LogFAQs > #948446622

Not Rated: Yakuza Kiwami

I didn't like Yakuza Kiwami much. It's the worse of the two Yakuza games I played by a good margin, largely owing to its weaker story and weaker consistency of tone.

The charm of Yakuza, from what I've gathered, is the spectacle and the zaniness. While Yakuza 0 (we'll get around to it) pulled these things off with no issue, Kiwami didn't hit the mark for me. It attempted spectacle with its literally explosive ending, but it was too unbelievable to allow me to continue suspending disbelief, and it couldn't find the sweet spot between taking itself seriously and being a caricature.

If you haven't played a Yakuza game yet, gameplay consists of a standard beat 'em up that you can largely mash your way through with a bunch of minigames to toy with whenever you want. It's not very engaging, there's too many throwaway minigames, and typically the better minigames are games you could go play outside of Yakuza (such as Koi-koi and Mahjong). But this isn't really what Yakuza is all about anyways, so I could forgive shortcomings in this department if the story made up for it. It doesn't.

I'll leave this game unrated because it's quite faithfully based on the original Yakuza. I realize I'm judging what is basically a game from 2005 under standards from 2020, so I'm likely being unfair to it. As a remake, I'm sure it does its job just fine.

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Got a brand new blues that I can't explain