Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties

The game is really good. Great even. If you have fun playing Yakuza games you will most likely enjoy this. It's a lower budget Gaiden title and it definitely shows, but the remake of 3 is well done and the Dark Ties side game, though short, is very fun as well. There's a lot of content to be had here, and I think it's worth full price if you love these games. If not, just wait for a sale. No big. That concludes my review of the game itself, and the rest of this review will be a rant about the once-great but now insufferable fanbase of Yakuza and how it's turned in to a parody of the terminally online, hate-fueled stan communities that plague the modern internet. You'll notice a trend in the negative Steam reviews. A few have salient criticism about the game itself, but most are cringey whiners pretending to fight a disingenuous culture war. Most of the negative reviews are complaining about the sex offender casting, the de-listing of the original Y3, or pining for the days of their golden boy Nagoshi (who, side note, just wasted 5 years and tens of millions of dollars making a basic looking Yakuza clone that still didn't even have a playable build before getting cancelled after he asked for 44 million more dollars). These negative reviews, of course, all have dozens upon dozens of hours played in Kiwami 3, showing a lack of any real conviction and that they don't actually care about any of these issues they repeat ad nauseum. This is a series whose fans still play the hell out of all of these games, but b**ch about them incessantly and pretend like it's because they're fighting for some abstract greater good. It's exhausting. The revisionist history that's sprung up around the original Yakuza 3 is hilarious. Up until even 6 months ago, it was agreed that it was the black sheep of the series. The hardest to get through. The most frustrating. Everyone rushed through it to get to the better games. But now suddenly since the most vocal section of the fanbase has collectively decided that "anything after Like a Dragon sucks, actually", it's a precious baby that must be protected at all costs. Compared to Kiwami 3, it's an objectively broken mess and anyone saying it's somehow better than the remake loses any credibility immediately. Everyone suddenly cares about a retcon that ultimately is not a big deal. They lack any kind of imagination, like the possibility of anything playing out differently in future remakes breaks their brain. They clutch their pearls and act like this series is some high art that shan't be touched. I assure you: It is not. It is a melodramatic Japanese crime drama with the goofiest s**t imaginable and it has been this way for decades. Things get changed, retconned, and re-made constantly and always have, dating back to even the earliest entries. Get over it, this isn't Shakespeare. I'm begging. Pleading. If you hate what Yakuza is now, either re-evaluate what you THINK it should be, or just stop. Stop playing. Play any of the other thousands of games out there. But I already know you won't. It's only a matter of time before the people throwing their last shred of hype behind Stranger than Heaven turn on it and say that actually... it sucks too! They'll then log 90+ hours and post their "Not Recommended" review about how great Yakuza used to be and how much RGG is ruining their life while continuing to be sucked ever downward in to an eternally miserable vortex of their own making.