izigame.me

First Yakuza game I've ever played and I'm glad I did. Here's the rundown:
COOLS:
+ Dialogue and overall writing are amazing. Main story is super serious while the side stuff is usually really silly, and they SOMEHOW make it work instead of feeling dissonant.
Funny, engaging and they know how to twist expectations.
+ Looks great. You spend a lot of time conversing, so they made sure to make good-looking faces, poses and expressions.
+ The location of Kamurocho feels alive and booming. The whole thing feels thematically on point for the 80's, the time this game takes place in.
+ Combat is good. It's a standard 3D beat-em-up with some flair. Plays best on a gamepad. Controls are easy, you can switch between 3 fighting styles and it's mostly about using your Heat (power meter) in the most advantageous ways. This includes AMAZING animations for the dozens of finishing moves the protagonists have.
+ Music is SO FRIGGIN GOOD OMG. Fantastic OST.
+ Games with multiple protagonists are usually a miss for me, but here they managed to juggle them well. They fight similarly and their stories manage to intertwine quite smoothly.
+ Side stories and minigames are fleshed out. Not all of them are fun (I dislike gambling and baseball, but bowling and dancing are super fun) but they definitely managed to pack this game to the brim with content to kill time with.
+ Doing said sidequests and earning money actually comes with great rewards, something a lot of games forego. Also has a lot of content for the completionist among us, like me!
+ Voice acting is great too. Japanese voices with properly done English subtitles. It's a treat seeing it done this well.
+ As far as I could tell, nearly bugless. I never ran into any problems with the game itself.
NOT-SO-COOLS
- The story is compelling and feels important. However, this means I had no idea I even had time to do most of the side-stuff since the main story is so pressing and it feels like you shouldn't be doing anything else.
- Combat is rather stale early on. You'll need to invest a lot in the combat skill trees to get some cool moves that increase your options to deal with enemies. It takes some time for it to become really fun
- On that same note, cheesing is also part of how you get through tough fights. Beast mode Kiryu and Breaker mode Majima are how you get through big crowds, expect to rely on them a lot. Also chugging health drinks during any boss fight is a bit of a must..
- The "Power/Heat Move" button is the same as the regular power attack button. Making it so you often can't attack enemies on the floor when you want to preserve heat, or you get punished when you try to counter or somesuch. Unreliable. Could've just made it a different button.
- It's hard to properly target specific enemies, sometimes the protag seems to have a will on his own during fights. Gun enemies are extremely annoying and hard to deal with, grinding most fights to a halt until they're defeated. "Fast" enemies can stunlock you into frustrating scenario's.
- Some minigames are trash imo. Cafights are dumb rng. Baseball is way too hard. Pool's opponent AI is way too good. I have no idea how to play Shogi or Mahjong and their in-game explanations don't help one bit. So that's about 40% of the side content I don't care for. Can't expect to love it all, but checking the web I've found most people agree with me on this, so it's still a point against it.
- The fanservice is basic and sometimes kinda cringe. But that's just my taste.
So all-in-all, fantastic game. Play it for the story, comedy and the heavy gang violence, but don't expect everything about the game to have the same amount of quality and fun.
Go in without too much expectations and I'll think you'll get a lot of surprises that will make you laugh and feel a whole range of other emotions like confusion, arousal(?) and HOT BLOODY RAGE!
Never played a Yakuza game? Give this one a go!
Thank you for reading and if you have any questions please leave them in the comments! Cheers!