Yakuza on Lux Fero

Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017)

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:29:16 +0300

So i cried. Doesn’t make me less of a man.

Now that’s a good game. The story is solid, the mini-games are great, the combat is a bit slow and laggy due to the new engine and the heat actions are a bit too long, but otherwise, it’s a great game

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2007)

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:05:30 +0300

Plot wise it makes even less sense than the plot of the first game. But otherwise it’s a perfect adaptation of how it feels to play a Yakuza game

Also this film definitely was the inspiration behind the Majima Everywhere system and you can’t prove me wrong

Yakuza Kiwami (2016)

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:37:27 +0300

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 :)

Due to the economic bubble bursting in 1986 i suppose ↩︎
Of cource everything was civil, except for breaking Russian law that banned the organization vaguely known as “International Lesbian Society” ↩︎

Yakuza 0: Director's Cut

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:42:00 +0300

In short 42 hours i finished Yakuza 0, and i must say that it was a very interesting gaming experience. And that is because it is two games in one, and it is not because of the two protagonists i played as

The selling-point of the series is the slice-of-life element integrated into a serious crime story. Simply speaking, in the middle of the yakuza families’ territory war in Tokyo you can: help a rockband with delinquent aesthetics behave like delinquents, find a complex password for the black market purely to find it out, help two lovers with their relationship by the means of crossword, help a guy go through the bridge full of people he pisses of with his jacket, pull out a bunch of toys from SEGA’s UFO Catcher™ for a little girl, and my favorite: write a bunch of letters for a radio-show and get a million yen prize, by this point i had about 200 mills :)

The main story is divided into two arcs. And for me, one of them is way more interesting than another one. I’ll not spoil anything, but i’ll say that first half of the game you’ll think that devs tried to put two games into one, but after chapter 6 you’ll finally start seeing the connections. And you’ll feel pain, i genuinely teared up a bit in the finale

As a whole this two lines can be described as a story about a boy becoming a man, and a man breaking down

Also you can throw money into people >:)