I know this has been beaten into the ground but I always love when the story has someone be like “So the Dragon of Dojima will finally bloody his hands with a kill…” when I’ve thrown people off of 15 story buildings, stabbed a guy in the gut with a knife and then kicked the knife deeper into him, and blown up a helicopter with a rocket launcher within the last 5 minutes of the game
Kiryu goes to prison for 3 years so he can have clean hands and spend the remainder of his days guilt free with the orphanage. Within 24 hours of release he’s slamming chinpira punks’ heads in car doors in Kamurocho and is embroiled in a turf war between the Tojo and the Triad and it MAKES SENSE
In Onomichi when you are walking around with Haruto in your arms you can still get into random street fights with punks. There’s a little animation that plays where Kiryu hands this baby over to a random passerby so he can beat their heads in that made me laugh every time.
I loved everything about Onomichi and the Hirose clan and could play another whole game with them. I loved that you get little team heat attacks with them where Kiryu tees someone up for Nagumo or Yuta or whoever to finish them. Really fun little storytelling beat imo especially with how many enemies start getting thrown at you and how quickly they can kill you (on hard mode) at the end so having your bros rolling with you as backup is a cool feeling.
Just me rambling about the ending - I honestly loved the game and its probably my favorite besides Y0, but the ending feels like a copoout - the ENTIRE arc of Y5 is that Kiryu CANT just disappear and be by himself, even though he seems like a big bad stone faced killer, he gets as depressed and lonely and sad as anyone when away from his family, and then as mentioned above he’s going to PRISON for 3 years so he can clear his conscience or something (I dunno, the way the Yakuza games use “going to prison” has never really made sense to me) before riding off into the sunset. Then when offered a large sum of money to basically just go away to Okinawa forever he instead blows the guy off and instead makes him fake his death certificate?? Like I get that Kiryu pukes at the idea of being bought off but he could have just not taken the money? I think the orphanage financials are basically fine because of the events of Y3 (it’s on free Tojo land) and Y5 (Park offered to pay all of the bills for the orphanage forever as long as Haruka came to work for her as a star). I guess the generous reading is that he knows his life is going to be miserable but he’s making the choice anyways because he also knows that he just cannot quit the Tojo and their bullshit but like can’t he just go to prison again for a few years or something???
I loved Onomichi more than any other location in the series and for some reason an image of the red traffic (train?) lights at night have stuck with me since it came out.
Maybe Kiryu took after his own foster father who also seemed to be barely there except for that time he was being tortured to death by the triads or part of some typically convoluted plan to save the Tojo/pull it out of shit that it started.
This big boy just took multiple sledgehammer blows to his back in order to save a doghouse, making him the greatest hero of all times.
Yakuza 3 is a masterpiece when it is incredibly mundane or melodramatic and a total bore whenever it tries to be a serious crime drama.
I love it. Though I’m sure soon I’ll hate it, because they’ll start talking about gangs and spies again.
EDIT: INSTEAD OF WASTING MY TIME ON SPOOK BULLSHIT THEY HAD AN OLD MAN SUPLEX A FUCKING BULL WHICH IS TOTALLY BELIEVABLE CUZ HE WAS POWERED BY THE WORDS OF HIS PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED TO BE MUTE DAUGHTER AND NOW MY LIL BRO IS DYING IN A BULLRING AND KIRYU IS CRYING I LOVE THIS SO MUCH!!!
Don’t worry, even the big plot there ends up ridiculous because the CIA, or a really silly cartoonish version of them end up involved and no it doesn’t go anywhere really.
Having now played all 7 of the Kiryu games I honestly think that this whole sequence in Okinawa was my absolute favorite. They go back to this well in Y6 and it’s awesome there too. IMO the “Kiryu integrates into a small time yakuza outfit and starts solving their problems/dragging them into WAY bigger problems” works so well I kind of just wish it happened in every game.
I’m still laughing that two separate games have identical twins/body doubles as a major plot point, i love these games
I’m kind of hungering for some more Kamurocho action. Was that Kimutaku spinoff Judgement any good? I think I remember @Rudie hating it but maybe he ended up liking it but I can’t seem to find the post. Or should I go back and play Way of the Samurai? Or maybe Mafia 3?
Judgment is a bit of a mixed bag. I really loved being a private eye doing private eye things in Kamurocho but found that the combat was pretty mindless once you get a specific upgrade that just does guaranteed massive damage. As has been mentioned it takes forever for the story to pick up but it has one of the most dramatic final bosses in the series. Tailing missions are excruciatingly slow so if you don’t like tailing people in games it might affect your momentum through the game.
The baseball player in 5 (can’t remember their name) was the point in the series where I felt like they just wanted to get away from all the Kiryu stuff and just make new stories. Judgment feels like this, as does Yakuza 7 (although I have yet to play it).
Yeah i still have to finish Judgement, but I appreciate how it is slightly different Kamurocho, as it feels like a new perspective on the area a bit, and yeah, Motor Raid rules.
I spent a lot of time on the VR board game where each space on the board was a mini-battle or 3rd-ps drone sequence, and you could rake in enough cash to make any other method of moneymaking useless. Also agreed on Motor Raid. We need more Sega arcade ports. Drone racing is fun until the speeds and obstacle courses became too much for me to keep up with.
I’ve been looking for this game everywhere recently, but it seems to have completely disappeared from all stores. Except in one place where it was still full price and I dunno if it’s worth that much at this point.
maybe I missed something in language but I did the VR thing twice and the second time took like 30 minutes and I decided to never do that timewaste again.
I never had money troubles.
The story is pretty well paced but all of the side stuff I just felt my life ticking away at all the dead air and loading. And the tailing people thing is good like twice.
I think what made it worthwhile was buying the upgrades you could use to get the dice to stop rolling so you land on a square with the gold bonus cat to get more money. But yeah, there isn’t a need to make much money unless you want to do everything. I am someone who enjoys being a weirdo completionist with these games and would not recommend that anyone approach them like this as it is definitely not respectful of your time.
I’m pretty far into Kiwami 2 and I think switching up the combat for 7 is the best thing they could have done. The Yakuza 6/kiwami 2 combat feels like a backwards step to me. Obviously, the yakuza combat has never been ‘great’, but I feel that zero really hit a sweet spot with all the styles and a lot of cool heat moves. Plus all the money flying everywhere. It felt over the top enough, without going truly overboard.
The new engine tries to combine all the styles or at least turns beast mode into heat mode. But it just feels a bit off and unsatisfying.
