**”I lost the sexy bug battle? Screw this game. Too damn frustrating.”**

Yakuza Kiwami was a notable success for RGG Studio and Sega. After the series had hit a new high after 0’s surge, Kiwami came out of the gate tiger dropping, tiger dropping, tiger dropping, tiger dropping, tiger dropping, and tiger dropping, which ended up not only bringing the 2005 original into a new light, but also gave a surge of new content for fans of 0. But did it earn its keep? Mostly. Not only does Yakuza Kiwami present a very good story with an unreal immersion in metropolitan Japan, but it is also the game of a hundred games and a million distractions, becoming a confident and exuberant celebration of video games themselves.

Kiwami is my second tussle with the Like A Dragon series, and it certainly won’t be my last. A close friend of mine got into the series a few years ago, and my impulse sale-buys of 0 (the series’ six entry and the prequel to the first game, which I recently reviewed) and Kiwami were pretty high on the priority list for my backlog since then, even when I knew it was something I was going to have to put aside quite a bit of time for. Despite Kiwami being the seventh game in the mainline series, it’s sometimes recommended as the first game to play for those wanting to get into Like A Dragon, notably for some spoilers for 4 being included in 0 and uhh idk why else. I understand that these games are not normally bite-sized romps, but Yakuza Kiwami is both a big and long game. There is not only a plethora of stuff to do, but it’s essentially an extended-length crime-drama epic. Between my two playthroughs (one completionist, one Legend difficulty) and my completion of the climax battles, I put a whopping 120 hours into the game. I can admit I was taking my time with playthrough #1, because my Legend playthrough only ran me about 5 hours, given that I skipped pretty much every skippable cutscene. This is definitely not the way to play the game for the first time, however. There’s a maddening amount of stuff to do, people to meet, stories to hear, and minigames to lose your mind over. Even if the game reminds you every 20-ish seconds idling of what your “main” objective is, it wants you to slow down and take your time to get to know the city, and that I did.

Kiwami sets itself within the year 2005, which I knew was gonna be a lot of fun to engage with. I think the way the game employs the tropes of the 00s is quite tasteful, and I even personally think that it could’ve gone farther, but I appreciate the restraint. I’ve been in a lot of Y2K/frutiger aero/frutiger metro aesthetic circles over the years and got to understand a plethora of perspectives on the decade (alongside having experience the entirety of it, albeit in my early childhood); Over the years, I’ve seen the most shameless of the shameless of nostalgia-baiting garbage with no interesting angles or ideas, pretending the 2000s were a perfect time for everybody. Japan was leaving an economic surge during this time (and the richest man in the world was Bill Gates), and I think the story and major minigames tie in perfectly to this. Even the game’s Japanese opening is scored by some kool electro house. I think it shows the seedy side as well, with homeless people serving a pretty significant role in the world and story, alongside presenting their exploitation by the rich. The balance is great here, ultimately. It isn’t some rose-tinted nostalgia fest, but it also isn’t a down-and-dirty verbose torrential downpour of pessimism. Ultimately, the tone the game sets is all over the place, and I mostly like it.

The Yakuza games are, at their core, beat ‘em ups, which makes sense as a series that was born near the end of the sixth generation. I never had a ton of experience in the genre, and the last one I played was Yakuza 0. In my experience, the beat ‘em up stuff was not the main attraction here, but I find here that this aspect is kind of the glue that ties everything together. All of the fighting styles were fun to mess around with. K-san has a clear-cut “normal” style, respectively within Brawler,and also gets a dex build in Rush and a strength build in Beast. The insane animations from the Heat actions also definitely keep things a bit fresh and very entertaining as well, and there are so many moments where the assertion that “Kiryu doesn’t kill” seems dubious. I watched that man throw live firecrackers into gangsters’ mouths, throw some rowdy youths hard and headfirst into the pavement, and pour boiling water on some biker douche he pinned to the ground. I think the difficulty was messy here; I regret cranking it up to Hard, since I died way too many times. Balancing can be pretty tough though, with the ability to stack your inventory full of full-health healing drinks and insanely overpowered weapons, the latter of which there are a huge number of. The Legend playthrough was basically trivialized by being able to use shotguns/zap guns/the golden gun, alongside some of the more overpowered combos in certain styles from K. I think Majima completely breaks the difficulty mould here though, and he’s basically to this game what the Marauder was to Doom Eternal: completely unlike other enemies, extremely powerful, will come out of nowhere to completely wreck you, and wants all of your yen. I felt a similar way here, in that I was frustrated with his techniques at first, but I came to appreciate how much they broke up the gameplay, and anyone complaining should git gud. Or just Beast XXXY or Tiger Drop. His moveset can be varied, but his health feels too tanky, so fighting him legit can feel more like chopping at a tanky boss for a long time rather than a proper duel. Outside some of the encounters (and ignoring completion), he’s completely optional and can be mostly avoided. Besides this and the cutscenes, there is a minor amount of other stuff to be done in the main story, like an on-rails shooting section which kind of sucked ass and felt completely out of place in the game, as much as a similar section felt in 0. There also are a couple of parts where you just follow a bro and talk, and it was pretty incredible that this game found a way to fix gaming’s eternal “he’s moving faster than my walking speed and slower than my running speed” problem by just giving you a “Follow [x]” button at the appropriate times to match speed. Brilliant.

Balanced with these bouts is a pretty heavy amount of story and cutscenes. This is another aspect of the game that’s gonna be a nonstarter for many, as, if you skip the dialogue in 99% of games you play, you’re just not going to have a great time here. Ultimately, while sometimes a bit slow-moving, Kiwami’s story came to some great climaxes, many of which gave a ton of great context for the fights. It has some incredibly cinematic cutscenes, even though there are at least 3 different types of “cutscenes” in the game which caused a bit of whiplash. The story does move a bit slowly in the first half while the two stories remain mostly independent. Regardless, the story starts to kick into high gear in the second half, and it’s fantastic. I could not for the life of me understand people thinking it’s the other way around, in that it starts strong but gets weak. Watching the two stories begin to converge and unravel each other was magnificent, and all of it was aided by an incredible cast of characters. I think someone like Kiryu is a perfect example of how you can make a lawful good/neutral good type character interesting. You get to feel his internal struggle and his moral code in almost all of his interactions, but his strength comes through in his overt kindness, selflessness, and desire to help people in need. On the other hand, a lot of people call Kiwami a Nishiki game, and I don’t understand that at all. You don’t even play as him.

The setting of Kamurocho (based on Kabukichō in Tokyo) is one of the most alive and breathing video game worlds I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience. A lot of this obviously can be attributed to the density of substories/enterable buildings/things to do, but I think a more overlooked aspect of this is the density of NPCs and their wide array of behaviours. People are minding their business, gathered with their friends, getting off of school, going to work, on break, on dates, drunkenly stumbling home, or just out for a walk. You’ll see them exit and enter buildings, ordering food, gossiping, schmoozing, and all kinds of stuff. This world felt so insanely tangible and invoked my desire to travel to either surrogate location just to experience the real thing, which is impressive to engender in someone who doesn’t do a lot of travelling. There’s still a lot of shared DNA though with my own experiences on the other side of the planet; When the game opened with Kiryu and his best bro hitting the streets to gouge money out of people, I knew I was in for a fun time.

The best part of peeling apart this locale is that Kamurocho isn’t particularly “big”, at least by today’s open world standards, or even 2016 open world standards. There’s not entirely a lot of “variety” either; One of my favourite open worlds ever to this day is the one portrayed in Saints Row 2, considering just how many different environments were cohesively included in there. I’ll probably elaborate on that if I commit to the Saints Row series replay I’d like to do this year, but most importantly, environment variety used to be the biggest thing I would praise an open world for. There isn’t a lot of “variety” within Kamurocho. It’s mostly nightlife…clubs…seedy spots…pretty bright lights…downtown stuff.. Is this lack of variety a detriment? No, not at all. There are some nice changes in the environment here and there, like the park/homeless encampment and ensuing Purgatory, but it earns its keep by doing everything else amazingly. The number of shops and restaurants you can enter, as alluded to earlier, is a huge plus. Specifically, I love the variety of restaurants you can enter with completely different menus and atmospheres. So many games kind of rough it with their healing system, and if you’re just playing this game for the story, that’s probably all it will be, as you chug down a billion Staminan Royales, with maybe a few Staminan Sparks later on. But I just love entering random restaurants to try stuff and heal up. Want to stop by a kiosk to have some takoyaki and a beer on the sidewalk? Want to stop into an American imitation joint to have a greasy burger and some fries with a shake? Want to stop into a quiet bar to try some real-life whiskies and brandies? Want to stop into a café for some tea and cake? I am a lifelong fatass foodie and this was far and away one of my favourite parts of the game, and it did a huge part in turning the tables of making me want to visit Kabukichō myself for a food tour.

And what would these games/locales even be if they weren’t filled to the brim with their substories? Being one of this series’ most celebrated aspects, the substories not only bring loads of bite-sized narratives to chew on as you progress the story, but they’re generally much more light-hearted in tone to both give the characters some relief from the drama and give the series its iconic occasional zaniness and silliness, as well as set fire to everything so far in making these locales blazingly alive. There’s not necessarily a lot of difficulty to these substories, but there are occasionally things you can get right and wrong, as well as the occasional combat bout. I would go on for way longer than I should, so to keep it brief, some of my favourites were…
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.
- The one where you get scammed on the streets.

As I said, Yakuza Kiwami is a game of a hundred games. You know UFO 50? You know that stupid ass 700,000 Games collection Jerma made a video about when he still posted on YouTube? Add everything I’ve mentioned up to this point (+ more) and that’s Yakuza 0. It’s a pretty common observation within the fanbase that it’s possible to just ignore the story and get completely lost in these minigames, but I’ve come to realize that that’s kind of the point, with all these minigames having their own level of complexity. Publisher Sega managed to shoehorn in their own arcade efforts into the game, with a reimagining of their early-mid 00s arcade title “Mushiking: The King Of Beetles” alongside a crane game. I think this just walks the line of Sega tastefully preserving and celebrating their past without seeming vainglorious. For what it’s worth, I had fun with both of them. Furthermore, there are some standard-issue recognizable minigames found in the game’s bowling, darts, billiards, and western gambling games such as blackjack, roulette, and poker. It starts to get a bit more obscure once you’ve hit the mahjong parlour and learned how to play every completionist’s nightmare, as well as challenging some underground shut-ins in shogi, which is essentially Japanese chess. But once you make your way up to the secret gambling den, you’ll fully be lost in East Asian gambling games you’ve never heard of but will get enthralled in. They have some Western counterparts; oicho-kabu has similarities to baccarat (which already has its origins in East Asia), and koi-koi shares some DNA with poker. Cho-han is almost identical to craps, and both suck and are stupid, which makes sense. Cee-lo felt pretty original though, and I had a lot of fun with it, even if there was a lot of RNG involved. K-san has his own illicit underground fighting minigame; I found the Coliseum to be pretty fun, even though the progression system expects you to play it a lot longer than you probably will. It also has pocket circuit racing, which I got insanely lost in. It once again has its own story which I had a lot of fun with, as I also enjoyed customizing the cars to win races.

It’s also worth mentioning the karaoke here, my favourite minigame. It falls under the rhythm game category, and it’s pretty conventional. It is a bit hard to get adjusted as there is no metering and you kind of have to make an educated guess when to hit the buttons, but I think the mode is carried by both the great music and the insane music videos, as well as hearing other characters’ takes on the songs. Letting the voice actors themselves sing these songs was a great idea, as Kiryu’s series-long V/A Takaya Kuroda has an absolutely blessed baritone voice, and hearing his take on “Bakamitai -Sorrow-” is legendary to this day. I also have to give love to the hostess-related ones, like Rina running around on some sunshiney beach set singing EURO de x3 SHINE, and Yui breaking it down on the dance floor to Moment de la Petite Sirène.

Kiwami is far from a perfect game, as I think the story spends its time getting going, enemy variety is pretty non-existent, and some of the gameplay choices were a little rough, as well as some substories and minigames simply being better than others, but it’s truly one of the most unique games I’ve played. In a very weird, roundabout way, it can sort of be construed as a life sim, for how a major focus of the game is putting you in the shoes of the protagonist and just having the freedom to go do whatever and have fun. It has the balls to serve up an insane, dramatic, transfixing story with satisfying battle sequences, but has the heart to keep things upbeat and lighthearted when the time is right. I laughed, I cried, I grimaced, I smiled. From what I know, I couldn’t equate Yakuza 0’s development to a Final Fantasy 1-type situation, but it’s hard to think this could’ve been the final entry in the series if just a few things were different and it didn’t make the splash it did in the West. Confidence and bravado come through in every possible facet of this game, and it paid off.

And there it is, my second time being like a dragon. Did not expect to write this much considering I save my super-long ones (5k+ words) for games I feel like I’m outspoken on (Cyberpunk, My Summer Car, Dead Rising 4), and not only am I not going against the grain by saying this game is terrible, but it didn’t seem like something that demands this kind of analysis. But alas, here we are. At this point I’ve already started my actual review for Kiwami and have rough plans to go through the series in time. It’s not something I want to rush through, in fear of all the games just folding in on themselves in my memory thereon, but I am so excited to experience the rest of this series. I had so much fun wandering around these semi-fictional locales, that I’m now trying to put myself in the early stages of planning a trip to Tokyo just to capture some of that magic myself (eat a lot of food), with some insight from friends who’ve already been. But I’ll know to dodge any sketchy men in snakeskin jackets and eyepatches intently running my way, in case I see any.

Thanks for the read if you made it down here (and apologies for this nonsense); my birthday was a few weeks ago so I wanted to have a non-serious review out in celebration.

Actual review coming soon.