Yakuza Kiwami
RPGs often fall apart a bit when you stop and wonder what happens to NPCs in need. Do they just, like, hang around indefinitely, rooted to the spot, doing nothing until you come back? If so, then we can only apologise to some of Yakuza Kiwami’s helpless quest-givers. To the man caught short in a loo without toilet paper, we are sorry for making you wait five hours for the packet of tissues we promised you. To the lady hanging around outside Millennium Tower for us to finally, a dozen hours later, get around to retrieving her stolen handbag, we offer our humble apologies. We got distracted, OK? We know. We are the absolute worst.
It’s also why we leave Goro Majima hiding in an outsized traffic cone outside a burger joint for about ten hours. We make no apology for that, however: after all, he’s had it coming. Majima’s been a thorn in protagonist Kazuma Kiryu’s side ever since the first game in the Yakuza series – though never before has he been this frequent, or troublesome, a presence.
While in story terms this is a retread of 2005’s Yakuza, there’s enough that’s new here to make it feel like a game in its own right, and the Majima Everywhere system is the driving force behind it. As its name implies, Majima now pops up all over the place: he roams the city looking for random battles; he muscles in on scraps you’re having with other people; he even shows up during story missions. The system is at its best when it has Majima appear when you least expect him – peering in through a convenience-store window, appearing as an opponent at the underground fight club, or popping up behind the bar of a tucked-away watering hole, testing your knowledge of expensive whiskies.
Winning fights raises your Majima Everywhere rank, and at certain milestones you’ll be invited to a set-piece of sorts. You might go bowling, or be asked, terrifyingly, to meet a struggling cabaret hostess who’s insisting on your custom. It is, in the spirit of the series, delightfully silly stuff. And it makes a lot of sense coming after Yakuza 0, the prequel which cast Kiryu and Majima as dual protagonists. It would be a shame, after all that, were Majima to retreat to his old, bit-part role. And he really does look excellent in fishnets.
There’s a mechanical benefit to all this daftness, too, since winning fights will let Kiryu learn moves in one of his fighting styles, Dragon Of Dojima. As the story has it, Kiryu, fresh out of a ten-year prison stretch, has lost some of his edge on the inside. Majima – and Komaki, Majima’s martial-arts instructor in Yakuza 0 – will help him back to his best. Sadly, leaving our old friend in a traffic cone for ten hours means we finish the game with barely half of the Dragon style’s sprawling skill menu unlocked. Yet the other three – the slow, powerful Beast; the fast and flighty Rush; and the all-rounder Brawler – are pretty much complete, thanks to a subtle, but welcome change to Yakuza 0’ s skill-unlock system.
In the prequel, you bought new abilities with cash, and so were punished if you didn’t focus your efforts on cash-generating side-modes such as Kiryu’s realestate business. Yet here, your accrued XP is your currency. For every 1,000 experience points you earn, you gain a skill point. Costs quickly skyrocket – the most expensive unlocks cost 85 points, for instance – but big lategame battles pay out hundreds, so you never feel like you’re struggling to keep pace. While there’s a degree of flexibility in the way you choose upgrades – they’re split into four sections, allowing you to focus your efforts on raising health and attack power, or new moves, and so on – you’ll want to pay early attention one in particular. The Heat system, which gives access to powerful attacks once you fill a meter by landing successive hits, has been subtly expanded, too. ‘Kiwami’ is Japanese for ‘extreme’, and while its use in the game’s title is intended to show that this is no mere remake, it has mechanical connotations too. Whittle down a strong enemy’s health bar and they’ll stop fighting, stooping over stunned, a coloured aura appearing around their head. Leave them alone, and they’ll claw back some lost health. Yet stand in front of them and match your fighting style to the aura’s colour and a button prompt appears that will trigger a very powerful Heat-style move. It’s the sort of minor tweak that has become this series’ calling card – but which, in the context of a 12-year-old game, feels truly refreshing.
As, to be fair, does most of what Yakuza Kiwami has to offer. It may tell the same story – of a yakuza family torn apart by the anonymous theft of ¥10 billion; of two lifelong friends suddenly at war; of Kiryu, an orphan, taking another, much younger one under his wing – but it feels like a new game. It has a free-moving camera, not the original’s series of fixed ones. It runs in 1080p at a near-unbroken 60fps. It is available, for the first time in the west, in subtitled Japanese audio. The original had a dismal English dub starring Michael Madsen, and remains the only game in this series to have been playable with English audio, with good reason.
On it goes. Twelve-year-old fights feel brand new because of the inclusion of Yakuza 0’ s switchable combat styles. New substories and minigames give life to a world that, once, felt oddly empty. And in the rare moments where you feel you’re retreading old ground, up pops Majima, all baby-talk and condescension, goading you into a fight – or a bowling date, or a drinking session, or a pretend zombie apocalypse – that you’ve definitely never had on these streets before. While Kiwami was presumably sketched into life primarily for new players who came on board with Yakuza 0, there’s also plenty here for old hands to fall in love with all over again. That, you’d think, is about as good as a videogame remake gets.
Kiryu, fresh out of a ten-year prison stretch, has lost some of his edge on the inside