I was consumed by my showdown against T-Set. As the second round of the Princess League finals approached, I had spent hours working on my routine and engaging in impromptu dance-offs in the streets of Osaka. My rhythm was perfect. I was in sync with every step. I was demolishing all opponents, but the incredible confidence and smug demeanor behind the duo that composed T-Set was driving me up a wall. Who did they think they were? Why were they always mean to me? They found me buying jewelry for the motherly head of my talent agency and they stole it and crushed it on the street. I needed to destroy these teenagers through the medium of competitive performance entertainment.
Yakuza 5 is the (sort of) latest iteration in a series principally defined by beating the living shit out of seedy individuals on the mean streets of Tokyo. While previous Yakuza games dabbled through extraneous mini-games, divergent player-controlled characters, and eccentric side-quests, none sewed its threads together with ability of consequence and commitment of Yakuza 5. It’s almost a callback to decades gone by when Japanese role-playing games shoved everything under the sun into their composition. Bloat is the inevitable negative, and Yakuza 5 its superfluous heft, but it’s such a mountain of effort and arrangement that it’s tough not to stand in awe of its accomplishments.
We’ll get back to my Princess League face-off shortly, but Yakuza 5 actually opens behind the eyes of its enduring protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu. He’s been living quietly as a taxi driver in Fukuoka in his (second) attempt to retire from his role as the legendary fourth chairman of the Tojo clan. The development team at Sega is seemingly in on the joke here, as just about everyone Kiryu encounters are fully aware that he’s an ex-yakuza trying to live on the down low. Still, he plays it with a straight face and still manages to eke out a few moments of sincerity amid his drab day job.
When Yakuza 5 says Kiryu is now a taxi driver, it isn’t kidding. People still pick fights with him when he walks around town, and he can still scrape their face off against the sidewalk (literally) and bludgeon them with mopeds (again, literally) in frequent hand-to-hand combat, but his role has been adjusted. JC Fletcher over at Tiny Cartridge already coined the term “Sane Taxi,” and I can’t help but borrow it; Yakuza 5 has like two dozen optional missions that task Kiryu with driving through the streets of Fukuoka and obeying all traffic laws, up to and including crosswalks and turn signals. He’s even required to have a friendly and contextually appropriate conversation with his passengers.
Eventually Kiryu parlays his taxi driving prowess into Tokyo Xtreme Racer highway races. Yakuza 5 has a fairly competent racing game inside of it! That’s crazy! It even incorporates its fighting mechanics, like heat actions, for some tricky bonuses. Every one of Yakuza 5’s five playable protagonists has his or her role in its sweeping narrative, but each also features an additional (and optional) side story with a set of disconnected characters. These questlines are completely separate from the traditional one-off sidequests that also line the streets of Yakuza 5’s five cities.
Taiga Saejima, returning from Yakuza 4, picks up as the second playable character. Kiryu’s agile, and somewhat traditional, manner of fighting is replaced by Saejima’s raw power. He has a bunch of charge moves worked into the middle of his combos, and the dude can pick up human beings and larger objects and swing them around like whips. Saejima also gets the most mileage out of his time, beginning in Yakuza’s proverbial homeland of Kamurocho before moving onto a maximum security prison, a remote hunting village, and, finally, Tsukimino, which is a stand-in for a part of Sapporo.
Taxi’s and street races are traded in for hunting and trapping wild game on a giant mountain, prison riots, snow mobile escapes, and first-person snowball fights. Most of the basics—a hideout to charge your health or store items, a dozen sidequests, street brawling and tons of collectables lining the environment—remain the same, but some are just a little different. The battle music changes up a bit with each character, and their skillset and levels completely reset. The latter may seem like a pain in the ass, and it kind of is, but the level cap of 20 is within reach if you plow through all the sidequests, and slowly picking up new moves and skills is a functional carrot-on-a-stick.
Chapter 3 takes place in Sōtenbori (a fictional version of Osaka’s Dōtonbori, back from Yakuza 2) and splits its time between Robin Hood loan shark Shun Akiyama, returning from Yakuza 4, and, playable for the first time, Kiryu’s erstwhile daughter figure, Haruka Sawamura. Akiyama shuffles around as expected. His kick-heavy fighting style has finally been granted a series of impossible air combos (making him happily indistinguishable from Tekken’s Hwoarang) and lighting fast foot-play. He’s functional, but by virtue of splitting his time with Haruka, he doesn’t have much to do in Yakuza 5. He’s just kind of there to occasionally give money to desperate people and watch over Haruka when her life starts heading south. Akiyama is my favorite character to play as, but admittedly he’s the weakest link in Yakuza 5’s sweeping narrative.
This brings us to Haruka Sawamura. Her rhythm mini-games and quest to become a Japanese idol are legitimately my favorite thing about Yakuza 5. Like, on the surface, if you told me one of my favorite series of games was going to detour to a female-focused Hatsune Miku-alike I’d ask you what sort of drugs you had been doing and if I could possibly have some. It turns out these drugs are pretty great, because Haruka’s sequence in Yakuza 5 is all kinds of cool. Instead of bashing strangers’ brains in she gets into dance-offs, instead of grand battles she throws concerts and, along with traditional sub-quests, she has to do crazy things like appear on Japanese TV programs, conduct interviews with journalists, and attend meet-and-greets with shifty otakus. The latter, in particular, even has a mechanic that incorporates a bouncer throwing people out of line if they get too creepy during handshakes.
Haruka’s sequences are a fresh coat of paint on everything that drew me to the original Yakuza in 2006. That slice-of-life Japanese culture isn’t available anywhere else. From walking down a busy Tokyo street at night to the pitch-perfect chime and feel of something as mundane as walking into a convenience store, Yakuza carries a bullet-proof badge of authenticity. Appearing on game shows and engaging in testy showdowns with T-Set is a contemporary part of Japanese culture, and one that I wasn’t too familiar with before playing Yakuza 5. I went to Japan in real life after having played the first two Yakuza games and I was stunned by how well they captured how everything felt, and, while Haruka’s gameplay may mirror Sega’s own brand of rhythm games, it carries the same cultural cache. After playing her sequences I feel like I’ve been watching Japanese television all day long.
Yakuza 5’s penultimate sequence belongs to a total newcomer, Tatsuo Shinada. Excised from a professional baseball career under dubious circumstances, Shinada currently works in the non-lucrative field of writing about his experiences at massage parlors. It’s highly implied he’s either writing sex stories or reviewing actual sex, but Yakuza 5 passes it off as “adult entertainment writer” and moves onto more important aspects of his story. Either way, Shinada owes money to everyone and his quest is consumed with figuring out the exact reason why he was expelled from professional baseball, after a single plate appearance, over a decade ago.
Shinada’s main side story involves encountering his former high school teammates and, somehow, always challenging them to contests at local batting cage in Nagoya. The batting cage mini-game has been greatly refined from its appearance in past Yakuza games, and Shinada even has a series of stats he can level up by taking part on optional quests. I found this to be the most enjoyable of all of Yakuza 5’s mini-games, and by the end of it I was hitting homers on every single pitch. Shinada also gets involved in chicken races and his fighting style is focused around tackling and weapons, which exist to, if nothing else, separates him from the rest of the pack.
It’s no surprise that Yakuza 5 wraps up in Kamurocho, and it’s unfortunate that this sequence is actually the weakest in the game. It’s here that all of the plot threads are tied together, and simultaneously it’s where they all come crashing down. The story—which is so wild, intricate, and occasionally convoluted I can’t begin to summarize it here—breaks from its pace of intrigue and dives headfirst into a series of 24-inspired villain one-upmanship where it keeps revealing a new Big Bad at every available moment. On one hand, I get it, Yakuza, if nothing else, is an interactive Japanese drama and contains hours upon hours of voiced cut-scenes. On the other hand, Jesus. I respect ambition but Yakuza’s inability to be concise at any available moment, especially the three or whatever hour no-save finale, is a serious mark against it. Its appearance on the PlayStation 3 and initial release date of 2012 make this more understandable, but it doesn’t excuse the annoyance.
The raw fighting engine, soldering on for the umpteenth time, is also showing its age. Brawling has always been the heart and soul of the game, akin to the random battles that have composed the majority of Japanese RPG’s for decades. Just like random battles, these are starting to feel dated and grating. I just want to walk down a street and get somewhere without a gang of hosts or thugs or other assorted dipshits picking a fight. This is especially annoying after I’ve hit max level and fighting these guys serves no immediate purpose. For the most part, at least until the last chapter, Yakuza 5 skips sequences where a character has to kill a hundred guys in some non-descript building, so I guess that’s progress, but it still feels like a vestigial appendage to a game that’s capable of so much more.
Did I mention Yakuza 5 has a functional Virtua Fighter 2 arcade machine inside of it? Every Club Sega arcade inside the game sports that and a version of Taiko Drum Master (along with some nondescript space shooter I don’t recognize). The game also has first-person shooter snowball fights, bowling, darts, a pretty neat take on air hockey, an insane hostess club dating side story, race-like chase sequences, incomprehensible pachinko and mahjong, and other stuff I’m sure I’m missing. At a certain point Yakuza has started to inherent these things like GTA inherits its menagerie of time wasters, but they’re all there and did I mention Virtua Fighter 2 is among them? There was a time when I essentially paid $300 to play this at home, and I know the game is available for peanuts on downloadable services now but, man, I can’t get over Model 2 game as a mini-game in Yakuza 5. What a time to be alive.
It’s worth mentioning that Yakuza 5 is likely the last major release on the PlayStation 3. Part of this stems from the fact that it was originally released three years ago, and it bears certain anachronisms from that point in time. The game has to save your data and system data every time you save, which seems to take forever. It also has save points, which most games abandoned a decade ago. The pacing isn’t friendly to tight schedules, and managing a clumsily inventory and regenerating health at a hideout is a drag. Still, this is technically the best and most efficiently produced Yakuza has ever been (sidequests, especially, are much easier to manage and keep track of), but players should be well aware of how out of sync it is with the modern generation.
If nothing else, Yakuza 5 always feels like it’s trying. If you’re counting spin-offs and sequels that never made it to North America, there have been over a dozen Yakuza games at this point, but it Yakuza 5 still feels like it’s aggressively trying to impress on all of its fronts. Compared to iterative western franchises like Assassins’ Creed or Call of Duty and it feels like Yakuza is making an honest try for both innovation and relevance. Its brawling backbone may be its weakest moving part, but the steps it’s taking outside of its comfort zone makes the series feel like it’s headed down a bold new path.
How often do you finish a sixty-hour game, not to mention one that’s twelve deep in its own franchise, and feel like you’re ready for more? A remake of the first Yakuza, Yakuza 0, and Yakuza 6 may or may not be arriving on North American shores at some point in the future (remember, Yakuza 5 took three years to get here, mostly thanks to goodwill from Sony), and I can’t wait to see where they push the series next.
That’s probably not true. I can wait because I’ll have to wait. I’ll do this because nothing else out there offers what Yakuza is trying to sell. I didn’t necessarily know that I wanted narrative heavy Japanese crime drama with interstitial bits of Japanese idol competition, a rural hunting community and fists fights with large bears, taxi driving simulations, money lending debates, a four hour rumination on the cultural significance of stealing signals in baseball, what it’s like to work at a 7/11, escorting Lady Gaga around Nagoya, or fetching energy drinks for prostitutes. Yakuza 5, for better and worse, has it all. There is no indication that it’s aching to step away from this trend.
