I was playing through Judgment and it reminded me how janky the series is as a whole. I think the jank grew even worse with the transition to Dragon Engine and my hope is that the switch to turn-based will provide the game with a much needed shot in the arm.
How do I define jank? Well, there is the "eurojank" term of developers like Spiders where a lot of things just feel "off" in terms of bugs, clipping, erratic movements, gaps in the animation etc (Greedfall improved on that but the combat feels off to me).
Then there is the jank commonly associated with Bethesda which is frequently forgiven (besides the last Fallout but that was not the main reason it was raked over the coals...) because their games are massive and in having so many elements dynamically interact, jank inevitably results.
Now, why are Yakuza games janky? It comes in multiple fronts: notice how in Judgment for example nearly every kick clearly clips through the enemies, the objects they fly against wobble and break even if they merely graze them on impact and the running animation basically acts like a tornado when you constantly bump into people, objects, etc which leads to janky results as everything is torn apart in a very haphazard manner (it got worse with the DE transition as the older games did not have quite that much jank happening at any given moment as not everything had that kind of physics applied to it). I mean, imagine games like Astral Chain where running around would bump everything to the sky to the merest touch. That would just look so bad and there is a reason why its not applied to every object and most just stop you dead in their tracks.
The other elements which many may not even consider jank are also that in my eyes:
- The dialogue grunts and general lack of voice acting outside of the main missions (Yakuza 6 was a delight in that regard) with only basic animations that really look bad in comparison to pretty much any major title nowadays (if you skip the dialogue even for a few lines, the animation resets at unattractive angles as if someone was recompiling the scene every time from scratch).
- The side quests where characters suddenly come and go unnaturally (they disappear into the ether and there is always the same stock animation of them kneeling down and holding their stomachs and the same running animation away from the scene which just doesn't look like it fits the current generation). There was this sidequest in Judgement where you beat the guy up, and then went to access the computer. The guy meanwhile comes running (even though he was like passed out) in a very bad camera angle switch and destroys the computer with those precanned animations until you punch him at the very end and the punch animation was just so BAD and every side quests reuses these animations which don't fit dynamicaly into cutscenes that permeate the rest of the main storylines (for instance, in Y0 when at the end Majima punches out the guys who wronged him when he was at his weakest self. It looks painful and impactful and the camera accentuates it all. For the rest of the game, it looks like you are suddenly hitting a feather and the camerawork is extremely weak and amateurish).
- The general flow of the traffic outside where people walk unnaturally back and forth and then turn back for no reason and you can see it in the background at all times (it gets even worse when the crowd suddenly materializes out of thin air when the combat starts and the rest of the background crowd disappears until it ends).
- The unending amount of goons that populate the streets. This is worse than random encounters as there is literally no reason to be interrupted so often other than to pad the playtime. There has to be a better way to naturalize that aspect without making it seem like busywork and interruptions on your way somewhere else.
- The map size in all the games makes impossible to believe that all of these massive shake-ups, story events and reverberations are happening when you can traverse it easily in a few minutes. Compare that to Rockstar games where the map is big enough to make such events believable since the world is big and doesn't feel like you are waltzing through a shoebox just waiting for a jarring transition in a script to yet another cutscene where you have to suspend your disbelief again at what's happening.
- The sudden, jolty animation transitions between regular map and the combat where sometimes you run around for a second or two before the battle even begins until the game loads up the assets to start the combat. They tried to bring the transition time down in Y6, Kiwami 2 and Judgment but at this point it feels less natural than when we had loading screens or when Yakuza 0 had the wind up period before the battle that wrested control away until the combat began proper.
Yakuza 7 is switching to turn based and they said the map is at least twice bigger than in the previous games. I hope this will improve at least some of this jank.
How do I define jank? Well, there is the "eurojank" term of developers like Spiders where a lot of things just feel "off" in terms of bugs, clipping, erratic movements, gaps in the animation etc (Greedfall improved on that but the combat feels off to me).
Then there is the jank commonly associated with Bethesda which is frequently forgiven (besides the last Fallout but that was not the main reason it was raked over the coals...) because their games are massive and in having so many elements dynamically interact, jank inevitably results.
Now, why are Yakuza games janky? It comes in multiple fronts: notice how in Judgment for example nearly every kick clearly clips through the enemies, the objects they fly against wobble and break even if they merely graze them on impact and the running animation basically acts like a tornado when you constantly bump into people, objects, etc which leads to janky results as everything is torn apart in a very haphazard manner (it got worse with the DE transition as the older games did not have quite that much jank happening at any given moment as not everything had that kind of physics applied to it). I mean, imagine games like Astral Chain where running around would bump everything to the sky to the merest touch. That would just look so bad and there is a reason why its not applied to every object and most just stop you dead in their tracks.
The other elements which many may not even consider jank are also that in my eyes:
- The dialogue grunts and general lack of voice acting outside of the main missions (Yakuza 6 was a delight in that regard) with only basic animations that really look bad in comparison to pretty much any major title nowadays (if you skip the dialogue even for a few lines, the animation resets at unattractive angles as if someone was recompiling the scene every time from scratch).
- The side quests where characters suddenly come and go unnaturally (they disappear into the ether and there is always the same stock animation of them kneeling down and holding their stomachs and the same running animation away from the scene which just doesn't look like it fits the current generation). There was this sidequest in Judgement where you beat the guy up, and then went to access the computer. The guy meanwhile comes running (even though he was like passed out) in a very bad camera angle switch and destroys the computer with those precanned animations until you punch him at the very end and the punch animation was just so BAD and every side quests reuses these animations which don't fit dynamicaly into cutscenes that permeate the rest of the main storylines (for instance, in Y0 when at the end Majima punches out the guys who wronged him when he was at his weakest self. It looks painful and impactful and the camera accentuates it all. For the rest of the game, it looks like you are suddenly hitting a feather and the camerawork is extremely weak and amateurish).
- The general flow of the traffic outside where people walk unnaturally back and forth and then turn back for no reason and you can see it in the background at all times (it gets even worse when the crowd suddenly materializes out of thin air when the combat starts and the rest of the background crowd disappears until it ends).
- The unending amount of goons that populate the streets. This is worse than random encounters as there is literally no reason to be interrupted so often other than to pad the playtime. There has to be a better way to naturalize that aspect without making it seem like busywork and interruptions on your way somewhere else.
- The map size in all the games makes impossible to believe that all of these massive shake-ups, story events and reverberations are happening when you can traverse it easily in a few minutes. Compare that to Rockstar games where the map is big enough to make such events believable since the world is big and doesn't feel like you are waltzing through a shoebox just waiting for a jarring transition in a script to yet another cutscene where you have to suspend your disbelief again at what's happening.
- The sudden, jolty animation transitions between regular map and the combat where sometimes you run around for a second or two before the battle even begins until the game loads up the assets to start the combat. They tried to bring the transition time down in Y6, Kiwami 2 and Judgment but at this point it feels less natural than when we had loading screens or when Yakuza 0 had the wind up period before the battle that wrested control away until the combat began proper.
Yakuza 7 is switching to turn based and they said the map is at least twice bigger than in the previous games. I hope this will improve at least some of this jank.
