Yakuza Kiwami

有基佬

I don't think I have ever played a more phoned-in game outside of modern world of warcraft. The story is almost beat-for-beat the same as both yakuza 0 and yakuza: like a dragon (7), which I played back-to back before this, so this is the third time I am experiencing the same story in a month and it's weird to say the least. I know this studio is famous for reusing assets, animations, environments, mechanics, etc. but reusing plot points and pacing from the other games is something else. I don't even mean that the series adds on to the previous plot points like a sequel should, they just [spoiler]outright kill off all the old characters and replace them with identical ones[/spoiler] that fit the same story beats. The yakuza series so far has the "meat" of a madlibs book, where after the first two times through you realize it's the EXACT same story just with different names penciled in. This series has a lot of soap opera elements, but has somehow transformed into adopting the worst practices of a soap opera where actor A who wanted too much money has their character killed off and is instantly replaced by actor B whose character is exactly the same plot-wise but is new so doesn't have the leverage for a raise yet. I can almost excuse the reuse, but the developers took it a step further to actually make the replacements objectively worse almost out of spite. Combat here is a carbon copy of yakuza 0, but: 1) ALL of the fluidity and cancels have been removed. 2) everything either costs or loses you heat now, and it's A LOT harder to build up, and heat moves become useless after being used once. 3) enemies spam block and have such permanent hyper / super armor it makes dragonball xenoverse 2 look fun. 4) everything knocks you onto the floor constantly. 5) bosses regenerate health for some reason. 6) past the midway point, superarmor and constant gun/knife enemies means the entire experience relies on finicky counters that go off maybe 1/10th of the time you intend them to. Remember the Komaki training for Majima in 0 where you had to counter 5 times in a row, and then it took an hour chugging health items and basic-attacking to gather heat to try again and get through the bad controls? That's this entire game. Oh, and for some reason the grind is turned up to 11 here. 0 was so fun you grinded on purpose to make the game longer so it wouldn't end, this one you grind to make the game shorter so you are free of the misery. Except the game REQUIRES that grind just to get powerful enough to progress, and so the whole thing feels like a prison. The original yakuza 1 was this last ditch effort by the Shenmue and Phantasy Star Online teams to keep their jobs after sega got out of the console business. The original yakuza therefore was an "adult horror" game where you were a wronged, out-of-shape 37 year old betrayed by the world and all of your friends, all alone except for having to care for a young child amidst all the mess as your past comes to bite you. It was compelling, relatable, the developer's fears and desires about getting older without a sense of security all melded into a story about Real Life. How can you give a Child security when you have none for yourself? Well, you fight for it, not for yourself but for them. You earned the pain, they didn't. This game somehow takes a layup of one of the most compelling stories in gaming, that took a low-budget game about adult single-parenting into a multi-billion dollar franchise, and somehow ruins it. All the gravitas and sweetness of the original? Replaced by cartoonish "references" to yakuza 0, except ALL of the meaningful characters from 0 [spoiler]are killed unceremoniously or character assassinated[/spoiler] in the first half-hour. Meaning all of the story beats in 0 are rendered moot. In comes slapstick humor and more fantasy elements, just now drenched in "references" to yakuza 0 being relegated to "hey, remember that sidequest? Anyways, back to grinding colosseum so punks on the street don't one-shot you." "Groundbreaking single-dad sim" on the ps2 then is completely retooled into "grindy paycheck-cashing 'adventure game'" on the ps3 / ps4. What's worse, the only functional part of the gameplay, the "majima everywhere system" (which itself is just a load of "hey remember this majima sidequest from 0!" instead) is itself invalidated by the story ([spoiler]majima gets unceremoniously stabbed and appears to die in a main story cutscene right near the start[/spoiler]) but don't worry he's right there 30 seconds later in overworld gameplay wearing a dress wanting to fight you. Oh, then he gets hyper-armor too, right around the time his moveset stops having variations. All of this happens about a third of the game in, which means two-thirds of the game is bandaged with hyperarmor to cover up the fact the devs gave up on the game by then. The story has some really interesting bits (the parts carried over from the original ps2 game verbatim), but EVERYTHING else here is just a carbon copy of 0 but "what if we ruined it?" It really seems that this was made by the "b team" while the full team was off doing yakuza 6, and it seems the b team wanted to purposely make a bad game so they would be able to do something else other than remake yakuza 3 over and over again under a new names.