I was really excited to start Yakuza 3 when I first bought it. I never took the time to write full reviews on this site for Yakuza 1 and 2, but I had a lot of fun with those games, especially Yakuza 2. Y2 was a near perfect evolution of the prior game in all aspects. A better feeling and more in depth combat system, more areas to explore other than Kamurocho, an even better narrative, and slightly a better soundtrack. To me, Yakuza 2 was an ideal sequel to the first game. I wouldn’t consider myself the world's biggest Yakuza fan, but Y2 was a damn good game. I guess I wasn't expecting the same kind of evolution from Y2 to 3, but unfortunately, Yakuza 3 is a downgrade from Yakuza 2 for me.

The most glaring issue with the game for me is probably the combat, and it’s what causes a majority of my negative feelings on the game. It's been said thousands of times online but the “Blockuza 3” shit is real. Normal enemies aren’t a problem, and the game’s combat really shines there. It feels just as if not even more smooth than Yakuza 2, and once you start getting some upgrades going you get new combo enders and heat actions which really spice up an already great system. The issue with Y3’s combat is not with how it feels, it's really just the boss battles. Full disclosure: I am not a pro Yakuza gamer. However, the boss AI in this game is kind of ridiculous. I’m aware that the issues I'm about to describe are partially the fault of the remastered version from my understanding, but the bosses in Yakuza 3 constantly block. They do not stop. Normally, when enemies were spamming block in the last two games you could pretty reliably grab them and your issue was solved, but it was seldom a problem in the first place, and you could also deal with this in other ways. But in Y3, half the time you even attempt to grab a boss you get a huge chunk of health off for even attempting it, and like i said, these guys just will not fucking stop blocking. Lots of people say you're supposed to just quickstep behind them and get a full combo, but unfortunately in my experience this almost never works. Quickstepping is kind of awkward at times and it almost never travels enough distance to reliably get behind an enemy to hit their back before they can turn around and start blocking again. I’ve been told the short quickstep is a product of the remaster doubling the framerate without adjusting the animation, resulting in a quickstep that goes half the distance. This could be totally wrong (Quade told me tho so it's probably true), but it definitely makes sense if that's the case. So, what are the other options for dealing with the bosses? My favorite and honestly most used option was to build up my heat gauge with items or blocking/spamming attacks on their block, and then picking up the nearest chair and slamming it over the boss's head with a heat action. This would do some pretty decent damage, and if i was lucky i would get an object with one of the heat actions that prompts me to mash Square or something. Those ones would net me a REALLY nice chunk of health, since I’m a self-proclaimed pro masher. But when there was no reliable way to fill up my heat gauge, every boss was more or less a 20-minute slap fight where i would cycle between spamming attacks on block to do chip damage, trying to bait and punish attacks so I could get one or two hits in before they start immediately blocking again, and trying to throw them which i would say worked about 1/10 times i would try it. This would lead me to seriously dread every single time I knew a boss fight was coming up. This really sucks, because the boss fights in Yakuza 2 were all pretty awesome. And I bet the ones in Y3 would have been lots of fun too if they didn't block the entire time. To be clear, I do think that Y3’s combat is in general pretty fun, but these boss fights really drag it down quite a bit. I do like the added arms dealer who sells reusable weapons, but I almost never used it because of the hassle required to go and fix my weapon every single time it broke, since it would only last a fight or two. Neat concept but I’d love to see it expanded upon in future games.

The plot of Yakuza 3 is sort of weird to talk about for me. I had a lot of knee jerk negative reactions to some of it at first but now sitting down trying to articulate everything I feel like I should have been more fair to it. Yakuza 3 has a mostly pretty good-decent narrative but with a few issues. First of all, this game has really weird pacing. I really like how in this game Kiryu is stepping away from the Yakuza life for real. It’s really caused him nothing but trouble, and honestly, I just wanna see this guy happy. I love the decision to have Kiryu start an orphanage in Okinawa. Not only does it provide a change of scenery compared to the bustling cities of the last two games, it just makes you feel good. The opening hours of the game helping out at the orphanage are pretty awesome, and I like that you actually spend a pretty significant portion of the game with the kids, because it really ends up making you care about them too. However, I do think that the pacing in these early sections is a bit slow. Not that it really overstays its welcome, but it just feels like a lot of it takes longer than it needs to. At the very least, Okinawa looks pretty good so it's not a bad place to be looking at for a while. Once you get to Kamurocho though, it feels like the game moves at breakneck pace. Yakuza 3 is already not a very long game, so it feels like you're only really in Kamurocho for a little bit before it's suddenly the end of the game. On the subject of Kamurocho, although this is not related to the plot, I can't help but feel like Kamurocho has lost some of its grandiosity from the last two games. Yakuza 3 is a good looking game, but I wouldn't say it looks better than Y2. The free third-person camera works really well in Okinawa, but it just doesn’t really do Kamurocho any favors. The fixed camera angles in Y1 and Y2 offered a really great sense of scale to the streets of Kamurocho, and I can't put my finger on it, but something about the ambiance of the city feels off compared to the prior games in Yakuza 3. Moving on though, I do really like most of the Kamurocho section of the game. The new characters introduced are all pretty interesting for the most part, and following the mystery of the guy who looks exactly like Kazama might be is really intriguing. It only really falls apart for me in Chapter 9, which is after all of the leads you were following before-hand dried up and it seems like there really isn't anywhere else to go from here. Titled “The Plot '', it certainly doesn't waste time telling you exactly what it sets out to do. It’s just a 30 minute exposition dump chapter that is just kind of ridiculously boring, because it has to figure out where the game is even going to go next, and answer the question of who the guy who looks like Kazama is. There’s only one fight the whole chapter, and then it ends. Wow. Awesome. I think most of my problems with the game's plot stem from this very chapter. The game needed a new villain character, and of the new characters introduced, Kanda already died and Hamazaki had effectively exited the plot, so all that was left was Mine. I don’t think he's as bad as I felt he was directly after finishing the game, but I still think Mine is a relatively weak villain compared to the ones from the past two games. For starters, he just kind of asserts himself into the plot in the last third. Sure he was there before, but he didn't really do much or present himself as a threat or really do anything until he killed Kanda. The game has to spend what little time left trying to develop his character, and while I don't think he's a bad character, he just feels kind of rushed. He’s meant to be a mirror of Kiryu… like how the last two games' main villains were. OK. I just wish they had done something different instead of the same thing as the last two times, because it just sets Mine up to be directly compared to the last two, which really doesn’t do him any favors. The final fight with Nishiki worked so well because it was built up the whole game, and Nishiki was partially great because of his personal connection to Kiryu, with the two of them essentially being brothers.Nishiki isn’t especially complex or anything but he was interesting pretty much from the get go because we also got a glimpse of his relationship with Kiryu prior to when he shot Dojima. Along with this, the parallels between him and Kiryu were also shown the symbolic nature of their back tattoos. Sure, he could have been more developed, but Nishiki really worked for what Yakuza 1 was. Ryuji was great because he pretty much embodied everything great about a rival character in video games. He was threatening, but most important of all he was really fucking cool. Every scene with him in it, he commands such a uniquely threatening presence which makes him a convincing villain almost immediately. Once again, the back tattoos have great significance to his character and his relationship with Kiryu. While Kiryu and Nishiki tattoos more-so told a story of an inevitable duel between fated rivals, Ryuji and Kiryus were direct parallels– both of them being dragons. Furthermore, both Ryuji and Kiryu had the same nickname, “The Dragon of Dojima” and “The Dragon of Kansai.” I don’t need to talk about how great Ryuji is that much, but it's pretty easy to see how the face off between him and Kiryu was so good. While we’re on the subject of tattoos, the way tattoos are done in Yakuza 3 bothers me a little bit. They were really meaningful in Y1 and 2, and usually shirtless fights were reserved for ultimate clashes of ideals, so pretty much only in the final battle. In Yakuza 3, everyone is constantly pulling off their shirts and showing their tattoos. It really cheapens the whole tattoo thing in the first place for me. If everyone is just going to pull their shirts every time they get into a minor street brawl then why does this shit even matter anymore? And despite how much everyone wants to pull their shirt off, there is no emphasized symbolism between Kiryu and Mine’s tattoos. There totally could be, but I don't know shit about Japanese art and shit like that, so that's kind of my bad i’ll admit. But anyways, In comparison to the last villains, Mine doesn’t really have the same kind of immediate appeal as a character meant to mirror Kiryu. Sure, they were both orphans, and Mine is obviously just kind of supposed to be a version of Kiryu who had a really warped worldview and grew into a much worse man than him, but he just really doesn’t have enough time to develop for me to find him convincing. The most jarring thing is in the last mission when Haruka comes to Kamurocho with Kiryu and they start talking about how Kiryu “knows that this is the end for him”. And it's like… I've only seen this dude like two or three times at this point in the plot and nothing he’s done has made him seem like a genuine threat to Kiryu's life. He fucked up Kanda pretty bad and had his goons behead him, but Kiryu also completely fucking dogged on that jobber beforehand. It just feels kind of weird for them to suddenly spring on that Kiryu thinks this might be his last battle, because pretty much none of the game has been building to that kind of moment. Before I talk about the very end of the game though, I do want to say I do like most of this last stretch. I really like the scene of Rikiya's death, and especially the performance that Takaya Kuroda gives in this scene. Dude sounds like he's legitimately bawling his eyes out in the recording booth, it's just a great scene. I haven’t talked about Rikiya the whole review, because honestly I don't really have much to say about him. He’s not a bad character, I just don’t really care. Other than that, the scene of the orphanage getting destroyed is great, and is probably one of the only things that makes Mine at least a little bit convincing as a villain. Moving on to the final confrontation, after you fight through Mine’s goons, you have to fight CIA agents who are really part of the U.S crime syndicate Black Monday. I didn’t mention Black Monday before because they really just feel like an afterthought in the plot, especially since you’re introduced to them in that huge exposition dump chapter I mentioned before. I think they’re pretty weak as an antagonistic force but I do really like their ring leader, Andre Richardson. To be honest, I just think it's funny to have this one guy speaking English while everyone else is speaking Japanese. The final showdown itself is just kind of ok, Mine pretty much explains everything I’ve said about him previously and then you square off. I don’t know what happened here, but Mine barely blocks, like at all. You would think this is a good thing but it leaves the whole fight pretty anticlimactic, since all I did in this one was spam square square square triangle triangle and heat actions till he died. I pretty much already said my problems with Mine, so I'll avoid sounding like a broken record. I will say, the relationship he had with Daigo that was briefly hinted at was kinda interesting, but that's the only thing i really have left to say about him. After you beat him he jumps off the roof with Richardson, killing them both. Sad! All that's left is the final cutscene, and to be honest I really hated this scene when I first saw it. I still don't like it, but I just kind of dont care about it now. Hamazaki (I forget his name every time i write about him in this review and i have to go on google to figure it out every time btw) basically just approaches Kiryu on the street and tells him how much he fucked up his life. Kiryu tries the whole “It’s not too late to change your ways” thing he did with Mine and then Hamazaki stabs him, and then credits roll. To me this is just a really cheap shock value ending that contributes almost nothing. I know it's supposed to show that not everyone is willing to change and you have to use your judgment to figure out who's worth believing in but I just don't really like the way this was done. Even if there weren't multiple Yakuza games after this with Kiryu’s face on the cover I wouldn't have believed this death because it's just stupid. It honestly did nothing but leave a bad taste in my mouth.

That’s pretty much all I have to say. I said a lot of negative things about the game in this review but i dont think Yakuza 3 is a bad game. You could do much worse, and overall the game is pretty enjoyable. It just has a lot of glaring flaws to me and is a pretty clear downgrade from the last two entries in the series. I haven't gotten to the rest of the series yet but I definitely don't think you should go out of your way to skip this one, there's definitely some good stuff here still if you liked the last two games. Maybe play the original ps3 version if that version doesn't have the quickstep issue, or play on pc if you can so you can use mods to fix it. Also i didn't know where to put this but the karaoke minigame is awesome