Not all heroes wear capes, some wear seriously outdated suits.
It's been a long road getting to this point for both myself and Yakuza's main star Kiryu Kazama. Like many people I got into this series with Yakuza 0 through word of mouth in 2017 and wondered what I had missed all that time. There simply isn't another game series like it. It's a Frankenstein's monster whose separate parts on paper don't feel like they should work but amalgamated together they create something magical. They are serious crime dramas, only they are off beat comedies. They are beat 'em ups yet also adventure games, RPGs and dating simulators. It's all of these things and yet none of them. Not all it's ideas work, when they throw so much at the wall some things don't always stick but without fail for me they are always emotional, hilarious and entertaining.
The series' big selling point to me though is actually it's world design. This series along with Deus Ex made me realise I don't dislike open worlds, I dislike vast areas for the sake of being vast with empty meaningless content, sometimes less is more. Yakuza games are open worlds done right, not gigantic bloated icon maps usually used for those descriptions but smaller denser hubs. Locations have meaning, they have personality, the cities feel like characters in the game as much as the cast. If the game tells me to go to a shop or street I normally know where it is without having to bring up a map. They are full of life, small compact and focused.
Yakuza 6's story follows this same thought, whether it was because this was the first game on the Dragon Engine at the time meaning they cut back I don't know but I appreciated the sharper focus on Kiryu rather than the overly large games before that were getting a bit too big for themselves. Kiryu was really the heart of this game, it's his personal story about his own values and dedication to family. Hard to discuss without spoilers but whilst the overall story wasn't quite my cup of tea generally resulting in some pacing issues it still has some fantastic characters, moments and voice acting. This is partially because Yakuza's cinematography for it's cutscenes are a step above most games to me. The camera angles, facial details and expressions have always been extremely impressive but I truly noticed it here.
Like every Yakuza game the side content is often as important as the linear main story. Yakuza 6 scales back on this too but there is still a wealth of content here I spent a lot of my 70 hours playing through on. Spear fishing in an underwater on rails shooter, building up a clan for street fights in a mini strategy game, helping a small baseball team beat their countryside rivals (I'm not into baseball but this is making me consider some other games for it) as well as the usual suspects like cabaret clubs, video chat dating, mahjong and arcade games. It even has the full arcade game of Virtua Fighter 5 as optional content which is pretty crazy as far as a throw away mini game is concerned.
Honestly except some story beats I just don't have anything negative to say about this game. The combat is a little simpler than some other titles though that doesn't concern me much as the moment to moment narrative beats and atmosphere are the core to the series to me. I started it because I needed to play it to play Gaiden as I skipped from 5 to 7 initially but then had a feeling of regret I hadn't played it sooner as the Yakuza magic took hold of me. I love the world, the characters, the side content, exploring and taking in the sights of the locations. Yakuza as I discussed is a lot of things but to someone who grew up as a Sega fan it really shows to me that they still have that spark that made me a fan of theirs in the first place and may it long continue.
+ Hiroshima is a great new location.
+ Cinematography and voice acting are superb.
+ Baseball, spear fishing and clan fighting are pretty fun side content.
+ It's Yakuza.
- Storyline is a little up and down.
It's been a long road getting to this point for both myself and Yakuza's main star Kiryu Kazama. Like many people I got into this series with Yakuza 0 through word of mouth in 2017 and wondered what I had missed all that time. There simply isn't another game series like it. It's a Frankenstein's monster whose separate parts on paper don't feel like they should work but amalgamated together they create something magical. They are serious crime dramas, only they are off beat comedies. They are beat 'em ups yet also adventure games, RPGs and dating simulators. It's all of these things and yet none of them. Not all it's ideas work, when they throw so much at the wall some things don't always stick but without fail for me they are always emotional, hilarious and entertaining.
The series' big selling point to me though is actually it's world design. This series along with Deus Ex made me realise I don't dislike open worlds, I dislike vast areas for the sake of being vast with empty meaningless content, sometimes less is more. Yakuza games are open worlds done right, not gigantic bloated icon maps usually used for those descriptions but smaller denser hubs. Locations have meaning, they have personality, the cities feel like characters in the game as much as the cast. If the game tells me to go to a shop or street I normally know where it is without having to bring up a map. They are full of life, small compact and focused.
Yakuza 6's story follows this same thought, whether it was because this was the first game on the Dragon Engine at the time meaning they cut back I don't know but I appreciated the sharper focus on Kiryu rather than the overly large games before that were getting a bit too big for themselves. Kiryu was really the heart of this game, it's his personal story about his own values and dedication to family. Hard to discuss without spoilers but whilst the overall story wasn't quite my cup of tea generally resulting in some pacing issues it still has some fantastic characters, moments and voice acting. This is partially because Yakuza's cinematography for it's cutscenes are a step above most games to me. The camera angles, facial details and expressions have always been extremely impressive but I truly noticed it here.
Like every Yakuza game the side content is often as important as the linear main story. Yakuza 6 scales back on this too but there is still a wealth of content here I spent a lot of my 70 hours playing through on. Spear fishing in an underwater on rails shooter, building up a clan for street fights in a mini strategy game, helping a small baseball team beat their countryside rivals (I'm not into baseball but this is making me consider some other games for it) as well as the usual suspects like cabaret clubs, video chat dating, mahjong and arcade games. It even has the full arcade game of Virtua Fighter 5 as optional content which is pretty crazy as far as a throw away mini game is concerned.
Honestly except some story beats I just don't have anything negative to say about this game. The combat is a little simpler than some other titles though that doesn't concern me much as the moment to moment narrative beats and atmosphere are the core to the series to me. I started it because I needed to play it to play Gaiden as I skipped from 5 to 7 initially but then had a feeling of regret I hadn't played it sooner as the Yakuza magic took hold of me. I love the world, the characters, the side content, exploring and taking in the sights of the locations. Yakuza as I discussed is a lot of things but to someone who grew up as a Sega fan it really shows to me that they still have that spark that made me a fan of theirs in the first place and may it long continue.
+ Hiroshima is a great new location.
+ Cinematography and voice acting are superb.
+ Baseball, spear fishing and clan fighting are pretty fun side content.
+ It's Yakuza.
- Storyline is a little up and down.
For me Yakuza 6 undoubtly has one of the weaker stories in the series, if not the weakest. But it's nontheless also one that pulls at your heartstrings, because it highlights once again Kiryu and his strong bond to his loved ones.
While I do not like certain aspects of the story, like Haruka's teenage pregnancy and the long search for the father that followed after, I could still enjoy it for what it was. But mostly because it was great to see how committed Kiryu is to his family. Papa Kiryu in Y3 was a sweet experience, so Grandpa Kiryu in Y6 is just as endearing and heartwarming to see. Just like in Y3, I like how the game switches from grandpa simulator to the usual Yakuza stuff we're used to and I honestly couldn't ask for more.
Kiryu and his ties and strong emotions towards his loved ones is a strong component of the series, so it's only natural that family bonds, especially fatherhood, and blood ties are the main aspect of Kiryu's final journey....or so I thought.
With the announcement of LAD Gaiden and LAD 8 it's clear that Kiryu's journey seems far from over and honestly? I'm very happy about that, because Kiryu is one of my favorite characters in all of gaming. The fact that LAD Gaiden will also feature the traditional Yakuza combat, which I really love and will dearly miss in future installments, makes me even more happy and excited.
While I do not like certain aspects of the story, like Haruka's teenage pregnancy and the long search for the father that followed after, I could still enjoy it for what it was. But mostly because it was great to see how committed Kiryu is to his family. Papa Kiryu in Y3 was a sweet experience, so Grandpa Kiryu in Y6 is just as endearing and heartwarming to see. Just like in Y3, I like how the game switches from grandpa simulator to the usual Yakuza stuff we're used to and I honestly couldn't ask for more.
Kiryu and his ties and strong emotions towards his loved ones is a strong component of the series, so it's only natural that family bonds, especially fatherhood, and blood ties are the main aspect of Kiryu's final journey....or so I thought.
With the announcement of LAD Gaiden and LAD 8 it's clear that Kiryu's journey seems far from over and honestly? I'm very happy about that, because Kiryu is one of my favorite characters in all of gaming. The fact that LAD Gaiden will also feature the traditional Yakuza combat, which I really love and will dearly miss in future installments, makes me even more happy and excited.
i';m makign him jump off a building over and over cus i think it's funny.. a twisted game that satisfies my twisted desires..
Demonstrates in perfect stride how this series has never had any clear idea for what they want Haruka to be, in such a way that it almost entirely uproots this whole story for me. My experience was more positive on this entry overall than it was with Yakuza 5, largely because its runtime is less than half of that game's torturously bloated length. This is a series that is at its most effective (to me) when it narrows its scope and focuses on the micro stories of its world’s inhabitants, rather than the endless vortex of clan warfare and revolving door system for cloak & dagger. It was honestly so refreshing that this was as stripped-back as it was. I see a lot of people almost rightfully decry the large swathes of Kamurocho being blocked off for what I’m assuming to be development timeframe reasons. It’s a shame not to see the Champion District in the shiny new Dragon Engine, but I’ll take a few bites out of a world map if it saves me tens of hours of playtime at this point.
Since much of the appeal of these games remains to me in its stunningly realised period piece virtual tourism, I’m always happy when they jumpscare me with an entirely new locale. Hiroshima’s gotta be my favourite in the series I’ve seen yet! It’s such a stunning portside town, coiling up a mountainside. It adds a level of verticality unseen in these games before, offering an incredibly scenic look into sleepy rural life in the Japanese afterglow. I’ll never personally have the funds to justify a trip to the country - so this series is about the best I’ll ever get, and it just doesn’t disappoint.
Alongside the Dragon Engine came some shifts to the gameplay I found very welcome (autosave 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯). I’m surprisingly keen on the revamped eatery system, better encouraging exploration and dining wherever possible for stat gains and tourism points. They fixed the rhythm game so the tracks aren’t bizarrely varying speeds. Also kind of hilarious to me how busted the dropkick is. Yaku 6 will throw so many mobs at you that it’ll almost feel like a musou game at points, and that attack felt like a Lu Bu finisher or something. The ragdolls are insanely fun too.
But yeah, the story was a miss for me. Broadly speaking, I’ve come to learn that you’re best off taking everything the Yakuza series says at absolute face value without an inch of scrutiny, because its platitudes about honour and family and determination tend to fall apart under even a non-prescription lens. It is so insane to me how Haruka spends 95% of this game in a vegetative state when she’s played such a pivotal role in setting the stage. As I mentioned, this series is terrified of scratching the surface of Haruka’s autonomy and growth into adulthood, god forbid she leaves the “Pure & Perfect Daughter” box she’s been bolted into. God forbid we see the romantic relationship between her and her partner blossom, her demonstrate her independence and stop being a mom for five minutes. It felt as though she learned next to nothing from her experiences in Yakuza 5 outside of the events in its final hour, once again sabotaging any attempt the game makes into having her stand up for herself and stop doing exactly as told. She’s stern but in the same way a Weeble is. And while Kiryu’s final letter demonstrated a touching degree of self-awareness w/rt his effect on the people around him, where he stands on family, etc, it was addressed to Daigo while Haruka was in the room lol.
Since much of the appeal of these games remains to me in its stunningly realised period piece virtual tourism, I’m always happy when they jumpscare me with an entirely new locale. Hiroshima’s gotta be my favourite in the series I’ve seen yet! It’s such a stunning portside town, coiling up a mountainside. It adds a level of verticality unseen in these games before, offering an incredibly scenic look into sleepy rural life in the Japanese afterglow. I’ll never personally have the funds to justify a trip to the country - so this series is about the best I’ll ever get, and it just doesn’t disappoint.
Alongside the Dragon Engine came some shifts to the gameplay I found very welcome (autosave 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯). I’m surprisingly keen on the revamped eatery system, better encouraging exploration and dining wherever possible for stat gains and tourism points. They fixed the rhythm game so the tracks aren’t bizarrely varying speeds. Also kind of hilarious to me how busted the dropkick is. Yaku 6 will throw so many mobs at you that it’ll almost feel like a musou game at points, and that attack felt like a Lu Bu finisher or something. The ragdolls are insanely fun too.
But yeah, the story was a miss for me. Broadly speaking, I’ve come to learn that you’re best off taking everything the Yakuza series says at absolute face value without an inch of scrutiny, because its platitudes about honour and family and determination tend to fall apart under even a non-prescription lens. It is so insane to me how Haruka spends 95% of this game in a vegetative state when she’s played such a pivotal role in setting the stage. As I mentioned, this series is terrified of scratching the surface of Haruka’s autonomy and growth into adulthood, god forbid she leaves the “Pure & Perfect Daughter” box she’s been bolted into. God forbid we see the romantic relationship between her and her partner blossom, her demonstrate her independence and stop being a mom for five minutes. It felt as though she learned next to nothing from her experiences in Yakuza 5 outside of the events in its final hour, once again sabotaging any attempt the game makes into having her stand up for herself and stop doing exactly as told. She’s stern but in the same way a Weeble is. And while Kiryu’s final letter demonstrated a touching degree of self-awareness w/rt his effect on the people around him, where he stands on family, etc, it was addressed to Daigo while Haruka was in the room lol.
Not the best Yakuza game out there, it was RGG's first game in the Dragon engine and so it has some teething problems, but still a very solid entry and a good end to the Kiryu saga. The story can get daunting at times but it has some incredible highs and lows and the ending is extremely bittersweet. The combat is decent enough but Kiwami 2 is more refined. Just use Extreme Heat in this game to beat every boss.
Overall, a solid entry and an enjoyable time, can be beaten pretty quickly but this was a great play.
Overall, a solid entry and an enjoyable time, can be beaten pretty quickly but this was a great play.
Yakuza 6 was a turning point in the series in more than one way, so I felt the urge to express my thoughts on the game I've had for a while now.
This is the first entry made with the 'Dragon Engine', which also was used in the newer games of the series like Yakuza 7 or the Judgment duology. It's notable for the more fluid combat and ragdoll mechanics, but also introduced small changes like directly being able to walk into street fights without having to sit through the loading screens disguised as intros. I won't go too much in-depth about this, since the review is about the game and not the engine :p
Let's just say it feels very obvious that Yakuza 6 was the first game to run on the Dragon Engine, as the combat is really wonky and a lot of heat action moves from the previous games are just missing, even simpler ones. People love to meme about Yakuza 3 enemies blocking all of your attacks, but it's honestly almost as bad in 6. Not to mention that fighting groups of enemies at once in this game is a disaster, since they WILL stun you. Repeatedly. Very fun. Fortunately the combat in general was fixed in later games and Kiryu got a proper Dragon Engine moveset in Kiwami 2.
After complaining about the combat for a while now, it's time to name the strong aspect of Yakuza 6 - the story. It might be very divisive in some regards, but in my opinion it's one of the best stories in the franchise and has lots of well written and memorable characters. Without giving away too much, it feels reminiscent of Yakuza 3's story, but in a new light.
The side content in this game... exists. All substories in this game are voiced, but I only found a handful of them actually interesting and memorable. Substories are always a subjective topic so your experience with them might differ from mine. Some other new side activities include spearfishing (rail shooter), the gym (press some buttons) and the Clan Creator, which I won't go in-depth about because I personally hate that minigame. To put it short, you deploy troops in battles to take down other troops, paired with a pretty generic and boring side storyline.
In conclusion, Yakuza 6 has a great story, but suffers from the annoying early Dragon Engine combat and the side stuff is mediocre at best. Not the best game for a cohesive Yakuza experience, but still a good finale for the Kiryu Saga.
(Also it's locked to 30 FPS on consoles, just a heads up :p)
This is the first entry made with the 'Dragon Engine', which also was used in the newer games of the series like Yakuza 7 or the Judgment duology. It's notable for the more fluid combat and ragdoll mechanics, but also introduced small changes like directly being able to walk into street fights without having to sit through the loading screens disguised as intros. I won't go too much in-depth about this, since the review is about the game and not the engine :p
Let's just say it feels very obvious that Yakuza 6 was the first game to run on the Dragon Engine, as the combat is really wonky and a lot of heat action moves from the previous games are just missing, even simpler ones. People love to meme about Yakuza 3 enemies blocking all of your attacks, but it's honestly almost as bad in 6. Not to mention that fighting groups of enemies at once in this game is a disaster, since they WILL stun you. Repeatedly. Very fun. Fortunately the combat in general was fixed in later games and Kiryu got a proper Dragon Engine moveset in Kiwami 2.
After complaining about the combat for a while now, it's time to name the strong aspect of Yakuza 6 - the story. It might be very divisive in some regards, but in my opinion it's one of the best stories in the franchise and has lots of well written and memorable characters. Without giving away too much, it feels reminiscent of Yakuza 3's story, but in a new light.
The side content in this game... exists. All substories in this game are voiced, but I only found a handful of them actually interesting and memorable. Substories are always a subjective topic so your experience with them might differ from mine. Some other new side activities include spearfishing (rail shooter), the gym (press some buttons) and the Clan Creator, which I won't go in-depth about because I personally hate that minigame. To put it short, you deploy troops in battles to take down other troops, paired with a pretty generic and boring side storyline.
In conclusion, Yakuza 6 has a great story, but suffers from the annoying early Dragon Engine combat and the side stuff is mediocre at best. Not the best game for a cohesive Yakuza experience, but still a good finale for the Kiryu Saga.
(Also it's locked to 30 FPS on consoles, just a heads up :p)
This game gets way too much hate considering how tightly written it is and how much personality Kiryu's able to exude here. He has an incredible emotional range and drops snarky comebacks like a cool grandpa that can beat up your bullies.
Yakuza 6 is gorgeous -- one of the nicest looking games in the franchise, with a revamped engine and a rich, organic soundtrack. The combat, while rushed, places an increased focus on realism and feels more fluid than the previous engine by giving you all sorts of directional kicks and crowd control tools.
6 parallels Yakuza 1 and 3 heavily and has an understated, yet very apparent reverence and respect for Kiryu's legacy and the several decade-long journey he's been through. While it lacks the impact of "team effort" present in a game like Yakuza 5, Kiryu at least ends things on a good note.
Yakuza 6 is gorgeous -- one of the nicest looking games in the franchise, with a revamped engine and a rich, organic soundtrack. The combat, while rushed, places an increased focus on realism and feels more fluid than the previous engine by giving you all sorts of directional kicks and crowd control tools.
6 parallels Yakuza 1 and 3 heavily and has an understated, yet very apparent reverence and respect for Kiryu's legacy and the several decade-long journey he's been through. While it lacks the impact of "team effort" present in a game like Yakuza 5, Kiryu at least ends things on a good note.
+the beginning and middle of the plot are by far better than what had come before, even more so than yakuza 0. the game focuses in on parent-child relationships with depressing results, putting kiryu's failures as a father figure into perspective through both the viewer's eyes and his own. rgg studio's skill in characterization has improved so much as they've continued to make games.
+the new combat is polarizing, but I've come to understand it as capturing what old yakuza combat was trying to replicate rather than what it actually felt like. dragon engine combat is extremely fluid and has made choosing the correct combos/finishers for certain situations more intuitive. this was an important feature in previous games as well but never directly mentioned, and here it's specifically mentioned in the tutorial and expanded to include things like high-low mixups. ground takedowns are out, but now you can punch people on the ground directly, which keeps the action flowing, and with carryable weapons removed heat actions can now be used repeatedly with no degredation in damage. top that off with plenty of new and returning abilities (is that tanemura's parry and diving punch finisher?), this is some great, exciting combat that makes the game feel more modern than previous entries.
+dungeon design is the best it's ever been, with each action stage having a gimmick that sets it apart from the others. it's still not anything complex, but it's absolutely better than room after room of enemies. some good ones are the helicopter turret sections towards the end of the game, and the dark mines under the shipyard on the edge of onomichi.
+autosave. oh my fucking god.
+performance-wise i know this was hard to play on old ps4s but on a pro honestly I only caught occasional frame drops. given how gorgeous this game is, I'm totally good with a locked 30fps, though I will say this was on 1080p. this is one of the first games I've tried playing at 4k, and while it seemed to run fine it looked pretty blurry; I would rather have a sharper look with some jaggies in 1080p.
+this isn't necessarily a standout group of substories given the games before it, but it's no slouch at all. most of the substories have a more grounded feel, esp since many of them are done through making friends at new gaudi as well as interacting with the hostesses (admittedly I didn't play any cabaret).
+after so many games reusing the same minigames, yakuza 6 finally recreates a couple from scratch. while I of course love karaoke old and new, you'd have to be willingly ignorant to pretend like old karaoke isn't terrible as a rhythm game... new karaoke fixes that with a proper scrolling field of notes and measure markers. darts also returns, with a much slicker presentation and more legible gameplay that doesn't involve a giant ugly hand in the middle of the screen.
+baseball also returns, tho similar to shinada's side story incarnation in many respects. what really elevates it tho is the fact that a full baseball team management sim has been added, giving this side story levels of content in all but name. actually playing the games mostly just involves sitting and watching a fast-forwarded play-by-play, but it does feel tense when you finally are at bat with bases loaded, and even with no trophy involved I sat through the main missions and filled out the team just because of how cool it is as a concept.
+the actual side story here is clan creator... I was really not looking forward to this after playing kiwami 2 clan creator but much to my surprise this is much more like a reverse tower defense than the RTS-lite kiwami 2 variant. it doesn't really take much strategy but it's not too long thanks to how short the missions were, and the villains have a dope vigilante-esque flair to them.
+the biggest surprise for me was fishing, spearfishing to be precise. this plays like a fully-fledged rail shooter with a high skill ceiling to raise score, different types of guns, treasure chests to shoot open, and a reload mechanic that forces the player to watch their ammo count carefully. the final shark boss is legit difficult and took me about four tries, though if needed you can also grind out levels in the minigame to lengthen your health bar.
+the live chatroom was the only thing I knew about this game for a long time, and god did it deliver. my roommate and I were laughing so hard at this thanks to the unnerving level of detail, from the trappings of the web browser to the hilarious screennames in the chat to kiryu chicken pecking the keyboard with one finger on each hand. it's not really interesting enough to warrant replays to be fair... but that didn't stop me from hopping in anri's chat a couple extra times LOL
+onomichi is so gorgeous... it has so many unique areas and such a cozy layout that it really feels like home, even tho kiryu doesn't get to hang around there for long.
+the baby soothing minigame is perfect, with just the right amount of annoying combined with a tiny little skill curve fitting the bill nicely. best of all: the designers were smart enough to only throw it in once and leave it at that, instead of annoying the player further.
+yakuza games fall back on the usual "run to objective marker to begin combat encounter and/or cutscene" progression insanely often, so the microfilm code puzzle really caught me off-guard. it's nothing too taxing for sure, but a little scavenger quest really goes a long way to spicing the main scenario up, and I'll remember that sequence without a doubt thanks to how unique it was for the series.
+the hunger gauge and the new exp system are some of the best mechanical upgrades to yakuza without a doubt thanks to how they incentivize doing a wide variety of activites as well as making sure to eat on a regular cycle. earlier games couldn't quite integrate these things into the gameplay loop but this system absolutely nailed it. to aid players in grinding, the RIZAP gym is available, and it's pretty nice for a couple of sessions as long as you're rock-solid on your knowledge of kamurocho cuisine.
+returning things I was happy to see: akiyama of course (he looks the most different to me out of all of the returning characters from the y5 engine), saigo and sodachi each as roaming bosses, pocket circuit fighter, florist of sai (as in I was happy not to see convenient plot device on legs trotted out again), morning glory (with new orphan character renders that far exceed the hideous ones from y3), amon, locker keys, health drinks (they're in the pawn shop now!! re: comments on other reviews I've seen claiming they don't exist), the sewers, date (with much more screen time than usual)
+all of the arcade games from yakuza 0 return along with virtua fighter 5 and puyo puyo. I didn't really touch these much from overexposure (I already played vf5 a fair bit right before starting this game when it was rereleased) but it's a great set of games
+new gaudi is a really swell time, with a solid conversation minigame that's easy to understand. it adds a nice set of systems overlayed on top of karaoke, darts, and having a couple drinks, and the associated substories are all fun. multiple bar patrons run shops around town as well!
-the story really falls apart in the last third or so, as the game lapses back into the usual yakuza tropes of trying to sort out the spaghetti of loose ends. the secret of onomichi is really wild but feels like it has little bearing on the actual plot or that it has any weight at all... said secret itself is pretty much filler, as kiryu already has the mystery of haruka's hit-and-run and haruto's father sorted by the two-thirds mark of the game, and once the secret is out the game has nothing left to do except for invent excuses to keep kiryu involved. the tojo clan is also underrepresented while still being present and vaguely involved, and it would've cleaned up the plot a lot to remove them entirely.
-I wasn't really against it earlier when I was actually playing the sections involving them but the jingweon mafia... why even involve them here. they're barely involved in the plot, and joon-gi han is just a worse version of someya.
-let's pour one out for the series staples that didn't make it in: mack and revelations, kamiyama works (since there's no carryable weapons), komaki, the coliseum, ufo catcher, the top portion of kamurocho + the champion district, the individual showcases for every alcoholic beverage featured in the game, a substory finder, multiple colored health bars for each boss
-the main villains are not really all that interesting at the end of the day... the game has great auxillary villains but by the time the end rolled around I didn't feel much excitement at the prospect of beating the final boss up. it's not a complete bullshit thing like in y5 for sure, but they really went with the most boring choice in the who-is-the-actual-mastermind roulette
-there aren't that many random substories out and about overall; it felt like it was a while into the game until I actually started running into them more regularly. I totally get why there's so few, but I would've liked more that aren't tucked away behind the minigames.
-even though haruka is the centerpiece of the plot she does next to nothing. especially after she really blossomed as a charcter in y5 this was disappointing.
-while one-on-one fights feel much more dynamic thanks to the new combat, fighting groups of enemies wildly varies. virtually any random encounter can be taken care of in mere seconds just by grabbing a nearby bike or bench and hitting everyone in range, making regular tactics irrelevant. meanwhile, if there's no large items around or the crowd gets too big, expect to be mashing circle to do a roundhouse throw long past the onset of tedium, or just ping-pong between enemies who can hit you much quicker than you can respond to.
this is a leaner, more modern yakuza game with less content than previous entries but a much higher bar of quality across the board... and honestly I'm down for it. cruising through this one in 30 hours still felt meaty enough to me, and there's still side content left to do when I eventually return for the platinum. the story doesn't quite stick the landing but it nails what a yakuza game should feel like on virtually every other level, and that alone makes this a satisfying play. after the gargantuan yakuza 5 this is the perfect yakuza experience to follow up with, and I feel refreshed to take on judgement before lost judgement arrives just next month.
+the new combat is polarizing, but I've come to understand it as capturing what old yakuza combat was trying to replicate rather than what it actually felt like. dragon engine combat is extremely fluid and has made choosing the correct combos/finishers for certain situations more intuitive. this was an important feature in previous games as well but never directly mentioned, and here it's specifically mentioned in the tutorial and expanded to include things like high-low mixups. ground takedowns are out, but now you can punch people on the ground directly, which keeps the action flowing, and with carryable weapons removed heat actions can now be used repeatedly with no degredation in damage. top that off with plenty of new and returning abilities (is that tanemura's parry and diving punch finisher?), this is some great, exciting combat that makes the game feel more modern than previous entries.
+dungeon design is the best it's ever been, with each action stage having a gimmick that sets it apart from the others. it's still not anything complex, but it's absolutely better than room after room of enemies. some good ones are the helicopter turret sections towards the end of the game, and the dark mines under the shipyard on the edge of onomichi.
+autosave. oh my fucking god.
+performance-wise i know this was hard to play on old ps4s but on a pro honestly I only caught occasional frame drops. given how gorgeous this game is, I'm totally good with a locked 30fps, though I will say this was on 1080p. this is one of the first games I've tried playing at 4k, and while it seemed to run fine it looked pretty blurry; I would rather have a sharper look with some jaggies in 1080p.
+this isn't necessarily a standout group of substories given the games before it, but it's no slouch at all. most of the substories have a more grounded feel, esp since many of them are done through making friends at new gaudi as well as interacting with the hostesses (admittedly I didn't play any cabaret).
+after so many games reusing the same minigames, yakuza 6 finally recreates a couple from scratch. while I of course love karaoke old and new, you'd have to be willingly ignorant to pretend like old karaoke isn't terrible as a rhythm game... new karaoke fixes that with a proper scrolling field of notes and measure markers. darts also returns, with a much slicker presentation and more legible gameplay that doesn't involve a giant ugly hand in the middle of the screen.
+baseball also returns, tho similar to shinada's side story incarnation in many respects. what really elevates it tho is the fact that a full baseball team management sim has been added, giving this side story levels of content in all but name. actually playing the games mostly just involves sitting and watching a fast-forwarded play-by-play, but it does feel tense when you finally are at bat with bases loaded, and even with no trophy involved I sat through the main missions and filled out the team just because of how cool it is as a concept.
+the actual side story here is clan creator... I was really not looking forward to this after playing kiwami 2 clan creator but much to my surprise this is much more like a reverse tower defense than the RTS-lite kiwami 2 variant. it doesn't really take much strategy but it's not too long thanks to how short the missions were, and the villains have a dope vigilante-esque flair to them.
+the biggest surprise for me was fishing, spearfishing to be precise. this plays like a fully-fledged rail shooter with a high skill ceiling to raise score, different types of guns, treasure chests to shoot open, and a reload mechanic that forces the player to watch their ammo count carefully. the final shark boss is legit difficult and took me about four tries, though if needed you can also grind out levels in the minigame to lengthen your health bar.
+the live chatroom was the only thing I knew about this game for a long time, and god did it deliver. my roommate and I were laughing so hard at this thanks to the unnerving level of detail, from the trappings of the web browser to the hilarious screennames in the chat to kiryu chicken pecking the keyboard with one finger on each hand. it's not really interesting enough to warrant replays to be fair... but that didn't stop me from hopping in anri's chat a couple extra times LOL
+onomichi is so gorgeous... it has so many unique areas and such a cozy layout that it really feels like home, even tho kiryu doesn't get to hang around there for long.
+the baby soothing minigame is perfect, with just the right amount of annoying combined with a tiny little skill curve fitting the bill nicely. best of all: the designers were smart enough to only throw it in once and leave it at that, instead of annoying the player further.
+yakuza games fall back on the usual "run to objective marker to begin combat encounter and/or cutscene" progression insanely often, so the microfilm code puzzle really caught me off-guard. it's nothing too taxing for sure, but a little scavenger quest really goes a long way to spicing the main scenario up, and I'll remember that sequence without a doubt thanks to how unique it was for the series.
+the hunger gauge and the new exp system are some of the best mechanical upgrades to yakuza without a doubt thanks to how they incentivize doing a wide variety of activites as well as making sure to eat on a regular cycle. earlier games couldn't quite integrate these things into the gameplay loop but this system absolutely nailed it. to aid players in grinding, the RIZAP gym is available, and it's pretty nice for a couple of sessions as long as you're rock-solid on your knowledge of kamurocho cuisine.
+returning things I was happy to see: akiyama of course (he looks the most different to me out of all of the returning characters from the y5 engine), saigo and sodachi each as roaming bosses, pocket circuit fighter, florist of sai (as in I was happy not to see convenient plot device on legs trotted out again), morning glory (with new orphan character renders that far exceed the hideous ones from y3), amon, locker keys, health drinks (they're in the pawn shop now!! re: comments on other reviews I've seen claiming they don't exist), the sewers, date (with much more screen time than usual)
+all of the arcade games from yakuza 0 return along with virtua fighter 5 and puyo puyo. I didn't really touch these much from overexposure (I already played vf5 a fair bit right before starting this game when it was rereleased) but it's a great set of games
+new gaudi is a really swell time, with a solid conversation minigame that's easy to understand. it adds a nice set of systems overlayed on top of karaoke, darts, and having a couple drinks, and the associated substories are all fun. multiple bar patrons run shops around town as well!
-the story really falls apart in the last third or so, as the game lapses back into the usual yakuza tropes of trying to sort out the spaghetti of loose ends. the secret of onomichi is really wild but feels like it has little bearing on the actual plot or that it has any weight at all... said secret itself is pretty much filler, as kiryu already has the mystery of haruka's hit-and-run and haruto's father sorted by the two-thirds mark of the game, and once the secret is out the game has nothing left to do except for invent excuses to keep kiryu involved. the tojo clan is also underrepresented while still being present and vaguely involved, and it would've cleaned up the plot a lot to remove them entirely.
-I wasn't really against it earlier when I was actually playing the sections involving them but the jingweon mafia... why even involve them here. they're barely involved in the plot, and joon-gi han is just a worse version of someya.
-let's pour one out for the series staples that didn't make it in: mack and revelations, kamiyama works (since there's no carryable weapons), komaki, the coliseum, ufo catcher, the top portion of kamurocho + the champion district, the individual showcases for every alcoholic beverage featured in the game, a substory finder, multiple colored health bars for each boss
-the main villains are not really all that interesting at the end of the day... the game has great auxillary villains but by the time the end rolled around I didn't feel much excitement at the prospect of beating the final boss up. it's not a complete bullshit thing like in y5 for sure, but they really went with the most boring choice in the who-is-the-actual-mastermind roulette
-there aren't that many random substories out and about overall; it felt like it was a while into the game until I actually started running into them more regularly. I totally get why there's so few, but I would've liked more that aren't tucked away behind the minigames.
-even though haruka is the centerpiece of the plot she does next to nothing. especially after she really blossomed as a charcter in y5 this was disappointing.
-while one-on-one fights feel much more dynamic thanks to the new combat, fighting groups of enemies wildly varies. virtually any random encounter can be taken care of in mere seconds just by grabbing a nearby bike or bench and hitting everyone in range, making regular tactics irrelevant. meanwhile, if there's no large items around or the crowd gets too big, expect to be mashing circle to do a roundhouse throw long past the onset of tedium, or just ping-pong between enemies who can hit you much quicker than you can respond to.
this is a leaner, more modern yakuza game with less content than previous entries but a much higher bar of quality across the board... and honestly I'm down for it. cruising through this one in 30 hours still felt meaty enough to me, and there's still side content left to do when I eventually return for the platinum. the story doesn't quite stick the landing but it nails what a yakuza game should feel like on virtually every other level, and that alone makes this a satisfying play. after the gargantuan yakuza 5 this is the perfect yakuza experience to follow up with, and I feel refreshed to take on judgement before lost judgement arrives just next month.
It's about what you expect from RGG's first outing in its new janky engine gameplay-wise and you do feel the content cut compared to previous entries, but the story's heavy-lifting really brings the game out and some great storybeats and surprisingly memorable characters that stick with you alongside the writing and parallels.
It is a little funny that this was suppose to be Kiryu's "final" outing in the series in retrospect, but it definitely was a good ending for its time for such a legendary character.
It is a little funny that this was suppose to be Kiryu's "final" outing in the series in retrospect, but it definitely was a good ending for its time for such a legendary character.
Yakuza 6 also known as "Who pumped and dumped my daughter?"
Remember kids, use a condom.
Remember kids, use a condom.
This game ruined my life
2-3 years after only playing Yakuza 0 to Kiwami 2, I've finally caught up with most of the Yakuza games. As for why I only played those 3 at first, I'm not quite sure myself truthfully. But this game...I don't even know where to start with this masterpiece. An emotionally devastating yet breathtaking end to Kiryu's story, now my favorite video game character. This is the best RGG has been with it's writing, completely unrivaled from characters to storytelling. It's not as ambitious in scope as Yakuza 5 was but it still does a good job in finalizing Kiryu's character and Haruka's relationship. The callbacks throughout this game were spectacular, each and every one of them making everything hit so much more harder. Even the substories are easily at it's best in this game, with surprisingly amazing writing throughout all of them.
Moving on to the gameplay itself, I really enjoyed the return of the Dragon Engine, albeit in an older state since this game released before Kiwami 2. I seriously don't think the Dragon Engine is that bad; and while yeah I do agree that 0's/5's/etc is better, It's still pretty fun for a prototype.
Finalizing my thoughts on this, I'm just glad I could experience the rest of Kiryu's journey throughout Kamurocho and the rollercoaster of emotion it offers. He is easily my favorite video game character ever as I've said before, and this game was pretty much confirmation of why. The RGG games as a whole has taught me a lot and I'm so glad I could experience these games. From beginning to end, it’s truly been an unforgettable journey.
Moving on to the gameplay itself, I really enjoyed the return of the Dragon Engine, albeit in an older state since this game released before Kiwami 2. I seriously don't think the Dragon Engine is that bad; and while yeah I do agree that 0's/5's/etc is better, It's still pretty fun for a prototype.
Finalizing my thoughts on this, I'm just glad I could experience the rest of Kiryu's journey throughout Kamurocho and the rollercoaster of emotion it offers. He is easily my favorite video game character ever as I've said before, and this game was pretty much confirmation of why. The RGG games as a whole has taught me a lot and I'm so glad I could experience these games. From beginning to end, it’s truly been an unforgettable journey.
Almost exactly a year (give or take a couple weeks…) after finishing Yakuza 0, I’ve finished Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. I’m really happy to have finished the Kiryu saga, alongside the Judgment games, it’s been a great experience that is consistently enjoyable. Yakuza 6 itself is a little all over the place - the first on a new engine, while also being a bookend to a chapter in the series narratively. It can be a bit up and down throughout the story and it fumbles pretty hard at the end, but it has some good stuff and is, overall, a good time. Doesn’t reach the heights of the series for me and definitely fails on delivering a good end to Kiryu’s story but I had fun regardless. Spoilers to follow.
Combat
I’ll get combat out of the way - it’s RGG’s first attempt at the Dragon Engine combat, lacking obviously the improvements from the Judgment games, but even the minor changes that they made in Kiwami 2. Like that game, it can feel really good at times, with a far more fluid system and a lot of animations that link together nicely. When you get the flow going, Yakuza 6’s combat feels untouchable, like you’re choreographing the fight yourself. When it doesn’t, it can be annoying. You have far fewer options than in other games and the upgrade tree doesn’t do much to change this. Like many others have said before me, Y6 has startlingly few heat actions, which is unfortunate as a final chapter in Kiryu’s story. That said, Extreme Heat Mode is a cool inclusion, especially for the aforementioned choreographing options it gives you. Landing a slow-motion punch on the boss you’re fighting is extremely satisfying. This game is not hard, especially if you played Kiwami 2 before this, but even still the combat can be frustrating. Not a major deal though, especially considering just how much is new in this engine. This game’s long fight segments are absolutely incredible though, I want to stress that out of the gate. Probably the best in the series aside from Lost Judgment. The shipyard, the inn, Shangri-La, they all deliver in the best possible ways.
Story
The story is what defines Yakuza 6. This is the end of Kiryu’s tale, and it needs to deliver. It does. Well, for about half of the game, anyway. The start is strong, starting off immediately after the events of Yakuza 5, which was unexpected. They briefly go through a bit of time before Kiryu goes back to prison (alongside the rest of the Tojo brass) and before he returns to Okinawa. This section includes some brief supernatural stuff, with Kiryu seeing his past friends and family on the beach at Morning Glory. It’s a really powerful start to the game, and I wish there had been more of it. There's some good stuff in the first 2 chapters for sure, but it picks up so much in chapters 3 and 4 with the introduction of so many new characters and plot devices.
The introduction of Onomichi is fantastic, and the first chapters there are excellent. I agree with @Pangburn in that it might be the peak of the series in terms of storytelling. It stumbles briefly earlier with Akiyama telling Kiryu not to take Haruto (what the fuck was that about?) but then rapidly kicks it into high gear. Nagumo, Yuta, Hirose, and Kiyomi are really compelling characters and the small-town feel is comparable in quality to Y3. Someya’s introduction isn’t amazing but he rapidly gets better and better until he peaks at the end of the game. The long fight in the Onomichi inn with all of the Hirose family looking for Someya is incredible.
Around chapter 5 or 6, when Kiryu is, obviously, still looking for Haruto’s father, RGG decide to have the player go on this ridiculous wild goose chase for Tatsukawa, a character we haven’t met or seen. It’s essentially 2 straight chapters of filler. As I’ll get into later, this game really needed more time in the oven, especially at the end, and getting 2-3 chapters of no plot progression for an obvious ruse is massively disappointing. The player knows Tatsukawa is a nobody and it feels cheap to pretend otherwise. The introductions of all of these useless characters in and around Little Asia do little other than slow the game down. Ed is boring, as are the rest of the Saio Triad. They don’t have the appeal of the Liumang or the mystique of the Jingweon. Speaking of which, Joon-gi is a bright spot in terms of the tertiary characters. His role is insanely small, however, which makes the decision to revive him in spirit for Y7 way more understandable. His fight with Kiryu is a real high point for the Kamurocho section of the game.
As the game progresses towards the end, however, it takes a downturn in quality. Someya continues to be an excellent inclusion, but everything else gets worse. The Iwamis in particular do little other than dilute the pool of villains. The Secret of Onomichi is an ominous tease, and it ends up being… okay? Politically, Yakuza 6 touches on some really interesting aspects of post-war Japanese history, particularly the intense corruption as a result of the occupation and what followed. The Secret does a good job in that context, but it’s a silly reveal and one that has no impact on Kiryu whatsoever. Given that he’s played by Beat Takeshi, Hirose’s character switch is expected, but still not really earned. The whole final segment isn’t bad, however. The attack on the Millennium Tower and on Someya is fantastic. Someya’s theme is amazing and the fight is as well, with an incredible dynamic intro to boot. Then we get Koshimizu and Sugai on the TV screen and I started groaning audibly. Everything after this is a joke. Iwami is a terrible villain. He doesn’t really relate to Kiryu at all, and he just wants his dad’s role as leader of the Yomei - even though he really has no criminal experience. His fight is bad and the whole final cutscene is cliche after cliche. Essentially, they just fumble into the same old issues that have plagued the series before. In a way, I suppose that’s poetic, and I wasn’t really all that surprised to see Kiryu choking on bullets after someone failed to take Sugai’s gun. It's not surprising they went on to do Judgment and Yakuza 7 after this because it really feels like they were running out of ideas with Kiryu. The epilogue helps a little bit - Haruka and Yuta at Morning Glory is good. The bit with Daigo and Saejima and Majima feels like too little too late.
Presentation
Yakuza 6 is gorgeous. 5 was a good looking game, as is 0, but they were both making the best of an older engine. Moving into the future with the Dragon Engine was a great decision as it catapults the presentation in quality. Seeing the stuff from the end of 5 in full HD was insane. Cutscenes are more fluid than ever and model quality is shocking. Some of these shots of Kiryu look better than games that are coming out in 2022. Ryu Ga Gotoku have always had an eye for the look of their games and it’s most evident here. The karaoke scenes are better than ever. As @Pangburn mentioned in his review, it’s insane that we finally have autosave. Onomichi is jaw-dropping. In terms of vibe and aesthetic they really captured what makes a rural town different from Kamurocho. The breadth and variety of vistas here is astounding, with a ton of housing, construction stuff, restaurants, small vendors, a shrine, multiple smaller locations you can get to from a loading screen (including the vastly under-utilized Senkoji), and tons of pretty views. Getting to know the locals through the story and through the minigames is awesome, the town really comes alive through the story and it’s absolutely the best segment of the game.
Yakuza Kiwami 3
Yakuza 6 is, in a startling number of ways, a remake of Yakuza 3. It was a shorter game, showcasing a completely new engine that required a condensed dev cycle. Obviously, aesthetically it carries the same rural Japanese town vibe. But further than that - Kiryu is forced into the countryside to investigate the attack on someone close to him who's still unconscious, dealing with absurd minutiae from locals before going on to meet the small, local yakuza family who initially dislike his appearance but grow to love him and treat him as one of their own. Someya is a pretty obvious sendup to Mine - a businessman with a background like Kiryu’s who has a strong sense of morals and honor but is also quite capable physically. There’s a huge plot dump 75% of the way through the game when they realize they need to finally get on with it. Perhaps most blatantly, Yuta is a total Rikiya clone, the younger yakuza who looks up to and forms a brotherly / parent-child bond with Kiryu. Oh, and he’s literally voiced by Rikiya’s VA. In the same vein of returning cast, Miyasako returns to Yakuza as Nagumo, having previously been Kanda in Y3. As mentioned before, even emotionally this is basically just a retread of every theme from Yakuza 3: family, honor, giving up your life’s pursuits, sacrifice for someone else’s future, etc.
Kiryu’s Character
This game really starts to play with Kiryu's established character in interesting ways. For example, when Kiryu tells Haruka he's going to remain in prison so that she won't be embarrassed (para) to call him family, it's readily apparent that she didn't even think of that - Kiryu's little show of faith by falling on his sword doesn't mean much to her. In fact, she would much rather he just stay with her and the rest of the kids the whole time than make these honorable gestures that he built his character on in his years in the Tojo Clan. Similarly, despite his efforts to stay out of trouble, Kiryu can't help himself when Nagumo is in trouble, so much so that he'll give up Haruto to Kiyomi in order to lean back on his natural instinct to solve problems with his fists. He spends all this time telling the world that he's done with the yakuza life, but in reality he can't help but see every situation through those exact eyes. It's pretty funny how Someya actually calls out Kiryu for this type of naivete. Kiryu goes on and on about ideals and dreams while usually forgetting to mention the violence at the heart of a crime family. Someya is a businessman like Mine, and he prefers to just raise money in legally-adjacent ways, specifically not shaking down people or whatever. It's a neat way to confront the central contradiction of the series - Kiryu is a good guy who propped up decades worth of horrible, horrible people.
How It Fails As a Finale to the Yakuza Series
@Blitz on Backloggd put it best when he said that there’s "So much left unsaid." Yakuza 6 makes the extremely questionable decision to cut nearly every single important character from the series out of its narrative: Haruka is out of commission, negatively impacting the whole message of family that it's trying to sell. Daigo, Majima, and Saejima are just completely absent, causing it to fail to capitalize on their importance to Kiryu and the series itself. I kept waiting for them to be brought back into the narrative after the beginning and it just never happens. The only characters that get any attention are Akiyama (deservedly) and Yuta. The finale really needed more to get across the weight of the end of Kiryu’s story. I would've liked to have seen past characters and events in montage form, a reflection of what made the series and what made Kiryu. Even just a simple 2 minute thing with a couple clips from each game - Nishiki, Ryuji / Kaoru, Mine / Morning Glory, Saejima / Akiyama, Shinada. Instead, the final cutscenes are just…there. Even the whole "twist" of killing off Kiryu is abandoned immediately, and in a very anticlimactic way, no less. Just a shot of Kiryu in a hospital with an extended cutscene with a nobody. If they wanted to do the whole "Kiryu is faking his death" thing, they should've had the Date & Akiyama conversation and nothing else until a brief shot of his shoes or suit appears in the frame as he watches Haruto walk. The direction they went with just really doesn't have any impact whatsoever. If anything, 0 ends up being more of a celebration of the series than 6 is, which is bizarre.
Miscellaneous
>The substories, when given attention, are pretty fun. Y6’s variation on substories takes a lot from 0, upping the quantity of “bizarre / paranormal situation” ones and significantly cutting down on “scamming / character biography” ones. Stuff like parodying The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or doing a ghost fight. The most notable is Ono Michio’s story, which this game became famous for. Ono Michio has, from my perspective, transcended this game in popularity, since making appearances in the other non-Kiryu games and having a metric shitload of fanart. For good reason, it’s an inspired choice of substory for Kiryu and it lends further growth to Onomichi as a believable location. Some of the substories are just introductions to the minigames and minigame related stuff, which is a shame. More than a few are references to ones from 0 (and I think specifically 0, not as much in the way of references to 1-5, which is odd) - the cult, Pocket Circuit Fighter, etc. My runthrough of this game was pretty short since I have other stuff to play and it wasn’t necessarily hitting for me all the time, so I missed a bunch of substories. I’ll be back to finish them and the minigames though, for sure.
>The soundtrack is pretty darn good. The combat themes don’t hit quite as hard as some of the series’ best, but themes like Someya’s are in the running for the gold. The karaoke selection isn’t incredible (especially with only one character to play…) but Today is A Diamond is an instant classic.
>The baby bit is really funny. Glad it only lasted a little bit but it’s a great annoyance.
>Like in Kiwami 2, I couldn’t stand Clan Creator. It’s different from that game’s version, more of a light action attack thing than the RTS style of K2, but I didn’t enjoy it regardless. Even worse is that it does what K2 would do, pulling the player aside with cutscenes in the middle of the story that seem like they’re going somewhere only to transition into explaining Clan Creator. Once I saw it happening I knew what was coming. Like its successor, it’s not bad but still not my thing.
>The live-chat minigame is incredible. Like in previous entries, they’ve managed to include something so BLATANTLY horny that I’m amazed the ESRB didn’t dock it a full point just out of spite. This is a fun and novel idea of course, but the real appeal is how incredibly funny it is. The localization here is absolutely perfect, replicating a ton of insane chatroom usernames and comments across the many many minutes of video content. These are probably the single most popular AV actresses they’ve gotten in the games yet, other than Asuka from K2, which only makes it funnier. Kiryu replying BOOOOOOOBS to Anri Okita is without a doubt a peak in the series.
Conclusion
The story gives me a fair amount of pause, especially in how it fumbles on delivering a satisfying retrospective on Kiryu’s ten year journey. That said, this is still another fun entry in the series. Even if the other characters don’t get attention, Haruka and Kiryu together is a treat. The ending is a little hamfisted in places and really should’ve just concluded at Someya instead of “little baby Iwami”, but there’s good stuff in there and it’s a poetic end to Kiryu’s mainline story - fading out into the background, letting the younger generation take the reins. This game’s vibe is very similar to Yakuza 3, which is a great compliment. Onomichi is one of the best locations in the series and its cast is equally good. Nagumo and Yuta are memorable as hell. Miyasako’s performance as Nagumo is honestly up there as one of the best in the whole series, especially in the facial capture. Someya makes for one of the series’ best villains. It has some fun minigames and some great comedy in its substories. It’s damn gorgeous and performance is surprisingly good. While it maybe needed to balance the time differently, the pacing is pretty good and it’s nowhere near as huge an undertaking as Yakuza 5. This is a quieter and more personal iteration in Kiryu’s story, tying up only a couple loose ends but ultimately giving Kiryu the ending he needed. Well worth playing, despite its issues.
Combat
I’ll get combat out of the way - it’s RGG’s first attempt at the Dragon Engine combat, lacking obviously the improvements from the Judgment games, but even the minor changes that they made in Kiwami 2. Like that game, it can feel really good at times, with a far more fluid system and a lot of animations that link together nicely. When you get the flow going, Yakuza 6’s combat feels untouchable, like you’re choreographing the fight yourself. When it doesn’t, it can be annoying. You have far fewer options than in other games and the upgrade tree doesn’t do much to change this. Like many others have said before me, Y6 has startlingly few heat actions, which is unfortunate as a final chapter in Kiryu’s story. That said, Extreme Heat Mode is a cool inclusion, especially for the aforementioned choreographing options it gives you. Landing a slow-motion punch on the boss you’re fighting is extremely satisfying. This game is not hard, especially if you played Kiwami 2 before this, but even still the combat can be frustrating. Not a major deal though, especially considering just how much is new in this engine. This game’s long fight segments are absolutely incredible though, I want to stress that out of the gate. Probably the best in the series aside from Lost Judgment. The shipyard, the inn, Shangri-La, they all deliver in the best possible ways.
Story
The story is what defines Yakuza 6. This is the end of Kiryu’s tale, and it needs to deliver. It does. Well, for about half of the game, anyway. The start is strong, starting off immediately after the events of Yakuza 5, which was unexpected. They briefly go through a bit of time before Kiryu goes back to prison (alongside the rest of the Tojo brass) and before he returns to Okinawa. This section includes some brief supernatural stuff, with Kiryu seeing his past friends and family on the beach at Morning Glory. It’s a really powerful start to the game, and I wish there had been more of it. There's some good stuff in the first 2 chapters for sure, but it picks up so much in chapters 3 and 4 with the introduction of so many new characters and plot devices.
The introduction of Onomichi is fantastic, and the first chapters there are excellent. I agree with @Pangburn in that it might be the peak of the series in terms of storytelling. It stumbles briefly earlier with Akiyama telling Kiryu not to take Haruto (what the fuck was that about?) but then rapidly kicks it into high gear. Nagumo, Yuta, Hirose, and Kiyomi are really compelling characters and the small-town feel is comparable in quality to Y3. Someya’s introduction isn’t amazing but he rapidly gets better and better until he peaks at the end of the game. The long fight in the Onomichi inn with all of the Hirose family looking for Someya is incredible.
Around chapter 5 or 6, when Kiryu is, obviously, still looking for Haruto’s father, RGG decide to have the player go on this ridiculous wild goose chase for Tatsukawa, a character we haven’t met or seen. It’s essentially 2 straight chapters of filler. As I’ll get into later, this game really needed more time in the oven, especially at the end, and getting 2-3 chapters of no plot progression for an obvious ruse is massively disappointing. The player knows Tatsukawa is a nobody and it feels cheap to pretend otherwise. The introductions of all of these useless characters in and around Little Asia do little other than slow the game down. Ed is boring, as are the rest of the Saio Triad. They don’t have the appeal of the Liumang or the mystique of the Jingweon. Speaking of which, Joon-gi is a bright spot in terms of the tertiary characters. His role is insanely small, however, which makes the decision to revive him in spirit for Y7 way more understandable. His fight with Kiryu is a real high point for the Kamurocho section of the game.
As the game progresses towards the end, however, it takes a downturn in quality. Someya continues to be an excellent inclusion, but everything else gets worse. The Iwamis in particular do little other than dilute the pool of villains. The Secret of Onomichi is an ominous tease, and it ends up being… okay? Politically, Yakuza 6 touches on some really interesting aspects of post-war Japanese history, particularly the intense corruption as a result of the occupation and what followed. The Secret does a good job in that context, but it’s a silly reveal and one that has no impact on Kiryu whatsoever. Given that he’s played by Beat Takeshi, Hirose’s character switch is expected, but still not really earned. The whole final segment isn’t bad, however. The attack on the Millennium Tower and on Someya is fantastic. Someya’s theme is amazing and the fight is as well, with an incredible dynamic intro to boot. Then we get Koshimizu and Sugai on the TV screen and I started groaning audibly. Everything after this is a joke. Iwami is a terrible villain. He doesn’t really relate to Kiryu at all, and he just wants his dad’s role as leader of the Yomei - even though he really has no criminal experience. His fight is bad and the whole final cutscene is cliche after cliche. Essentially, they just fumble into the same old issues that have plagued the series before. In a way, I suppose that’s poetic, and I wasn’t really all that surprised to see Kiryu choking on bullets after someone failed to take Sugai’s gun. It's not surprising they went on to do Judgment and Yakuza 7 after this because it really feels like they were running out of ideas with Kiryu. The epilogue helps a little bit - Haruka and Yuta at Morning Glory is good. The bit with Daigo and Saejima and Majima feels like too little too late.
Presentation
Yakuza 6 is gorgeous. 5 was a good looking game, as is 0, but they were both making the best of an older engine. Moving into the future with the Dragon Engine was a great decision as it catapults the presentation in quality. Seeing the stuff from the end of 5 in full HD was insane. Cutscenes are more fluid than ever and model quality is shocking. Some of these shots of Kiryu look better than games that are coming out in 2022. Ryu Ga Gotoku have always had an eye for the look of their games and it’s most evident here. The karaoke scenes are better than ever. As @Pangburn mentioned in his review, it’s insane that we finally have autosave. Onomichi is jaw-dropping. In terms of vibe and aesthetic they really captured what makes a rural town different from Kamurocho. The breadth and variety of vistas here is astounding, with a ton of housing, construction stuff, restaurants, small vendors, a shrine, multiple smaller locations you can get to from a loading screen (including the vastly under-utilized Senkoji), and tons of pretty views. Getting to know the locals through the story and through the minigames is awesome, the town really comes alive through the story and it’s absolutely the best segment of the game.
Yakuza Kiwami 3
Yakuza 6 is, in a startling number of ways, a remake of Yakuza 3. It was a shorter game, showcasing a completely new engine that required a condensed dev cycle. Obviously, aesthetically it carries the same rural Japanese town vibe. But further than that - Kiryu is forced into the countryside to investigate the attack on someone close to him who's still unconscious, dealing with absurd minutiae from locals before going on to meet the small, local yakuza family who initially dislike his appearance but grow to love him and treat him as one of their own. Someya is a pretty obvious sendup to Mine - a businessman with a background like Kiryu’s who has a strong sense of morals and honor but is also quite capable physically. There’s a huge plot dump 75% of the way through the game when they realize they need to finally get on with it. Perhaps most blatantly, Yuta is a total Rikiya clone, the younger yakuza who looks up to and forms a brotherly / parent-child bond with Kiryu. Oh, and he’s literally voiced by Rikiya’s VA. In the same vein of returning cast, Miyasako returns to Yakuza as Nagumo, having previously been Kanda in Y3. As mentioned before, even emotionally this is basically just a retread of every theme from Yakuza 3: family, honor, giving up your life’s pursuits, sacrifice for someone else’s future, etc.
Kiryu’s Character
This game really starts to play with Kiryu's established character in interesting ways. For example, when Kiryu tells Haruka he's going to remain in prison so that she won't be embarrassed (para) to call him family, it's readily apparent that she didn't even think of that - Kiryu's little show of faith by falling on his sword doesn't mean much to her. In fact, she would much rather he just stay with her and the rest of the kids the whole time than make these honorable gestures that he built his character on in his years in the Tojo Clan. Similarly, despite his efforts to stay out of trouble, Kiryu can't help himself when Nagumo is in trouble, so much so that he'll give up Haruto to Kiyomi in order to lean back on his natural instinct to solve problems with his fists. He spends all this time telling the world that he's done with the yakuza life, but in reality he can't help but see every situation through those exact eyes. It's pretty funny how Someya actually calls out Kiryu for this type of naivete. Kiryu goes on and on about ideals and dreams while usually forgetting to mention the violence at the heart of a crime family. Someya is a businessman like Mine, and he prefers to just raise money in legally-adjacent ways, specifically not shaking down people or whatever. It's a neat way to confront the central contradiction of the series - Kiryu is a good guy who propped up decades worth of horrible, horrible people.
How It Fails As a Finale to the Yakuza Series
@Blitz on Backloggd put it best when he said that there’s "So much left unsaid." Yakuza 6 makes the extremely questionable decision to cut nearly every single important character from the series out of its narrative: Haruka is out of commission, negatively impacting the whole message of family that it's trying to sell. Daigo, Majima, and Saejima are just completely absent, causing it to fail to capitalize on their importance to Kiryu and the series itself. I kept waiting for them to be brought back into the narrative after the beginning and it just never happens. The only characters that get any attention are Akiyama (deservedly) and Yuta. The finale really needed more to get across the weight of the end of Kiryu’s story. I would've liked to have seen past characters and events in montage form, a reflection of what made the series and what made Kiryu. Even just a simple 2 minute thing with a couple clips from each game - Nishiki, Ryuji / Kaoru, Mine / Morning Glory, Saejima / Akiyama, Shinada. Instead, the final cutscenes are just…there. Even the whole "twist" of killing off Kiryu is abandoned immediately, and in a very anticlimactic way, no less. Just a shot of Kiryu in a hospital with an extended cutscene with a nobody. If they wanted to do the whole "Kiryu is faking his death" thing, they should've had the Date & Akiyama conversation and nothing else until a brief shot of his shoes or suit appears in the frame as he watches Haruto walk. The direction they went with just really doesn't have any impact whatsoever. If anything, 0 ends up being more of a celebration of the series than 6 is, which is bizarre.
Miscellaneous
>The substories, when given attention, are pretty fun. Y6’s variation on substories takes a lot from 0, upping the quantity of “bizarre / paranormal situation” ones and significantly cutting down on “scamming / character biography” ones. Stuff like parodying The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or doing a ghost fight. The most notable is Ono Michio’s story, which this game became famous for. Ono Michio has, from my perspective, transcended this game in popularity, since making appearances in the other non-Kiryu games and having a metric shitload of fanart. For good reason, it’s an inspired choice of substory for Kiryu and it lends further growth to Onomichi as a believable location. Some of the substories are just introductions to the minigames and minigame related stuff, which is a shame. More than a few are references to ones from 0 (and I think specifically 0, not as much in the way of references to 1-5, which is odd) - the cult, Pocket Circuit Fighter, etc. My runthrough of this game was pretty short since I have other stuff to play and it wasn’t necessarily hitting for me all the time, so I missed a bunch of substories. I’ll be back to finish them and the minigames though, for sure.
>The soundtrack is pretty darn good. The combat themes don’t hit quite as hard as some of the series’ best, but themes like Someya’s are in the running for the gold. The karaoke selection isn’t incredible (especially with only one character to play…) but Today is A Diamond is an instant classic.
>The baby bit is really funny. Glad it only lasted a little bit but it’s a great annoyance.
>Like in Kiwami 2, I couldn’t stand Clan Creator. It’s different from that game’s version, more of a light action attack thing than the RTS style of K2, but I didn’t enjoy it regardless. Even worse is that it does what K2 would do, pulling the player aside with cutscenes in the middle of the story that seem like they’re going somewhere only to transition into explaining Clan Creator. Once I saw it happening I knew what was coming. Like its successor, it’s not bad but still not my thing.
>The live-chat minigame is incredible. Like in previous entries, they’ve managed to include something so BLATANTLY horny that I’m amazed the ESRB didn’t dock it a full point just out of spite. This is a fun and novel idea of course, but the real appeal is how incredibly funny it is. The localization here is absolutely perfect, replicating a ton of insane chatroom usernames and comments across the many many minutes of video content. These are probably the single most popular AV actresses they’ve gotten in the games yet, other than Asuka from K2, which only makes it funnier. Kiryu replying BOOOOOOOBS to Anri Okita is without a doubt a peak in the series.
Conclusion
The story gives me a fair amount of pause, especially in how it fumbles on delivering a satisfying retrospective on Kiryu’s ten year journey. That said, this is still another fun entry in the series. Even if the other characters don’t get attention, Haruka and Kiryu together is a treat. The ending is a little hamfisted in places and really should’ve just concluded at Someya instead of “little baby Iwami”, but there’s good stuff in there and it’s a poetic end to Kiryu’s mainline story - fading out into the background, letting the younger generation take the reins. This game’s vibe is very similar to Yakuza 3, which is a great compliment. Onomichi is one of the best locations in the series and its cast is equally good. Nagumo and Yuta are memorable as hell. Miyasako’s performance as Nagumo is honestly up there as one of the best in the whole series, especially in the facial capture. Someya makes for one of the series’ best villains. It has some fun minigames and some great comedy in its substories. It’s damn gorgeous and performance is surprisingly good. While it maybe needed to balance the time differently, the pacing is pretty good and it’s nowhere near as huge an undertaking as Yakuza 5. This is a quieter and more personal iteration in Kiryu’s story, tying up only a couple loose ends but ultimately giving Kiryu the ending he needed. Well worth playing, despite its issues.
Join us for another exciting episode of Dame Dame as Kiryu finally takes on his biggest enemy, Sex Ed (not to be confused with Chinese Ed)
At first controlling Kiryu feels a bit like controlling a truck with a wiimote, but with a few skillpoints and some practice the combat gets very satisfying - as long as you're fighting at least 20 enemies
Triadkino, boatslop, familykino
At first controlling Kiryu feels a bit like controlling a truck with a wiimote, but with a few skillpoints and some practice the combat gets very satisfying - as long as you're fighting at least 20 enemies
Triadkino, boatslop, familykino
(7.5) Vocês já tiveram muito ansioso pra algo, e msm q tenham gostado muito da experiência, ficaram decepcionados msm assim por ser problemático ou/e pelo seu potencial perdido? Essa é a minha relação com Yakuza 6 (ou Like A Dragon 6).
Eu tenho muita coisa pra falar do jogo, mas como tô com sono e com febre irei só falar algo:
Yakuza 5 é um final pro Kiryu Saga MUITO melhor que o 6, e espero q o Gaiden e o 8 fazem justiça ao meu homem. Mas ainda sim, gostei muito, PRINCIPALMENTE tudo oq envolve o Someya e a relação dele com o Kiryu
Eu tenho muita coisa pra falar do jogo, mas como tô com sono e com febre irei só falar algo:
Yakuza 5 é um final pro Kiryu Saga MUITO melhor que o 6, e espero q o Gaiden e o 8 fazem justiça ao meu homem. Mas ainda sim, gostei muito, PRINCIPALMENTE tudo oq envolve o Someya e a relação dele com o Kiryu
Kiryu really brute forced his way into becoming one of the greatest characters of all time
This review contains spoilers
I'M DRAGGING YOU TO HELL WITH ME LITTLE BABY IWAMI.
Yakuza 6 was surprisingly a fire ass game. Y6 is the 1st game on the dragon engine and it adds some very nice changes such as being able to enter buildings without a loading screen or the removal of intros in random encounters.
The combat of the game didn't click with me at first and it is clearly not as good as some the previous entries in the series, but after some upgrades it suddenly clicked, and i started loving the combat.
Extreme heat mode is 1 of the reasons why i love the combat, it can get you out of sticky situations and it can make bosses way easier. My only complaints about the combat is that the enemies block a bit too much, and for some reason they removed the equippable weapons.
The bosses are mostly very solid, but i wish some of them had more health bars. My favorite bosses in the game are: Akiyama, Yuta Usami, korean Vergil, Toru Hirose and the third Takumi Someya fight.
Out of all the rgg games that i've played, this is easily the best looking game both graphically and visually, and good lord this game has some very good looking cutscenes such as the one before the Yuta boss fight.
Y6 also brings a new location to the table which is onimichi. Even tho i think that onomichi is one of the weaker cities in the series, it was still a nice addition, and it has a tofu shop owned by the GOAT pocket circuit fighter.
The substories were pretty solid but not as good as the substories of the previous entries. Spear fishing and clan fighting were pretty fun side content but i wasn't a big fan of the baseball stuff.
Now lets get to the best part of the game and that is the story. Yakuza 6's story for me is on par with Y0 and Y5's story which is a very high bar. The game introduces a bunch of new characters. The hirose family are some very loveable characters, and my favorite of the bunch is Nagumo, who would've thought that the tutorial boss would become such a fun and memorable side character?
Yuta Usami is another well written side character that i loved, and him being the father of Haruto was quite unexpected but thankfully he isn't a horrible person.
As for the villains of the game well there are some good ones and a bad one. Takumi Someya is my favorite villain in Y6, in the final chapter we get to see how he cares for his ex wife Kiyomi and his daughter and that deep down he isn't a terrible person such as another villain that i will talk about soon, and he even sacrifices his life to save Kiyomi, but sadly he died thinking Kiyomi was dead. Toru Hirose is the other villain (not 100% sure if he is considered one) that i like, at first you think that he is just a funny old man, but then you find out that he is a very intimidating old man. Toru Hirose's backstory was very intriguing and he probably reminded Kiryu of Kazama, and like Takumi Someya he gets quite a sad death. Tsuneo Iwami is genuinely one of the most hateable, kickable, punchable, slappable villains i have ever seen, if they were aiming to make the most unlovable villain ever then they did a damn good job. Iwami ain't even very strong, dude got his ass kicked by Kiryu who suffered some heavy blows just before the fight.Sugai fucking sucks. What about the protagonist Kiryu? Well its fucking Kiryu! He is obviously a hot and amazingly well written protagonist.
As for the music well it fricking slaps! My favorite songs are:
Lots of lights which plays during the final long battle
Destiny which plays during the final Someya fight
Brother brother which is Nagumo's boss theme
The way of life which is Tsuneo Iwami's boss theme.
Overall i personally think that Yakuza 6 is insanely underrated and even tho it has a few issues i am still gonna give it a nice
9.5/10
Edit:I decided to higher my rating to a 10
Yakuza 6 was surprisingly a fire ass game. Y6 is the 1st game on the dragon engine and it adds some very nice changes such as being able to enter buildings without a loading screen or the removal of intros in random encounters.
The combat of the game didn't click with me at first and it is clearly not as good as some the previous entries in the series, but after some upgrades it suddenly clicked, and i started loving the combat.
Extreme heat mode is 1 of the reasons why i love the combat, it can get you out of sticky situations and it can make bosses way easier. My only complaints about the combat is that the enemies block a bit too much, and for some reason they removed the equippable weapons.
The bosses are mostly very solid, but i wish some of them had more health bars. My favorite bosses in the game are: Akiyama, Yuta Usami, korean Vergil, Toru Hirose and the third Takumi Someya fight.
Out of all the rgg games that i've played, this is easily the best looking game both graphically and visually, and good lord this game has some very good looking cutscenes such as the one before the Yuta boss fight.
Y6 also brings a new location to the table which is onimichi. Even tho i think that onomichi is one of the weaker cities in the series, it was still a nice addition, and it has a tofu shop owned by the GOAT pocket circuit fighter.
The substories were pretty solid but not as good as the substories of the previous entries. Spear fishing and clan fighting were pretty fun side content but i wasn't a big fan of the baseball stuff.
Now lets get to the best part of the game and that is the story. Yakuza 6's story for me is on par with Y0 and Y5's story which is a very high bar. The game introduces a bunch of new characters. The hirose family are some very loveable characters, and my favorite of the bunch is Nagumo, who would've thought that the tutorial boss would become such a fun and memorable side character?
Yuta Usami is another well written side character that i loved, and him being the father of Haruto was quite unexpected but thankfully he isn't a horrible person.
As for the villains of the game well there are some good ones and a bad one. Takumi Someya is my favorite villain in Y6, in the final chapter we get to see how he cares for his ex wife Kiyomi and his daughter and that deep down he isn't a terrible person such as another villain that i will talk about soon, and he even sacrifices his life to save Kiyomi, but sadly he died thinking Kiyomi was dead. Toru Hirose is the other villain (not 100% sure if he is considered one) that i like, at first you think that he is just a funny old man, but then you find out that he is a very intimidating old man. Toru Hirose's backstory was very intriguing and he probably reminded Kiryu of Kazama, and like Takumi Someya he gets quite a sad death. Tsuneo Iwami is genuinely one of the most hateable, kickable, punchable, slappable villains i have ever seen, if they were aiming to make the most unlovable villain ever then they did a damn good job. Iwami ain't even very strong, dude got his ass kicked by Kiryu who suffered some heavy blows just before the fight.Sugai fucking sucks. What about the protagonist Kiryu? Well its fucking Kiryu! He is obviously a hot and amazingly well written protagonist.
As for the music well it fricking slaps! My favorite songs are:
Lots of lights which plays during the final long battle
Destiny which plays during the final Someya fight
Brother brother which is Nagumo's boss theme
The way of life which is Tsuneo Iwami's boss theme.
Overall i personally think that Yakuza 6 is insanely underrated and even tho it has a few issues i am still gonna give it a nice
9.5/10
Edit:I decided to higher my rating to a 10
Kazuma Kiryu's career has essentially been a series of attempts to retire which all failed. I already know he's in the next one so evidently this isn't an exception, but it was still meant to be the last game with him as the main character. My assumption is that this would be a big sendoff for everyone: a big treadmill of old pals retiring and leaving things to a new generation. The Florist? Komeki? Sure, heck yeah, bring all those jokers by for a conclusion.
And then that's not what happened! The story instead focuses really narrowly on Kiryu and his found family, old and new. They managed to make a dad game that wasn't just about how hard it is to be a shitty father who hates his kids and abuses them. Amazing. Truly unheard of in the gaming industry. I think a lot of people were not happy that the "main" extended cast of Haruka, Daigo, Majima and Saejima spend most of the game incapacitated. I understand that. I too wanted Majima to show up just like old times and say the thing. I did. But the game is really still about them through a certain lense, and that's interesting. After 5 was a big bloated mess, 6 is scaled way down to make room for a more personal story. Not really a small story, but a personal one.
Just to get the like, game stuff out of the way, I had some mixed feelings on the new engine. It was a bit physics-y at times, making everything feel kinda weightless. But it's nice to get a closer look at some of these spaces we've spent 6 previous games in. I felt that there was less variety in the fighting, but I'm not sure that matters. Weapons seemed more important. The experience system could be interesting but almost everything requires every type, and the green "technique" experience is the rarest, at least with how I played, so it was really just about that one type rather than five. Maybe Kiwami 2 fixes it a little?
So anyway, it's about Family. It's about shitty dads and why they're shitty. It's about how a dad doesn't have to be blood related, but blood is still powerful, but it also isn't enough. Anyone can be a dad, says Yakuza. Dad is a state of mind. But anyone can fuck it up, too. Blood and love and dedication can't do it alone. In the end, I saw that the characters who spent the whole game offscreen were kind of there in spirit the whole time, exerting gravity on events, because it was the end of Kiryu's story, and that means the conclusion of his relationships with all of these people. I cried, in the end. This probably isn't my favorite of these games, but the restraint it showed made it stronger overall, not weaker.
Also he punches a shark in this one.
And then that's not what happened! The story instead focuses really narrowly on Kiryu and his found family, old and new. They managed to make a dad game that wasn't just about how hard it is to be a shitty father who hates his kids and abuses them. Amazing. Truly unheard of in the gaming industry. I think a lot of people were not happy that the "main" extended cast of Haruka, Daigo, Majima and Saejima spend most of the game incapacitated. I understand that. I too wanted Majima to show up just like old times and say the thing. I did. But the game is really still about them through a certain lense, and that's interesting. After 5 was a big bloated mess, 6 is scaled way down to make room for a more personal story. Not really a small story, but a personal one.
Just to get the like, game stuff out of the way, I had some mixed feelings on the new engine. It was a bit physics-y at times, making everything feel kinda weightless. But it's nice to get a closer look at some of these spaces we've spent 6 previous games in. I felt that there was less variety in the fighting, but I'm not sure that matters. Weapons seemed more important. The experience system could be interesting but almost everything requires every type, and the green "technique" experience is the rarest, at least with how I played, so it was really just about that one type rather than five. Maybe Kiwami 2 fixes it a little?
So anyway, it's about Family. It's about shitty dads and why they're shitty. It's about how a dad doesn't have to be blood related, but blood is still powerful, but it also isn't enough. Anyone can be a dad, says Yakuza. Dad is a state of mind. But anyone can fuck it up, too. Blood and love and dedication can't do it alone. In the end, I saw that the characters who spent the whole game offscreen were kind of there in spirit the whole time, exerting gravity on events, because it was the end of Kiryu's story, and that means the conclusion of his relationships with all of these people. I cried, in the end. This probably isn't my favorite of these games, but the restraint it showed made it stronger overall, not weaker.
Also he punches a shark in this one.
If we’re gonna be realistic this is a 4.5 and I might drop it down later. For now, I don’t care frankly.
A really nice conclusion to Kiryu's saga. Same old Yakuza problems but it was wholesome (and sad but mostly the other part) Time to replay Like A Dragon lol
A fitting and beautiful sendoff to Kiryu and the Dragon Saga. 6 tackles the themes of fatherhood and the different types of bonds formed through it. This entry feels way more grounded than the others; it feels more personal and rough while also showing Kiryu in a different light compared to his other appearances (except 5). He's willing to fight and do anything to protect those he loves, and he really feels backed up by his "I'm not a saint" statement on this one.
The cast of 6 is top tier as well. The Hirose Family are a fun addition and I love all of them. They really do feel like a family (i know this is corny) who are there for each other and fight for one another, Nagumo and Yuta are both really good. Someya is great as well, he brings a "new vs old" feel to the game that conflicts Kiryu (and basically every main member before this game), while also having great characterization and one I felt for at the end.
There are definitely some issues with the game. Story-wise, the final boss is pretty bad. You can say he fits thematically all you want, but there's really not enough buildup at all to justify HIM as the big mastermind. The game starts to falter around the middle, as well. The big secret is way too hyped up for what it is and although it KINDA make sense after it's all explained, it just felt stupid.
Gameplay-wise, yeah it's rough. It's too weighty, it feels off, grabs kinda suck, the combo pause when they block is annoying, etc. I'm probably one of the few people that think it's actually fine, but that could just be because I decided to max all skills and get most of my stats to around 300. It's weird, repetitive, and you will definitely want to go back to the PS3 era of how it's done. It works, but it's really not great.
I think Onomichi is a really fun place to explore, it's compact and small but it kind of reminds me of Okinawa in a way? They're just kinda cozy and I think they're great. Also, substories in this one are fun here too. Ono Michio.
Overall, 6 manages to give Kiryu the closure he's needed all these years and does so in a beautiful way, telling a heartfelt and emotional story that although falters in some areas, will have you satisfied by the end of it. Well until 8 got announced.
PS: why is akiyama here
The cast of 6 is top tier as well. The Hirose Family are a fun addition and I love all of them. They really do feel like a family (i know this is corny) who are there for each other and fight for one another, Nagumo and Yuta are both really good. Someya is great as well, he brings a "new vs old" feel to the game that conflicts Kiryu (and basically every main member before this game), while also having great characterization and one I felt for at the end.
There are definitely some issues with the game. Story-wise, the final boss is pretty bad. You can say he fits thematically all you want, but there's really not enough buildup at all to justify HIM as the big mastermind. The game starts to falter around the middle, as well. The big secret is way too hyped up for what it is and although it KINDA make sense after it's all explained, it just felt stupid.
Gameplay-wise, yeah it's rough. It's too weighty, it feels off, grabs kinda suck, the combo pause when they block is annoying, etc. I'm probably one of the few people that think it's actually fine, but that could just be because I decided to max all skills and get most of my stats to around 300. It's weird, repetitive, and you will definitely want to go back to the PS3 era of how it's done. It works, but it's really not great.
I think Onomichi is a really fun place to explore, it's compact and small but it kind of reminds me of Okinawa in a way? They're just kinda cozy and I think they're great. Also, substories in this one are fun here too. Ono Michio.
Overall, 6 manages to give Kiryu the closure he's needed all these years and does so in a beautiful way, telling a heartfelt and emotional story that although falters in some areas, will have you satisfied by the end of it. Well until 8 got announced.
PS: why is akiyama here
I love Kiryu-chan and I'm so glad this isn't his final appearance in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise, one of the top characters in all of gaming. I'm thoroughly excited to dive into Like a Dragon Gaiden after diving into Yakuza 7, and subsequently diving into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth in January. Oh and I can't forget diving into Lost Judgment after I dive into Judgment. RGG gamers, we are so back.
Where do I start, undeniably the best Yakuza has to offer when it comes to character writing, story, side-cast, antagonists, music and payoff, the side content is up there among the best.
It's only a bit lacking in the gameplay section, but that's understandable since this is the first dragon engine game.
The way Kiryu's arc comes to an end here is not simply through what the series says about living, but also its overarching themes of parenthood from way back in Yakuza 1...it's magical even, Hard to describe it with words when I have tears all over my face. RGG fucking killed it.
It's only a bit lacking in the gameplay section, but that's understandable since this is the first dragon engine game.
The way Kiryu's arc comes to an end here is not simply through what the series says about living, but also its overarching themes of parenthood from way back in Yakuza 1...it's magical even, Hard to describe it with words when I have tears all over my face. RGG fucking killed it.
This game is so at odds with itself, it wants to be Kiryu's final chapter but also wants to cash in on that yakuza 0 newcomer boom. So what you end with is a game with a primarily fresh cast, that's isolated from the rest of the series. The ending attempts to bring some closure to Kiryu's saga, but it really just feels thrown in there. There's so much left unsaid between so many of these characters that I just can't really get behind the decision.
i liked this game. but it makes me feel very weird.
i get the choice to not have as much of previous characters since this is (well, was) kiryus last big thing where he's the main focus, but man it just does not sit well with me to have so many of the franchises characters completely shelved due to that. the new characters that were introduced are fine, they're silly goofy guys, but they don't have the same intrigue as akiyama and saejima and majima or daigo or anyone like that. and i don't mean that as a totally negative thing, those characters have been built up for multiple games to have that intrigue and screen presence that make them enjoyable to see. and yes akiyama is there but he has literally 5 scenes in the entire game, i don't think it counts. but yeah, i think my issues with the story are mostly just with that, the rest of it is just whatever, i mean there's the obvious "well why doesn't kiryu just go to the florist this game would be like an hour long" and that's fair, but i don't usually hold it against a certain piece of media for having that particular kind of plot issue like that, you can make up any number of reasons for that in response, idk
as for the combat, i mean this game is basically just kiwami 2 with a different story, so i didn't think it was bad, i liked it, i will say that the physics were definitely very underdeveloped and don't feel amazing and big guys don't feel very enjoyable to fight but other than that i don't have really any issues. i will say that extreme heat mode feels fucking awesome to use and i hope that i see it again in man who erased his name, kiryu is the strongest guy in the yakuza universe, i think it's perfectly acceptable to oneshot minibosses with one combo. oh yeah, as for the health bar change, i feel very neutral on it, fights don't drag out, but some feel a little undercooked because of it. like someya should realistically be a 4-5 minute fight, but isn't. joon-gi han should realistically be a 4-5 minute fight, but isn't. in spite of that, i still enjoyed them, i would have just liked them to be a bit longer.
soundtrack for this game was pretty okay, not on the level of 0 or 7 but definitely good enough to keep the energy going.
side content was good enough to make me want to do more of it and actively seek it out, so that's cool. a lot of super interesting ideas in them and also wacky goofy stuff that made me smiley face
yeah idk, people really dislike this game but i think it's pretty good and was worth playing, def overhated. man who erased his name next.
i get the choice to not have as much of previous characters since this is (well, was) kiryus last big thing where he's the main focus, but man it just does not sit well with me to have so many of the franchises characters completely shelved due to that. the new characters that were introduced are fine, they're silly goofy guys, but they don't have the same intrigue as akiyama and saejima and majima or daigo or anyone like that. and i don't mean that as a totally negative thing, those characters have been built up for multiple games to have that intrigue and screen presence that make them enjoyable to see. and yes akiyama is there but he has literally 5 scenes in the entire game, i don't think it counts. but yeah, i think my issues with the story are mostly just with that, the rest of it is just whatever, i mean there's the obvious "well why doesn't kiryu just go to the florist this game would be like an hour long" and that's fair, but i don't usually hold it against a certain piece of media for having that particular kind of plot issue like that, you can make up any number of reasons for that in response, idk
as for the combat, i mean this game is basically just kiwami 2 with a different story, so i didn't think it was bad, i liked it, i will say that the physics were definitely very underdeveloped and don't feel amazing and big guys don't feel very enjoyable to fight but other than that i don't have really any issues. i will say that extreme heat mode feels fucking awesome to use and i hope that i see it again in man who erased his name, kiryu is the strongest guy in the yakuza universe, i think it's perfectly acceptable to oneshot minibosses with one combo. oh yeah, as for the health bar change, i feel very neutral on it, fights don't drag out, but some feel a little undercooked because of it. like someya should realistically be a 4-5 minute fight, but isn't. joon-gi han should realistically be a 4-5 minute fight, but isn't. in spite of that, i still enjoyed them, i would have just liked them to be a bit longer.
soundtrack for this game was pretty okay, not on the level of 0 or 7 but definitely good enough to keep the energy going.
side content was good enough to make me want to do more of it and actively seek it out, so that's cool. a lot of super interesting ideas in them and also wacky goofy stuff that made me smiley face
yeah idk, people really dislike this game but i think it's pretty good and was worth playing, def overhated. man who erased his name next.
I got covid twice in 2023 and the second bout was far worse than the first. Its possible, then, that my attempt to play Yakuza 6 in a week was a number of things. Ill-advised. Dangerously exhausting. Experience hampering. Unhealthy. Something like that. I tried to alternate days between this and Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, but I truly hit a feeling of hatred to Yakuza I never reached before. I had started Y6 because I needed a vacation game. I needed the mindless repetition that I've found so soothing in previous entries. Instead, I hit one of my lowest existential lows I've ever hit. Taking five days away from it before I entered endgame was the correct move for me. I found joy again in the baseball minigame and I wrapped up the final boss with general positive outlook.
But with all that in mind, with all my understanding of how my illness and angst definitely impacted my mood and perception, I still kinda think this game isn't very good.
Hiroshima is a fun setting. Placing Yakuza in a small town is the sort of direction I'd want to see more from. Intimate little stories about locals and their daily troubles is a different vibe from the constant hustle and bustle of Kamurocho and I think its a good place for the emotions of this franchise to go. Yet, the substories don't really lean into that intimacy. The wider story about the power of the Shipbuilding Company and its impact on the local economy, that's good meat! But shockingly, when I think of Yakuza stories about tight-knit communities, the Yakuza 3 substories easily outpaces Yakuza 6's just sort of banal local oddities. There's some fun gems, but its hard to feel like that they add to defining Hiroshima. Kamurocho is a place where anything can happen. Transplanting the high concept substories into Hiroshima without putting in some work into defining the daily life of the setting sort of takes me out of the process.
The minigames of Y6 can't help but feel weaker in other aspects. The hostess dates have shrunk in complexity and scope. In previous entries, hostess dates followed a steady path. You gain hearts, you build trust, and you gain short conversations about the personal life of the hostess. There's an arc to unravel. In Y6, every conversation is randomized in all your interactions, regardless of your heart rankings with the women. As a result, there's no real sense of progression or growing trust. You can learn about hobbies or favorite foods, but you can't learn about past traumas or insecurities. One of the hostesses is a professional wrestler, a storyline that only amounts to "I must keep fighting for my fans." I dislike criticizing something for what it isn't, but previous hostess minigames would often involve subplots with rivals or evil boyfriends or family troubles, slowly padded out over different dates. The hostess minigames were always a completionist obligation for me more than anything, but striping down the story advancement only made the process more tedious rather than less. What am I advancing towards if there's nothing interesting to talk about until the end?
This feeling of absence permeates through Yakuza 6's main story. For what's supposed to be an attempt to wrap up Kiryu's story, the game is shockingly disinterested in revisiting much of the franchise's history. This isn't always a dealbreaker. Yakuza is a soap opera, the rules change depending on what's narratively convenient. Sure, Kiryu could meet with the Florist of Sai to uncover the entire plot of the game. But that wouldn't allow for the game's wider story to unfold. Thus, Yakuza 6 kind of just pretends the Florist of Sai doesn't exist.
There's other areas where the game abandons different parts of the franchise history. The cast of Yakuza 3 get very little focus, with the Ryudo family nonexistent and the Morning Glory orphans quickly vanishing as the plot kicks off. There's a baseball minigame that doesn't even think of referencing the baseball protag Shinada of Yakuza 5. Entire sections of Kamurocho are suddenly blocked off in ways they never were before.
But most frustrating to me is the general arc of Haruka. Its hard not to feel like the franchise didn't know what to do with Haruka after Yakuza 2. In a lot of ways, the devs often struggle to fit a whole woman in their minds. Women are Lovers, Mothers, or Daughters. Haruka of Yakuza 1 and 2 was a sharp, savvy young girl who enjoyed sneaking into gambling dens and playing dangerous odds. Yakuza 3 and 4 demonstrate a dramatic shift as Haruka becomes more of a caretaker around the Morning Glory Orphanage. Yakuza 5 toys with the idea that Haruka still possesses that savvy edge, but its not behavior she's allowed to display frequently. She expresses it in soft, passive kindness towards everyone around her. She doesn't get to fight with the big boys. She sits off to the side. This isn't to say Haruka's character only has value when she's as violent as the men. But its hard not to feel like she's been cordoned off from the main action and shoved into a box.
Yakuza 6 doesn't change the trajectory. Haruka gets coma'd, shunted aside as Kiryu raises her surprise son. The game skips over anything dangerous like seeing Haruka pursue a romantic relationship. We're given scenes that indicate when Haruka would have gotten pregnant, but its still hard to imagine her as a woman taking ownership of her own desires and relationship aspirations. Even now, the game leaves me uncomfortable saying the flat out fact: Haruka is a grown woman who had sex. That's textual and inoffensive. Yet Haruka is still so defined as the Wise Daughter, its impossible to square that circle in my head that Haruka has any kind of sexual desire or longing for companionship. By the time she's woken up from her coma, she's fully ready to exist as The Mother, the third kind of woman that can exist. The game can't handle Haruka leaving the role of Daughter and into something more complete, but it also firmly believes she must eventually become a Mother. So that second stage, that second kind of woman that exists in the Yakuza universe, is shoved into a coma box where no one can see her. If you don't show the step between Daughter and Mother, you don't have to think about it. And Haruka can remain as innocent and pure as the game needs her to be.
Endgame spoiler: Its so fucking weird that Kiryu's last letter is to Daigo.
I love everything Kiryu says in that scene. I love that he acknowledges that he dealt Daigo a bad hand. I love that he recognizes how his inability to think ahead has damaged the world around him. I love that he admits he's neglected his loved ones in the pursuit of some pointless isolating honor. I love that he calls Daigo his son.
But he says all this while Haruka is in the same room, while he still refuses to call her his daughter too. His last letter isn't to Haruka or even the other kids he's raising. He repeats that Haruto is not his grandson. In both Yakuza 3 and 6, he explains that he takes care of Haruka, but repeatedly denies any claim that she's his kid. What's the distinction? Why claim otherwise? Is it to keep Kiryu from truly being defined as a single dad instead of a cool action guy? But why have him insist upon this in the same moment as him gently rocking a baby to sleep? Given Kiryu's monologue about fatherhood to Daigo, one has to assume there's self-awareness here. Kiryu's core flaw is his inability to choose one life. He can't fully leave the yakuza, he can't fully commit to being a parent. Its clearly something he enjoys doing! But he's so caught up in his own mistakes, he never allows himself to exist in the present.
The joy of Yakuza, to me, is in how its disparate elements clash together. Comedy and drama in a chaotic mix, bringing out the best in each other and advancing the narrative in such a specific, confusing tone. But sometimes, its soap opera sensibilities leave me cold. Despite all the ways it puts its whole heart into something, there's so many examples of where you can feel the hesitation. Where you can feel the points that they held back. And when comparing the sheer gusto of the franchise's ambition to these moments of anxiety and regression, it just makes those flaws all the more obvious.
But with all that in mind, with all my understanding of how my illness and angst definitely impacted my mood and perception, I still kinda think this game isn't very good.
Hiroshima is a fun setting. Placing Yakuza in a small town is the sort of direction I'd want to see more from. Intimate little stories about locals and their daily troubles is a different vibe from the constant hustle and bustle of Kamurocho and I think its a good place for the emotions of this franchise to go. Yet, the substories don't really lean into that intimacy. The wider story about the power of the Shipbuilding Company and its impact on the local economy, that's good meat! But shockingly, when I think of Yakuza stories about tight-knit communities, the Yakuza 3 substories easily outpaces Yakuza 6's just sort of banal local oddities. There's some fun gems, but its hard to feel like that they add to defining Hiroshima. Kamurocho is a place where anything can happen. Transplanting the high concept substories into Hiroshima without putting in some work into defining the daily life of the setting sort of takes me out of the process.
The minigames of Y6 can't help but feel weaker in other aspects. The hostess dates have shrunk in complexity and scope. In previous entries, hostess dates followed a steady path. You gain hearts, you build trust, and you gain short conversations about the personal life of the hostess. There's an arc to unravel. In Y6, every conversation is randomized in all your interactions, regardless of your heart rankings with the women. As a result, there's no real sense of progression or growing trust. You can learn about hobbies or favorite foods, but you can't learn about past traumas or insecurities. One of the hostesses is a professional wrestler, a storyline that only amounts to "I must keep fighting for my fans." I dislike criticizing something for what it isn't, but previous hostess minigames would often involve subplots with rivals or evil boyfriends or family troubles, slowly padded out over different dates. The hostess minigames were always a completionist obligation for me more than anything, but striping down the story advancement only made the process more tedious rather than less. What am I advancing towards if there's nothing interesting to talk about until the end?
This feeling of absence permeates through Yakuza 6's main story. For what's supposed to be an attempt to wrap up Kiryu's story, the game is shockingly disinterested in revisiting much of the franchise's history. This isn't always a dealbreaker. Yakuza is a soap opera, the rules change depending on what's narratively convenient. Sure, Kiryu could meet with the Florist of Sai to uncover the entire plot of the game. But that wouldn't allow for the game's wider story to unfold. Thus, Yakuza 6 kind of just pretends the Florist of Sai doesn't exist.
There's other areas where the game abandons different parts of the franchise history. The cast of Yakuza 3 get very little focus, with the Ryudo family nonexistent and the Morning Glory orphans quickly vanishing as the plot kicks off. There's a baseball minigame that doesn't even think of referencing the baseball protag Shinada of Yakuza 5. Entire sections of Kamurocho are suddenly blocked off in ways they never were before.
But most frustrating to me is the general arc of Haruka. Its hard not to feel like the franchise didn't know what to do with Haruka after Yakuza 2. In a lot of ways, the devs often struggle to fit a whole woman in their minds. Women are Lovers, Mothers, or Daughters. Haruka of Yakuza 1 and 2 was a sharp, savvy young girl who enjoyed sneaking into gambling dens and playing dangerous odds. Yakuza 3 and 4 demonstrate a dramatic shift as Haruka becomes more of a caretaker around the Morning Glory Orphanage. Yakuza 5 toys with the idea that Haruka still possesses that savvy edge, but its not behavior she's allowed to display frequently. She expresses it in soft, passive kindness towards everyone around her. She doesn't get to fight with the big boys. She sits off to the side. This isn't to say Haruka's character only has value when she's as violent as the men. But its hard not to feel like she's been cordoned off from the main action and shoved into a box.
Yakuza 6 doesn't change the trajectory. Haruka gets coma'd, shunted aside as Kiryu raises her surprise son. The game skips over anything dangerous like seeing Haruka pursue a romantic relationship. We're given scenes that indicate when Haruka would have gotten pregnant, but its still hard to imagine her as a woman taking ownership of her own desires and relationship aspirations. Even now, the game leaves me uncomfortable saying the flat out fact: Haruka is a grown woman who had sex. That's textual and inoffensive. Yet Haruka is still so defined as the Wise Daughter, its impossible to square that circle in my head that Haruka has any kind of sexual desire or longing for companionship. By the time she's woken up from her coma, she's fully ready to exist as The Mother, the third kind of woman that can exist. The game can't handle Haruka leaving the role of Daughter and into something more complete, but it also firmly believes she must eventually become a Mother. So that second stage, that second kind of woman that exists in the Yakuza universe, is shoved into a coma box where no one can see her. If you don't show the step between Daughter and Mother, you don't have to think about it. And Haruka can remain as innocent and pure as the game needs her to be.
Endgame spoiler: Its so fucking weird that Kiryu's last letter is to Daigo.
I love everything Kiryu says in that scene. I love that he acknowledges that he dealt Daigo a bad hand. I love that he recognizes how his inability to think ahead has damaged the world around him. I love that he admits he's neglected his loved ones in the pursuit of some pointless isolating honor. I love that he calls Daigo his son.
But he says all this while Haruka is in the same room, while he still refuses to call her his daughter too. His last letter isn't to Haruka or even the other kids he's raising. He repeats that Haruto is not his grandson. In both Yakuza 3 and 6, he explains that he takes care of Haruka, but repeatedly denies any claim that she's his kid. What's the distinction? Why claim otherwise? Is it to keep Kiryu from truly being defined as a single dad instead of a cool action guy? But why have him insist upon this in the same moment as him gently rocking a baby to sleep? Given Kiryu's monologue about fatherhood to Daigo, one has to assume there's self-awareness here. Kiryu's core flaw is his inability to choose one life. He can't fully leave the yakuza, he can't fully commit to being a parent. Its clearly something he enjoys doing! But he's so caught up in his own mistakes, he never allows himself to exist in the present.
The joy of Yakuza, to me, is in how its disparate elements clash together. Comedy and drama in a chaotic mix, bringing out the best in each other and advancing the narrative in such a specific, confusing tone. But sometimes, its soap opera sensibilities leave me cold. Despite all the ways it puts its whole heart into something, there's so many examples of where you can feel the hesitation. Where you can feel the points that they held back. And when comparing the sheer gusto of the franchise's ambition to these moments of anxiety and regression, it just makes those flaws all the more obvious.
half of this shit wouldnt have happened if they just talked to the florist lmfao
This review contains spoilers
no story greater shows how kazuma kiryu impacts lives with the one he's led greater than this one.
that charisma aizawa resented kiryu for so much in the final moments of yakuza 5 comes into full force the moment you step into onomichi. kiryu's actions rock the humble town to its very core, forever leaving his mark when he uncovers the secret it holds. the hirose family, originally antagonizing him, slowly comes to respect kiryu more and more, eventually sticking with him for the long haul and being fully willing to die for and with him as their aniki, and in the case of nagumo, as brothers.
and yet, it is ironically that same influence kiryu holds that has doomed both him and the people he cares about. countless lives of the people he had met had been thrown in danger or cut short as a result of getting swept up in kiryu's life, leading to him never knowing peace as those he holds dear to his heart are constantly threatened by those seeking to one-up him. it is this never-ending torture of a life that causes him to nearly snap into a righteous desire to snuff out the lives of iwami and sugai.
the story of kazuma kiryu and the legacy that has both blessed and haunted him does not end on a happy one - it is only the mask of a dead man that can end the curse he had inadvertently placed on his loved ones, doomed to walk the world as a corporeal ghost if it means keeping those associated with him out of harm's way - a pitifully ironic fate for the tale of a man who wanted nothing more than to walk the same path of his father figure with his head held high just the game prior.
although a janky, and sometimes frustrating combat system that lacks the tightness of yakuza games prior in favor of a looser and more realistic take on kiryu's fighting style plays a double-edged sword in yakuza 6, and the epilogue is admittedly an unfortunate case of the story not sticking to its guns (kiyomi's survival robs the story of one of its otherwise most deliciously harrowing moments and if it were up to me, I'd have kiryu die for real as him going into hiding feels somewhat like a betrayal of his arc from yakuza 5), none of that takes away from what I consider one of my favorite stories in this franchise thus far wholesale - yakuza 6 is otherwise a heartstring-tugging and beautiful ending note to the saga of kazuma kiryu.
that charisma aizawa resented kiryu for so much in the final moments of yakuza 5 comes into full force the moment you step into onomichi. kiryu's actions rock the humble town to its very core, forever leaving his mark when he uncovers the secret it holds. the hirose family, originally antagonizing him, slowly comes to respect kiryu more and more, eventually sticking with him for the long haul and being fully willing to die for and with him as their aniki, and in the case of nagumo, as brothers.
and yet, it is ironically that same influence kiryu holds that has doomed both him and the people he cares about. countless lives of the people he had met had been thrown in danger or cut short as a result of getting swept up in kiryu's life, leading to him never knowing peace as those he holds dear to his heart are constantly threatened by those seeking to one-up him. it is this never-ending torture of a life that causes him to nearly snap into a righteous desire to snuff out the lives of iwami and sugai.
the story of kazuma kiryu and the legacy that has both blessed and haunted him does not end on a happy one - it is only the mask of a dead man that can end the curse he had inadvertently placed on his loved ones, doomed to walk the world as a corporeal ghost if it means keeping those associated with him out of harm's way - a pitifully ironic fate for the tale of a man who wanted nothing more than to walk the same path of his father figure with his head held high just the game prior.
although a janky, and sometimes frustrating combat system that lacks the tightness of yakuza games prior in favor of a looser and more realistic take on kiryu's fighting style plays a double-edged sword in yakuza 6, and the epilogue is admittedly an unfortunate case of the story not sticking to its guns (kiyomi's survival robs the story of one of its otherwise most deliciously harrowing moments and if it were up to me, I'd have kiryu die for real as him going into hiding feels somewhat like a betrayal of his arc from yakuza 5), none of that takes away from what I consider one of my favorite stories in this franchise thus far wholesale - yakuza 6 is otherwise a heartstring-tugging and beautiful ending note to the saga of kazuma kiryu.
This review contains spoilers
I hated this game when I played it at launch, you know. Pure, utter vitriol. It actually made me tap out of the franchise for years until 7. For the longest time, it occupied near-permanent spot in my Bottom 25 list. I've often said that Yakuza was the refuge for MGS fans who were scorned by MGSV, and sure enough Yakuza itself scorned me with 6.
What I wanted from this game was a good Last Yakuza Game. A nice sendoff to a series I'd fallen hard and fast for over the preceding years. What I got wasn't that, it was a relatively lowkey and frankly boring mess with bad combat, droll side content and a complete disconnect from the games that it's meant to cap off. All of these criticisms still apply; the combat is slow and uncomfortable due to being a beta test for the Dragon Engine, a lot of it is just plain boring and the Yakuza Conspiracy at the heart of this game is the franchise's least interesting, the side content is snoozeworthy and god knows it has fuck all to do with the previous games.
Anyway, the thing about growing up is that change usually isn't an explosive shift towards something new, a sudden binary change or what have you. It's walking through life, day by day, not noticing any changes until you stop, rub your face and look behind only to be met with a different life - a different you.
Coming back to Y6 now that I'm much older feels strange. Difficult to articulate.
It is indeed a bad Yakuza game, but I realize now that it's not even a Yakuza game by design.
Y6 is a Kiryu Kazuma game. It's not about Yakuza, it's not about conspiracies, and it's not about clans or supporting casts or whatever:
It's about Kiryu, the guy who leads these games but only really got any meaningful depth in Yakuza 3, and has mostly been carried by side content.
It's about fatherhood, both in the literal sense (of Kiryu as Haruka's adoptive father) and more abstract ones (Kiryu's mentor role to Daigo, a man whose father was murdered by Kiryu's best friend). Mercifully, it avoids a lot of pitfalls that other sad stories fall into by not being a hyper-maschismo "fathers are the most important men in a girl's life! :D" tale nor is it a weird self-insert story by a director who recently became a father (I fucking see you, Ken Levine).
It's about an old man who is at once the worst Yakuza on earth yet also the textbook definition of their ideals. A man who disavows all that nonsense yet is ironclad in his loyalty and would take bullets for those in need. A man who respects his enemies if respected in turn, and who mourns a tragedy regardless of which 'side' it comes from.
It's about the process of blinking and realizing you're in a new world that you'd slipped into by accident; a wrong turn on the road that you can't reverse out of.
His 'daughter' is all grown up, old enough to court men and have children. She no longer just has 'children's problems', but faces many of the same woes Kiryu's compatriots ran into in older times.
The orphans he doted upon in days gone by are now young adults, ready to enter the world he'd sheltered them from. The whacky yet noble Yakuza he spent many years living alongside are now a minority. Besides Majima, Daigo and Saejima it's all unfamiliar faces and the young.
Time has eroded the difference between the Tojo Clan, the Omi Alliance, the Triads and the Jingweon mafia, for they're all staffed by young, ambitious, ruthless and amoral criminals. So deep is their decay that even an ambitious businessman with no scruples can pose as one.
When this game came out 5-6 years ago, I hated it because it wasn't what I wanted; a big glorious send-off to everything Yakuza related. The Endgame of Yakuza titles, if you want to go for the low hanging fruit. I wanted to see and fight alongside/against tons of supporting characters, I wanted characters like Majima and Daigo to have arcs running concurrent to Kiryu's, I wanted the villain to be some ghost from Kiryu's past come back for revenge. And when it didn't give me that, I hated it.
Coming back to it now, I respect it. I respect that RGG Studios opted to go against the expected finale and to create what's basically a character study, for they've always been fans of pushing the envelope and this is no different. Don't get me wrong, most of the complaints up above are still present (The Yamato 2 plot is so fucking dumb, it makes the baby lockers seem sensible), but they're easily ignorable honestly? If you focus on this as a character study you have a relatively compact story where most characters are mirrors to some aspect of Kiryu and the concepts he embodies that also manages to not overstay its welcome compared to the game immediately before it.
It's doubly easier to respect what this game did in hindsight because it set the stage for yet another Yakuza renaissance and a significant paradigm shift for the series. From this game we got two Judgment titles and the utterly mythical Yakuza 7. In an age where most publishers seem content to shit out More Games in an endless status quo, it's actually nice that Yakuza avoided that. I really do hope Y8 is the end of Kiryu.
The combat still sucks tho.
What I wanted from this game was a good Last Yakuza Game. A nice sendoff to a series I'd fallen hard and fast for over the preceding years. What I got wasn't that, it was a relatively lowkey and frankly boring mess with bad combat, droll side content and a complete disconnect from the games that it's meant to cap off. All of these criticisms still apply; the combat is slow and uncomfortable due to being a beta test for the Dragon Engine, a lot of it is just plain boring and the Yakuza Conspiracy at the heart of this game is the franchise's least interesting, the side content is snoozeworthy and god knows it has fuck all to do with the previous games.
Anyway, the thing about growing up is that change usually isn't an explosive shift towards something new, a sudden binary change or what have you. It's walking through life, day by day, not noticing any changes until you stop, rub your face and look behind only to be met with a different life - a different you.
Coming back to Y6 now that I'm much older feels strange. Difficult to articulate.
It is indeed a bad Yakuza game, but I realize now that it's not even a Yakuza game by design.
Y6 is a Kiryu Kazuma game. It's not about Yakuza, it's not about conspiracies, and it's not about clans or supporting casts or whatever:
It's about Kiryu, the guy who leads these games but only really got any meaningful depth in Yakuza 3, and has mostly been carried by side content.
It's about fatherhood, both in the literal sense (of Kiryu as Haruka's adoptive father) and more abstract ones (Kiryu's mentor role to Daigo, a man whose father was murdered by Kiryu's best friend). Mercifully, it avoids a lot of pitfalls that other sad stories fall into by not being a hyper-maschismo "fathers are the most important men in a girl's life! :D" tale nor is it a weird self-insert story by a director who recently became a father (I fucking see you, Ken Levine).
It's about an old man who is at once the worst Yakuza on earth yet also the textbook definition of their ideals. A man who disavows all that nonsense yet is ironclad in his loyalty and would take bullets for those in need. A man who respects his enemies if respected in turn, and who mourns a tragedy regardless of which 'side' it comes from.
It's about the process of blinking and realizing you're in a new world that you'd slipped into by accident; a wrong turn on the road that you can't reverse out of.
His 'daughter' is all grown up, old enough to court men and have children. She no longer just has 'children's problems', but faces many of the same woes Kiryu's compatriots ran into in older times.
The orphans he doted upon in days gone by are now young adults, ready to enter the world he'd sheltered them from. The whacky yet noble Yakuza he spent many years living alongside are now a minority. Besides Majima, Daigo and Saejima it's all unfamiliar faces and the young.
Time has eroded the difference between the Tojo Clan, the Omi Alliance, the Triads and the Jingweon mafia, for they're all staffed by young, ambitious, ruthless and amoral criminals. So deep is their decay that even an ambitious businessman with no scruples can pose as one.
When this game came out 5-6 years ago, I hated it because it wasn't what I wanted; a big glorious send-off to everything Yakuza related. The Endgame of Yakuza titles, if you want to go for the low hanging fruit. I wanted to see and fight alongside/against tons of supporting characters, I wanted characters like Majima and Daigo to have arcs running concurrent to Kiryu's, I wanted the villain to be some ghost from Kiryu's past come back for revenge. And when it didn't give me that, I hated it.
Coming back to it now, I respect it. I respect that RGG Studios opted to go against the expected finale and to create what's basically a character study, for they've always been fans of pushing the envelope and this is no different. Don't get me wrong, most of the complaints up above are still present (The Yamato 2 plot is so fucking dumb, it makes the baby lockers seem sensible), but they're easily ignorable honestly? If you focus on this as a character study you have a relatively compact story where most characters are mirrors to some aspect of Kiryu and the concepts he embodies that also manages to not overstay its welcome compared to the game immediately before it.
It's doubly easier to respect what this game did in hindsight because it set the stage for yet another Yakuza renaissance and a significant paradigm shift for the series. From this game we got two Judgment titles and the utterly mythical Yakuza 7. In an age where most publishers seem content to shit out More Games in an endless status quo, it's actually nice that Yakuza avoided that. I really do hope Y8 is the end of Kiryu.
The combat still sucks tho.
the bruh moment of life
Story
After the incredibly stupid decision Haruka made at the end of Y5, her family faces the consequences and Kiryu decides to go to jail for a few years even though he could fight the case because he thinks it'll take the heat off his kids at the orphanage. When he returns from prison he discovers that his daughter Haruka left a long time ago and no one knows where she is and for some reason no one thought to write him a letter saying that she left. He leaves for the shores of Onomichi, a shipbuilding town to track her down and gets involved in another criminal conspiracy.
That's the premise of the story. When I first played Y6 months ago I actually really liked the story, especially coming off of my disappointment with y5 but the more I think about the plot of Y6 the more I take issue with certain things. This is supposed to be Kiryu's last hurrah but the game is almost entirely composed of new characters, and these characters are good I won't lie but its still disappointing. Haruka is on the box art but she has like a minute of dialog, Little Asia is burned down in the opening of the game but Tanimura doesn't get a single mention. Kiryu is searching for Haruka but somehow everyone in the game forgot about the Florist and Akiyama becomes his new informant? I have a lot more complaints but this review is probably gonna be long so I'll just leave it at this. Here is a video about Y6 that goes into the flaws of the story and while the presentation can be pretty pseud at times I agree with most of the major points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCbawU_pJKU
Gameplay
This combat sucks lol. Kiryu has a new fighting style because they wanted to showcase the ragdoll capabilities of the new Dragon Engine and there's a heavy emphasis on throwing enemies with grabs and finishing throws which gets old so fast. Punches don't have much impact and your combos can be stopped very easily by the new blocking system. Heat mode was changed to essentially be the Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry cause now you have to manually trigger it after storing orbs of Heat and in this mode you gain access to new strong Heat moves. It sounds cool but in reality it is super broken.
This game was rushed so there's no coliseum, no weapon system, no Komaki training, no Revelations, no Purgatory and the Kamurocho map isn't even complete
Onto some positives, the hunger system and the new xp system is pretty cool. By eating food and doing different content you can get different types of XP. You can also buy drinks from the vending machine now and you can walk around with it in your hand. Its really cool and even immersive in a way to wrap up a street fight, get a drink from the vending machine and then walk along the shore of Onomichi during sunset, or the temple at the top of Onomichi while looking at the view. You can also enter buildings without a loading screen now.
Music
Yakuza music is great as always. Some highlights for me are 応龍の嘶き, KAMURO Again, Through, Bloodstained Philosophy, Fist Law, Lots of Lights and obviously The Way of Life.
Something most western players won't know about the is the licensed music in Yakuza 6. The international release cut these tracks and its a shame cause the tracks by Tatsuro Yamashita are god tier and make each scene hit much harder. In previous games, licensed music was only used in a minor way but in Y6 it is used in many emotional scenes as well as the credits. Personally, I used a patch to restore the music on my pc. Here is a video displaying each Y6 cutscene that had licensed music with subs. https://youtu.be/zJFGjkUqzhc
Overall, while Yakuza 6 has a very strong cast and a pretty decent story, the many plotholes as well as the lackluster treatment of returning characters sucks and drags it down. If this was just another Yakuza game I would probably like it a lot more but as a finale to the decade long saga of Kazuma Kiryu, this rushed ass game had no hope of delivering
Story
After the incredibly stupid decision Haruka made at the end of Y5, her family faces the consequences and Kiryu decides to go to jail for a few years even though he could fight the case because he thinks it'll take the heat off his kids at the orphanage. When he returns from prison he discovers that his daughter Haruka left a long time ago and no one knows where she is and for some reason no one thought to write him a letter saying that she left. He leaves for the shores of Onomichi, a shipbuilding town to track her down and gets involved in another criminal conspiracy.
That's the premise of the story. When I first played Y6 months ago I actually really liked the story, especially coming off of my disappointment with y5 but the more I think about the plot of Y6 the more I take issue with certain things. This is supposed to be Kiryu's last hurrah but the game is almost entirely composed of new characters, and these characters are good I won't lie but its still disappointing. Haruka is on the box art but she has like a minute of dialog, Little Asia is burned down in the opening of the game but Tanimura doesn't get a single mention. Kiryu is searching for Haruka but somehow everyone in the game forgot about the Florist and Akiyama becomes his new informant? I have a lot more complaints but this review is probably gonna be long so I'll just leave it at this. Here is a video about Y6 that goes into the flaws of the story and while the presentation can be pretty pseud at times I agree with most of the major points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCbawU_pJKU
Gameplay
This combat sucks lol. Kiryu has a new fighting style because they wanted to showcase the ragdoll capabilities of the new Dragon Engine and there's a heavy emphasis on throwing enemies with grabs and finishing throws which gets old so fast. Punches don't have much impact and your combos can be stopped very easily by the new blocking system. Heat mode was changed to essentially be the Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry cause now you have to manually trigger it after storing orbs of Heat and in this mode you gain access to new strong Heat moves. It sounds cool but in reality it is super broken.
This game was rushed so there's no coliseum, no weapon system, no Komaki training, no Revelations, no Purgatory and the Kamurocho map isn't even complete
Onto some positives, the hunger system and the new xp system is pretty cool. By eating food and doing different content you can get different types of XP. You can also buy drinks from the vending machine now and you can walk around with it in your hand. Its really cool and even immersive in a way to wrap up a street fight, get a drink from the vending machine and then walk along the shore of Onomichi during sunset, or the temple at the top of Onomichi while looking at the view. You can also enter buildings without a loading screen now.
Music
Yakuza music is great as always. Some highlights for me are 応龍の嘶き, KAMURO Again, Through, Bloodstained Philosophy, Fist Law, Lots of Lights and obviously The Way of Life.
Something most western players won't know about the is the licensed music in Yakuza 6. The international release cut these tracks and its a shame cause the tracks by Tatsuro Yamashita are god tier and make each scene hit much harder. In previous games, licensed music was only used in a minor way but in Y6 it is used in many emotional scenes as well as the credits. Personally, I used a patch to restore the music on my pc. Here is a video displaying each Y6 cutscene that had licensed music with subs. https://youtu.be/zJFGjkUqzhc
Overall, while Yakuza 6 has a very strong cast and a pretty decent story, the many plotholes as well as the lackluster treatment of returning characters sucks and drags it down. If this was just another Yakuza game I would probably like it a lot more but as a finale to the decade long saga of Kazuma Kiryu, this rushed ass game had no hope of delivering