Everyone's naturally abuzz about the upcoming localization of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, otherwise known as Yakuza 7, but after starting 2018's Yakuza 6: The Song of Life over the weekend I've noticed that even prior to Like a Dragon's paradigm-shifting absence of the Dragon of Dojima and the introduction of a whole new turn-based structure to combat, the series had already been undergoing some major changes. Yakuza 6, which released between the Kiwamiremakes, feels considerably different to its more immediate predecessors in part because the developers wanted to tell a more intimate story about Kazuma Kiryu, his suddenly-comatose adopted daughter Haruka Sawamura, and her apparent infant child Haruto without losing focus with multiple character perspectives and the feature creep that continued to expand Yakuza's enormous catalog of incidental content from sequel to sequel.

As such, the game is streamlined in myriad ways, and I'm finding myself split between appreciating a condensed Yakuza experience that doesn't sacrifice that vital balance of serious drama and silly distractions, and missing a whole suite of side-activities and optional objectives that the developers deemed superfluous. That isn't to say that Yakuza 6 hasn't seen its fair shake of new improvements and features to compensate, just that a great culling has commenced; its victims, numerous and unexpected.

Gone, But Not (Yet) Forgotten

It occurred to me when building this list of activities that once graced every new entry but no longer is that I don't actually "miss" most of them in the conventional sense of being unhappy that they're absent. it's more to do with how I approached every Yakuza playthrough with the same mental checklist of goals to chase and "game completion" targets to hit, despite having little chance of ever reaching that coveted 100% for one obnoxiously grindy reason or another. The lack of each of the following carries with them a gap in that routine that I find myself a little further adrift, even if my actual mood when completing them in the past was often more obligatory than joyful.

In this era of open-world padding concerns, in which we commend each new genre entry that bucks the previous trends or attempts a more concise approach while in turn decrying to some degree "old souls" like Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima or any of Disgraced Developer™ Ubisoft's upcoming projects for steadfastly adhering to rote filler and map icon emesis, Yakuza 6 has definitely made smart downsizing choices here. Doesn't mean I can't call them out for trimming all that delicious, flavorsome fat regardless:

Phone Box Saving

A positive example of modernization finally hitting the Yakuza series. Y6 is, I believe, the first Yakuza game where all saving is done automatically on a regular basis. You can also make manual saves too, in case you need to go to the dark side and save-scum a situation, but the game lets you make these saves anywhere (provided you aren't in a fight or a mini-game). Definitely an appreciated change, and it's not like public phoneboxes make much sense in 2016. Likewise, there's no separate storage system: Kiryu now has pockets a mile deep.

UFO Catchers

I really wish the Yakuza games had found more to do with the UFO Catcher prizes besides letting them sit in your storage box once you'd caught one of everything. I would've enjoyed having somewhere to set up a little shrine of Sega-branded stuffed toys, even if it would be hard to imagine Kiryu putting any effort into something as cute as that (then again, he spends a lot of this game inside a mascot costume and playing with local cats, so you never know). Instead, since they serve no practical purpose and I guess the developers were sick of everyone complaining about the physics involved, they've been removed from all the Club Segas to make room for "Easy Mode" cabinets of Super Hang-On and OutRun. If I want my own Opa-Opa, I'll just have to play the Fantasy Zone machine like everyone else.

Pool

This one hurt. I love some video game pool, even if I'm terrible at it (pretty lifelike then), and knocking around balls in the mature smoky atmosphere of Yakuza's bars was a great means of slowing down a little and enjoying the nightlife of Kamurocho without having to punch out a dozen portly thugs in tracksuits every five minutes. I usually tried to complete most of the pool challenges in every game, and I particularly liked the "puzzles" where it set up a specific shot that you needed to figure out. The real salt in the wound is that they dropped pool but kept darts.

Cards/Gambling

This feels like a big absence because of the traditional portrayals of yakuza. My knowledge of old yakuza movies is somewhat limited, but there's a common romantic image of them spending their time gambling in seedy dens with hanafuda card games like Koi-Koi or dice games like Cee-Lo and Cho-Han. In fact, these den of iniquities usually played a major role in the Yakuza series, from The Florist's lavish underworld to the city's homeless putting together a multi-floor casino in an abandoned building they'd taken over, though the parlor games themselves were always incidental. I never did get a hang of how scoring works in Koi-Koi, though the dice games were simple/fun enough for a few minutes. (Could be they're just really well hidden in Yakuza 6...)

Shogi

Bye, Felicia. (Mahjong's still around, but at least I know the rules to that.)

Golf

Maybe it was unrealistic to expect Yakuza 6 to bring golf back since it was already relegated to a driving range in Yakuza 5, but Kiryu is old now and there are certain expectations for men his age. I guess they never really found a way to "Yakuza it up" like they did with cab driving or wild animal hunting. I'm not saying they should have Kiryu rework some punk's face with a 7 Iron in a bunker trap every other hole, but maybe a more exciting user interface could've done the trick.

Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey

Only around for one game and then gone forever. Your time came too soon, Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey.

Lockers

Well, sorta. They've been replaced with big safes that have nearby keys you have to find first. Same deal, but fewer in number and with way less running around involved. I can't tell you how many cumulative hours I've spent looking for tiny twinkles on the ground so I could roll the dice on some sweaty locker treasure. Going from something like 50 or 100 keys per game to just ten makes much more sense, and now the sparkly items I keep finding are these weird photographs of past Yakuza characters instead. It's a new mystery to solve, and honestly that was the best part of that sparkly scavenger hunt.

M Store

Looks like Poppo finally won the war of the conbinis in Kamurocho, because they have twice as many branches in Yakuza 6 and M Store has vanished. The only thing left of them is an empty storefront on Nakamichi Alley. At least there was a safe key in there: I like to think of it as a reward for all my years as a valued patron, for as much good as it did. (In gameplay terms this kinda sucks because the two stores had slightly different inventories, but that's been less of a concern in Y6 so far with its lack of inventory limits and more emphasis on vending machine drink buffs.)

Magazines at the Conbinis

Related to the above. The Yakuza games have always prided themselves on their verisimilitude to Japanese urban life, and one way it could inject some realism was with a rack of modern-day Japanese magazines for you to peruse in any of the game's convenience stores. They weren't magazines you could read: Kiryu (or whoever the protagonist was at the time) simply gave you a rundown of the type of content each periodical covered. Later Yakuza games even let you check out the smaller nearby rack of manga. Kinda fun, but if I was looking for places to cut content and didn't want to jump through the usual hoops to ask a bunch of publishers for permission, I guess this would be an immediate consideration for some spring-cleaning.

La Marche

Haughty, up-market luxury goods store La Marche has long been a staple on the lengthy Showa Street that makes up the bottom edge of the Kamurocho map. I believe this is the first game where they've become inaccessible. They've revamped the hostess system so that gifts aren't a concern, so there's no reason to pop into La Marche any more for Italian handbags and French perfume, but I miss just going in there to loiter and make the cashiers nervous about the big unfashionable yakuza dude in their midst.

Champion District

The lack of La Marche, M Store, and Ryugujo (The Dragon Palace, aka the homeless-run casino) is bad enough but they even had to take out the entire Champion District. This cramped labyrinth was home to several bars and a common place to find substory triggers and collectibles in previous games, so I'd always make it a priority to sweep it whenever I was passing by. It never really served any purpose you couldn't get from Bantam and Kamurocho's other bars, but I liked the vibe of those tiny hole-in-the-wall drinking establishments. Apparently the whole district is being "renovated" during Y6, so I'd be curious to see if it shows up looking completely different in Judgment. Or if it's just a parking lot.

Coliseum

There's no Underworld that I'm aware of, so that means there's no underground arena either. A major timesink in any Yakuza game, the goal here is to beat each tournament to get the best rewards and truly test your fighting prowess if you're at the point where you're stomping all the games' bosses (unlikely, but you might just be that good). The real reason you're there is to take on every one of the randomly-determined rogue's gallery of underworld fighters and weirdos, which often included American boxers, hulking Muay Thai warriors, luchadors and pro-wrestlers, nerds with laser swords and grenades, clowns, serial killers, an actual fucking bear, and legendary Konami composer Akira Yamaoka in Michael Jackson cosplay. I'll miss getting to fight that crazy bunch again.

Still Around, But Different

These mini-games have been significantly reworked, to the extent that they're hardly recognizable any more. This is another part of Yakuza 6's process to streamline and modernize a lot of the content it has hauled over from sequel to sequel, though I'm here to weigh in on how much more improved these activities have become.

Darts

All right, so I may have intimated earlier that I've never really cared for darts either in or outside of video games, but the analog stick finesse that so often buried any chance I had of improving at this mini-game has now been replaced with a more accessible timing gauge. All you have to do is hold the cursor in place - there's a small amount of drift, so you can't just wait for the timing slider to line up forever without readjusting the aim - and then let it fly once the timing gauge is dead center. Not nearly as tough as it looks, though it's rare that I get all three shots where they're supposed to be. It's tolerable, which I'm thankful for because Y6 has a few darts-related substories.

Fishing

The Yakuza fishing mini-games have always resembled those in other JRPGs: you cast a line, wait for a bite, and then reel it in while adjusting for the fish's behavior. Final Fantasy XV is probably the apex of this particular type of mini-game - I can only assume the devs spent so long tweaking it that they forgot to write half the story - but Yakuza's version was always decent enough. Y6's is very different, however: Onomichi's spearfishing is a first-person, on-rails shooter set underwater against many aquatic opponents that I've taken to calling "Panzer Lagoon." It's way more intense now, though it's easy to get bored of the same three levels. Still, you can make a huge amount of cash with the right gear and money is always vital in the Yakuza series.

Hostesses

Y6 has done something interesting with the old hostess mini-game, which relied a lot - to my chagrin - on your social and conversational prowess. This effectively boiled down to a lot of multiple choice prompts in the middle of dialogues, the outcome of which either involved you getting closer to your partner or her calling the cops. In Y6, you have a selection of dialogue prompts that you play like cards, switching out your hand whenever you find yourself with useless options. Some of these dialogue cards still lead to multiple choice scenarios, but for the most part you're actually working with stacking bonuses: each card is either plainly conversational, stylishly "dapper," playfully sexy, or has a goofy party vibe. Huh, pretty much exactly like the four Ninja Turtles even.

The End!

I'll spare you from going through every Yakuza 6 side-activity, but suffice it to say there's a lot that's been tossed out or reworked. It all ultimately works in Yakuza 6's favor however, keeping itself a more tightly-paced experience, as does the Yakuza team getting over the idea that everything must carry from game to game in case there's some really annoying fan out there who'd be mad if you took anything out (I realize the irony of that statement, trust me). After the bloatedness of Yakuza 5, though, Yakuza's been trying to find the right balance to keep the series' reputation as a prime screwing around simulator without spending an obscene amount of time and resources revamping all these legacy mini-games for each new console generation (Yakuza 6 being the first PS4-exclusive). If a Yakuza game only takes me 50 hours instead of 100, that's probably for the best. I tend to get carried away.

In conclusion, Yakuza 6 is pretty awesome and I'm not at all mad that they took out pool, even though I really liked the pool. Totally not mad. At all.

I have only recently begun diving into the world of Yakuza when Yakuza 0 came to Game Pass. I am in love with the game putting I think 30 some hours in so far and only just hitting chapter 6. I am 100% happy to hear that they did away with the phone saving and the inventory restriction.

I get the feeling that each of these games are all pretty long up to this one? I am planning on trying to play most of them at least, if not all of them.

I played through the entire Yakuza series (just waiting for Like a Dragon) back-to-back as they released on PS4, and after playing through a few of the games, I decided to stop doing every single mini-game. Originally I had set out to play each mini-game at least once, but I think it was in four that I stopped because they all play the same from one game to the next (which, I kind of like mind you). Some games, however, were too confusing for me to want to learn, like the game in the casino by theater square. Also, I feel stupid for it, but when I went through Yakuza 0, it didn't even cross my mind that the lot area is where Millenium Tower sits throughout the entire series. It wasn't until I finished it that I was like 'Ohhhh...'

It's just weird because you go there a lot; it's a big part of the story, and one of my favorite things is taking note of the differences in the settings between the games. It was in Yakuza 3 that I stopped seeking out every substory because it's when some of the games started making the player search for them themselves without a trouble finder, and there were just too many after I finished the story in three that I just moved on (it also didn't help that, at least from a combat perspective, three was my least favorite). Oh, and I haven't played Judgment. Maybe I should. I played through the series in order from Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 0, Yakuza 3, 4, 5. I was surprised to find out that that was quite a good order to go in, with three after 0.

I wish my brother played through these games, they're right up his ally.

@bobafettjm: They start long and keep getting longer, to the point where Yakuza 5 sort of resembled the Donkey Kong 64 of the franchise (five separate playable characters, practically a whole game's worth of content for each). Yakuza 0 was significantly abbreviated as a response to Y5's criticism, and Yakuza 6 was even more so from what I've played so far.

@ntm: This is why I don't typically play Yakuza games back-to-back - I started with Yakuza 1 in 2010 and have been playing each sequel around 18 months to two years apart. When I heard that others do play them consecutively, like yourself and possibly Alex Navarro for his upcoming Yakuza feature, it took me a minute to figure out that very few people ever put any heavy investment in the mini-games or full completion if they're playing the games that way, because as you say most of the side-stuff has been identical from game to game for so long. Yakuza 6 has been the first where almost all the usual mini-games have either been removed or heavily reworked somehow.

I might still recommend people play every substory if they can though. They're not all great and some are annoying to find and/or complete, but it's often where the series's best content lies.

I forgot to mention it in the blog but thanks for reminding me, but I'm guessing since Kiwami 2 is based on the Yakuza 6 engine it might have the same new/modified mini-games and systems. I've not played Kiwami 2 since I already completed the original Yakuza 2, but going from the sleek Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 0 to the overstuffed Yakuzas 3-5 would definitely be an adjustment.

5 was long but it did way better at keeping my interest than say 3 or 6. That game really, really went places. Haruka's entire arc is ... phenomenal.

@mento: I think it can be seen as both a pro and a con for the series that they all play out very similarly, and not just the mini-games, almost everything. The hunting in five is honestly the moment where I was like 'wow, this is something new'. I have to say, on an off-topic note, I was disappointed that Kaoru Sayama never came back into the series after two, and intro of three. Oh, and yeah, while I gave up on trying to find all of them, I fully agree about doing the substory missions. A lot of humor, charm, and sometimes variety come from them. Lastly, just a random tidbit since it's on my mind too, the theater square Club Sega in Kiwami 2 is huge, and yet going back to it in the later games it's as if they downsized back to the original size for some reason. I mean, I know why it was like that, but creating a story about it in my mind, it's funny that it's like that. I played the games as they released on PS4, so I had to wait for some of them to come out because they didn't all hit at the same time.