Main Post part 1
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16.
Yakuza Kiwami - 32 hours
Yakuza Kiwami - almost literal remake of the very game in this Japanese series, made on the same engine as Yakuza 0. I knew about this beforehand so I started playing it with realistic expectations, yet in the end, Kiwami left me with mixed impressions. Despite improved graphics, it's still the same 2005 game from PS2 at its heart and of course, it's lacking in comparison to the brilliance of released in 2015 prequel that was 6th in the series.
The story of Yakuza Kiwami starts almost after the same moment where you left in Yakuza 0 - Kiryu returned to Tojo Clan and preparing to start his own yakuza family, but everything going to shit after his sworn brother Nishiki kills his boss and Kiryu decides to save him from the prison and take all the blame for murder. After getting a release from his 10-year sentence, Kiryu finds his clan in disarray because of the disappearance of 10 billion yen and murder of their leader, chairman Sera, and also learn that Nishki started his own family and apparently lost his goddamn mind in his pursuit for power. Unlike Yakuza 0, the story in Kiwami is not that exciting and unexpected, everything more or less predictable, cutscenes and fights direction are not as mindblowing, and the main villain is kinda weak and cliche with his "I'll become a ruler of the whole Japan!". Yes, it was like that in the original game, but still, the quality drop is too noticeable and it can't be helped.
Gameplay in Kiwami is pretty typical for this series, it's a mix of 3rd person beat 'em up with RPG parts, compact but detailed open world and a huge amount of side activities like minigames and substories. It's still fun to run around the city and look for adventures on your ass, but because of not very strong storyline it became more clear that some of those activities can be really repetitive and tedious, and even story missions can go into boring "run from point A to point B and talk with someone" scheme. But overall, Yakuza formula still works as intended and you can easily forget about time and play Kiwami through the entire evening without notice. Graphics remained the same compared to Yakuza 0, even TOO same, the game looks quite decent by modern standards, but not without weak moments like some of non-important NPC models. Story cutscenes recreated on the new engine with impressive attention to details, while playing Kiwami I was also watching on Youtube walkthrough of the original Yakuza game from PS2 and I can confirm that cutscenes are almost identical.
But despite the fact that there is not much difference comparing to the original Yakuza, not all additions that were made in Kiwami improved the game. First of all, I didn't like what they've done with the fighting system, they took it from Yakuza 0 and made it more confusing. In the original game, there was 1 fight style and 3 stat bars, you could spend gained experience points and gain new abilities and improve your health after every level up. In Kiwami they tried to take 3 fight styles from Y0 and attach them to that old 3 stat bar references, but instead of making it simple they randomly put abilities from all 3 fight styles and passive effects like health and heat gauge improvements in 3 skill trees. This lead to a confusing mess we have in Kiwami, where if you want to focus only on one fight style or find some specific skill you need to spend a lot of time to go through all 3 skill trees and carefully plan what is important to get as fast as possible and what you'll probably never use. The fact is, most of those skills are way too specific and can be used on really rare occasions, but you'll still have to buy them in order to get access for stuff you really need.
Also, they decided to add another skill tree for the 4th fight style that supposed to be a mix of all 3 fight styles (again, just like in Yakuza 0), but it was decided to tie progression in this skill tree to your relations with Majima, one of the protagonists of the prequel. And here is where developers went too far because those relations can only be improved after you beat Majima ass each time he surprise attacks you at the city - and you have to fight him DOZENS of times. Yes, you can avoid those conflicts most of the time, but there is a catch - in remake there were also added "finishers" for boss fights, at some moment during the battle boss can stop fighting and start to glow with specific color, and if you won't be quick and activate finisher of relevant to color fight style, then boss will recover a lot of health. And while you can quickly unlock those finishers for 3 regular styles, in order to unlock it for the 4th style you need beat Majima for at least 100+ fights, and this is insanely tedious and time-consuming. And you won't even need this finisher except for last 2 boss battles - but developers forgot to warn about this and without having this finisher move unlocked difficulty of those boss battles unexpectedly increases. It's disappointing that instead of simply adding some depth to Majima character (he had a very limited appearance in the original game) they decided to tie him to such dull grind mechanics and turned meetings with him into the annoying obligation.
Of course, there are positives change in Kiwami as well. The best improvement compared to the original game is extended backstory of Nishiki, they added tons of flashbacks about what happened to him after Kiryu arrest and how gone mad, and it really adds depth to his character. Though without playing prequel it's still could have been hard to care about old characters like Reina or Dojima. Another positive change is (finally!) ability to save almost anywhere and the addition of autosaves. I also really like a dedicated button to hide HUD (though still no proper photomode), but it won't be useful for everyone.
Yakuza Kiwami in really unlucky position because there is such outstading prequel nearby - no matter how you try, but it's impossible to review this game without looking at Yakuza 0. Despite being the first game in the franchise, it's really not the best starting point to start learning about Yakuza series - you simply won't understand why there is so much hype around these games and why people love them so much. But even if you played Yakuza 0 already, you also need to be careful and temper your expectations, because you can be disappointed that this remake is not as amazing as a prequel. Yakuza Kiwami feels more like big DLC to Y0, rather than a separate game, and this is how you need to approach it. It's not right to skip it completely either, because while story here is not amazing, but it still has some bright moments and important for understanding next mainline Yakuza games.
In conclusion, I want to recommend everyone who still hasn't played any Yakuza game to just stop loafing and play Yakuza 0 already. Every awesome person who already played Yakuza 0 just need to always remember that this is just a remake of the old game and you probably need to wait for a sale. For the old fans of this series who played all Yakuza games on consoles I only can say that port quality is much better than it was in case of Yakuza 0 PC release, it's not requiring top hardware to get decent performance and I haven't seen any major game-breaking glitches and bugs during my walkthrough.
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