficulty spike is optional but I’m including it here because you get something useful out of it that makes it feel necessary. Remember when I said fighting Majima was the only way to upgrade the Dragon style? I lied. There is another way to upgrade it through getting trained by this old karate hobo named Komaki. To get access to this you need to obtain pictures by competing in the coliseum. The issue with this isn’t having to play the coliseum to get these. I actually like the coliseum despite some annoying moments. Plus, the opponents you fight are random so there’s a chance you won’t fight some of the more annoying enemies.

No, the problem comes from this one training mission where you fight 4 guys at the same time. For some reason, this was way harder than any of the other training missions. These guys whooped my ass. At least the move you get from it is one of the best in the game, so the reward matches the struggle.

Speaking of fighting multiple enemies at the same time. There's this one boss fight between two punks in a nightclub that annoyed the piss out of me. Not only do you have their goons to deal with on top of them, even when I had dealt with them the two main guys would just tag team me. The idea is that one is quick and nimble while the other is a slow tank. A simple idea but it’s very annoying here. They both dodge everything and trying to get them separated so you can focus on one of them at a time is harder than you think. People say the fight the fight with the guy who dual wields pistols is bad but I thought this one was more annoying.

But the worst part of the game, by far, happens at the end of chapter 9 where the game decides, for no reason, that it is now Time Crisis, or Virtua Cop since it's a Sega game. Yes, there is a random rail shooter section that comes completely out of nowhere and it is bad, really frigging bad. I get that variety is the spice of life but these kinds of forced mini game sections are the worst

It's funny because the game didn’t even need the variety since it was doing pretty well with it up to this point. In between fights I was playing at the casino, dating the hostesses and even having a good sing song at the karaoke, it didn’t need a forced in rail shooter section. Here's a pro-tip for any future game designers, if you have a section of a game that is too frustrating to play through to the point you have a prompt to ask the player if they want to lower the difficulty, either have the difficulty lowered by default or don’t include it at all.

I suppose this is the price you pay when you try so many different things. Not all of them will pay off. I remember a lot of games from the PlayStation 2 era, the same one the original Yakuza game released in, suffered from this issue. Most of them would have these little moments, a brief genre change-up to add a little variety that never really worked. The only way to get around this problem is to have a strong core gameplay foundation to keep everything together. Something Yakuza thankfully has.

Yakuza Kiwami, is a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. It does a lot of different things and not all of them work, but they all coalesce into a very fun game. Now as to whether or not this makes it a good jumping on point, I can’t really say for certain since I haven’t played the rest of the series yet, but I would say it is. I know that this series gets very, very dumb later on, in the fun way I mean, so Yakuza Kiwami is a good option if you want to ease yourself into the series.

Plus, it is a more accessible way to experience the first game in the series. I never played the original but Kiwami does appear to be very faithful to the original story, almost to a fault. The cutscenes are shot for shot the same and that includes re-using the old animations which can look a bit awkward with the updated visuals. Granted the animations in gameplay aren’t that great, they’re fine but do feel very, “gamey” for want of a better term. At least the graphics are nice to look at even if they don’t look quite look, “PS4” level if you know what I mean. Probably because the game is running on an engine they’d been using since 2008. Hey props to the team for getting the most out of that engine. I'm not saying Kiwami looks bad, on the contrary it looks great, but by this point in the series it was time for an upgrade which is why every game after it used a more updated engine.

So yes, this is a good starting point for the series. Though be forewarned, if you are going to get into this series be prepared to be in it for the long haul. Yakuza Kiwami took me over 60 hours to complete, granted I was doing a lot of the side content on top of the main story which accounts for most of that time but still. This is a long series that will require some time to fully enjoy. I may have bit off more than I can chew with this one.

Next time we’ll be looking at the second of the remake duology, Yakuza Kiwami 2. This one is running on the updated engine the team have been using since Yakuza 6, so I feel like I’m being spoiled here. Like I’m being given a glimpse of the future before being dropped in the past. I’m actually curious how Yakuza 3-5 will hold up after Kiwami 2 since those only got remastered. Oh well, we’ll burn that bridge when we cross it. Until next time, remember to stay safe and have fun.