TL;DR: I LOVED the gameplay and most of the story, ESPECIALLY the finale, but the game can kinda feel like it's overstaying its welcome at times because of how much is going on inside it. Regardless, it's a good god damn game at least worth one long playthrough.

Not gonna be talking about plot at all outside of the bare minimum. This is a story that doesn't need to be spoiled.

Y'know the phrase "too much of a good thing"? I feel like Yakuza 5 represents that phrase very well, even if it's still overall a fantastic experience.

I thought the gameplay for this entry was amazing - very, VERY easily challenging 0 for my favorite combat in the franchise. Kiryu felt as clean as ever, Saejima got some much-needed tools he was missing in 4, Akiyama got FUCKIN AIR COMBOS, and the new guy Shinada, while a lil underwhelming, had an interesting gimmick by being kinda like a grappler and a weapons specialist mixed into one. Oh, and Haruka dances.

My first problem with this game unfortunately comes from the gameplay: street battles. Street Battles in this game are INCREDIBLY frequent, to the point where you will at some point while playing get 2, 3 or even 5 consecutive fights in a row, if not multiple of those chain fights. I had 3 times as many fights in this game than I did in any other Yakuza. They can be ignored by walking, but sometimes you can't see them and they'll just rush you. Or you'll bump into a civvie and they'll start a fight anyways. Oh yeah, sometimes civilians are fights, with no indicator other than their model, but have fun seeing that in a crowd of 30+ NPCs. It's too much.

Speaking of which, NPCs are also strangely frustrating to get around in this game. I didn't have this problem in ANY other Yakuza game, but I commonly got stuck on groups of civilians that just spawned in front of me for no reason. 0-4 did not have this problem, and it's more of a pet peeve than an actual issue. It's mildly annoying going for all the sub and side stories while dealing with a horde of middle-aged office men appearing into existence in front of you with little time to react.

Substories are extremely plentiful in this game, and many of them are what you expect from Yakuza. Some of them are kinda iffy, but it's not too big of a deal. The real kicker (usually) comes in the form of the Sidestories, which is a different, story-introduced option. Kiryu gets to drive a taxi, Saejima hunts (the lamest one), Haruka does stuff on TV, and Shinada goes for home runs at the batting center. There's a surprising amount of funny, critical (as in critiquing), emotional, or just flat-out cool missions in these, which I happily enjoyed. Including these to the normal substory count of 78 makes for a grand total of 227 substories. Jesus.

Yakuza is a series that I do most if not all the side content for because their sidequests aren't random bullshit and actually used for world and character building. Without substories, I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with this series with 0, at least as deeply as I love this series now. By the time I was done with Yakuza 5, I had played it for 108 hours, over DOUBLE what it took me for basically every other game in the series, 68 hours of which was side content. I loved a lot of it, but it genuinely took me over 2 months than what I planned to finish this game because of that. You can imagine the burnout from that alone probably.

Of course, there are another 40 hours to that. The story.
Kiryu had an amazing start. I can't comment on it much further because of enormous spoilers, but it's one of the strongest starts I've seen in a game. Made me respect Kiryu even more as a character. I was having a blast. Then came Saejima.

Saejima was a standout character for me in 4, his arc and character being incredibly refreshing and enjoyable. In 5, it felt like RGG didn't know what to do with him to reasonably keep him in the story, so they just threw him in prison again. This section was a complete and utter slog, which said slog ends at his FOURTH SECTION of the chapter. His personality also doesn't shine through as much, oddly enough, but how mind-bogglingly slow his section was, alongside his sidestory, made me mentally check out of the game for a bit.

Haruka's section was a breath of fresh air even if I didn't click with the rhythm game dance battles all too much, it just felt nice to be able to do things again. Akiyama showing up instantly made it much better, even if he really... didn't need to be, at all? He's just kinda there, gets involved for 3 seconds, and then starts doing a monologue about the villain being smart. It didn't help that I was still kinda checked out from this section, but to be fair, I could watch Akiyama balance his checkbook and I'd be on Cloud 9 because he's one of the best characters in the franchise even when he doesn't need to be there.

Like I said about Tanimura before him, the fact that Shinada never reappears in the series again is a fucking crime. Shinada was easily my second favorite story in the game, being somewhat self-contained and bringing interesting characters and thoughts to the table. Shinada himself is also great at how complex his character can be. A lot about Shinada's story was incredibly enjoyable and even heartwrenchingly relatable at times, and I don't understand why people don't like this section of the story.

Everything I've mentioned (bar Saejima's section) is good on their own. But this is where I tie back into that common theme: too much. This is all in ONE GAME.

With how dramatically the pacing can change going from the reserved taxi driver trying to lay low Kiryu to sarcastic, down-on-his-luck but optimistic Shinada, how long you can go without seeing side characters that end up becoming critically important to the story, how many twists the game tries to throw at you, doing whatever number of side content you end up doing and how many characters you meet in each section, it all becomes too much. It can very easily become confusing to why something's happened/happening in the story, and you can start to feel really burnt out by the gameplay. It's too much of a good thing in everything but gameplay - it can feel like it's just going on forever, even if you're just walking around, because of how it feels to be in that part of the story.

Even through all that, I can't bring myself to say Yakuza 5 isn't good. I can't.

I can't say that I didn't enjoy the finale. I can't say I didn't enjoy (most of) my time with the game overall. The story might be a tad bit weaker in terms of the franchise, but I can't say that this is a bad game in the slightest because, at its core, it's still trying to be genuine like every other Yakuza game. I'd rather a game be genuine and have issues than be forgettable, safe, done-to-death muck. The ending alone made me reconsider some of my problems with this game. It's that good.

I'll, at minimum, give it a 4/5. (If you see higher, I probably changed my mind and edited it.)
Yakuza 5 is an incredible game that just, unfortunately, has too much going on. But that's its one and only weakness - everything else about it is phenomenal.

Except for Saejima's section, I'm still a little salty that they him dirty.

Honestly liked it more than I thought it would. I liked the slow burn at the start and slowly learning about all the kids. I really like Kiryu being beach orphan dad. That section with the politician that just did 30 minutes of exposition dumping was baffling. Mine is a cool villain though.

~100%ing Review~
Might be one of the most frustrating things I have ever done in a video game. Trying to do the bonus VR bosses genuinely made me think that this combat system is unfathomably worse than DMC 2's.