A Yakuza with a warm heart
The story in Yakuza is a fine one with many plot-twist and cheesy dialog. You are Kazuma Kiryu, a well established yakuza who is about to form his own family. One day, you find your friend Nishiki and Yumi inside a room with your dead leader. Fortunately for them, you are the influential tough guy, so you took the blame. 10 years gone by, Kazuma is placed on Parole and the world around him faces immense danger. He seeks Nishiki and Yumi, he hears about a mission ten-billion yen, and he encounters Haruka, a mysterious little girl running from the Yakuza.
The story is extremely scripted and linear. Though Yakuza is a open free-roaming game, everything you do in the main story feels repetitive and redundant. Most of the time you'll be giving a mission to meet a certain person or fetch a membership card. After meeting that someone, you'll be told to meet a certain someone else who will trigger a random battle and that concludes the chapter. Sure there are some cut-scenes in-between but they aren't very interesting or engaging to sit through. Do we really care about Detective Date's daughter when she only appears once in the entire game?
Adding to the infinitely many fetch quest are the questionable loading times. Each and every enemy encounter is followed by a brief loading screen. Every time Kazuma turns a corner there's a brief loading screen. After every cut scene that leads to another cut scene, there's a brief loading screen. These loading screen aren't too long (about 4-6 seconds) but they do appear way too often and they do bog down the story and the mood.
Free-roaming is a lot like Shenmue where you can go anywhere you want to go. There's only one city you'll visit through the entire game, and its large enough to get lost in. There are various restaurants, markets, pawn shops, and arcades you can visit. With its extensive amount of stores, I only wished there was more offered within the store. Sure Kazuma can hit the market and buy some Rice balls. It would be better if we can manually shift through the stores inventory like Shenmue and take the item to the counter. Instead, Kazuma can only buy items by pulling down a list from the cashier. The lack of clothing stores and accessories leaves much to be desired.
Combat takes place in a enclosed environments walled off by npc's rooting for you. There are random encounters where thugs will start chasing you during your exploration. It actually stuns the pacing of the game and feels unnecessary. It wouldn't be so bad if Kazuma could actually aim where he was attacking. Enemies tend to slide a lot when u attack them. When they do slide, Kazuma will end up punching in the wrong direction and leaving himself wide open for an attack. His dodging abilities are also severely lacking, and he cant crouch nor block. What he does have however, is the ability to perform small stings of combos (nothing fancy here), a throw, and a Special. When you hit your opponent enough times, you'll build up your heat meter in which you can perform a special. By utilizing the weapons scattered around or the environment, you can perform a deadly attack. After each battle, you'll gain EXP which you can power up your HP, learn new moves, or get physically better at pulling off your moves. There will be A LOT of fighting in Yakuza, and you'll eventually get one or all abilities maxed out by the end of the game.
Aside from the terrible aiming and loading times, I also hate the weapon design. Each weapon you equip comes with a counter. Hit the opponent enough times and the counter will hit 0, breaking that weapon. Why in the world would anyone limit the amount of hits you can do with a weapon? Considering how much expensive the weapons cost in the black market, it greatly bogs down any satisfaction you may have in investing new weapons. The fire-arms are no good here too. A stomp to the face actually does more damage than a bullet to the kidney.
Cameras are problematic at times, especially in small rooms. You'll almost always loose sight of your enemies on screen and way too often will you need to refer to the small map to locate your enemies. Because of Kazuma's terrible aiming, you'll frequently hit L2 to fixate your camera angles, adding much more unnecessary work than it should be. The game also tends to feel extremely linear and scripted. You'll know where to go and when you do try to enter a door or head up a staircase, you must defeat every single enemy on screen to unlock a door to proceed. Adding more to this dated, scripted game play is the astonishing body counts you'll rack up at every chapter. After clearing a mob of 8, a small cut scene will introduce 6 new enemies randomly picked up and dropped inside the kitchen for you to battle. Take those guys out and you'll take on the big boss who's equipped with tons of health but lacks any sort of AI to pose any real threat. All you need to know is to tap the same three hit combo from chapter 1 through chapter 13 to beat the game. There will be certain sequences where you'll need to button mash to break loose a grapple, and some forced cut-scenes midway during a boss battle will easily break a nerve(thanks a lot for resetting my position Sega, I really had him in that corner that time).
There's not a whole lot of interactive cut scenes that keeps you on your feet. Most of which will keep you occupied with great delivery in dialog and story presentation. However near the end, everything feels way too convoluted and you'll feel tired and out of it. Throwing in hordes of enemies doesn't make Kazuma any more Yakuza than dropping the F-bomb. Kazuma is the direct opposite of every Yakuza you'll encounter. He rarely drops the F-bombs, he's very kind-hearted and morally correct. Kazuma is not a bad guy at all, and he establishes his kindness and concern early in the game all the way to the end. It's a good thing to have a main character who players can cling to. Most of the enemies you'll encounter feel like plastic action-man figures. They are what they look like, but they lack any sort of motivation and reason to act the way they do. They are simply "Yakuza", that's why they're evil.
Visually, the character's lack detail and polish. NPC's lack any facial substance, character's facial features lack life and the color fails to impress. Sure the city may look gorgeous and beautiful at first. At times it will rain, but that can't hide the fact that the game is still lacking in detail and color. Kazuma's footsteps doesn't make any sound. It took me a few minutes before I realize it was even raining cause Kazuma's suit doesn't even get wet. However, people do start carrying umbrellas around, not that it makes a whole difference to their lack of dialog or under-detailed designs. The sounds are weak. You wont feel any satisfaction from pummeling a guy to death with a lead-pipe or a sledge-hammer. Every single weapon makes similar low-quality sounds that doesn't feel too special. For a mature rated game, it wouldn't hurt to see blood gushing out the enemy as you slice them with your sword. Voice-acting is done by big name people, but poor localization bogs down the overall cinematic feel of the game. You'll laugh in embarrassment as each Japanese yakuza calls Kazuma "stupid old f" , "mother f'r". Saying bad words don't always mean you're a bad person. I'm sure we've all said bad words sometime in our life, does that necessarily makes us a bad person? Better yet, a Yakuza? Original Japanese dub with English sub would've been authentic.
Sega is trying to revive an old classic, Yu Suzuki's masterpiece, the long lost Shenmue Series. Unfortunately for fans of the series, we get a somewhat half-baked iteration with forced dialog and tons of bad guys to beat up. Yakuza is not necessarily an unplayable game, but by the time you beat it, you'll see that this game is all hype and no substance. With Yakuza II hitting US shores 08, I will be picking that one up to continue the story. It takes anywhere from 20-25 hours to complete, with many side quest to part-take in and unlockable premium mode (time attack , mission mode, view cinemas) if your interested. I won't be replaying this game anytime soon, but at the budget price you won't be disappointed. Yakuza is a great cinematic game that lack tricks to distinguish itself from the crowded ps2 library.