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.
Pangburn
1 year ago