THE YAKUZA REMASTERED COLLECTION

Touching up the back tattoo

The Yakuza series is undoubtedly unique, offering emotional crime stories that frequently go off the rails. Playing this collection you’ll both shed tears for dead friends and watch a masked panty thief swing from rooftops.

It rounds out bad-boy-with-a-heart-ofgold Kazuma Kiryu’s epic saga on PS4, finishing off the set with remastered versions of Yakuza 3, 4, and 5. While not full remakes like the Kiwami games before them, plenty has still been done to raise these up the PS4 crime family’s ranks. Extra features have been added, cut content’s been restored, 1 and they’ve been re-translated. The remastering of the ahead-of-their-time facial motion capture is still startling in places.

For the most part you’re stomping around town as usual, getting involved in crunchy brawls where you deliver over-the-top justice by smashing bikes over antagonists’ heads, doing flip kicks, or jamming daggers into people’s stomachs (and somehow never killing them – all part of the deliberately overexaggerated charm). The action gets varied in the fourth and fifth entries as sections of the game have different protagonists with unique, though similar, fighting styles. 2

At times the games’ age is apparent – in some repetitive and annoying boss fights, or the way special moves shift you annoyingly away from where you initiated them in order for them to animate properly. Even so, they’re still immensely playable.

Yakuza is one of the few series that elicits genuine belly laughs while telling a gripping story. Oscar Taylor-Kent

FOOTNOTES1 There have also been some minor revisions and removals of content where the dev felt the jokes had aged less well. 2 And all have their own, often hilarious, side-missions too.