Yakuza Kiwami is a good story with inconsistent pacing being its major downfall. It's a fun title on its own and worth playing if you're interested in the Yakuza series, especially as a follow-up to 0, but as a remake I feel as if Kiwami fails to successfully engage me as a player in its additional content and content directly inherited from Yakuza 0.
In particular I'd like to talk about "Majima Everywhere". Not only does this side story lose all of its initial charm after the first five hours of gameplay, I feel as if it's actually significantly detrimental to the story at times. It creates, with it, something of a tonal black hole in which Majima's character becomes a clustered mess of nonsense that feels undeserved as someone who hasn't played future entries. Coming off of Yakuza 0, Majima's character was played relatively straight the hole time and could hardly be considered a cartoonish goofball. He was grounded and tragic in many ways. Moving in to Kiwami, the opening introductory scene immediately has its tone set by Majima confronting Kiryu and threatening his life. He's established as a man with nothing to lose and a terrifying amount of power.
This is then immediately undermined by him popping out of trash cans and staging a zombie attack.
You then return to the story and proceed along and all of his appearances are played as being genuinely frightening and threatening, yet somehow he doesn't feel to be a threat at all. You already become aware that he's of no real threat to you because, well, he would never harm you or anyone around you because it would impede his overall goal of "fighting you at your absolute strongest" which is established and re-established constantly up to the very end.
I would argue its a total reduction of a character all in the name of shoving him down your throat for the sake of fan service. I'm not saying he had much of a role in Kiwami otherwise, because he truly didn't, he was mostly used as a "goon" type character, but once removed from the Majima Everywhere scenes you're left with a man who could be a legitimately psychotic threat to anyone around him. The scene at Shangri La was actually pretty unsettling until you remember this was the guy who you just got done playing Pocket Racers and MesuKing with.
This is, to be honest, a relatively minor nitpick in the grand scheme of things, but beyond that I think it's relatively lazy that all the side content in this game is mostly just recycled from Yakuza 0. It was nice seeing continuations of some of the substories from Kiryu's past, at least, but just the same they failed to introduce anything new of any interest. Other issues I had were how absolutely little damage Kiryu can actually deal to boss enemies - the game is borderline miserable to complete when it comes to bosses (and especially the endless Majima encounters) until you unlock tiger drop (thank god), at which point the game is trivialized.
Overall this game just felt pretty weak to me and left me feeling mostly empty upon completing all of the content it had to offer. The story was good as always but the gameplay failed to elevate it or accompany it in a satisfying way.
In particular I'd like to talk about "Majima Everywhere". Not only does this side story lose all of its initial charm after the first five hours of gameplay, I feel as if it's actually significantly detrimental to the story at times. It creates, with it, something of a tonal black hole in which Majima's character becomes a clustered mess of nonsense that feels undeserved as someone who hasn't played future entries. Coming off of Yakuza 0, Majima's character was played relatively straight the hole time and could hardly be considered a cartoonish goofball. He was grounded and tragic in many ways. Moving in to Kiwami, the opening introductory scene immediately has its tone set by Majima confronting Kiryu and threatening his life. He's established as a man with nothing to lose and a terrifying amount of power.
This is then immediately undermined by him popping out of trash cans and staging a zombie attack.
You then return to the story and proceed along and all of his appearances are played as being genuinely frightening and threatening, yet somehow he doesn't feel to be a threat at all. You already become aware that he's of no real threat to you because, well, he would never harm you or anyone around you because it would impede his overall goal of "fighting you at your absolute strongest" which is established and re-established constantly up to the very end.
I would argue its a total reduction of a character all in the name of shoving him down your throat for the sake of fan service. I'm not saying he had much of a role in Kiwami otherwise, because he truly didn't, he was mostly used as a "goon" type character, but once removed from the Majima Everywhere scenes you're left with a man who could be a legitimately psychotic threat to anyone around him. The scene at Shangri La was actually pretty unsettling until you remember this was the guy who you just got done playing Pocket Racers and MesuKing with.
This is, to be honest, a relatively minor nitpick in the grand scheme of things, but beyond that I think it's relatively lazy that all the side content in this game is mostly just recycled from Yakuza 0. It was nice seeing continuations of some of the substories from Kiryu's past, at least, but just the same they failed to introduce anything new of any interest. Other issues I had were how absolutely little damage Kiryu can actually deal to boss enemies - the game is borderline miserable to complete when it comes to bosses (and especially the endless Majima encounters) until you unlock tiger drop (thank god), at which point the game is trivialized.
Overall this game just felt pretty weak to me and left me feeling mostly empty upon completing all of the content it had to offer. The story was good as always but the gameplay failed to elevate it or accompany it in a satisfying way.