Misunderstood
I recently had the opportunity to get my hands on Sega’s “Yakuza”, an action rpg title for the Sony Playstation 2. Developed by the recently merged teams of Sega’s old Amusement Vision (Super Monkey Ball, Spikeout) and Smilebit (Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Gun Valkyrie) teams, Yakuza utilizes many elements from a few well known open-ended games, such as Grand Theft Auto and Sega’s very own Shenmue. The game ends up being a completely unique experience, and is a very compelling take on a play style which is flooded with dozens of “me too’s” on the market.
First and foremost, it must be said what Yakuza is, and what it isn’t. While it was indeed suggested that the game is definitely inspired by a few open-ended games released prior to it, it is nothing like these games and the similarities are small. Many reviewers and profressional game journalists seem to be giving this game the most mundane and out of touch titles, many of which the game doesn’t deserve. Game Informer’s beyond tepid review described the game as “not GTA in Tokyo” like they thought it was going to be, and this actually made them dock points in their review. In fact, it was perhaps their biggest complaint. Instead of concentrating on what Yakuzais, most reviewers seem to only care about comparing this piece to it’s peers.
Whether the game is GTA in Tokyo, Shenmue’s core gameplay aspects revisioned – which is what I truly believe – or not, Yakuza still stands on itself as a unique intentity and does many things right. Although there are a few hiccups that may deter some players from enjoying the game in full, these problems do not ruin the experience, as Yakuza is a game where it’s fine points overcome it’s apparent (mostly technical) flaws.
Gameplay
Yakuza features a blend of many well known elements from specific games, which is the reason why the title is being compared left and right to every open ended game on the market, or the beat em up genre, something Sega was once very proficient at.
The two main gameplay elements are adventure and battle.
Yakuza’s main setting is in the fictional district of Kamurocho, a take on the Kabuki-cho district of Tokyo. Kamarucho, like it’s real life counterpart, are red light districts heavy in yakuza hangouts, strip clubs, hostess bars, and many other vicinities. In Yakuza, your main form of exploration is by foot in what I call “adventure mode”. Here, you have access to a map which shows various blips and places Kazuma can visit. It’s something very much comparable to the likes of Grand Theft Auto, while at the same time there’s no form of transportation anywhere in the game (aside from the taxi you can use to instantly teleport to various locations in the district). The game offers a good amount of freedom, but it’s a different type of freedom compared to GTA, which is a sandbox. I would like to emphasize that Yakuza is not a sandbox. You cannot even kill or intereact with random bystanders. While in adventure mode, the player has access to missions, or sidequests, by talking to various npc’s. These sidequests range from fetch quests, to character specific side missions that add to the overall plot, atmosphere, and setting. The game features over 70 missions, so there is definitely plenty to do and keep players busy. The open-ended nature of the game is apart of it’s draw and appeal. I found myself doing nothing but side stuff for hours on end without touching the story. Yakuza truly is an immersive game, and my clock time is there to prove it. This is where the Shenmue comparison comes in: most of your time in the game will be spent dawdling, and doing side quests rather than venturing through the main story (as good as it is). In fact, doing missions is key to actually enjoying the game, as rushing through simply makes the game feel unbalanced, incohesive, and inconsistent. While exploring the moderately sized Kamurocho, players may encounter many ways to invest his/her time without actively participating in the main story, whether it be mini games, like hitting balls at the batting cage, or getting drunk at hostess bars attempting to get pixelated women to become attached to the player, where they’re eventually rewarded with rare items.
While continuing with the comparison to Shenmue, Yakuza is a sort of spiritual sucessor to the game series, albeit more approachable. Shenmue was a series so stuck in it’s bid for achieving life like results, and emulating real life, that it wasn’t as approachable as other games. It was typically a hate it or love it type of game. In Shenmue,which was a detective game of some sorts, in order to get your information, you needed to go to the right people to get the right clues. Any NPC could be engaged, any drawer in a closet could be opened, rarely was a texture ever reused. While still technically amazing, even to this day, that element of seeking life like results cast away a lot of potential fans of the game series. Yakuza kills off any type of distinctive line that Shenmue created between it’s fans and detractors, all the while still retaining many aspects that made Shenmue games amazing: the attention to detail, and common sense puzzles. Do you need to feed that little kid who’s starving and poor? Where do you buy food? The convience store. Need some medicine because someone’s sick? Go to the pharmacy. Need to find some seedy organizations and people? Go to raunchiest street in town. I appluad Sega for reinventing this approach and making it more accessible, they did a job well done.
Continuing, we have battles. While the adventure elements are perhaps the meat of the game, battles is another big emphasis in Yakuza. Potential battles in adventure mode can be seen. Gang members, Yakuza, or just about anyone can start a battle with you. They stand out from the rest of the crowd so it’s easy to spot them. Battles are “random”, and I say “random” because while you can indeed see the enemies you fight before you engage them, the rate that they appear is not set at any interval, and they often respawn randomly.
Battles are done in a beat em up fashion. You start out with only a few moves, which makes combat sort of dull after awhile. You have a few combos, and that’s really it. Kazuma has the ability to pick up weapons in the battle field, ranging from pliers, street signs, poles, traffic cones, swords, and guns to even shields, sledgehammers, chef knives, axes, schimitars, lances, even the meat you can find hanging in a kitchen, and many many other forms of weaponry. The weapon list is perhaps the most varied, diverse, and expansive than any game I’ve played that is not Dead Rising.
The magic in Yakuza’s battle system is the heat system. A guage that acts like a Super guage in a fighting game, racks up points when you kick tail. When it reaches to a certain point, a blue aura surrounds Kazuma, allowing him to pull of abilities he other wise wouldn’t be able to do. Heat moves are preset to the triangle button, allowing various moves, whether they are enviromental, weapon based, or whatever. Grabbing an enemy and walking them toward an object (wall, desk) allows you to slam their head into it. Equipping a weapon and pressing triangle lets you do it’s heat specific attack. As you learn more and more moves, the battle system depth rises from archaic and basic, to some of the funnest crap you’ll ever lay your hands on, and it’s all thanks to the Heat guage, a genius game design mechanic.
As you win battles, Kazuma gains experience. After gaining a certain amount of experience, players can customize Kazuma, docking their points into three seperate categories: Body, Soul, and Technique. Technique makes Kazuma learn new moves, whether it’s a kick that charges, or a throw where he grabs the enemy and swings them around in a circle, hitting their comrades in the process. Body increases HP, defensive maneuvers, dodge ability, and other things. Soul gives heat specific attacks, like the ability to use heat with a weapon, or using the taunt to increase your heat guage.
If there is any game that applies to the phrase “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”, Yakuza is that game. The gameplay continously gets better and better. If all games had gameplay pacing like this, they’d be unstoppable. As you learn more moves, the depth of the battles truly open up. Certain moves are heat specific, so players will find themselves fighting their best so they can pull off these seriously badass (and useful) moves. Yakuza is not the type of game where, upon getting new abilities you don’t use the old ones. In order to understand and utilize the battle system, you have to take advantage of everything. This makes the battle system not getting boring, because when you get a new move, it will prove usefullness and you will use it. Throughout the game, Kazuma can learn multiple throws, parries, counters, reversals, moves that hit behind his back (completely nulling the fact that you can’t change your move direction in mid-combo), the ability to safe fall when in mid air to prevent falling on the ground and being subjected to a down attack. What was once a battle system that was nothing but combo after combo and the occasional block turns into a game about strategically placing yourself on the field, learning how to counter and parry (think Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Devil May Cry 3’s Royal Guard style), learning when and how to use a heat attack, and what weapons to use. Add in the QTE like sequences, which make battles absolutely intense, and you have a winner. Yakuza offers one of the most deep and fun fighting systems I’ve played with since Devil May Cry 3, and nearly trumps any battle system in recent beat em ups, and for an action rpg that’s saying a lot, especially considering the fact I often find action rpgs to be the most repetitive and boring action games out there. The battle system has a lot to offer, and will keep players coming back. What’s more, the later battles in the game are difficult and take a certain degree of skill, but it still doesn’t cut off players who are struggling and want an easier ride, because after a certain amount of deaths in a row the game asks if you want to switch the difficulty to easy mode.
Quite possibly the only bad thing about the gameplay are the load times. Load times are frequent, and usually long, but you will find that by the 5th hour you don’t care at all because the game is that much fun. Still, it’s an issue you can’t help but hope is fixed in the upcoming sequel.
Story
Yakuza is based around an ex-yakuza gangster, recently released from prison. Ungrettably admitting doing a crime he didn’t commit, to protect those he loved most, Kazuma spent 10 years in jail. Once he was released, it seems a few people decided to start brewing a tea I like to call “trouble”. 10 billion Yen was found stolen straight from Tojo Clan safe, the Yakuza clan Kazuma was expelled from, and a little girl named Haruka, is at the center of it.
Yakuza features an extremely well done, serious story. Everything from the direction, the characters, the side quests that enrich the plot even further, are all very well told, even if cliche’ at times. The main character in particular, Kazuma Kiryu, stands as one of the more likeable main characters in a new video game IP in some time. The guy is not only a badass, he has a good heart too. Many video game characters come off as trying to be badass just because they can – one of my favorite characters, Dante from Devil May Cry, is a very good example. Kiryu’s badassness never comes off as over the top. When Kazuma does something, the player can’t help but cheer and root at the tv screen. Kazuma is such an interesting and overall fun character to play as, he can make even the most tame players really get into the game.
While the story is very good, it’s not perfect and it’s definitely not for everyone. Some may not like it as it could come off very B-movie like. Others may not be satisfied with the twists and turns in the plot, some even going as far as calling the story convoluted. I, myself, was very into the story of this game, and couldn’t wait for the next cutscene. It’s the type of game where you want more cutscenes instead of less, which brings up my next point: the flow and development of the story. While the direction is definitely up there, cutscenes are haphazardly ruined because of a problem that plagues other parts of the game: the loading. Instead of making one long cutscene, Sega treats it’s audience with multiple ones seperated by load times. This can absolutely kill the mood, as a lot of these scenes are either aprupt or poorly developed with little if any transition. Unfortunately this is not new to games recently as many rpgs lately have had this problem. But while a lot of those games are low budget, Yakuza is an extremely high budget game with production values leveling at nearly 20 Million. Surely, with that kind of budget, more care could have gone into polishing the game’s cutscenes up. We can only pray Sega will fix this problem in the upcoming sequel.
Another problem is the characterization. Perhaps this is because I wanted more of the story, but certain characters simply were not developed as much as they should have been, which is disappointing, as a lot of interesting character relationships are present.
Despite these small niggles, the story still presents itself as an extremely well done and cohesive plot that will keep the player coming back for more.
Yakuza is the type of game where it’s good points overcome it’s flaws. It’s a flawed beauty. Even though it’s not perfect, it gets the job done, and it does it extremely well. While I did not like the load times before battles, the heart pumping heavy metal music made up for it, making me anticipate the battles even more. Even though the cutscenes had a serious problem with consistency, I got over that problem much more easier than I thought I would. I felt there were far too many fetch quest type quests in the game, but I still enjoyed them. In the sequel I really hope there are more character specific missions, and personal ones, as those were my highlights of the first game.
Yakuza offers a lot to players, and they can expect 15 hours of playtime if they play for the story. Doing all 70+ missions, beating the secret boss (the hardest boss in the game), and all other extraneous stuff could prolonge the game easily to 30 to 40 hours (my clocktime). And even after that, the game offers some semblance of replay value – aside from being an awesome game – through Adventure Review Mode and Battle Review Mode. Adventure Mode lets players have access to the entire city district of Kamurocho and every single mission is unlocked right at the beginning. However, all story elements are absent and Kazuma starts at level one. Adventure review mode makes Yakuza feel like a completely different game. Battle review mode lets you replay various battles in the game with set conditions, whether Kazuma is customized to a certain play style or level, or you fight every boss in the game in a marathon boss rush mode.
Yakuza is the complete package. Highly suggested. Although a flawed game, the attempt and heart was there, and it’s the type of game that simply gets better the more you play.
