ONCE WERE BROTHERS
Also for: Playstation 3, Windows
Have you ever played a good game that ended so poorly it almost ruined the
entire experience? For me, Yakuza Kiwami begins as well as one could
hope by picking up the pieces in 1995, seven years after the events of the
masterful Yakuza 0. Well told, gripping, funny, whacky and thrilling
are all adjectives applicable to a good Yakuza game. This is true of Yakuza
Kiwami too - until it slowly dawns on me that it's not.
With, say, ten percent left of the lengthy playthrough I more or less yielded to the fact that I was no longer enjoying my time in this city. Few aspects of the experience held up to scrutiny; neither the gameplay nor the story kept it together and the exploration was starting to get on my nerves. And those ten percent might be more - it was a growing, nagging sensation, like a buzzing fly you can't swat, that might have tormented me across the second half of my playthrough.
To be fair, Yakuza Kiwami is a full-blown remake of the flawed Playstation 2-classic simply titled Yakuza in the west. Ryu ga Gotoku studios recreates the old cinematics with updated sound and visuals, and updates the game mechanics to fit modern standards, telling mostly the same story again.
Thus they have to adhere to storytelling standards from a decade-old game, when developers were still learning the craft.
Video games have come a long way since then, and still has a lot to learn, but they're getting there. Yakuza 0 took it quite a bit further, but Yakuza Kiwami unfortunately feels like a step back. The acting is still mostly good, but the camerawork in cutscenes is somewhat lacklustre and the writing - particularly the dull character development, or lack thereof - leaves something to be desired.
OPERA OF DECEIT
You control Kazuma Kiryu (still voiced by Takaya Kuroda), the stoic and kindhearted young hero from Yakuza 0, as he's about to become the head of his own Yakuza family. With great support from his father figure, Kazama (Tetsuya Watari) - an uncharacteristically good-natured Yakuza boss - Kiryu's future looks bright. His close childhood friends from the Sunflower orphanage, Nishiki (Kazuhiro Nakaya) and Yumi (Maaya Sakamoto), cheer him on from the sidelines. He has a budding romance going with Yumi, and his combat skills are legendary, earning him the nickname "The Dragon of Dojima".
If things are looking too good to be true, they probably are... After a night of misfortune, Kiryu gets charged with the murder of a Yakuza boss, and sentenced to imprisonment. He's expelled from his clan, which is the only "good" news. He was expecting total banishment. Expelled means he's fired from the clan, but the decision could be reversed in the future.
Time passes...
Cut to ten years later. Kiryu, now 37 years of age, is released on parole, ready to hit the streets of his old Kamurocho district. Immediately, he gets entangled with the Yakuza again, as unfinished businesses resurface and old acquaintances make themselves known. His former clan is at a boiling point after someone murdered the high honcho, third chairman Masaru Sera (Toru Okawa). Who will take charge? A civil war is brewing.
In the centre of it all is a friendship turned into animosity for reasons no one could help or predict. I'll leave the rest of the bloody tale for you to find out. A lot of the characters hide behind masks of aggression, their brows constantly furrowed, like they're threatening to burst out in violence against the slightest misdemeanor. The story is a decent operatic tale of love, greed, jealousy and betrayal. It begins well, but halfway through starts relying too heavily on clichés and cheap twists to invoke drama.
When any game or movie overuses a certain story element - like someone jumping in front of a bullet to protect someone dear - that element loses its desired effect. Close to the end of Yakuza Kiwami, taking bullets for one another seems like everybody's new favorite pastime. It almost becomes self-parody, and sadly takes away all the impact of the main storyline.
MAJIMA EVERYWHERE!
Another disappointing element is the supporting character Goro Majima (Hidenari Ugaki), who has fully embraced his moniker "The Mad Dog of Shimano". After his glorious and dignified treatment in Yakuza 0, this transition feels sad, unworthy and not convincing. Here, he is little more than a court jester and a maniac who likes to keep Kiryu prepared for the worst. Majima even gets his own game mechanic - the "Majima everywhere!" - a great idea which starts out fun, but spirals out of control the further you play.
After ten years in prison, Kiryu's combat skills are very rusty, and "Majima everywhere!" exists as a supposedly fun way to polish them. This means Majima can pop out of nowhere at all times - from behind vending machines, manhole covers, inside trash cans, et.c. - as well as interrupt other activities. It usually ends in a tough, long-lasting fight that drains your resources, but rewards you with a good chunk of experience points to invest in combat skills and attributes.
Admittedly, this sidequest gave me a few hearty laughs, especially some scripted events like Majima hijacking my date night, but towards the end this mechanic went totally berserk. I had Majima appear for four consecutive fights about fifteen seconds apart, when I was only trying to reach a drugstore to refill my health potion reserves. Each fight lasted a couple of minutes, and did nothing to help my levelling. I had already maxed out all the applicable skill trees, and was just sitting on thousands of unusable experience points.
AN INSANE CITY
Luckily, the game still contains the zany, unvoiced substories that you just happen upon by exploring the city. These are neither as numerous or memorable this time around, but for as long as they last, they provide the game with the unmistaken personality and wealth that constitute so much of the Yakuza world-building. Along with the high quality mini-games and side activites like pool, darts, dating, bowling, underground fighting, pocket circuit racing and karaoke, they elevate Yakuza Kiwami to a tier above the ordinary open world.(As for traditional gambling and the shogi parlor, I skipped it. And did someone mention mahjong?)
My favorite would be the card-collecting fighting game that is inspired by Pokémon. By entering one of the SEGA arcades, you come across the "Professor", a lab-coated kid who is an expert at a game called MesuKing. It involves collecting and playing with cards portraying scantily clad, attractive women vaguely trying to resemble insects.
On the surface it involves an impressive array of different statistics, and the battles themselves are fully animated wrestling matches. But the mechanics are, comically enough, just glorified bouts of "rock-paper-scissors". These brief segments are tied together by a fun, cheesily moralistic framing story, like any typical season of the Pokémon anime (I dare say with some prejudice). But adults are also welcome to play:
In other words, even after Kiryu spent ten years in prison, Kamurocho is more or less the same. People persevere with the prospect of striking it rich and getting famous, which turns a lot of them into conniving bastards. The ones who remain true to themselves tend to remain poor, but they nevertheless get their little stories told. I tried to find them all, but the completion list in the menus reveals that I missed a lot.
Kamurocho is as fun to explore as ever, with loads of encounters, stores and secret collectibles. As for the geography, it looks very familiar, but at its heart, where the Empty Lot once lay, is now a skyscraper called The Millennium Tower. Given how much of the prequel's plot that was centered around the construction of that tower, it's of surprisingly limited importance here.
BRAWLING LIKE CLOCKWORK
Your exploration keeps getting interrupted by random street punks, yakuza and delinquents eager to fight. Combat continues along the established path of the four different martial arts schools, and a myriad of upgrades and new moves within each school. The skillful Yakuza-player would master them all and switch back and forth depending on the situation, whereas the very patient player would focus on the "Dragon of Dojima"-style (which probably renders all others superfluous) by grinding through the "Majima everywhere!" questline.
I'm none of those and mostly stuck to the middle-of-the-road Brawler style. This got me through random ecounters with ease, but consequently left me totally unprepared for some tough boss encounters. One particular fight close to the end frustrated me to no end. Let's just say I have to question the decision to allow most bosses to rapidly regenerate health - especially when you can do little to stop it. Slowly getting knocked out by every single bullet is also aggravating - especially when facing three tough gun-wielding enemies at once.
Combat is fun in theory, with great flexibility giving you room to adapt and develop your own favorite style. But in the cramped streets and back alleys of Kamurocho you run into it too frequently, especially with Majima stalking you with an almost homoerotic fervor. I can live with that, but I have a harder time reconciling with the lacklustre end to some of the storylines that were set up so nicely in the prequel.
SUMMARY
I still like Yakuza Kiwami just fine, but I realize I must have approached the game with unfairly high standards. Whereas my perception of a game normally starts out as a blank slate, this time my mind was predisposed on playing a good, entertaining game from the outset. Following Yakuza 0, I expected the dozens of gameplay and story elements to line up and form this sort of perfectly even Tetris-row. But the pieces of Yakuza Kiwami just don't fit very well together. Some of them are just flawed and impossible to combine, leaving the game with something to be desired.The original Yakuza and this remake were made 11 years apart, and accordingly Kiwami feels like a patchwork. The story underneath the polished, updated exterior is a mixed bag. At worst, it is hackneyed, clichéed and laughable at the worst possible moments. Then again, some moments shine through as delicate and subtle. I am unsurprised to learn that most of these were added specifically for the Kiwami remake to give it some depth.
Ryu ga Gotoku studio has apparently come a long way since the dawn of this franchise, and I have much left of the Kazuma Kiryu saga to live through. I refuse to believe I'll never again experience anything close to that Yakuza perfection I witnessed with that prequel. It even happened here, but only in short bursts. It felt comforting, like coming back after a long time away from home. That is what I choose to take away from Yakuza Kiwami, and for that I am grateful.
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