Get that shirt off. Time to prove ya still got what it takes!
I'm finally back after all this time to put the 'wrap up' on this, my longest running exploration into a franchise of games that seems to multiply everytime I put it down. At least from here on out I can cease my bizarre journey of backtracking and move onward to newer games, better graphics, more sensible combat improvements and less loading screens! (Oh god, the loading screens!) And Yakuza 5 is an interesting send off to the original slate of games because quite unlike those that came before and even those that came after, I think this game alone might be the very first that hit me, repeatedly, with the odd sense that everything on offer was just too much. I know, right? "Who doesn't want more game?" And to try and define that myself, it's best I get somewhat into the game and break it down piece by piece for the benefit of all.
RGG clearly set out trying to recapture that special magic which made Yakuza 4 such instant fire in a bottle- namely the four-way narrative which allowed for a mystery to be weaved between four smaller tales, players to have control of four different characters with their own progression paths and themes to be further reinforced between 4 character arcs. Unfortunately this cannot just be a direct sequel to everything that Yakuza 4 built thanks to the scandal around Tanimura. The actor behind the character, Hiroki Narimiya, found himself wrapped up in ultimately fake charges of drug possession that ended up in his reputation becoming so tarnished that RGG pulled his likeness and voice from the game. Now technically this alone was not the reason for Tanimura not being included in Yakuza 5 (the scandal happened after the release of 0) but it did mean that we'd never get our 4 heroes in the same room ever again and that does kind of weigh over this entire game with all the slight references to Tanimura scattered here and there.
But Yakuza 5 has a tendency to go that 'one step beyond' with everything it does, so not only do we have 4 protagonists this time, but they also explore, drum roll please, 4 totally distinct cities! That's right, Yakuza went from having only two locations (Kamarucho and Sotenbori) that they jumped between over and over, to having dozens set all over Japan! From a tiny rural hunting village placed deep in the snowy mountains to a totally fresh (if slightly cramped) city district in a whole new city: Nagoya! (New to the franchise, I mean. RGG didn't travel back in time to 1610 in order to found the real-life city of Nagoya just to set one of their more bizarre storylines there. I think. Actually, that does seem like the kind of thing Toshihiro Nagoshi would do. Remember: He came up with idea of 'Super Monkey Ball'. Weird guy.)
Our four protagonists have their stories split across 4 acts consisting of four chapters, and when I tell you they touch on vastly distinct narrative threads that sometimes fray as the story desperately tries to pull them together- know I'm not exaggerating. In the late game there are times when characters are summarising recontextualising twists of such rippling magnitude that I literally had to pause the cutscene and go for a walk whilst I tried to figure out what that even meant for the dozens of characters and major events I already had stacked on top of each other up in my noggin. It's all a bit of a mess if I'm being honest. But for scope, Yakuza 5 might just be the most ambitious 'Like a Dragon' game I've experienced to this date. But let's go chapter by chapter, shall we?
Kiryu
First off, we get to actually start with my boy Kiryu this time, so I don't have to spend the first three quarters of the game wondering around like a lost child at the supermarket pulling on stranger's shirts and asking after my Yakuza mother-figure. (Instead I just spent the sixty odd hours between his act and the final act growing as restless as a Meth-head outside Vince Gilligan's house. I assume he has Meth, you don't make two shows and a movie based around something you don't have a vested stake in.) Kiryu is familiar territory and a fine reintroduction to everything we love about Yakuza- that fine straight up single-target-with-versatility brawler fighting style which starts off effective and becomes more fun as you improve it. Ah, to whack fools about the face as the Dragon himself- does life hold any more violent a pleasure?
And yet, right off the bat I do have to knock some points off for a non-cohesive narrative. As the great theme and lesson of Yakuza 4 affirmed- there's nothing worse in life than not being in control of your destiny for a single second. Did you mother cook you breakfast? Unacceptable! Throw that crap back in her face and hunt your meal like a damned Yakuza! (Real Yakuza subscribe to the 'Eat-what-you-kill' grindset!) So if that is the case, and Kiryu looked damn ready to stop running away from his place in the Tojo Clan and perhaps even start his own family or, you know, contribute in the slightest to the organisation who raised him- why in the heck has he cut all ties from them and is posing as a Taxi Driver in the middle of Fukuoka called, lemme check my notes, 'Tachi Susuki'? He gave himself one of the most common names in all of Japan to go undercover? Great naming conventions, RGG, what's next- you gonna name a character Ichiban or something? Sheesh...
Of course, this ties back in Haruka and a sacrifice of his identity that Kiryu needs to make in order to ensure she can follow her dreams to become, shifting through my notes again, a pop idol... huh? You mean, like when she had that one substory relating to idols back in Yakuza... I think it was 3? That one chance encounter really had an effect on her, huh? And that's her 'dream' now? Well I guess that means it takes precedence over 'taking control of your destiny' because the theme of this game is 'Dreams' and we're going to drill that into your skull until you're in danger of brain leakage! Look, I'm swear I'm not going to break down every plot point, (We'd be here until the heat death of the next universe over if I did.) I just want to set the foundation of what I consider to be a messy plot in a franchise that is already verging on being too convoluted for it's own good. The more I truck along the franchise, the more I totally understand the need to refresh the story like they did with 7. Looking forward to that one... even if his name is 'Ichiban'...
Now the first actual gameplay point I want to bring up is actually on the progression systems. Because of the truncated chapter structure, Yakuza 5 features a rather free-form approach to combat training wherein you meet one relevant trainer, and immediately unlock their entire questlines to be squeezed in during your exploration of your 4 chapter romp before you get kicked off to the next character. It's actually quite nice to get access to improvements as early as possible. (Provided you can actually beat the training challenges, which are not easy.) As for the EXP based levelling this game brings us- crap! The stat increase bars from Yakuza 3 are back! Actually it's a mix of spirit orbs and random stat and ability improvements that you can't predict. A little better than 3, but you're still building a character practically blind. (I'm so glad they figured this out so much better in 0.)
Also, joy of joys- technology has reached the point where fights can be started without cutscenes, such as in Yakuza 0! Most still do have cutscenes, because god and RGG hate us, but you don't need to wait for one to exit combat- which makes street fights so much more bearable! There's also been an AI overhaul for the street trash to make their fights feel more interesting, such as the ability to call for back up, group on you or even run away screaming out of the battle if you freak them out by horrifically maiming their childhood friends brutally enough. ("I love being the goddamn Yakuza-man!") And yet... there's yet to be devised any method for avoiding or escaping said fights, so they still feel like tall-grass encounters in late-game Pokémon- deeply annoying. But on the plus side, we've got a lot of really great environmental heat action takedowns this time around which makes the street brawls a bit meatier to get into- so you take some you give some, I guess. Oh, and there's also a new 'Climax heat mode' to spruce combat up a bit in different ways depending on the character being controlled. Everyone gets a unique super-move that gets charged up, but Kiryu specifically has a new 'rage state' he can enter which kind of acts like his 'Devil Trigger', to borrow DMC parlance. Not only does he become 'suped up' but all of his basic attacks come with brand new animations! And he can basically teleport whilst raged. Not really sure why that last ability is a thing. Yakuza gets weird when you let it out of the collar for a bit.
Now playing Yakuza as it's evolved over the past decade before the fifth entry, you're probably stamping your feet and asking "Where is the distractingly over detailed Taxi driving meta-game with dozens of customer deliveries, Taxi cab modifications and a self-contained side-narrative involving high-way drift races... in that same taxi?" And I too have shared in your pain for that one crucial omission to the Yakuza fantasy. But fret not brothers, because finally in Yakuza 5 you have all of that, and it's every bit as concerningly in-depth and devised with meaningful gameplay loops as you've been... wanting? There's Taxi XP to unlock new custom parts and colours, Taxi points to buy those parts and a musical track for the racing portions that sounds right out of the Initial D OST. So... celebrations? (It's actually pretty fun, I'm not gonna lie. I kind of wish the Taxi was capable of reversing, however. That's a bit of an oversight.)
The Taxi side quest narrative also comes with a surprising amount of character and depth to it's participants despite every one of them being side characters who will absolutely never make an appearance again. Heck, the various personalities of the Taxi office alone are worth getting to know! Wada is the old soul that everyone can see comfortable geniality within, Kiyokawa is the starstruck newbie eager to jump into his own legend and Muramatsu is the straight edged 'stick in the mud' ruining everyone's fun. The chief is kindhearted and fatherly and the receptionist, Hirakawa, acts selectively oblivious with flashes of intuition. They sound like a tight knit pirate crew but they're completely missable side characters in this ten ton game of SEGA's- it's nuts!
That is easily the most developed minigame of the Kiryu chapter, but it's far from the only one. Also back is the chase minigame that the past two Yakuza games have loved, only here it's much more forgiving and quicker paced. It's still a headache and a half to have to deal with, however, and I wish it didn't exist. What else? Oh yeah, there's a whole dang Ramen making minigame to get involved in as well. A whole mini-browser-style game they cobbled together for a side story. I swear, RGG put more work into bringing their little snippets of Japan alive than the entire CDPR team could ever even consider when it comes to Cyberpunk. Imagine any other game with as many distractions as Yakuza has! I guess that's just why we love it, eh?
This time around the side stories that we go on are erring towards the more interesting and deliberate end, with some of the stories being downright tear jerkers once you let them go all the way. 'Another Haruka' in particular straight punched me in the gut. It reminded me of the love I had for these side stories from the first time I played Yakuza 0- true condensed nuggets of emotionally charged gold. And then there's the cooking side stories. I understand that celebrity tie-ins are cool, but when I don't know the celebrity because he's a Japanese chef, and the missions he imparts is simply 'Go to every restaurant in the area and tell me about them', I get real tired of the shitck in about 5 minutes. So what a pleasure it is to know that he shows up for every chapter to annoy all the characters! Wonderful!
There's also the Victory Road meta-plotline which plays out chapter to chapter wherein each hero is beset by random encounters that add up to a colosseum tournament for all the best fighters in the world. It's a cool way to tie in the colosseum to the narrative, but it necessitates the hunting down and beating of a dozen 'contestants' across each city, which is itself a headache when these contestants dress almost identically to street punks! Running into random encounters thinking you're progressing Victory Road only to be locked into a street-side gang rush is about enough to make me want to cave in my own skull with a claw hammer. But if I did that I wouldn't be able to maintain the requisite quantum-physics level concentration to keep up with the plot of the first act alone.
You see, Kiryu has gone to ground in order to protect Haruka but Sixth Tojo clan Chairman Daigo Dojima has come to see Kiryu to ask for his advice because he came all this way to see him, actually he came to Furuoka to seal a partnership with the local Yamagasa family but he thought he might as well take a detour to see his old pal K, but then he also decides to go missing for some reason which you have to investigate but you're also being attacked by people who think Kiryu knows where Dojima is despite the fact they've not been seen together for two years and Aoyama of the Omi clan is hunting them whilst also trying to sabotage the plan and maybe commit a double assassination but maybe not because Kiryu decides to come out of Yakuza retirement again in order to stop him, only to learn that there's even more layers to the various vying factions here and maybe a shadowy puppet master playing with all of them and Watase is just a villainous Majima. They didn't even make him act different, he's just bad-guy Majima!
Did you get all that? Because I didn't. But at least in tradtional Yakuza fashion there's the illusion of some sort of narrative conclusion by the end of the act, although it does of course end on a cliffhanger which doesn't get picked up on ever because this game needs to introduce every new character from scratch as if you've never seen them before in your life. But at least the mystery of a missing Diago is enough to start with. Great.
Saejima
Would you believe me if I told you that Saejima has his own massively complex side story just like Kiryu's taxi minigame? Would you then also follow if I were to say that it's a giant hunting-themed side game in the snowy mountains wherein Saejima learns how to brave inhospitable conditions in order to protect a small town from a enraged giant bear who threatens it? We're talking a minigame built all around survival, exploring a blizzard wildness that slowly chips away at your health whilst shooting down Deers and rabbits for pelts that you sell for upgrade materials. It, again, feels like a whole indie side project tacked onto this game, only somehow this one feels even more insane for how far removed it is from Saejima's main questline- to discover the secret behind... who killed Majima! (Oh goodness, how could one of the franchise's few characters who shows up in every game just die off-screen like that? What a crazy twist!)
Saejima's act is actually bursting with sections that, even coming to grips with this franchise like I am, I would never have expected to see in a Yakuza game. There's a Modern Warfare 2 style snowspeeder chase section, a fist fight with a bear, a imaginary dream city tour which goes on far too long but presents a fascinating concept of interactive exposition that I'd love to see explored in another game at some point. There's a First-Person-Shooter reminiscent snowball fight minigame, a scene where Saejima runs away from children whilst dressed as Santa Claus and... actually that's about it. But at least Saejima can go to hostess clubs and attend Karaoke this time around; I can finally feel whole whilst in his shoes..
For the impressive completeness of his in-depth hunting/survival minigame alone I think Saejima's chapter is a standout in an already cluttered game. But he also enjoys the least overly convoluted plotline out of the four protagonists, and he gets the chance to beat on Makoto Tokita (the absolutely unbearable student from Yakuza 4) for good measure. Good stuff, and a needed dose of familiarity given what Yakuza has next up it's sleeve.
Haruka/Akiyama
No, you misread nothing. Part 3 of this story is shared with Akiyama and Haruka. You know, Kiryu's adoptive step-daughter who used to chase 'Uncle Kaz' around town making him gamble, sing and otherwise embarrass herself for her twisted sense of amusement? She's both an idol and playable now. (Feel old yet?) Honestly, Akiyama is kind of just a tag along for a section of the narrative which is largely guided by Haruka on her journey to prove herself as the breakout pop idol star of the production company Dyna Chair, whom she feels deeply indebted to despite the fact that her manager, Mirei Park, literally blackmailed Kiryu out of her life and Haruka to become a Idol in the first place. But that's water under the bridge, as it were, she's supposed to be a mother-figure now, or something. I guess it helps that she even wears her hair the same as Yumi (That's Haruka's mother, if you've understandably forgotten) did back in Yakuza 1. That's called 'Dramatic narrative repetition', I think...
One credit I have to give Yakuza 5 is for taking the perspective of the franchise far outside of it's comfort zone in order to explore the distinctly novel view of the idol industry, or even the sex industry through the eyes of the 4th protagonist. (Or 5th, if we accept Haruka as a protagonist all of her own.) These really allow the range of characters we meet to expand out, not that Yakuza ever had trouble throwing colourful cast mates at us; still, learning what drives a woman of sheer determination like Park-san, a simple show-business organiser, is somewhat striking in the ways it resembles some of the most notable Yakuza members we've met over the years. Of course, the stakes and avenue are so distinct which is what allows for a greater range of narrative- it takes balls to get as risky as this game does.
Haruka also has some of the most heartfelt and sweet substories, through which you really get to see the imprint of the noble ideals of Kiryu stamped upon her over their many years together. Some of them are also just about Haruka learning to make friends with people her age, considering she spent all her years following a giant Yakuza man or raising tiny kids in lieu of said-'giant Yakuza man'. And yet she does have the worst minigame of the entire game in the comedy side story which is practically impossible to do unless you're a fluent Japanese speaker as it requires rapid and apt responses to lead in lines that just isn't possible when you need time to read the translated transcript and the responses and then select it- maybe the one serious moment where localisation dropped the ball in my entire Yakuza journey. (I can forgive them actively changing some of Akiyama's racier Yakuza 4 dialogue, but this was just frustrating.) Fittingly enough Haruka's metagame is managing her Idol career by attending talk shows, and guesting in quiz shows about Sotenbori, as well as conducting hand-shake meet'n'greets and performing shows for local businesses- all of which come with some form of minigame attached. Unfortunately the narrative of the metagame- based around a slew of completive dance competitions, is largely divorced from the core idol work and can easily be missed in a non-attentive playthrough.
Akiyama steps into the story about halfway through Act 3 and he brings with him that deviously "Black Leg" Sanji-coded kick-centric fighting style, now coloured up with a limited-time ability to literally kick so much he suspends himself in the air for about 7 seconds of flurry strikes and a sweet little guitar battle track which is my favourite of the game. As a side-protagonist, Akiyama's purpose for being here is pretty much just to be the money-lender and a stand-in guardian for Haruka in the meanwhile, and I can't help but shake the impression he was brought in simply because the developers thought fans would riot if there was a full 4 chapters without face-beatings. But I ain't gonna complain, Akiyama is the freakin' GOAT and I'll die on that hill!
That damned man has so much charisma it just makes me wanna reach through the screen and pinch his little rugged grown-man cheeks! Even if we get to see Akiyama further cement his legacy as the only character in a franchise full of compulsive smokers who suffers the ill effects of smoking. (At least until 'Infinite Wealth' releases...) Even when he's tacked on top of someone else's story Akiyama manages to steal the show with his suave laid-back persona and his deeply moralistic centre. We even get a few of his brilliant Sky Finance Substories where he meets potential debtors, all wonderful experiences to express Akiyama's uniquely interesting philosophy on the role of money in a deeply capitalistic world. If there was ever a full Akiyama spin-off, I'd buy it. Twice.
This chapter's narrative veers more towards the confused again, introducing new plotpoints that seem to have nothing to do with what we were already following, all up until they hit us with the shocker that kind of feels a little insulting in the way they neatly slip it into an important main character's past and just pretends he never mentioned it. To anyone. Seriously though, it was around Act 3 I was starting to get suspicions that the game wasn't going to manage to tie everything together in a clean manner... not least of all because every act starts from zero and has to build itself up from scratch!
Shinada
And new-comer Shinada rounds out the pack with such an insanely specifically themed personal narrative that I honestly think he was only invented because one of the key creative leads of Yakuza 5 was an obsessive baseball fanatic. Shinada is a smut-article journalist living on the bring of poverty in Nagoya, up to his eyes in debt to literally everyone whilst he mooches off his last 'good will' sneeking free meals and free 'sessions' with his favourite soap-land girl 'Milky-Chan', on the sly. He a little perverted, but just the appropriate enough amount not to be the franchise creep. He's more hopeless lover-boy, at least on the very surface- and it's not long before we start getting into the true heart of this new wild card.
Because you see, Shinada is actually a former Baseball prodigy who has his big break 15 years back, but is now living on the edge of financial destitution whilst borrowing money from shady Yakuza-looking types. That baseball past is still painfully hanging over Shinada, however, and when he gets the chance to pay away all of his debts in return for solving the mystery of what went wrong all those years ago he jumps on the chance to clear his name and take back his life. A pretty serious sounding set-up, but Shinada is still lovably affable to be around. Which I suppose is somewhat necessary to make the story of a broken man one bad week around from street living not increadibly depressing.
Of course, with Baseball being such a big part of his life you'd naturally assume that forms a large part of his fighting style, which might naturally lead you assume he plays something like Yakuza 0 Majima, who had an entire style dedicated to his use of Bat-play in combat. But you'd be wrong. In actuality, Shinada fights more like a grappler in a swinger, in a manner I'd associate more with American Football or Rugy than Baseball. His signature move is to tackle the midriff of his foes and slam them against walls for big damage, and he utterly refuses to use a Baseball Bat in combat because he respects the sport too much to degrade a symbol representing it. I'm not joking, if you pick up a Baseball bat he undergoes a lengthy animation which sees him regard it sadly and then set it aside gently for fear of harming the thing. I just want to know why he tackles, it's been bugging me all week now- did the gameplay designers just forget what Baseball was? 
Shinada's metagame is based around his visits to the local swing centre and becoming something of a local celebrity for the quality of his Batting game, of course by a public who have no idea of his secret big-time Baseballing past. The Batting minigame has been overhauled just for Shinada to be an RPG timing minigame that demands focus and reflexes in order to catch a ball at the right moment to score a homerun. As you become better, train and purchase second-hand batting equipment you'll unlock bigger margins of error in timing and the ability to slow-down time using your Heat. (However I found the slow down mechanic to be deeply temperamental and sometimes scuppered an otherwise perfect Homerun for seemingly no reason whatsoever. I recommend ignoring it.)
Seeing as how Yakuza 4's Akiyama narrative revolved around the idea of what one does with an abundance of wealth, it's clever to explore the opposite end of that with Shinada and what a challenge a life without means can be. (They even have almost opposite trajectories from one another going from a place of considerable fortune to rock bottom and vice versa. Although Akiyama also has his prologue of being a banker and losing that, but I'm trying to make connections- stop ruining them!) Shinada's is a pretty down-to-earth character such that he almost feels the most human out a cast of otherwise icons. He's fending off a small group of citizen-turned bad whilst Kiryu is facing off against twin rocket launchers vanguarding a small army of Yakuza- the scale variance is near laughable: but I enjoy the perspective variance.
Shinada's storyline focuses heavily on conspiracy and secrets, an as such feels the most satisfying to dig into because we're far enough along in the story for events to start revealing themselves instead of just rising to more annoying cliffhangers before passing things on to the next rube in procession. However the mystery of his Baseball misfortunes is seeped in such heavy Baseball jargon that I literally had to back off and look up definitions just to follow things. I'd never heard of 'Sign Stealing' before this game, and that's a huge element of the story they kind of just expect you to know about when they throw it about. There's some genuine Baseball passion deep in the writing of Shinada's narrative, and it alone almost confuses the otherwise traditionally Yakuza-styled narrative irreparably. Still, when you stick it out and take the take to learn what everything means, you get rewarded with one of the most insanely powerful batter versus swinger showdowns outside of a sport movie ever. I don't know how they did it, but for brief fleeting moment I cared immensely about a sport. RGG do strange things to my chemicals, I'll tell you what. 
Final Part
The last act attempts to bring everyone together to Tokyo, Kamurocho, in order smash every conspiracy plotline together into one and as I've alluded several times already- the results are rough. Everytime a character sat down to summarise events for the other I felt the need to pull out a pen and paper to try and follow along with the four separate stories worth of character, events, factions and motivations. On one hand it creates a vastly rich canvass of story to shift through, but on the otherhand it means you see a name you can barely remember and attribute it to the wrong character and loose track of everything because then the twists start. Oh, the twists! You might remember me lambasting the narrative of Yakuza 2 for overusing the whole "Aha! You did this thing but that was part of my plan the whole time!" twist set-up- well I'm afraid that's literally the entirety of the Final Part but on steroids.
There was effort put in to try and recapture the magic of Yakuza 4's converging narratives at one point. That tingly moment when everyone met on the rooftop of Millennium Tower and had their four way standoff against the various badguys... and then switched up to fight other people's badguys for some reason. (Still don't understand why they did that.) Unfortunately, the story kind of trips over itself this time around. They couldn't find a feasible excuse to get everyone up on the same rooftop so we only get Kiryu and Saejima, and they couldn't give them a good enough foe to fight so we're left with one of the most pathetic excuses to fight since Yakuza 4's "I'm pretty sure you're not the bad guy, but I'm going to fight you anyway." This time around it's "I think the bad guy brought all of us up here in hopes that we'd literally all kill each other. Somehow. He literally expects us to all punch each other to death in the same moment. And if we don't do that, he'll never show his face, so we need to do that in order to make him show up!" I'm not kidding, that is literally the reasoning. It's so stupid...
Yakuza 5 manages to keep it's final villain a secret until the penultimate chapter, but if you didn't immediately guess who it was the second they shambled into the narrative back in Act 1 with pathetically little explanation as to who they are and what they wanted, then you're a far more trusting man then I. Although, even I couldn't have predicted how embarrassingly cartoonish the bad guy would be, both in his motivation and conduct. First off, and I have to spoil his name and motivations in order to make fun of them so skip to the next paragraph if you want to spare yourself: what the heck is Kurosawa's problem? He's basically just upset that there's less thuggish Yakuza out there and is planning a mass conspiracy/assassination plot in order to clean the Yakuza of niceness? Aren't there like, 30,000 men in the Tojo clan? Do you think he profiled every one of them to find any he considers idealistically objectionable? I think that's an objectively poor villain motivation, imma just say it.
What's more, everything changes when the twists attack! Now a twist is a useful tool for recontextualising exposition and unveiling hidden motivations and plot-threads. Typically you have a twist which effects a certain aspect of the plot so that the audience doesn't feel like the time developing everything else was utterly wasted. Now obviously Yakuza 5 doesn't care about stuff like, the audiences time, they designed 4 ludicrously in-depth meta-games for all the acts: if you've made it this far your time must be worthless! So they twice pull out twists that utterly destroys all previously built context and totally shatters seemingly established motivations. The second of which, the one they leave on, I think genuinely doesn't make sense. If the main villains plan was, indeed, what they pretend it was at the end of this game- his actions throughout the story must be damn-near schizophrenic! Why the hell try and destroy Madarame's Clan if- AH! There's no point getting into it, we'll be here all year. The point I think is worth bringing up though, is that when the final boss of the game is revealed they are asked the question "What are you doing here?", to which the answer is "I don't really know myself." If the final boss doesn't even know why he's the final boss, how the hell is the audience supposed to?
When it's all said and done, the real tragedy of Yakuza 5 is the smothering of the true intentions of the final boss, to feed his repressed homosexual urges. Twice he forces rippling muscled men to rip off their shirts and grapple sweatily for his amusement. He even gets impatient the second time as everyone stays clothed for too long and urges them to undress at literal gunpoint. Then he stands there smiling like an Otaku at Comic Con, grinning dumbly as he forces half-naked men to slap each other around whilst standing around awkwardly. Someone needs to guide my man out of the closet, poor fellow got himself lost down there!
Summary
I've never really thought of Yakuza games as being safe slacker style games, but they do have a certain style and cadence they stick to. Yakuza 5 is a trailblazer that attempted to be more ambitious then most every other game in the franchise through sheer amount of distinct gameplay ideas alone. The number of minigames unique just to Yakuza 5 is so mindboggling I didn't even have time to try all of them. (I wanted to try Chicken Chasing, but I had already crossed the 100 hour mark!) But under the weight of all that content the usually slim and sleek body of the game contorted and squashed. I wouldn't say I dislike Yakuza 5, I just think it stumbles over itself too much to be ignored. It's still every bit as fun as you'd expect a Yakuza game to be in content, it's just longtoothed to the point of becoming ungainly in it's latter hours. Still, I would recommend this game just for the variety of gameplay experiences alone. And slap a respectable -B Grade, as befitting my arbitrary reviewing scale's demands. From here on out it's Dragon Engine powered games ahoy, as move into the modern age of Yakuza and pray it's less annoying than Kiwami 2 was. Time to wrap up the story of Kiryu once and for all, because 6 is absolutely his last game and there's no way he'd make a return in literally the very next after they promised 6 would be his finale! They wouldn't do that to us. That would just be disrespectful. And Yakuza is all about being respectful. Just like Sensei Logan Paul said before deciding to film a body in the suicide forest. Or like Kojima literally everytime he makes any game ever before immediately jumping on the sequel. It's the final one guys, I don't know what to tell ya. That's it. Fintio. All she wrote. The fat lady sung. Tata. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Adieu. Adieu to Kiryu, because he is done. He's out. No more Kiryu guys. Not again. New franchise, new hero. Right? Tell me I'm right. PLEASE TELL ME I'M RIGHT!
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