After my disappointment with Kiwami 1, I was very weary of Kiwami 2, but thankfully my experience with it was considerably better. It’s an improvement in every single aspect, especially the combat (boss fights don’t make me want to cut my wrists anymore) and exploration, with everything in the cities being connected now, meaning you can now seamlessly enter and exit stores with no loading screens in between. The game also looks much prettier now, thanks to the brand new Dragon Engine (and I don’t mind the green Matrix filter many people complain about).

The substories are also much more memorable, with a bunch of funny ones that are among the best in the franchise (out of the games I played so far), like one where you find a Kiryu impersonator, the one Kiryu watches a horror movie tape and gets jumpscared, the one he’s unknowingly pulled into recording voice lines for an erotic visual novel, the one he finds a clan made of men that wear diapers... There’s many crazy ones!

The main story, however, is still nothing to write home about. There are more memorable characters than in the previous game and the way the drama and romance is so over-the-top it feels like a soap opera does have some charm to it, so yeah, it’s better than Kiwami 1, but the bar was so low it was almost on the ground there. This game also has that one scene of Kiryu punching the table that you’d see the gif being used everywhere, so that alone already makes it more memorable than the entirety of Kiwami 1.