The Yakuza series is one of those video game titans that I adore but have to take at a measured pace. While each game has around 30 hours of "main story" to get through, the vast amount of side-content tends to put each of my playthroughs somewhere in the triple figures. It's not entirely unlike a Bethesda game in that regard, or a particularly expansive open-world game like GTAV. As such, while I make bold claims to be an avowed fan of Sega's Yakuza series and its self-serious tales of honor and respect between members of Japan's criminal underworld juxtaposed with uniquely Japanese quirkiness and absurdly cartoonish brawling, I've only managed to get as far as the third game. Fans in the west are anticipating the imminent release of the fifth game, while Japanese-speakers are on tenterhooks for the sixth game early next year, so it does genuinely feel like I'll never catch up. It's not an entirely unwelcome feeling either, as I discussed in the intro for a recent installment of ST-urday.
I could articulate what it is about Yakuza, and Yakuza 3 in particular, that I find so mesmerizing and immersive to the extent that I can walk away with 104 hours logged in and still have content to return to should I so desire, but it'd mean deconstructing every element of the game and putting it back together to convey fully my admiration for this series.
So that's what I'm going to do. Because I'm secretly a hack writer (don't tell anyone), I've superficially framed this comprehensive piece-by-piece examination of Yakuza 3 as a sort of tourist guide to the game's ever-present fictional setting of Kamurocho: which is, as far as I can tell through photographic evidence, an almost perfect recreation of Tokyo's real-life red light district Kabukicho in the city's Shinjuku ward.
Come to Tokyo's colorful and exciting red-light district Kamurocho, and...
...Watch a rich narrative unfold before your very eyes
With the advent of GTAIV and peripheral games like Red Dead Redemption, the chief narrative focus of Rockstar's more recent games have been to follow a very traditional, movie-like rendition of the genres they're attached to. They're overly serious, concerned more with character development and quiet moments than the silly, over-the-top farcical stories that Rockstar previously portrayed. I want to say this is in some small part due to the influence of Yakuza, who has been banging this particular taiko since its inception back in 2005. Each Yakuza brings with it a somber tale concerning the intimidating Kazuma Kiryu, the Dragon of Dojima, and his former associates the Tojo Clan, a coalition of powerful Yakuza families that is regularly threatened to the point of dissolution by some sort internal or external strife. Kazuma wants to live a peaceful life away from the Yakuza lifestyle after some disillusionment that followed a ten-year stint in prison, but his code of honor prohibits him from walking away from his adoptive Tojo Clan and the few members of that association he still calls "brother". Often, the villains of the piece are gunning for him in particular, both as the one-time proxy chairman of the Tojo Clan and as a legend of the criminal world.
Invariably, Kazuma is forced to return to Kamurocho, the crime-ridden seat of the Tojo Clan, and finds himself working with his underworld friends there - host club owners, mob doctors, undercover cops, etc. - to piece together whatever new enigmatic threat has targeted the Tojo Clan, himself and/or his closest allies. There's a certain degree of formulaicness to this approach that is entirely germane to the pulpy crime fiction it emulates, creating these little satisfying plots that ticks off an invisible checklist of genre mainstays: brash, young Yakuzas making exaggerated and boisterous displays of dominance to an entirely unimpressed Kazuma; small character scenes with the various innocents that Kazuma wishes to protect in order to establish their importance to him and to inform/rationalize his motivations; escalation as foreign powers come into play (Yakuza 3 has both the American CIA and Chinese Triads in crucial roles); a deeper and far-reaching conspiracy that unfolds as the plot thickens; a few tragic deaths; a lot of "what it means to be a man" type of talk; and, invariably, an epic shirtless fight between Kiryu and a rival Yakuza of equal strength with their enormous and symbolically meaningful back tattoos given special prominence by the camera work. It's entertainingly schlocky in the same way the aforementioned Rockstar games are: appealing stories that adhere closely to the tenets of the genre fiction to which they belong, generally opting for earnest fidelity over post-modern, sarcastic subversions.
That's as far as I can get into Yakuza 3's plot without spoiling large chunks of it, but while each game's stories are always different the pacing and tone is inevitably the same. They'll often play off the events of previous games too, but so far every new Yakuza game has provided the option to watch an abridged version of the prior games' events to get new players quickly up to speed. Yakuza 3 also has the benevolence to include a flowchart that keeps you informed of all the major characters, their role in the story thus far, their group affiliations and their relationships between each other so that the game can ratchet up the complexity of its web of deceit without ever losing the player in its strands.
...Get embroiled in altercations with one of Kamurocho's many friendly inhabitants
The cornerstone of any Yakuza game is its combat, which works as a modern interpretation of something like Technos Japan's Double Dragon or River City Ransom: upon triggering a fight while walking the streets of Kamurocho (or Ryukyu, the game's stand-in for Okinawa Island and Kazuma's present home), the screen subtly transitions, random encounter style, to a portion of the same street with a number of opponents, a barricade of cheering onlookers and any number of objects lying around that can be employed as improvised weaponry. Combatants have health bars and names, like any traditional brawler, and the player is free to employ a range of combination attacks and showy finishers to quickly eliminate their aggressors.
The game has a tremendous amount of versatility to offset just how many of these "random encounter" fights you're likely to bump into, especially if you're pursuing the game's many "substories", or side-missions. Kazuma has a weak and a strong attack: the weak attacks are best chained together for sustained damage with a strong attack to conclude the combo. There's also a button that performs the grab move which recontextualizes the three commands: weak attacks will now hit the grabbed opponent without releasing Kazuma's grasp, heavy attacks will send them flying but loose the grip and hitting grab again will cause Kazuma to throw the opponent in the direction held. The final face button is used for "swaying": an evasive slide that will put Kazuma out of danger and can allow him to side-step around opponents to their vulnerable sides and back. The left trigger blocks frontal attacks while the right trigger puts Kazuma in a fighting stance that effectively allows him to lock onto a particular opponent. Those are the basics.
Where the combat shines brightest, however, is in its HEAT gauge mechanics. As with any modern fighter, Kazuma will build a gauge with successive hits that allows him to unleash special attacks once it's filled to a certain point. HEAT actions are the collective name for these specials, and can run the gamut from contextual terrain takedowns like the brutal environmental finishers of Sleeping Dogs, to wrestling moves, merciless stomps to the face, counter-attacks and unique finishers attached to a number of weapons Kazuma can use, from swords and bats to items as innocuous (but still painful) as pliers, store signs, bottle crates and sections of rope.
Yet the HEAT actions are all a showy exterior for what gradually develops into a very in-depth combat engine. It's not quite the dizzyingly inscrutable arrays of gauges and techniques of an Arc System Works fighter, but the game will slowly introduce more effective means of fighting the opponents beyond standard combo chains and letting loose with an heavy object once the HEAT gauge has maxed out. I particularly appreciated Yakuza 3's reversal system: a sort of time-sensitive pre-emptive counter to enemy attacks that work similarly to the combat in Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham games or Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed but without the overt prompts. By hitting the grab button at the moment of an enemy's attack, Kazuma uses their momentum to pull them forward and knee them in the abdomen; a lightning-fast reversal that never gets old. Even trickier is the Tiger Drop Reversal, which is a devastating low punch that ducks under the incoming attack to send the opponent flying. The game rewards such tricky-to-master moves with larger HEAT gauge boosts, allowing the player to take advantage of the HEAT state sooner and more frequently. As well as unlocking HEAT actions, simply being in a state of HEAT - represented by a fiery blue or red aura - has all sorts of benefits, from a reduced chance of being knocked down to, eventually, a sort of immortality.
Tied indelibly to the combat is the game's levelling system, which doesn't so much automatically reward Kazuma with occasional stat boosts but allows the player to assign "stocks" of earned experience to any of four attributes: Soul, which boosts the HEAT gauge; Body, which boosts health and Kazuma's defensive skills; Technique, which unlocks new attacks and skills; and Essence, which unlocks new HEAT actions. As each attribute is increased, the amount of stock required for the next is increased in turn. The game informs the player whenever a new upgrade is within reach based on their present level of experience, but the player can always opt to hold onto what they have to boost a higher level attribute later instead. It's a progression system as versatile as the combat itself.
...Visit numerous parlors for diversions that take a lifetime to master
When I last wrote about Yakuza, it was to wax poetic (and maybe be just a little querulous) about Yakuza 2's Mahjong mini-game. Mahjong is a deeply layered and strategic gambling game beloved across the Far East which is only exacerbated in difficulty by a Byzantine scoring system which subtly changes from region to region. As such it's not a particularly easy game to glean to begin with, and Yakuza 2 had a specific substory that required you win a game with the odds stacked against you and three CPU opponents that, given that they were explicitly portrayed as tile hustlers, seemed to cheat every other round.
For whatever reason, Sega made the now-notorious decision to remove the mahjong and shogi from Yakuza 3's English localization, as well as a number of other conspicuous exclusions. The mahjong and shogi parlors are still extant, as the locations themselves are related to other substories that have nothing to do with the games they supposedly host, but it was one of many odd player-unfriendly excisions that even the Bombcast remarked on with some incredulity (which also spawned the legendary "Pizza Hut George Foreman Sonic the Hedgehog" skit from Jeff). Yakuza's second biggest draw after its combat is its verisimilitude to everyday urban Japanese living, and removing many aspects that had been around in prior games was seen as a betrayal by the franchise's stalwart western fans.
That said, there's still quite the number of mini-games and activities that the player can pursue, and they factor into the game's most intensely frustrating and difficult completionist trophy, which tasks the player to complete each mini-game at a prohibitively high level of skill.
Yakuza 3's big addition in this particular regard is a self-contained golf game, filled with the standard accoutrements of any virtual simulation of the sport of kings. There's wind, topography considerations, multi-step power gauges to hit and various clubs to choose between. The game only has the single nine-hole course in Ryukyu to enjoy, but it takes some mastery to get decent enough at it for the sub-0 game you need to complete in order to unlock a related substory. The aforementioned mini-game mastery trophy demands you score -5, which is a little more exacting for a nine-hole game.
There's also the standard batting cages, where precisely calling shots is an important as the timing behind them; the bowling alley, which like GTA IV has a trophy for scoring a turkey, or three strikes in a row; darts and pool in a number of the game's drinking establishments; Karaoke, which is a good place to bring a date; and the Club Sega Arcades, which has the infuriating UFO Catcher machines and the bizarre deconstruction of modern horizontal shoot 'em ups, Boxcelios. Boxcelios superficially resembles that recent Steam shoot 'em up Astebreed, but the opponents are all Rez-like abstract stacks of grey boxes, one of which is a glowing weak point. The goal of the game is to quickly destroy each of these enemy block ships by one-shotting them in their weak point and moving onto the next before a brief game-wide timer counts down to zero. It's as frantic and fast-paced as any shoot 'em up, but saves on a lot of artistic assets that would otherwise be overkill for such a minor part of the game.
...Drop in on our gambling dens and try not to lose your shirt playing a dozen Hanafuda variants
Of course, there's also the darker, sleazier side of side-activities, and that's the gambling. As a corollary to the previous section, it's interesting to note that none of the gambling mini-games were scrapped along with mahjong and shogi, despite being every bit as obscure and specifically far eastern. If I were to tell you that could play cee-lo, cho-han, koi-koi and oicho-kabu in Yakuza 3, would any of that even register? Maybe that comes off slightly more mean-spirited than I meant it to, but I didn't know one thing from another when trying any of the above games.
A quick Cliff's notes version, just so we're up to speed: Cee-lo is a dice game with three dice where you're trying to get certain Yahtzee-esque combinations for points, the best being four-five-six, three of the same number or a total that is higher than the banker's roll. Cho-han is the archetypal Japanese dice gambling game, seen in various samurai movies and old Japan-centric video games for decades: the banker rolls two dice and asks people to call odds or evens. Correct calls win money, incorrect ones lose money. Koi-Koi, Japanese for "come on", is a game that uses hanafuda cards and plays on going double or nothing every turn. Likewise, oicho-kabu ("eight-nine") uses hanafuda cards (or a variant, kabufuda) in a card game that is similar to baccarat where you have to ensure that the total value of the cards in your hand, excluding multiples of ten, is an eight or a nine.
You also have the standard roulette, poker and blackjack of course. There are separate trophies for scoring big on the obscure dice/card games above and one for the classic casino staples, but it's all mostly luck. Well, mostly. Y'see, there are a handful of "lucky" items that fudges the game's percent chance of certain outcomes, such as earning a twenty-one in blackjack or the green double-zero of roulette. Though it's not a guarantee, the idea is that you bet big on a remote outcome and use the item to make it happen. I generally avoid any non-exploitable gambling mini-game in RPGs, so I didn't check to see if the bouncers of these gambling dens would throw me out of the establishment for using forbidden luck magic. That'd be one hell of an incident to explain to the cops, though.
...Try to find the secret underworld Coliseum, where warriors from all over the world fight for your amusement
Kamurocho's darker half is Purgatory: an opulent underground haven run by the information broker Kage ("shadow", though his original Japanese name is Hanaya, which means "florist". No idea why the localization team changed it from one slightly sinister Japanese sobriquet to another) with its own casino and Coliseum. The Coliseum is the chief place of interest, as it allows Kazuma to fight against a number of opponents in specially configured arenas. Not only does it present new challenges for a player much more focused on the combat than the story, but it's also handy for late-game grinding if you're a few XP stocks away from another upgrade. Yakuza 3 introduces a tag team system, where you find and recruit partners around Kamurocho - most of them are arena combatants you have to defeat in the Coliseum first - and team up against other duos. I frequently chose to fight alongside a rather transparent Bruce Lee ersatz, because who wouldn't?
The Coliseum is a good test of ability because it strips you of your consumables and items of equipment, some of which can genuinely remove all challenge from the game with their OP status, and each bout involves three consecutive fights with only minor health recoveries in-between. I didn't spend quite so long on the Coliseum this time around - to hit full completion status, you need to have fought every opponent and won at least once - but if anything draws me back to that game it'll be finishing off what remains of its roster of would-be Kumite combatants.
...Avail yourself of the many fine (and real) consumables from top-class restaurants and conbinis
I talked about the verisimilitude of Yakuza's setting, which digitally recreates a real-life urban sprawl of convenience stores ("conbinis"), Michelin-star restaurants, flashy attractions, quiet bars and dubious dens of depravity, and key to all this is the game's insistence on real-life product names. Far from being mere product placement - there's so much from so many distributors that I can't imagine Yakuza sees a dime for including, say, C.C. Lemon in its virtual conbinis - the effect is the feeling that you're actually in Japan, walking down the street for a Japanese citrus drink frequently advertized by The Simpsons.
While I doubt the restaurants are named for real-life establishments, they offer the sort of elaborate menus you'd expect to peruse in similar locales. There's a place for Korean barbeque, gourmet sushi, quality ramen, an ersatz McDonalds, ice cream and sorbet parlors, a pricey tourist-trap teppan-yaki joint and an elegant café styled on Alpine cuisine. There's also the Matsuya, which is a real-life restaurant that sponsors the Yakuza series and largely serves bowls of curry, soup and meat dishes.
Similar to the conbinis, the game's number of classy bars serve actual alcohol, and each comes with a little stock quote about the drink's history. While it can seem like sponsor pandering ("unlimited anime!"), it's done in such a way that it feels like you're getting the sales pitch from the bartender after ordering a bottle as if you were a connoisseur. There's a range of both native and foreign brands of spirits, such as Yamazaki, Hokuto, Hibiki, Laphroaig, The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Jack Daniel's, Beefeater, and Early Time. As well as providing color to Kamurocho's nightlife, being drunk can also unlock unique HEAT actions (like a hurricanrana!) and increases the chances of a random scuffle. It also makes you way less accurate at darts and pool, so drink responsibly.
...Encounter all sorts of eccentric personalities, helping them out with their troubles
The substories are the meat of any given Yakuza game, though many essentially amount to a bunch of punks or low-level yakuza trying to swindle Kazuma or some bystander and getting their asses beat. They can be quite amusing though, and this is where I feel the previously stated comparison to modern Rockstar games, with its dichotomy between po-faced plots and goofy asides, is at its keenest. Yakuza 3 has 101 substories in total (down from the Japanese release's 122), and while most follow the formula of "bump into guy on the street, fight some hoodlums at the end", there's a number with some deeper narrative aspects at work. It's why they're referred to as "substories" by the game's documentation than the standard, far more mechanical-sounding "side-missions" or "side-quests".
Of note are five substories that are closely linked to side-players in the story. One involves helping Kazuma's undercover cop informant turned journalist Makoto Date into wooing the comely bartender at New Serena; another involves Date's new boss, a career journalist who is troubled by his rash reporting of a murder six years ago which you help to set straight; another concerns the host club managers that befriended Kazuma two games ago; two more involve Kazuma's companion Rikiya, a level-headed young yakuza he meets in Okinawa, as he finishes his viper back tattoo and encounters his childhood sweetheart all grown up as one of Kamurocho's many exotic dancers. These substories are worth pursuing because they give some extra development to characters that are essential to the plot but aren't given a whole lot of time in that busy plot to really shine.
Other side-missions involve dating hostesses (more on them later), teaching tricks to the dog at Kazuma's orphanage, running down a frequent dine-and-dasher, and recruiting a group of bodyguards for one of the casinos Seven Samurai-style by finding and fighting each of them. There's also substories attached to each of the mini-games, usually requiring that you do well enough at those games to trigger the substory. Substories take a lot of your time if you allow them to, and many are quite grindy and dull fetch-quests, but a few are the source of the game's more enjoyable moments.
...Meet glamorous hostesses and curry their favor with gifts and compliments
Yakuza 3's localization also removed the various hostess clubs, which previously involved sitting down with glamorous working girls and plying them with drinks, gifts and saying the right things in conversations in order to get them to fall for you. Instead, they skip ahead to the post-club dates in which Kazuma takes them out for a night on the town before resolving some minor strife in their lives and earning their everlasting adoration (and, it's implied, an hour or so in a love hotel). Honestly, this was probably the one exclusion that I was completely okay about, since a lot of Yakuza 2's hostess seduction took far too long and was kind of creepy besides. Creepy in that date simulation fantasy sense where, were you to learn beforehand everything they were into and pick the right options on a multiple choice menu, you could have any woman you wanted eating out of the palm of your hand.
Whenever I see a scenario like that I think back to that montage in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray's character is trying to engineer the perfect date with Andie McDowell's character and never quite getting the magic right, despite gradually picking up on everything she likes and dislikes through dozens of iterations of the same evening. That she even remonstrates with him after overhearing his mental checklist of the correct things to say to her on the next cycle, hitting him with the withering "Is this what love is for you?", meant that this sort of memorization-focused, points-based dating sim format never sat right with me thereafter. Like showing up outside of her window with a boombox, there's a lot of romantic gestures in media that are anything but in the real world.
...become the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass by training with our martial arts masters
The game's adamant about not giving you every combat skill too soon, as it's often essential for the player to master the basics before moving up to the advanced techniques. With that in mind, the game gates off advanced moves in two ways: the formerly mentioned XP-based progression system, and the game's handful of masters. Masters will teach Kazuma new moves, but they have to be sought out and usually won't appear until later chapters. Learning from these masters unlocks new skills, but generally require that Kazuma perform a difficult activity (or just busywork) beforehand to make sure he's ready.
Komaki, Kazuma's long-time martial arts mentor, is the one that teaches him reversals and a particularly powerful finisher that can only be pulled off after a successful reversal. Yonashiro is an odd gentleman in a straw hat that teaches Kazuma how to use exotic weapons like nunchakus, tonfa sticks and kali sticks. Mack is a foreign photographer and champion runner who challenges Kazuma to catch him in the game's new "battle chases", which aren't quite as annoying as they sound. Mack is also the one who teaches Kazuma how to blog on the internet about amusing scenarios he sees, which in turn unlocks new HEAT Actions and fighting techniques. There's also a handful of texts and DVDs the player can buy which inspire additional moves. None of these are essential, of course, and Kazuma is well prepared for any combat scenario he encounters with his default combos and finishers alone, but it doesn't hurt to add a bit of variety to one's repertoire.
The oddest of the masters is Dr. Minamida, a Doc Brown expy and former game programmer who has built a virtual reality Arcade machine to test Kazuma's fighting prowess. Kazuma can enter the virtual world of the machine and fight previous bosses recalled from the depths of his mind, all of which have some additional wrinkle like multiple mirror clones, enhanced speed or an odd case where you and the virtual boss will sometimes switch places. Kazuma's last opponent is a shadow version of himself: a near-perfect martial artist that requires that the player has mastered the game's advanced moveset, since regular attacks won't work. Beating each of these fights unlocks new passive and active skills, as with any master, but they're far harder to earn.
...make full use of Kamurocho's many convenient coin lockers and their easily misplaced keys
The requisite collectible-hunt of any given Yakuza game are the coin locker keys, fifty of which have once again been spread across Kamurocho (and another fifty in Ryukyu). Yakuza 3 makes this particular ubiquitous side-quest more challenging by implementing the game's first-person view (R3) to look around for keys arbitrarily hanging on lampposts, trees and on top of A/C units. The prizes you get for bringing the keys back to their matching lockers can include some very valuable gear, especially for the early game, but it's mostly for scavenger hunt enthusiasts and collectible diehards. I can't get enough of them, personally, though I'll admit to using a guide this time around: as with previous games, there's a lot of keys that can't be accessed until later on in the story when certain locations open up, and you have no idea which ones.
...have an eventful encounter with the most powerful and deadly assassin in the world, Jo Amon
Another Yakuza fixture, the Amons are an utterly ruthless assassin family that carries a grudge against Kazuma for not only defeating them, but refusing to kill them afterwards. The Amons are a scary bunch, equating defeat with death and polishing their death-dealing skills to an unnatural sheen. They are, inevitably, the most difficult opponent in the game and the "bonus" for completing every substory. Being the wuss that I am, I gathered as many post-game trinkets as I could find and cheesed the poor ultra assassin to death, but he's there as a test for any player who feels they have mastered the game.
Yakuza shares a lot of DNA with JRPGs, beyond simply the . The concept of the superboss - the ultimate opponent that awaits any player bold (or obdurate) enough to pass every challenge the game can throw at them - is something indelible to the JRPG as well. Jo Amon, with his gun kata and twin lightsabers (oh, you didn't think this game could get this stupid? Were you paying attention?) is every bit that concept.
...share a moment with everyone's favorite post-game bonus clown Bob Utsunomiya
For the final section, I just want to give a shout-out to my irascible post-game clown homie Bob Utsunomiya who has, since the very first Yakuza, been the one to dispense special powerful items for hitting certain quotas within the game. These quotas are things like eating every item of food in the game, completing every substory, utilizing every HEAT action at least once, facing every opponent in the Coliseum, mastering every mini-game, etc. Though a man of few words, the items he gives you are so overpowered they might as well be cheats for particularly meticulous players.
The way I eventually beat Jo Amon? By accepting the War God Amulet from Bob after completing all the HEAT actions, allowing me to perform HEAT actions at any time regardless of the HEAT gauge. Boy howdy, does that do terrible things to the game's fragile difficulty curve.
The Bit at the End
Yakuza 3, despite the crude hatchet job, is every bit the benchmark game that its predecessors were, and I'm glad to have finally carved out some time to add it to my library of played games. It did mean that I didn't have the time for two or three much smaller games in its stead, but I've still got two more months left in this year to hammer out some pressing 2015 bangers. That said, it looks like Undertale's next up. Stick around for my thoughts on that neo-retro Indie darling at some point in the near future, and thanks for reading.
Log in to comment