The most "Yakuza" Yakuza game. In its main story, side content, battle animations, etc. they have never made a game before or since that has captured this series' qualities and cranked them up to 11... for better and worse. Everything that is problematic about the series, it's here. Everything that can be tedious about the series, it's here. Everything that makes the series sick, it's here. Everything that you could say about the stories of these games, it's all here. For many reasons I now refrain from calling this "the best", or even that this series is "good" in actuality. However, I know back when I played this as my first Yakuza game, I absolutely had a blast (before and when I got back to it from a 2 year hiatus) and legitimately cried throughout the finale,whether the game actually earned that or not. If you were to play one Yakuza game (and please, for your own sake, do not play every Yakuza game), I'm not truly sure if this should be it, this is the 5th game of a long running series after all, but I do truly believe that this is the definitive Yakuza game in all of its strengths and its faults.

+this game basically presents four mini yakuza games with a finale tying everything up, and it's all the better for it. trying to stretch a single plot over 45 hours of story would be a death sentence
+after putting kiryu at the end of y4 with little relevance to the plot, they made sure to put him front and center here, and he's got one of the better stories of the bunch. his loneliness and listlessness as he attempts to provide for haruka and morning glory from afar is a standout arc for him
+the half-step engine upgrade here (that would be used for ishin, 0, kiwami, and fotns following this) is quite good, and makes this one of the better looking ps3 games in my opinion. all the character models look much less like action figures and the level of detail in each city is staggering
+haruka's dance sequences may be my favorite thing in the whole game, with both her main performance minigame and dance battle minigame being the best rhythm games in the series. her story is an unflinching view at the idol industry, and haruka's timid optimism matches her mentor mirei park's bipolar violent/cold streak that hides a yearning for motherhood. haruka also gets briefly kidnapped, and the scene actually feels important and not like lazy filler!
+the princess league competition and japan dome concert are some of the coolest moments in the series. winning feels like a significant accomplishment (esp since losing has lasting consequences), and the performance preceding the final battle serves as a greek chorus richly laying out the thematic underpinnings that encompass kiryu and the villains. truly amazing sequence
+I've always wondered what a game where you're penalized for disobeying the rules of the road would be like, and the kiryu taxi driving sequences nail it. my only complaint is that there's so few missions!
+saejima's hunting sidestory is an interesting and oddly relaxing mode to play in. the area is just large enough to explore without having to commit too much time to it, and hunting larger creatures feels suitably tense without being frustrating
+the improved batting cage minigame feels like its best incarnation, and shinada's sidestory revolving around it shows off the mode rather well
+substories across the board are on par with yakuza 0, if not in wackiness than certainly in quality of writing and difficulty of the prompts. the ones that come to mind immediately are the magical girl idol that akiyama manages for a day, shinada working at the convenience store, haruka having dinner with her vain classmates, and kiryu's acting one (admittedly basically the same as in yakuza 3). substories are also instantly visible on the map, in a major QoL move for the series (one that would be rolled back a bit for later entires)
+the comedy routine minigame is infamous in this version for its difficulty, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the translation and feeling of getting prompts correct. iirc the team that localized the remaster couldn't improve it and instead just added a meter that indicates when to press the button, which definitely could have been used here... also just lowering the score required to pass would have been useful. none of them took me more than a few tries to get right though
+baka mitai appears for the first time here, and I got a real kick out of kiryu crying into his drink over the morning glory shibu inu. the saejima/akiyama versions are lovely as well, the akiyama VA in particular has a great voice!
+the ramen cooking minigame... I had no idea about this one going in and enjoyed it quite a bit. I honestly would play it sometimes just for the hell of it
+getting to play as akiyama in this engine was an absolute godsend. he's like the rush style from 0/kiwami on crack, especially with his new launcher/aerial rave move he gets. shinada is also pretty fun to play, and I like how he can grab in the middle of a combo to deal with guarding enemies
+the two omi captains watase and katsuya are great, especially katsuya who reminds me a bit of mine from yakuza 3. I wish they got more screen time, though katsuya gets plenty of great moments bumping up against dyna-chair during the haruka/akiyama section.
+this game might qualify for the least amount of random deaths in a yakuza game, surprisingly enough. you can tell that they sort of know what people expect tho, given how many close scares they throw in throughout the story
+the stakes are so damn high in this game... it truly feels like a game worthy of its length, roster, and size. it's also the first entry that really reflects on how far the series has come and the unquestionable legend surrounding kiryu and his exploits

-issues I have with the combat in 0/kiwami begin to appear here, though it's still reliant on a lot of mechanics from 3/4. encounter rates are much higher, and the combat feels less click-y than any in the older games (akiyama being the exception ofc).
-saejima's special throw is virtually useless, considering how many ways there are to deal much higher damage without expending heat gauge. special moves in general feel overly situational especially as bosses are virtually immune to all of them
-the bosses in this game aren't exceptional, especially as this game worsens the yakuza 4 problem where the entire game feels like its at an early-game difficulty thanks to how often you must switch between characters. anyone who's gotten to this point in the series will likely feel disappointed tackling these compared to previous entries
-majima is supposedly a pivotal character in this game but is incredibly underutilized. he literally appears once at the end and clears up little of the mystery surrounding the plot even though he supposedly was a major player behind the scenes
-the story as a whole... yakuza 4 is incomprehensible in a way that makes it feel sloppy. this game, on the other hand, is confusing in a different way that makes it feel unfinished. the main villain has flimsy motivations and the explanations given for his actions fail to account for parts of plot given prior (what the hell did shinada's section have to do with anything?). there are multiple unexplained plot threads, and the whole game ends without the usual "things go back to normal" scenes that yakuza games tend to have (though this isn't necessarily a bad thing). the game sort of implies that there was supposed to be a third omi alliance lieutenant vying for the chairman position, but he's only mentioned briefly and dies off-screen. characters in the finale often routinely discover or figure out things they have absolutely no reason to know, with no explanation on how they figured them out
-saejima's section has two chapters where you're stuck in prison, with brief dream sequences in tsukimino to chop up the otherwise linear gameplay. the third chapter is entirely hunting-based in a mountain village, leaving most of his actual action to the fourth chapter. this makes his section feel unnecessarily long, and his interactions with kitakata feel like a dead-end for the plot. as I've implied earlier, the only sections that matter from a plot perspective are kiryu's and haruka/akiyama's
-the drag racing minigame is stiff, which is confusing to me given sega's racing game pedigree. thankfully they're very easy thanks to heat actions you can pull off right before the finish line that make losing nigh impossible. I also was disappointed at how many of the submissions in kiryu's sidestory were text-based, given how fun the actual taxi missions are
-the snowball fight minigame is laughably bad, what a shockingly poor FPS engine. thank god the trophy requirements are very slim for it
-the final boss fight is an infamously stupid twist, and a big difficulty spike as well. it's nowhere near as hard as jingu, but it's odd to have a boss with over 10 health bars and a goddamn healing ability after the previous bosses rarely exceeded 2 bars.
-performance on ps3 is not that great, especially in kamurocho, fukuoka, and kineicho. not really an issue given the remaster however

this game is absolutely an incomparable opus, and in some ways a manifesto on what a yakuza game should be. it's riddled with some of the series' highest highs and some pretty low lows, but as a package it's undeniably a fantastic game that is worth stomaching even the worst entries in the series to reach. it's an absolute monster too, with my playthrough clocking in around 80 hours just to reach the end (though I did the vast majority of the substories and finished every sidestory). this is also where I feel like the characterization began really taking off for this series, with much less of a focus on devising characters to tell a plot, and more on fleshing out the characters and making them appealing. a titan of a game I'm glad to finally have completed.

this one is completely disjointed and unhinged; at its core, past all the bloat, you can see what a sharper version of this title could have looked like, and that pervasive vision lingers in the foreground of all the games antics. but all the same you can feel the fervent passion of the development team in each minute of its runtime and their unrelenting, inelastic vow to push the bill and expand the scope of what is possible, sometimes unnecessarily. in all the ways that makes yakuza a titan it is fantastic, in all the ways it makes yakuza tiresome it is paramount. still some of the best side content in the series though, understands the core of what makes this franchise endearing with sniper precision