Post Script

Sega has spent years building a city around Kiryu. What happens when someone else moves in?

We have said many times in these pages that Kamurocho is the real star of the Yakuza series. That while Kiryu may be its protagonist, and trail around with him several TV box sets’ worth of history, it is in the corner of Tokyo he calls home that Yakuza’s real soul is found. Over the past 13 years, Kamurocho has been the central backdrop for seven mainline games, a handful of spinoffs, and now Judgment. Where other, similar series let their itchy feet take them to a different land in every new instalment, Yakuza has always been rooted in Kamurocho, a red-light district that never gets any bigger, just denser, richer and more beloved. It, as much as if not more than Kiryu, is the reason we keep coming back. Or so we thought. Judgment is the first game to truly put that theory to the test.

Takayuki Yagami’s first game has its problems, but its host city certainly isn’t one of them. It benefits from the new visual sheen afforded by the Dragon Engine, the dramatically improved RGG Studio tech first introduced in Yakuza 6 (and subsequently used to power the Kiwami remakes of the first two games in the series). Now even more buildings can be accessed, many with different businesses based on each floor; Yagami can even get into a few of their break rooms, chatting up staff for gossip that might help him crack a case. More rooftops are accessible, either by the stairs or a ladder in an alleyway, offering vantage spots for investigations using your drone. The hotel district, at the northern end of town, was under reconstruction during Yakuza 6; here it’s been re-opened. And if it can’t expand outwards, Kamurocho can still go down. An indoor koi-fishing pond turns out to be a front for a plush underground casino; elsewhere, a basement-level retro arcade is really a yakuza hangout.

These are small potatoes by typical open-world standards; imagine being in an Ubisoft pitch meeting and suggesting the same world as before with a few ladders and subterranean gambling. But they work in the context of Kamurocho, freshening up a city district whose streets we thought we knew inside out. And while Yagami’s debut adventure may hit many of the same beats – and faces – as a Kazuma Kiryu joint, it’s remarkable how different the place feels when you shuffle things round a bit. Kiryu’s adventures typically begin on Tenkaichi Street, in Kamurocho’s far southwest, where his second home, a first-floor bar called Serena, is found. Yagami’s begins a block-and-ahalf to the east: his office is next door to Club Sega, just behind the pawn shop Kiryu visits once or twice a game to offload the crockery and ornaments he’s punched out of the local mobsters.

Similarly, Yagami’s most frequent haunt is Genda Law, his former employer, nestled in the far northwest on West Shichifuku Street. Over the years we’ve used the manhole in the playpark to access the sewers and, beyond them, an illicit underground city. There was once a doctor there, too, who treated an ally’s gunshot wound. But that’s about it, and so trekking up here so regularly gives the game something approaching a sense of identity. And while it’s a bit of a mission heading from Yagami’s office in the southeast to a business in the opposite corner of the map – a trick the game pulls in a number of directions with suspicious frequency, as if 50 hours somehow weren’t enough – the world has been somewhat designed to accommodate it. Yagami’s favourite haunt, a bar called Tender, is his office local. Just past Genda Law, in the sewers, is the only doctor who can heal Mortal Wounds.

Judgment’s repurposing of sidequest chains as friendships also changes the way you see, and navigate, the world. To Kiryu, Kamurocho’s various restaurants, takeaways and cafés are mere healing fountains, used to top up his health after a fight (and, later, to chase the Trophy for eating and drinking everything the city has to offer at least once). Here, battered and bruised after just edging a battle gone wrong, our Yagami ignores the nearest eatery, because he’s maxed out the friendship meter of its kindly server. So begins a nervous journey to the Wild Jackson two blocks away, with pixels of health remaining, because we want to find out if the owner’s made any progress in his search for a business to collaborate with, and so arrest a fall in sales.

The world feels more modern now too, reflecting its more youthful new protagonist. While Kiryu shunned technology, Yagami embraces it, running precise socialmedia searches to gather vital info, flying his drone around outside office buildings, and taking endless video calls on his smartphone. Kamurocho, too, feels more technologically contemporary than before, with a giant HD screen beaming down from Taihei Boulevard, a city-wide loyalty scheme sending discount vouchers to your phone, and a cheerily daft VR arcade newly opened on the main square.

Inevitably, Kiryu casts a long shadow, and much of the game feels like wearing someone else’s slippers; comfortable, yes, and satisfying, but only to a point. Series fans may find themselves pining for that wornout old pair they were never entirely sure they wanted to say goodbye to. Newcomers – who Sega have courted with a level of enthusiasm we’d liked to have seen when it had a Yakuza game to promote – may leave wondering what all the fuss is about. Kamurocho has always been the star, and continues to be. But perhaps it needs that quiet, stoic ex-yakuza to bring the best out of it.

Yagami’s first game has its problems, but its host city certainly isn’t one of them