i told myself that i would beat all the main Yakuza games this year and im about halfway through the 3rd one today (already beat 0, 1-Kiwami, 2-Kiwami)
i think i’m surprised at myself that despite being at my oldest and most busy with IRL stuff, i have still managed to find time to go through these insanely long and stuffed games with all these crazy sub stories, though im starting to feel a bit of a fatigue, worried that i beat the games with my favorite story (0) and my favorite upgrade/fighting mechanics (2Kiwami) too early and will have to go through 3, 4, 5 and 6 before i get to one that i know i like (Like a Dragon, a game i played and almost beat a few years ago) and i just looked up that the Just the Story time for 5 is like 37 hours?? why did i start doing this?? i think the only reason im able to do shy of this is because i can play all of these on my Steam Deck and therefor get a lot of time in while watching/doing other stuff
and even after Like a Dragon there’s still Infinite Wealth and the Man Who Erased his name (i ain’t doing any of the other ones)
if I were to say, uh, skip some of these games and watch cutscenes on youtube, which entries would i miss the least by doing this? i might try to play all of them but beating all of them seems so daunting when confronted with all this data but if there is a sub story or mini game that feels essential, i will go for it
I think you are realizing that the Yakuza games do not lend themselves well at all to marathoning (though pretty much everyone who comes to the series late, including me, start by thinking to go through the games one after another) and are best taken individually when you are in the mood, even if it takes years.
I think any of the games can be watched on youtube but playing 3/4/5 all feel a little creaky at this point, and switching between multiple player characters/locations in 4/5 doesn’t add much, so those would be the ones I’d recommend skipping if you really felt like sticking to your goal.
I thought 6 itself was really fun and had one of the better told stories even if it makes no sense in the grander narrative.
thank you so much y’all, this is what i was hoping for. 3 is fairly short comparatively to the others so i might finish that but it sounds like skipping 4 and 5 won’t be that big of a deal. I hear 6 is good but it’s unsupported on Steam Deck at the moment so i might try to play a little on Xbox just to see before moving on to the Like a Dragon era
there are things from all the games that i have played that i like though, i love the whole vibe of this series but yes i am learning that maybe this marathon style was a bad idea (i knew it was a bad idea and still tried it anyways)
in my head these games are the same energy as the supermarket detective procedurals my wife likes to read so they have been easy to digest like that
You might have already looked into this and found it not to be the case with Y6, but a lot of games that work perfectly well on Steam Deck are actually not officially supported. Worth looking into at least.
I have always expected that finishing 0, kiwami, kiwami 2, 6, and 7, and at least trying all the others would take me about 10 years. So far I’m at 2 years and I’ve only finished 0 and gotten partway through 7 so I think I’m right on the money
5 basically saved the franchise and is a lot of fun but it did so in a way that is mainly appreciable if you stuck with it through 3 and 4, and if you’ve already played 0/1/2/6, that’s a lot of yakuza
Yeah 5 is where it finally starts resembling the games I wholly liked but it doesn’t really come together in the end. I loved driving a taxi and being an idol and hunting but in like bite sized portions. Took me over a year to beat that thing. Woulda gone nuts if I’d marathoned it.
The game seems to have an isolationist bent as your boss wants to kill him to stop Japan from opening up to foreign entities, but I don’t know if that’s going to be the main perspective of the game or of just that faction. But it’s interesting to be fighting western powers in a mass market big budget action game.
Also the game lets you swim underwater, a rarity for open world games. There are rocks and small islands and stuff off the coast of Japan and you can just swim to them. You can also explore broken geometry and drown.
To pick a different option, seeing as a year is an arbitrary set of time you can always change it to finishing them over a two (or more~) year period instead.
Swery saw True Detective Season 1 and went “I can rip this off too.”
He’s very diverse in the range of genders, backgrounds, and dispositions that he can treat poorly.
Realize this one did not start with “This game was made by diverse backgrounds” and A Good Life did.
The accents were mostly right, except they sounded like Houston not rural Louisiana. And that it didn’t make any fucking sense.
Thank you Steam Refund policy I could finally cure the demon that was “play the other game set in The Deep South” after that cyberpunk point and click I also thought was miserable.
