Yakuza Kiwami 3 constantly finds ways to disappoint

Reviewing a game is ultimately just the process of trying to verbalize an emotional reaction to art. This sounds easy, but you are also trying to inform people of the technical aspects: how long is it, how does it run, stuff like that. Much like games themselves, reviews are a medium where art meets commerce. This sometimes makes it really hard to boil all those emotions and facts down into a score. My feelings on Cairn are so much more complicated than the 95/100 I gave it. That said – having completed every substory, leveled up every ability, maxed out my Daddy and Baddie Ranks, cleared every Survival Hell floor, beat every coliseum challenger – Yakuza Kiwami 3 is 20/100, a 2/10. It’s a one-star game.

Verbalizing that is hard. I love Like a Dragon, it is my favorite video game franchise. It has made me reflect on how I think about masculinity, femininity, and gender. It’s made me interrogate my politics, and believe that I could do anything I set my mind to if I am willing to reach out to others for help. That’s why it hurts even more to reckon with the fact that Yakuza Kiwami 3 is a failure on nearly every level. While the original Yakuza 3 was never my favorite in the franchise (the clunky controls and slower pace were a harsh adjustment coming off of Kiwami 2), as a remake, Kiwami 3 takes the most emotionally important game in the series and grinds off all the charm and personality, only to replace it with filler side content, objectionable recasting, anachronistic character beats, and retcons that break the series’ long-running continuity, leaving me dreading the future of the series.

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If only Yakuza Kiwami 3 was closer to this line.

Hard Knock Life

It is really hard to single out any one fatal flaw with Yakuza Kiwami 3. If this is your first ever Yakuza game, it might seem serviceable in some respects. Like a long-suffering Pokémon fan begging Game Freak to just add voice acting and bring those games in line with modern expectations, I left K3 wondering if Ryu Ga Gotoku has any awareness or urge to address long-festering misgivings. As it stands, it feels like the studio is more than content to go through the motions while introducing a handful of new half-baked ideas to a series that is clearly not a top priority right now.

One of Kiwami 3’s biggest problems is practically ever-present. Its combat system is a massive downgrade from both the original and recent games in the series. The 3D brawler action of Like A Dragon has always been extremely iterative; heat moves and animations frequently re-used and re-tooled to work within a new structure. In K3, that structure takes the form of the Ryuku Style, inspired by Okinawan martial arts, weapons, and tools, and Dragon of Dojima: Kiwami Style, which is a mishmash of moves from the original Yakuza 3 and other Dragon Engine games like* Kiwami 2, 6*, and The Man Who Erased His Name.

The Ryuku Style feels serviceable, insofar as binding different weapons to different face buttons makes combo-ing look flashy, but it is maybe the most mashy combat the series has ever seen and often feels like a less-demanding version of the Agent Style from The Man Who Erased His Name. Dragon of Dojima: Kiwami Style fares much worse; it simply doesn’t feel good. It feels laborious in a way that Kiryu never really has before, and moves just don’t flow as you’d expect. Mine (in Dark Ties) also has his own fighting style, which feels like a severely stripped back combination of Yagami’s styles in Lost Judgment (which will become a problem later).

However, the biggest problem with K3’s combat isn’t the styles — it’s the introduction of the Aura mechanic. The original Yakuza 3 has become somewhat notorious over the years for just how much enemies will block your attacks. This can be circumvented with grab, but it can be very frustrating in the flow of combat and has earned the game the nickname of “Blockuza” among fans. Later games quickly rectified this poor balancing, but, in what I can only assume is a misguided homage to the original, RGG has introduced the Aura system. Certain enemies will emanate an effects-laden aura, and while they do, any damage against them is massively reduced, and they cannot be stunned. In a brawler game where you are juggling large groups of enemies, this invisible guard break mechanic is nothing short of a slog as you wail at enemies who hardly attack you but barely take any damage.

As a counter to this, another long-running combat mechanic has been changed. Previously, when you used the same heat move on an enemy multiple times in a row, its effectiveness would greatly decrease, encouraging you to set up different heat actions so you always do the most damage possible. That doesn’t happen in K3, assumedly so you have a less time-intensive way of chipping down the health of enemies with Aura. However, both of Kiryu’s movesets (and Mine’s) have noticeably fewer heat moves available than previous styles, meaning you will see the same easy-to-execute flying kick or nunchuck barrage over, and over… and over again. Never before has Yakuza’s brawling felt less inspired and more like a battle of attrition, and it makes the act of beating up dirtbags criminally dull.

Can’t Be Ignored

I should probably address the elephant in the room, as it came up in my preview of this game, and it will come up later: the casting of Teruyuki Kagawa as fan-favorite recurring villain Goh Hamazaki. In that preview, I described the actor’s inclusion in the game as “a stain on the franchise.” Alongside outlining my frustration with the casting an actor who had admitted to inappropriately touching a woman in 2019, I also highlighted that RGG has, in fact, recast roles in games in the run-up to a release following controversy.

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The decision to recast Goh Hamazaki with Teruyuki Kagawa is a real shame.

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Especially as a lot of the story beats tread familiar ground.

Following Judgment’s 2018 release in Japan, the game’s sales were halted in March of 2019 after an actor in that game, Pierre Taki, was arrested for cocaine possession and use. Taki’s voice and likeness were replaced by the time the game released worldwide.

I brought that up in a vain hope that my voice, along with the voices of other journalists and fans criticizing the inclusion of Kagawa, might be enough to see RGG implement a similar change in Kiwami 3. It clearly hasn’t. As a result, every time he shows up onscreen, I feel deeply embarrassed.

In the Dark Ties prequel story that is included with Yakuza Kiwami 3, we see how Mine joined Kanda’s family. One of the two bits of major side content in that story is called Kanda Damage Control. It sees Mine going around Kamurocho doing good deeds under Kanda’s name to try to rehabilitate his image after he finishes his prison sentence for sexual assault. The player is rather literally cleaning up the image of a known sex pest. By casting Kagawa as Hamazaki, Kiwami 3 doesn’t feel much different.

Suffering Substories

Now, I am very capable of analyzing problematic art. The problem is that when I start doing that in the case of Yakuza Kiwami 3, my feelings only sour further. When you consider how well Yakuza’s usual side content has been regarded, K3’s distractions feel, at best, like an afterthought. While most Yakuza games have half a dozen stand-out substories, virtually none of Kiwami 3’s garnered much more than a half-hearted guffaw out of me. Several of them are retreads of sub-stories seen in Kiwami 2, which is not unusual for the series, but those too, failed to find any interesting twists on conventions.

You will also find yourself running Morning Glory’s, the orphanage owned by Kiryu. I would say this side activity is the most enjoyable, but it’s almost beat-for-beat the exact same set of farming mini-games found in the much more charming Like A Dragon Ishin! The highlight of this mode is getting to see more of Kiryu’s interactions with his adopted children, but several of these blur together, and at least three end with creepy men threatening to abduct or hurt one of the kids and Kiryu stepping in at the last minute. They aren’t terrible, but when RGG spoke about expanding the story of the children Kiryu cares so much for, I thought we’d get a little more in terms of novel stories and experiences.

The second major side activity is the Bad Boy Dragon mode. This mode sees Kiryu join a women-led biker gang, not as its leader, but as an ally that will help them get stronger and face their own demons. It’s a promising setup; however, any enjoyment you might find in it is quickly drained. It would be the most repetitive content in Yakuza if it weren’t for the main side activity in Dark Ties. This mode, which you have to play a certain number of times to progress the already infamously slow Chapters 2 and 3, will see you recruit baddies, split them into groups, and drive your bikes down the same four lanes of shipping containers as you fight waves of enemies, time and again. You will do nearly a dozen of these fights, all on the same map, with the only shake-up being the occasional large-scale setpieces where everyone fights in a school gym or a Yokohama car park for some reason.

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Kiryu’s new side activities are laborious at best.

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While Mine’s in Dark Ties may be the most repetitive side activity in the series.

The final large chunk of side content in the package, and by far the most padded, is Mine’s Survival Hell challenge in Dark Ties. The game presents this mode as somewhere between a roguelike and an extraction brawler, where you can lose what you collect, but what it actually entails is tracking and backtracking around one of four massive sewer maps under time pressure to roundhouse kick gongs before fighting a final boss. Every time you kick a gong, enemies will receive a massive damage-resistant percentage increase, and the only way to counter it is to collect “Gospels,” which upgrade your damage (or a handful of other mostly useless abilities) when partaking in Survival Hell. There is no way to collect all the damage gospels you’ll need to clear the next floor in one run, so you’ll have to farm each floor multiple times, all with a much less fleshed-out fighting style. Dark Ties is about a three-hour campaign if you play it straight through. I played roughly five hours of this barebones and repetitive mode just to see if there was any worthwhile reward. There was not.

Kiwami 3’s one saving grace is its emulated collection of classics. A bunch of playable Game Gear games is a neat inclusion, but things get really interesting in the Sega arcades. While these buildings may no longer exist in the real Kabukichō anymore, they are still bustling here. Fighting Vipers, Virtua Fighter 2, and Virtua Fighter 2.1 have all been in previous Yakuza games. The inclusion of near-unheard-of Model 3 games like* Motor Raid, Magical Truck Adventure*, and Emergency Call Ambulance is great, but the real standout is Slash Out, marking the first time that a Naomi board game has been made playable via official emulation.

Sign Of Things To Come

All of these issues cannot be laid at the feet of RGG, partly because this game’s credits imply that a significant amount of the work was outsourced to companies like Yuke’s (of AEW Fight Forever and dozens of WWE games fame) and SEGA, too. The publisher’s apparent push to make the Like A Dragon franchise a yearly staple is clearly straining RGG, which is also juggling development of Stranger Than Heaven and the new Virtua Fighter, as well as the Monkey Ball games.

That strain can be seen all over Kiwami 3 which is by far the least polished and glitchiest Yakuza game I’ve played. On several occasions, fights on the street with thugs ended for no apparent reason. Several backgrounds (most notably the surrounding cityscape when atop the Millennium Tower) seem to be missing basic detail, with voids into nothing visible between buildings. It feels like death by a thousand cuts, as things you’d assume were given in a Yakuza game just feel rushed and harried here. There are several cutscenes featuring unflattering camera angles that expose parts of characters that haven’t been fully modeled, and flat lighting in setpieces drains the game of the 2009 original’s tone and style.

RGG’s proprietary Dragon Engine is now almost a decade old after being introduced with Yakuza 6, and both its age and notorious struggles with scenes taking place in natural daylight are on full display in the seaside town of Okinawa. This isn’t helped by the uneven remastering this remake has received. While main character models continue to look great, background characters stand out more and more with each passing year, not to mention a few egregious uses of PS3 assets.

Kiwami 3 just doesn’t feel ready for release at times. Twice while doing homework with the kids in the orphanage, my game came crawling to a halt, eating up 99% of GPU usage until I quit the application. And within 20 minutes of launching the game in English, you will even encounter a clearly flubbed line delivery when Kiryu (voiced by Yong Yea) talks about people “hingering” his investigation while recapping the events of Yakuza 2. The end result is that* Kiwami 3* feels thoughtless and hurried in its approach to remaking Yakuza 3.

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Yakuza Kiwami 3 has a distinct lack of polish.

As Kiwami 3 struggles on towards its conclusion, this thoughtlessness shifts into something that can only be viewed as openly hostile to the original game’s narrative. Embargo restrictions mean I can’t actually detail any changes, but I will say that Kiwami 3 does its damndest to not only undermine any emotional resonance or stakes the original game’s ending has, but it does so in one of the most hamfisted and baffling ways possible, while thoroughly mucking up the series’ continuity. This ending overhaul, along with the bizarre narrative retconning of three side characters’ deaths in last year’s Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut, sends an extremely strong message. The narrative bite and consequential moments that the Yakuza franchise was built on are no longer a given, and it leads to stories that feel shockingly toothless and hollow compared to their original iterations.

Baka Mitai

There is precious little to enjoy about Yakuza Kiwami 3. It’s up there with the Silent Hill HD Collection as a remake/remaster that will have you questioning your love for the original in the first place. From problematic casting to combat that feels near mindless compared to the series’ usual output, incredibly dull side content to story changes that seem to actively disdain the work of the original writers, Yakuza Kiwami 3 lacks charm, heart, and a clear direction, resulting in a new low point for the venerable series.