Yakuza Kiwami 2

PS4

Yakuza has long found its magic in contradictions. There’s Kiryu, the honourable hardman who we’re told has never killed, plunging knives into guts and throwing bad guys off rooftops. There’s Kamurocho, the grotty little corner of central Tokyo that he can’t help but rescue despite it having ruined his life across seven games and a couple of spin-offs. There’s its central tale, a sensitive study of love, life, family and the human condition dressed up as a gangland epic in which topless musclemen fight to the (implied) death. And above all there’s the structure of the thing, which allows you to abandon your supposedly pressing main objective – a kidnapped best friend, a missing loved one, an ally on the brink of death – and instead spend a dozen hours finding missing handbags, building up a business empire or heading into a grubby little video parlour to knock a quick one out.

Yakuza’s sub-stories have long given the series much of its heart and character, and they’ve never been easier to find than they are in this loving refresh of Yakuza 2. Time was when kicking off a new sidequest meant turning the right corner onto a particular street at a specific stage of the game. Here, for the first time, new opportunities for off-the-beaten-path madness are marked on the in-game map as grey speech bubbles. New steps in existing quests, meanwhile, are shown as blue ones. In so long-running a series as this, tiny tweaks can make all the difference. So it proves.

Stepping out onto the street at the beginning of a new chapter in the main story, your objective marker flashes pink on the minimap, as always. Now, however, you’ll bring up the full map of Kamurocho and plot your course to maximise sub-story opportunities along the way, taking the scenic route and delighting in the madness you find along the way. The results are absurd, of course. You’ll leave your best friend in the clutches of the Korean mafia to model for a cameraman in his pants, and abandon a friendly copper with a gunshot wound in order to take a pop star out on the town. But this is Yakuza at its best, the serious and the silly taking turns, alternately forgotten as momentum dictates.

It’s a smart way to handle a remake, bringing to the foreground the parts returning players might have missed or forgotten about, while ensuring newcomers don’t miss out on the game’s wonderful lightness of touch. Players in both of those camps will marvel at what is comfortably the prettiest game in the series. Third time is certainly a charm for the Dragon Engine, the performance quirks of the tech that was first introduced in Yakuza 6 now firmly smoothed out, with further improvements to the elements at which the engine excels – facial modelling, shaders and lighting in particular. Kamurocho and Sotenbori have never looked better, their busy streets shimmering in reflected neon under a perpetual night sky. Yes, there’s the odd spot of pop-in, the occasional clipping problem, some wonky slapstick physics and a handful of legacy textures. But it’s handsome, and frequently irresistible, the series’ unique sense of place helping you overlook the odd quirk in its presentation.

Combat, however, remains the Dragon Engine’s achilles heel. While perhaps a matter of taste, the slowed-down, stripped-back and more defensive fighting style pales in comparison to the lavish, freeform excesses of Yakuza 0’ s multiple stances. Repetition sets in quickly, and while experience points can be spent on new moves, most are Heat finishers that can only be used in specific situations; for the vast majority of the game you’ll be building up your Heat bar with the same handful of combos. In Yakuza 6, it made a certain sense that an aging Kiryu would need to focus on the fundamentals. In Kiwami 2, set as it is in 2006 with Kiryu at the peak of his powers, it feels a little off.

Yakuza 0 is the series’ high point, and the Kiwami games’ biggest problem, its refined legacy looming large over the concept of a return to the earliest games in the series. Yakuza’s 1980s origin story wasn’t just about Kiryu, after all, but Majima too, and the makers of the remakes that have followed are clearly conscious of the need to compensate for the absence of the series’ weirdly lovable one-eyed madman. The answer in the first Kiwami was to thread him into the main game. Here he’s given his own story campaign, selectable from the main menu and unlocked chapter by chapter as you progress through Kiryu’s story. The cutscenes are certainly up to the standard of the main narrative, and the story’s intriguing, our anti-hero finding himself jostling for power at the top of the Tojo Clan and quickly framed for the murder of a rival. But it’s structurally bland, a constant to-and-fro across a Kamurocho that has been stripped of much of its life, the sub-stories and streetside distractions that lure Kiryu so easily from the critical path either blocked off or removed. Combat, despite Majima’s pacey, cartwheeling fighting style, is similarly drab, and further undermined by a camera that at first struggles to keep up with its flighty focal point, and then simply gives up.

Flaws have always been easy to find in this series, of course, and are even easier to identify now that new instalments are finding their way to western shores with such frequency. And it’s perhaps because of that that they are so easy to overlook. It is hard, after all, to chide a new entry in a series that until relatively recently seemed dead for good in the west. It’s tricky to pick dourly over the faults in a game that refuses to take itself seriously, even when the fate of Japan itself is at stake. It’s not perfect, and it never will be, and in a weird sort of way we’re not sure we’d ever want to be. In a game built so cheerily on contradictions, that might be the biggest – and the best – of them all.

In so longrunning a series as this, tiny tweaks can make all the difference