KIRYUU-CHAAN!

I completed this game in about 40 hours. Of those, 20 were spent on the main story, 5 on side quests, 3 on the cabaret, 4 on the toy cars, 2 on the arcade game about half-naked women in bug suits fighting, and the remaining 6 hours were spent fighting Majima. He was everywhere, even on my website, you can’t hide from him.

But it’s a shame that the main story tended to stuff any interesting female characters to the freezer. It’s especially sad for Reina , who’s just begun to have any significant role in the story.

The combat system here is clearly better than in Zero. It’s basically the same (thankfully, Kiwami is just a reskin of 0), but they’ve simplified the heat system to one long bar, and instead of leveling up per fight style, all skills were divided into three groups.

Additionally, there’s the Dragon of Dojima style, which was leveled up separately by friendship with Majima, who’s been obsessed with fighting with Kiryu and hunting him down to help get back to his strength after ten years in the joint. Majima is Everywhere™, you cannot escape him; he can pop out at any moment. But somewhere after friendship rank C, it wasn’t Majima who was hunting me, but I was hunting him. Which caused the funniest case of ludo-narrative dissonance in my personal gaming experience, cause Kiryu in each of this cases still was turning tsundere on and pretended that he didn’t like having to fight Majima

Leveling up now works through a separate XP pool¹. XP can be given to you with or without real reason. You will not expirience much problems with cash, but unfortunately, the ability to throw money at thugs to make them flip off has been removed :(

But I play Yakuza not for the story and combat, but rather for the virtual tourism. And that’s generally fine. Although the map has been significantly and qualitatively trimmed down to make it more comparable to the PS2 original, so most buildings are now inaccessible. And there are far fewer cafes, shops, mini-gaming zones, and cabarets

But that didn’t stop me from walking around Kamurocho for five hours right before the final battle, completing side quests, beating fifth-graders in arcades and on the race track, loosing money at the casino, and then spending the pennies i won on bars and gals²

In one word romance :)