Yakuza 3: Remastered Review

 Beautiful Eyes.

Oh it has been a while, hasn't it? Several months, in fact, since my last review of Yakuza Kiwami 2. And how could that be? I already owned all of the Remastered collection when I finished Yakuza 2, and I already had 3 installed when I finished off the review for that game! Could it be that I was so enraptured by the intangible glory of Yakuza 3 that I felt the need to play it again and again for months on end? Well, considering my completion time was 30 hours, the shortest amount of time I've spent playing any Yakuza game, that can't be the case. So what could it be? Hmm... Perhaps because Yakuza 3 was, by the far, the most annoying, frustrating and inane experience that Yakuza has presented me so far and I am so very relieved to hear the good people of the fandom tell me that it's hands-down the worst one in the franchise, because I couldn't endure pain like that for a second time.

Obviously there was going to be some 'growing pains' going from the Kiwami franchise to the Remastered saga. That's more than ten years of video game design philosophy going straight out the window, afterall. But if you've been around this blog for a while then you'll probably know that I ain't one to dismiss a game merely because of it's age. My glowing reviews of the Baldur's Gate games should convey that well enough, I adored those games. What I can't abide, is a game so deeply and fundamentally broken that the very action combat system which is the cornerstone of this franchise (until we get to 'Like a Dragon') becomes imprisoned behind overzealous and painful combat necessities which turns every encounter into a mirror-image drag fest instead of the dynamic and free-flowing combat brawler I had come to love until this point. How did things get this bad? Let me start my explaining what makes Yakuza combat good.

At it's very heart the core gameplay of the Yakuza games is not inherently complicated. It's a very basic 'light attack', 'heavy attack' brawler system with grabs and special contextual super moves thrown ontop for a bit of variety. Progression slowly unlocks more specific abilities that can be employed, slowly opening up the depth of combat as the game trundles and becomes more complicated so that the general spread of combat possibilities never overwhelms the user when they aren't ready for it. Later Yakuza games threw in multiple combat styles with differing utilities, but even before those separate styles were bought in, the singular style approach of earlier games was functional and appropriate. What makes it so fun to play with is the increasing breadth of options that become available as you get more tooled up in the levelling. Different super moves, special attacks, new variation combos, utility move alterations; they all open up such an enthralling freedom for combat that the player constantly feels like they have direct control of a sprawling arsenal of attacks in every fight, which can make any old street brawl into a different experience. If every fight ended up playing out in the exact same way, then combat would get very old, very fast.

Which neatly brings us around to Yakuza 3, don't you know. For every previous game, playing on the hardest available difficulty mostly just effected the damage of attacks and the health of the enemy. Maybe some AI packages were made more ferocious as well, but for the most part you got exactly the experience as lower difficulties with an added punch. For Yakuza 3, however, higher difficulties were supplemented with a painfully asinine AI 'change up'. AI enemies were suddenly allowed to block, and they would; a lot. You really begin to understand the problem with this quickly during the very first fist fight with Majima, wherein what should have been a simple two minute tooth-and-nail brawl against the mad dog stretches into a seven minute+ nightmare once you realise that everytime you get the chance to pull a combo on him, he blocks the entire chain and takes no damage. Then you use a Heat Action, and it chips away one twelfth of a single one of his two healthbars. Safe to say: it is a miserable experience.

You see, you'll come to learn that Yakuza 3, unlike it's predecessors, doesn't want you to play with the freedoms of the toolset available to you however you want. Instead Yakuza 3 wants you to conduct fights in a very particular way. It wants you to sidestep enemies, dodge behind them and then sneak out a quick pitiful combo before rinsing and repeating. Heat actions do next to no damage, weapons can't break block, all you have is the sidestep and bait. This is how every fight will play out throughout the entire game and it is tedious, repetitive and creativity destroying. In the early game you'll probably end up trying to avoid random encounters with thugs. AVOIDING STEET THUGS: IN A YAKUZA GAME! Of course, fighting is what Yakuza is all about so you can only dodge the combat for so long before it's thrown at you screaming. Boss encounters become painful 'who can last the longest' slogs wherein you'll hit the boss upwards of a hundred times before they stop getting up again, group fights against swathes of enemies are a pain with the only consolation being the ability to switch targets mid-combo which seems to confuse the AI now and then, and almost every cool flashy heat action becomes functionally useless due to complete and total nerfing. It's a dire situation.

One further shackled system of this game's is the progression and levelling. You are granted EXP levels that can sink into one of four attributes which provide an ability, basic stuff. However, there's no way of knowing which attribute will unlock what skill, and though the game pretends you have free reign of which attribute you unlock, every level attribute level jumps the amount of EXP levels needed to raise it significantly, and the second you gain enough EXP to upgrade any attribute, the game will scream about it and plaster your upgrade opportunity all over the menu screen, begging you to upgrade every attribute at an even pace. Basically incentivising people not to try and pursue abilities and techniques specifically but to just take them as they come. A step down to what later Yakuza games leant towards. And largely moot on higher difficulties anyway since most of those abilities can't be used on anyone anyway.

As with any contrarian opinion, there is a special breed of deluded fan out there who not only swears by Yakuza 3's combat, but declares everyone else simple minded simpletons for coming to the logical conclusion that it just isn't fun. The excuses are always the same: "you don't like it because it's hard", erroneously equating frustration and tedium with 'difficulty' and "You just don't understand it's systems", that last one sounds intriguing, no? What systems could Yakuza be hiding, and pathetically explaining, so badly that it flies over people's heads? Well, lucky there's no end of videos on Youtube of people showing you how it's supposed to be done, and everytime it's the exact same routine. Counter an attack, knock the enemy into a wall until they glitch and bounce off the wall, and then stun-lock them to death. The same technique. Every fight. Yes, doesn't that sound exciting and diverse? Just as expansive and free as every other Yakuza game! Truly this is high level Yakuza 3 gameplay! (Yes, Yakuza 3 gameplay fans are deeply deluded just because they've found a way to squeak a cheese method out of a game the world rightly hates. That's what a hipster mindset does to you, folks!)

But a terrible combat isn't the only new system which Yakuza 3 lumps you with. There's also the 'chase' minigame which challenges Kiryu with chasing or escaping with more painful half-conceived ideas. For some reason there's a stamina management gauge which limits Kiryu's sprint time coupled with a 'shove' action which both drains that stamina and is the only way to whittle done escaping perps. Stamina reserves are typically just enough to beat your objective and require almost prescient reaction timing to account for dodging everyone in the crowd, jumping over every inexplicable obstacle and predicting every wild corner your annoyingly cowardly perp will run down. It is an attempt to bring something new to the gameplay slate, and I appreciate what the team were trying to do with these systems, but overall they fall flat in tandem, as you'd probably expect. There's also a hostess minigame which is, again, a total drag where you micromanage one girl based on keywords you need to look up a guide for to take advantage of because the game will not tell you what feedback equates to what taste. It's kind of like the precursor to the excellent hostess minigame of the 0 games onwards.

One of the new methods for gaining abilities involves Kiryu blogging, bizarrely enough. He is prompted to a random crazy event somewhere in the city, which he takes pictures of with his brand new phone, and then he blogs about it to an audience of, what I can only assume, are hardened Yakuza members who know of Kiryu and also double as his loyal fan boys who follow his every online post about random crap he spots on the street. Crap that involves, an old lady doing a full flip in her moped over a car and a child supplexing his father and dragging him into a sex toy shop because the kid's too stupid to know what 'adult toys' means. It's a fun and silly way to introduce Kiryu into new ways to dodge and throw enemies, and about as quirky as I'd expect from Yakuza. Making this throw away feature perhaps the only new addition to Yakuza 3 that I liked. Make of that what you will.

Before long I was avoiding all content from the non-essential routes of Yakuza 3 in favour of the main narrative, which at least was somewhat interesting and different to the previous stories. Kiryu Kazama is an early retiree, settling down in his Okinawa orphanage with a whole cast of new orphan kids and trying to live his life. The game spends a decent number of the chapters in Okinawa going through basic life lessons being taught to the kids, but done so in that typical RGG fashion which invites small scale drama and satisfying resolution. Largely these sections feel more wholesome than the Yakuza games are accustomed to being, what with their love of high drama, but these sections are no less well written and presented then the typical Yakuza fluff. During your stolen moments at the orphanage you'll really come to know the kids and maybe even like how varied and curious about the world they all are as you accept the role as their guardians. Of course, these quest chains can start to grate in the later chapters where the story quite literally brings it's own speedy pace to an utter standstill simply to try and rekindle some fatherly-devotion in the story, but overall it's a decent addition and a fine way to keep Haruka out of the events of the game. She can't be getting kidnapped when she's looking after kids in Okinawa, now can she?

Okinawa itself makes for a refreshing new location in the Yakuza pantheon of places, a less dense and packed group of city streets with a sunny tourist vibe to them. You feel less likely to get into trouble walking those streets, even if you are, technically, just as likely to run into street punks because that's just how the game's systems work. The narrative for these early chapters meanders a bit more in world building and stake placing, letting you somewhat naturally be introduced to the major players of the world without a huge exposition dump or 'third person introduction cutscene'. (Both those tropes are coming later in the story though, don't worry.) Okinawa neatly fits the slower pace which Yakuza 3 attempts to start with and makes for a neat atmospheric shift once the real plot kicks in.

Of course something has to eventually drag Kiryu out of the calm life and back into the Yakuza fold, and this time it's the attempted assassination of Daigo Dojima by a man who happens to perfectly resemble Kazama, Kiryu's adoptive father. This pulls Kiryu back to the busy streets of Kamurocho wherein he comes face to face with the new face of the Tojo clan and explores one of the more clandestine and politically active plots in the Yakuza franchise, which of course comes crashing into Kiryu's personal affairs in ways he cannot imagine from the outset. Date returns as a reporter, bizarrely, as well as a whole host of sub story characters who all largely felt like they were getting their final farewell in for this game. I wonder if Yakuza 3 was intended to once be the sign-off for the franchise, what with the rather startling allusions to 'finality' that the game starts to adopt in it's twilight hours. 

The plucky star-struck youngling of this game is Okinawan Yakuza member Rikiya, with his curly hair, viper tattoo and thug-with-a-golden-heart attitude. He reminds me of a more emotionally unrestrained young Kiryu in some ways, idealistic yet human. A far cry from the man Kiryu himself, who throughout the course of Yakuza 3 sheds the last vestiges of his human 'flaws' and pretty much ascends into a Christ-like figure. Kiryu is morally impeachable in general, but for Yakuza 3 he just becomes an almost eye-rolling paragon of virtue. He teaches orphan kids, remains the sole bastion of honour, and even when his most valued and treasured people in life are threatened and endangered, he never seems to act out of rage or grief. He's even so virtuous that the man insists on teaching life lessons to the big villains with fists for no reason other than a sporadic hunch that this is a guy he can get through to. All except for one supremely jarring scene where Kiryu, upon learning that Majima might be involved in the scheme against the Tojo, just blatantly announces that if Majima is playing dirty, then he'll have to kill him. Wait, what? Hasn't Kiryu avoided killing his entire career, but he's happy to kill a decades-old friend if they don't see eye to eye in that specific moment? (That's the tiniest bit wildly out-of-character, in my opinion.)

In many ways this does feel like the cap-off to Kiryu's arc. His rise to becoming accidental chairman and battling his sworn corrupted brother, to his struggles against his dark mirror Ryuji, his erstwhile counterpart, and now his evolution into a fulltime orphanage owner intercut with a battle against... honestly a final threat who feels a little like Nishki 2.0. By the end of the game there's a lot of seemingly undue talk about 'finality' and 'death' which seems to spurn out of nowhere and, considering the series is still alive and strong, goes nowhere. What the Kiryu of the next game might get up to in order to expand who he is could be anyone's guess, but I feel that from this point anything that drags him away from his life as an orphan rescuer can only really be more mild distractions that he is only barely  involved with, rather than actual involved character driven intrigue.

I found the cast to be largely likeably if somewhat underutilised. This narrative speeds through events as the game kills off pretty much every lose hanging thread these games have ever had related to Kiryu in an entry that feels like the most blood soaked. (At least in the moment.) The concept of 'Black Monday' is supremely under-explored and amounts to largely nothing, which I suppose lines it up neatly next to the surprise villains of Yakuza 3. And some key players, like the Minister, don't appear to have any significant role to play beyond 'exposition guy' for a single prolonged scene. Still, I think the story was fine for what it was, just lacking in a lot of the really engrossing character intrigue that really bought me into previous narratives. Maybe it was because I didn't like the gameplay, but I found the major story beats to be largely basic. 'There's a traitor; here's the list of suspects. Now you've whittled down them, I guess it was the last guy all along'. The only real rug-pull being the fact that there's a completely separate, more interesting sounding, plot that just happened to conveniently collide with yours? It didn't do it for me. 

I really wish Kiryu was more involved with the actual events going on for reasons other than sheer happenstance. Because a lot of Yakuza 3 can be summed up to sheer happenstance. Kiryu just happens to own an orphanage on land that just happens to become important. And not in the way that Yakuza 0 balances a similar plot, it just feels largely contrived to stir the Dragon. This story relies on it's emotional moments for dramatic tension, and they work just fine on the small level, when you're still dealing with nothing more than orphans, but when you start getting to the higher plot threads they are totally emotionless. When I think about the complex and developed cast of three that ruled Yakuza 0 and compare them with the caricature 'bad guys' of Yakuza 3's side cast, it doesn't even feel like the same franchise. And you can't tell me that good character writing was only developed in the last 10 years, because I won't buy that excuse! Also, Kaoru writes herself out of the story for no reason at the beginning of the game; because apparently Kiryu is the virgin mother and simply cannot keep a girlfriend for more than a few minutes. (That's the most relatable character trait left in the man!) 

Mine was a fine, if slightly confused, antagonist. His motivations seem to spur out of nowhere, which is waved away as a trait of his morally lost character, but then by that same merit he seems superbly morally judgemental for what essentially amounts to a money driven drifter. Someone who has that angry of a response to Kiryu simply because of what the Dragon of Dojima represents shouldn't also live his life by the moral compunctions of his bank account. And every thing he claimed to be, or was setup to be by the story, didn't really show on his face either. In many ways, Mine is like a more put-together Awano, only his apparent hedonism is only referenced, never represented. He seems like something of an paradoxical enigma that, quite honestly, should have been explored in later games; but to quote Chris Tucker: "He ain't gonna be in Rush Hour 3."

And I cannot wrap up without mentioning the way that this game attempts to leapfrog the cliffhanger ending of Yakuza 2 with another 'is Kiryu dead?' fakeout that borrows a cue from one of Yakuza 2's most iconic scenes. (Yes, the one with the Japanese reggae in the Kiwami version) It's pretty weak, mostly because I don't think anyone really would buy that Kiryu would be killed by a side-character in the story who was so brushed off that most people genuinely forgot he was even present in the game. Still, I appreciate the side villian trying his best to make one final attempt on our boy before he becomes fully immortal. I hear there's a scene of Kiryu strafing two rocketing missiles in the coming games; I can't wait to get to that level of absurdity.  

In summary, Yakuza 3 is a hugely disappointing game from a gameplay perspective, that muddles an occasionally heartfelt, but largely unimpressive main narrative. It's side content and quest were okay, but not particularly in depth, the new minigames felt weak and under-developed and the progression is a sad mistake that should never be repeated. Yakuza 3 is a game that, quite honestly, I think is probably worth skipping in the 'full saga playthrough'. I wouldn't recommend it at all, and it's grade on my arbitrary scale only come up to a C grade. That goodwill might just be left-over refuse from a franchise that I love, because if I had played this game first, I probably wouldn't have continued playing this franchise. But I did complete it, and the story wasn't terrible, so I think the game just about gets a passing grade. Also, the scene where Majima somehow sneaks an entire colosseum full of screaming spectators under our nose made me laugh, so it makes it out of a C- Grade for that. Poor show and a largely lacklustre entry. Luckily, I'm already eight hours into 4 and confirm that it's much better on all accounts so far. I can't wait to start reviewing that one!