Yakuza 3 Review
Yakuza 3 is the third main installment in the Yakuza series. The game was developed and published by Sega. It was released solely on the Playstation 3.
Yakuza 3 was originally released on February 26 2009 in Japan and then on March 9, 2010 in North America.
Yakuza 3 begins right after Yakuza 2 with you as Kazuma Kiryu, the fourth chairman of the Tojo clan paying your respects and saying farewell to all of your allies in Kamurocho, the setting of Yakuza 1 and 2. (Sidenote: a chairman is the equivalent of the big boss or don)
Kiryu has decided to leave the life of a Yakuza behind to move to Okinawa where he will manage the Sunshine Orphanage and take care of 8 children as well as his adoptive daughter. Himself being raised in a similar orphanage, he volunteered to take the job and raise the children with proper care.
Not too long after a calm life besides the Okinawa beach, the Ryudo family (a local gang in the area) begin posting eviction notices and staking out the orphanage. Kazuma Kiryu confronts Nakahara, the landlord of the orphanage and leader of the Ryudo family.
In this confrontation and a surprise visit from the sixth and current chairman of the Tojo clan, Kazuma Kiryu learns that the government wants to buy all the land in the area of the orphanage to build a resort and a military base that will in turn stimulate the Okinawa economy.
The current chairman of the Tojo Clan finds out that Kazuma Kiryu has an orphanage on the land they intend to take, so he halts the entire process by taking the entire Tojo clan out of the equation.
The problem with this however, is that the government covertly hired the Tojo clan to take the land they couldn’t legally buy out so with the Tojo clan out of the picture, both the resort and the military base cannot be built on land the government does not own.
In turn, the current chairman of the Tojo Clan, Daigo Dojima and the leader of the Ryudo family are shot and the deed to the orphanage is stolen. With the deed stolen, the fate of the orphnage is up in the air. With the current chairman of the Tojo clan, Daigo Dojima in the hospital, the fate of the Tojo clan is up in the air.
Now it is up to Kiryu to don his classic suit and save the Tojo clan and his orphanage.
STORY
Like all of the games in the series, the story of Yakuza 3 is a rather complicated one and even more difficult to write about. Most Yakuza games like Yakuza 3 are comparable to daytime soap operas or novelas in where there can be last minute reveals and last minute deaths that make sense but have a feeling of over the top drama to them. “The reason I know you so well is because…I was your half brother all along!”
That being said, I can’t say too much about the story because part of the storytelling is all the reveals towards the end and it would count as spoilers.
Most of the game, I found quite dull in that you were doing more for the people of Okinawa and his orphanage more than anything else. It was until the final stretch when the overall plot kicked into gear. If anything, two thirds of the game was character development while one third was the actual plot.
In one way, it’s a great way to develop the characters. In this game, Kiryu decided to leave the life so it only makes sense that he uses his physical strength to help people from getting cheated in Okinawa and running errands for his children. You do countless favors for people but while they are meaningless tasks, it builds up the characters.
Kazuma Kiryu is always described as a Yakuza God and being a legend in the underworld and it’s constantly mentioned but it was at odds with what I was experiencing running to get cool clothes for one of the orphans or helping out some local vendor by buying back a fish he sold. I bought ingredients for a bitter melon drink? What a legend!
However, this is the point. He left the life. He beats up scam artists. He helps the local people. He does favors for his children. It builds him up as a great father figure and it works. The problem is that you don’t see it until the end. As I was playing, I couldn’t help but keep checking the box of the game to make sure I was playing a Yakuza game.
After initially confronting the Ryudo family of Okinawa, Kiryu eventually becomes close with all of them especially a lieutenant called Rikiya. Rikiya being a yakuza in Okinawa and knowing that Kiryu was a yakuza from Tokyo, Rikiya falls for Kiryu and stays by him even following him back to Kamurocho after Kiryu tells him to stay home.
In Kamurocho, you can take Rikiya sightseeing and you learn more about Kiryu and Rikiya and again, it’s building up a character that you don’t really care about until the very end.
If anything, that’s the biggest downfall of the game. The story doesn’t kick in until the end and therefore, unless you’re a big fan of the series and its characters, it is difficult to stay attached to the story. It’s as if you were eating a hot dog that wasn’t good but you knew that for some reason, the last bite of that hot dog is orgasmic. If you already don’t like hot dogs, you’re not going to go for it even knowing that the last bite might be worthwhile.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay on the other hand is pretty solid for it being the first in the series to hit the next gen. The first two were on PS2 so for the first in the series to be on PS3, it’s definitely not bad.
The controls for the most part are pretty responsive and I never had much trouble beating up the Yakuza, street punks and the like.
The core of Yakuza 3 is beating people up. There’s nothing to it. Someone confronts you or you confront them and then there’s a fight. As you complete main quests, side quests or even collectibles, your range of attacks gets larger and larger and by the end of the game you have a variety of possible attacks that you can use. You can start the game with punch punch kick and a heat move where you just stomp on someone and by the end of the game you’ll have an impressive four punch two kick combo with a heat move where you essentially become the flash and attack four people at once.
Much like in Mafia 3 where executions are the highlight of the combat, in Yakuza 3, heat moves are the highlight of any fight you get into.
The combat is also incredibly easy to jump into. This is a third person action adventure game with RPG elements. It is not a fighting game though where one needs to use three hands to achieve a finisher. The game will tell you exactly how to use heat moves and all the player has to do is fill up the heat meter which is done through basic attacks. There’s nothing to it.
Throughout the game you can learn additional heat moves through revelations. Revelations are moments where Kiryu takes out his cell phone and snaps photos of certain events that then lead to the learning of a new move. These events add humor to the overall tone of the game and are always fun to take part in.
The world of Yakuza 3 is also filled to the absolute brim with side quests and activities. I thought I did more than enough but in the end, I only completed the game at a whopping and disappointing 18 percent.
You can go drinking and eating which also serve as ways to refill your health and give you experience. If you go drinking, the bartender will give insane details about your drink. I actually found one of my favorite whiskeys in the game and I learned a thing or two about it.
You can go out to eat food or dessert and each restaurant is realistic and serve their own menu.
There are collectibles in Yakuza 3 to my dismay but at the very least, in Yakuza 3, the collectibles are locker keys in which you open lockers with health/heat items and many other valuables that you can sell or even use to craft weapons.
The side quests can range from taking Rikiya to go sightseeing to stopping people from scamming the locals with supposedly lucky coral necklaces.
You can visit stores like Don Quijote (which is real, might I add) and buy equipment and other items.
Fighting enemies on the street rewards you with money, experience or equipment.
It’s astounding that everything you encounter in Yakuza 3 has a use in some shape or form.
The maps of the two cities you are in are also big enough to fit all this extra content in but small enough where it can take you about a minute to get from one end of the map to the other so it’s hardly ever an annoyance traversing the area.
So there’s never really a time in Yakuza 3 where you are left with nothing to do and that adds to the overall gameplay.
The only negative aspect to the overall gameplay is the chase sequence but this is more affected by the visuals than the controls.
VISUALS
The visuals of Yakuza 3 are good. Other games that released in 2009 include Saints Row 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 so considering this game originally released in 2009 albeit in Japan only, they’re good but nothing spectacular.
If anything, the environments look incredible. It’s the characters that seem a little iffy from time to time. The NPCs and basic enemy character models are repeatedly used without discrimination. You’ll probably have seen them all within 20 minutes of gameplay, if that. They have these weird faded faces without features which make all the main characters stand out so much more.
I would assume this is the case to save space and essentially focus more on content quality rather than quantity.
Whenever a fight is initiated, the civilians around you create the ring you fight in. They stand around the fight area and you can’t move past them. They create this invisible wall. However, this has to be done by the time the fight introduction happens so it’s common to see civilians that are right next to you just vanish into thin air and see civilians pop into existence where the invisible wall should be.
This very thing becomes a problem during chase sequences because in chase sequences where Kiryu has to catch an enemy, the two have limited stamina and running into people will diminish stamina. As you run towards the enemy, sometimes depending on the area, civilians will pop into existence giving you no chance to avoid them thus making the sequence a lot more difficult than it should be.
However, given that problem, I was never truly bothered by people disappearing and reappearing in and out of reality. Yakuza 3 never takes itself that seriously and therefore I reflected that attitude with that. I understand what they were going for and I left it at that.
Some people might find the cutscene and dialog scenes are little jarring in where sometimes there’s a fully fledged cutscene and then a scene where there’s no audio and only dialog boxes but that goes away with time. I assume that was merely budget issues and an easy way to get to understand the game a little more. You can animate the emotional scenes and then make scenes where there’s a lot of information that is being thrown at the player into dialog text cutscenes where the player can read it their own pace.
As for visual technical issues, I found very little. The loading and frame rate issues were that of the time the game was released. They’re minimal and never interfered with my gameplay experience.
AUDIO
As for the audio part of the game, the game sounds great. The sounds of the city are realistic and the voice acting is well done. With the exception of certain dialog text cutscenes where the character is on the phone and looks like they’re chewing on a massive stick of gum, I didn’t notice any poor synchronization in the cutscenes where it mattered.
The music was decent. There’s no music that comes to mind in retrospect except for the fact that the music adapts to where you are. You could be listening to soft jazz at a bar and then listen to some techno fusion while you’re fighting out in the streets but besides that, the music isn't something to applaud. It’s there for ambience and nothing else.
In terms of voice acting specifically, the only character I had some trouble with was the one American man in the whole game. His voice acting sounded off and somewhat cartoonish which is totally noticeable when you have professional Japanese voice actors giving their heart and soul into their emotional performances in cutscenes. There was one point in the game where the American yells and it was hilariously bad. If I could summarize his voice acting, it would be generic American male.
SUMMARY
In summation, the game isn’t something that I would urge people to play. If a Yakuza game interests you, I would also not recommend this installment.
There’s no question that this is a Yakuza game. I played this game after playing Yakuza 4 and 5 and never doubted that. The same creativity and soul I felt in Yakuza 4 and 5, I felt in playing in 3 but my biggest problem is just that the story takes too long to come together.
However, in saying that, I’m also divided because if it wasn’t for the long boring character development, I wouldn’t have cared so much about everyone when it came to the final stretch.
The gameplay is fun and there’s enough to keep you entertained in the world of Yakuza 3. Once you beat the game, there are also other game modes that are unlocked so the gameplay is extended through what is essentially New Game Plus and Free Roam.
The visuals and audio are good and work as intended with the exception of the one American character and the way the loading of NPCs affect certain chase sequences.
If you’re interested in a Yakuza game, Yakuza 3 is something I would not recommend unless extremely slow characterization is something you enjoy. If you’ve played other installments, this game is a 50/50 from me in terms of recommendation because while it does tell another story of Kazuma Kiryu, it’s a standalone story that doesn’t seem to matter in 4 and 5 with the exception of one plot point in 4 and it’s actually explained there too. It’s literally just the story that I wouldn’t want to play through again, otherwise it’s a fine game.
All that being said, I’d have to give Yakuza 3 a 7.5 out of 10.