Yakuza 4

This is actually the first Yakuza game I've ever played, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. In the back of my mind, I thought "this is going to be just like Grand Theft Auto, but with Japanese people, right?" Well, no, not quite.

If you're like me and have never played a Yakuza game before, luckily, to catch you up, Yakuza 4 has a "Reminisce" mode, which essentially allows you to play all the cut-scenes from the first three games. This is terrific for those of you who have never played it - which is quite likely, as it was quite hard to find the first three, and they never got a lot of attention outiside the Asian market. But if you plan on going through Reminisce mode, you'll need to seriously devote a couple of hours to this. Because the one thing that you'll quickly learn about this series is that it's heavy on the story. So. Much. Story. This is essentially Days of Their Lives, but with less Americans, more Asians and a lot more violence.

So after all the cut-scene catch-ups from the Remince mode, it should be pretty obvious here that there's a huge storyline to devour, that's full of themes of brotherhood, respect, and honour and mafia family heirachy, blah blah blah. Sure, at first the cut-scenes are pretty cool to watch, but after a couple of hours, I did start to get a bit sick of it all and just wishing that someone would have a conversation that started with "dude, have you watched all of The Wire yet?", "nah, not yet, I'm up to season 4 though", "oh dude, it gets epic from about here on in!" But no, just more conversation about family respect and honour codes.

So, let me try and recall the storyline as briefly as I can - it's a bit of a multi-threaded storyline revolving around four intertwining characters. There's Akiyama, a loan-shark who has some weird ideas about the terms and conditions of him lending money. Then there's Saejima, a mountain of a man who got set up during a mafia hit and spent 25 years in prison who really just needs to have a coke and a smile. Tanimura, some man-child of a cop who doesn't like to play by the rules, and Kazuma, who people may recognise from the older games. To be honest, that's pretty much all I can say at this point without this turning into a massive 3-hour seminar explaining the plot points (which is a shame, because my seminar had some sweet graphs, and I also provide scones and tea half way through).

Throughout the main storyline, there's plenty along the way to keep you occupied. Depending on what character you have at the time, there's a number of different little mini-games on offer that range from the amusing to the downright baffling. I'll admit that this is probably only confusing because I have little understanding about Japanese culture, but seriously, what the hell is a "pachinko"? I got so excited when I got to a Sega World, only to find it full of this game called Pachinko. I played it for about 30 minutes, and the whole time I couldn't work out whether I was winning or losing or even if it was a game that coule be won or lost.

You can also visit "hostess clubs", at various times throughout the game. Now at first, I just thought that this was some weird excuse to show cutesy japanese girls with doe-eyes and ever-plunging necklines, but I actually googled this, and it's something that really exists. Essentially, it's a brothel where you can't have sex with any of the 'ladies'. You just sit around, make polite conversation, buy expensive drinks and then leave way more sexually frustrated than when you arrived. If you're playing as Akiyama, you actually own some of these hostess clubs, so can recruit girls and train them up for some quite odd "mini-games", where you try and dress your girl to what you overhear the guys in the club talking about.

Just walking through the streets is bound to have to chased down by someone wanting to bash your brains in. These are quite fun, but the way they're crow-bar'd in makes them awfully painful - the excuses that some people give for wanting to start a fight borderlines on retarded, especially considering that you can't start fights. But once the set-up has been, uhh, set up, the fighting starts, and with it, the fun. The fighting mechanics here are great, although at times bordering on button-mashing, it does result in some truly satisfying results. Each of the characters you control definitely have their own style which helps breaks up that feeling of "oh god, not another fight scene". Fighting is usually fairly easy, but with the flashy combos, and the ability to pick up nearly anything nearby to use as a weapon, it's one of the main strengths of the game. As well as your standard light and heavy attacks, you can build up a Heat meter which allows you pull off amazingly brutal finishing moves. If you happen to have a weapon in your hand, there's another finisher you can do. I feel guilty about how much joy these finishing moves give, you can tell they're truly given a lot of attention to the brawling aspect of Yakuza 4.

It's not all happiness and broken limbs though, there's a lot about this game that I disliked that go beyond my mere ignorance of Eastern cultures. Firstly, the menus are atrocious and are something that are straight out of 1995 JPRGs. It's like they all picked a menu system and style, all the way down to the choice of font and decided not to make any changes for the rest of time.

Some of the animations are a little sloppy too. Once particular bit of the game rings out as being awful - playing as Saejima, you're in prison, and are looking for a way to escape, so you need to collect certain items for certain people in exchange for information and help. During some of the interactions, you're handing off items from you to an NPC, and the animation is just two hands reaching out with no actual item in view. I get that there's dozens of times where this action will occur and you can't possible animate them all, but there are better ways around it than this.

Some of the conversations are awful too. There's a number of times where you'll sit through an epic cut-scene, then for no real reason, the conversation will conclude with two characters face each other while text appears along the bottom of a screen with that annoying typewriter sound effect. This is 2011, and this is a Playstation 3, surely we're past the age where we have to go through this? If this was on a Nintendo DS, then I'd excuse it, but there's really no reason why this technique should be used still. It's lazy game production.

• Awesome fighting mechanics
• Quite possible one of the biggest games I've played, there's enough content here to keep you going for literally hundreds of hours.
• The cut-scenes are visually spectacular

• While I'm glad there's no cheesey English over-dubs, after 100+ hours, subtitles become annoying
• Cutting from spoken cut-scenes to text-only scenes is an instant fail
• The game requires a huge commitment time-wise; there's no such thing as "playing Yakuza 4 for a few minutes"

SUMMARY:

While writing this game, I think I've had about three re-writes of this review, each of them really different. I can't quite work out what I think of this game. Curiosity kept me going through this game instead of actual enjoyment, which I chalk up to a combination of me just not having a decent knowledge, let alone an interest in Japanese culture, along with some just really big let-downs and annoyances.

I can't explain enough just how huge this game is. It's quite possibly one of the biggest games I've played, content wise. There's so much here that I haven't mentioned, but this is your sort of game, then you're going to be kept amused for days on end.

At the end of the day, if you're a fan of the Yakuza series, then you're probably likely to really enjoy this game, no matter what I have to say. If you've never played a Yakuza game, then it's not really something I can recommend, because I'll assume that if you had an interest in the game, you would've played one of the first three games already. Labelling this game "GTA with Asians" isn't a fair or accurate description of this game, but I kind of wish it was. The incredibly intense soap-opera style of storytelling is quite intense and a lot to take in, and to be quite honest, quite exhausting.

This one is only for the true fans.

[this review was originally published on australiangamer.com]