TO LIVE IS TO NOT RUN AWAY

After I finished Like A Dragon, I got a sort of motivation to go through the rest of the Yakuza series. I decided to go with the release order, since that would give me the clearest perspective of the progression of the series, and it's a viewpoint I feel that I rarely ever see with Yakuza. This does mean that I'll have a hiatus my playthroughs for a while, since I don't have the remasters of 3-5. Even so, I'm interested in tackling this series I've heard so much about, and this one made a pretty strong impression.

The way I see it, Yakuza is the DMC1 of the franchise. It clearly shows a very early foundation of the franchise, but still feels like it has a unique flair from the games that followed it. Despite this, it doesn't look like this game gets nearly as much respect as that one does. I feel like this is because of Kiwami and how it ties things closer to 0, leading to most people saying "just play Kiwami". (I've had multiple people say that to me.) While I do have a bit of an urge to get on my soapbox and talk about how I despise this mentality, it's something that can wait for another time. For now, I just want to talk about my general thoughts on the game.

The biggest thing I want to start off with is its aesthetics. Kamurocho looks absolutely amazing in this game. The brightly-lit city is especially beautiful at nighttime. It's one of the most gorgeous environments I've seen on the PS2. This is the only game in the series(to my knowledge) that sticks with fixed camera angles, and they're used to great effect in making every area feel distinct. The atmosphere it creates with the bustling city noises and the occasional low-key music especially stands out. I haven't gotten quite this feeling from Like A Dragon and the bits of 0 that I've played, I can't stress enough how much this adds to the experience.

The gameplay is some fairly simple beat-em-up style combat, but I think it has a few elements that make it fairly interesting. The one that stood out to me the most was the heat gauge, where keeping up consistently good performance in battle rewarded you with passive buffs and the ability to do satisfying heat moves. I really like this system, it's sort of like DMC's style meter in terms of how it encourages keeping up momentum in combat, though to a similar effect. It's hardly a perfect combat system, though. My big issue is with how Kiryu can't turn at all when he's in the middle of a combo. Turning around in general when enemies are on you is a bit of a hassle. I'd complain about some other experiences, but I'm going to be more lenient since they probably had something to do with PCSX2's awful input delay. Despite that, I felt that successful combat encounters were really satisfying.

Combat is at its best with bosses, 1-on-1 encounters especially. They usually do a really good job at testing your abilities without being irritating with how much they bombard you with things to get past. My favorite boss in the game was easily Majima, his swift movement made it a very careful game of bait-and-punish approaches that constantly had me watching his next move. I hope to fight him more often in games moving forward, I think he'd be super fun with later gameplay tweaks.

The last thing I want to go over is the game's story. I bet I hardly have the most in-depth reading out there, but I found the throughline of people trying to run away from their pasts or relationships, or learning to move forward to be engaging in how it was portrayed through the different characters. Nishiki was the most stand-out portrayal of this, but I also saw a bit of that in the character of Detective Date, and how he was a deadbeat for most of his daughter's life. It has a strong message of facing your problems head on and forging your own destiny. This is the resolution that Kiryu is led to by the end of the game, after the suffering he constantly went through throughout the latter half of the game.

Oh yeah, I haven't really talked about Kiryu that much. I was a bit worried that he'd just stick with me as a usual stoic protagonist, but I think by the time his relationships with Haruka and Nishiki were developed, he became incredibly compelling to follow. I especially like how he ties into the core theme I described earlier. He feels he won't be able to live down the stigma from the killing that sent him to prison for 10 years, he lost many people close to him over the course of the game, but he still finds a resolve to keep moving forward. I find that kind of inspiring in a way.

I'm really glad I decided to play this one to the end first out of all the beat-em-up entries. It gave me a clear perspective on the roots of the series, provided me with something fairly special, and got me excited to pursue the franchise going forward. Finishing this series is for sure going to be one of my goals for 2022.

EDIT NOTE: I didn't have a point to say this but I'd mainly recommend playing through this if you have a strong tolerance for bad english dubs. It's far from the worst I've heard, but there's many moments of bad line delivery where I can see someone being completely taken out of the experience thanks to them.