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- Fantastic writing, with a solid story and awesome characters - Very fun combat that stays interesting thanks to a variety of special moves, weapons found in the environment, and four different fighting styles - High replayability and a world you want to keep returning to thanks to the sheer number of things to do, pre- and post-completion
- Majima Everywhere encounters can get a little samey after a time, and filling up your meter to get to the next rank takes painfully long the higher you rank
Back in 2018, my husband was playing Yakuza 0 in our living room, which began mostly as just background noise for me while I played other things or cleaned around the house. It was dramatic, over-the-top, violent, and entertaining when I would pause what I was doing to watch the on-screen spectacle. Entirely in Japanese, I couldn’t understand what was going on unless I stopped to read the subtitles, which I started doing. Then I started to get invested in the story to the point where I’d tell my husband to wait for me when once he hit a major cutscene. I wasn’t expecting to start sobbing once I watched the game’s final scene.
The Yakuza series is a unique exploration of myriad themes set within the context of organized crime in the Japanese underworld. It’s surprisingly soap-opera-meets-action-film, with an extremely colorful cast of heroes, villains, antiheroes, victims, misfits, hedonists, and monsters. Each game has a complex story that takes a twist and turn with every chapter, expanding the saga of Kiryu Kazuma and his inexorable ties to the yakuza’s Tojo Clan and his growth across his youth to middle age.
Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the PS2’s Yakuza, the first title in the franchise. It makes numerous references to events and characters from Yakuza 0, which is set 17 years prior to the events of Yakuza but came out in 2017 in North America on the PS4. Kiwami is effectively an entirely different game than the original, with numerous changes made to the story, gameplay and combat system, and substories (side quests).
Despite the overhaul, the main story remains the same. It’s 1995 and Kiryu and his sworn brother, Nishikiyama — Nishiki for short — are loyal members of the Tojo Clan. After Kiryu takes the fall for the murder of their patriarch, he spends a decade in prison. When he’s released, he finds himself having to adjust to a very different world while embroiled in a bitter internal conflict between the warring yakuza clans. Ten billion yen is missing, but so is the woman he loves, and Nishiki has undergone a vast change in personality and temperament. On top if it all, a mysterious little girl named Haruka enters Kiryu’s life, introducing yet another mystery he has to solve with the aid of some unexpected allies.
This may seem like an incredibly simplistic statement, but I mean it with every fiber of my being when I say that Kiwami is fun. I put 48 hours into this game and didn’t even complete all of the substories and extra content. Other than the main story, I sank the rest of that time into the Majima Everywhere System, earning completion points (CP) to unlock special abilities and gear, entertaining myself with the nightlife of Kamurochō, and completing substories as they’d pop up. The sheer amount of things to do keeps the game’s replayability high, especially coupled with the New Game Plus and highest difficulty that unlock after you beat the game for the first time.
Kamurochō is modeled after Tokyo’s Kabukichō district, which I got to see in real life last year. One of the funnest things about this game is running around comparing the game’s interpretation of Kabukichō to the real thing and continuously being impressed by how accurate it is. The city is swarming with a wide variety of losers, all with different names: goons, yakuza, menacing men, thugs, gang members, and so on. Random battles can happen at any moment, but if you’re not in the mood to fight, you can just sprint away until they stop following you. However, combat is as much of the core of this game as its story, so I’d suggest leaning into it.
There are four fighting styles you can switch between with the D-Pad:
- Brawler — Feels the most balanced between speed and strength
- Beast — Slow but hits like a semi slamming into a wall at 120 MPH
- Rush — Rapid-fire hits that do less damage overall, but also lets you sidestep quickly in any direction
- Dragon — Kiryu’s legendary fighting style that takes much work and time to upgrade and master
I didn’t care for chipping away at enemies with Rush and found myself using Brawler the most. Beast has the amazing ability to seamlessly auto-grab items around you while fighting, which became especially useful in fights where I wanted to take advantage of beating enemies senseless with everything I could get my hands on.
When Kiryu’s heat bar fills, you can do heat moves, a wide variety of incredibly creative attacks that do extra damage. Grab a bottle of “mystery liquid” off the street and force an enemy to drink it. Pick up a box of nails, shove some into a guy’s mouth, and then punch his mouth. Find a random kettle of boiling water and pour it over an enemy. Pick up signs, bikes, furniture, banners, and more and engage in all manner of colorful violence against your rivals. You can also use enemy weapons against them when they drop them, like guns, knives, and tasers. Through the course of your adventure you’ll also be able to find or buy powerful (and expensive) weapons that last a short while before they have to be repaired at a high price.
Kiryu’s Dragon style can only be mastered by engaging with the Majima Everywhere System, where Majima appears randomly throughout the city and challenges you to street fights. They increase in difficulty as your rank increases. Some Majima encounters are more elaborate and require Kiryu to humor Majima’s very odd eccentricities, making for some genuinely funny and bizarre moments. However, these fights did start to feel samey after a time, and increasing in rank progresses painfully slowly the higher you go.
Experience points are required to level up Kiryu’s abilities, such as increasing his health and strength or unlocking new moves for his fighting styles. You can earn experience a variety of ways, including fighting, completing substories, and eating and drinking at bars and restaurants. I managed to complete all of my ability wheels prior to finishing the game and felt like I was earning a ton of experience points at a good rate.
I was shocked by how good Kiwami looks on Switch. I thought this was going to be another Witcher 3 situation, where the graphics got a major downgrade when ported to Switch. Instead, the cut scenes were crisp and the gameplay looked good, with only the occasional visual stutter while running around Kamurochō. The game’s soundtrack is fantastic, too.
Kiwami isn’t just a bunch of fists to the face and brutal combat, as entertaining as that is. At its core, and what makes it such a great experience, is a story that’s incredibly well-written and engaging. The entire Yakuza series is a fascinating dive into masculinity and male relationships and bonds of all sorts. Father and son, father and daughter, brother and brother, man and woman, good men and bad men, and the challenges that come with age. While it’s easy to forget that the yakuza is a real-life organized crime syndicate that has committed terrible crimes against innocent people, the series is also careful about not glorifying the lifestyle too much. While the line between good guy and bad guy often gets muddled in media that depicts the Italian mafia, the Yakuza series makes it pretty clear who is a good person (and really shouldn’t be in the yakuza) and who is definitely not.
However, there’s nothing wrong with reveling in how cool these characters are. The bad guys are easy to hate and you will hate some of them while begrudgingly liking them to a degree. Kiryu is a fascinating character with a strong moral compass that makes him easy to admire, respect, and root for. Majima is equally intriguing, one part madman, one part driven by a strong sense of code, honor, and fixation on strength. Nishiki is a tragic figure, heartbreaking in his innocence and enraging in his callousness and brutality.
The plot twists in Kiwami get slightly outlandish toward the end, when the real mastermind is revealed, but then the REAL mastermind is revealed, but then there’s someone ELSE behind the curtain, and on and on. However, the bombastic revelations and drama are part of the allure of this series, and maybe growing up watching the absolutely insane plots of my grandma’s weekday soap operas gave me an appreciation for these types of stories.
I really hope that SEGA sees Kiwami as a stepping stone to at least bringing Yakuza 0 to Switch. It’s one of my all-time favorite games with a story that’s even better than Kiwami’s, and frankly I don’t really understand why they didn’t start with that game before this one. Regardless, the door is open to do so and I hope they take advantage of it, especially considering how well it’s selling and much it outpaced Ryu Ga Gotoku’s sales expectations. Yakuza is a special series and I’m so happy to finally see it on a Nintendo console in North America (and for only $19.99). Go download it. Now.
Nintendojo was provided a copy of this game for review by a third party, though that does not affect our recommendation. For every review, Nintendojo uses a standard criteria.
