Q+A: Remembering Yakuza 3

Raph asks:

can you talk about a game you love but would never want to be good at, something where wading through low level gameplay is satisfying enough (yakuza 3, i’m asking for yakuza 3)

This is a bit of a weird question because Yakuza isn’t necessarily the first example I would pull for this, both because I don’t really love the series anymore and because very few people are likely playing these at a “high level.” I gave up on being good at Yakuza out of practicality: I tried, but they take so insanely long to “master” (or rather, complete) that I fell off the chase. The closest I got was Kiwami, where I actually did all of the side-quests and Tiger Drop parry-spammed my way into beating Amon. But with the recent release of Kiwami 3 and the widespread public outcry over how it butchers the original, I’ve been reflective on Yakuza 3’s vision for the series that never quite came to fruition.

I’m not a Yakuza oldhead; I started playing through the series with Kiwami and Yakuza 0 at the start of the pandemic, and I always had one of the games in my rotation up until I tried Like a Dragon 7 and got turned off by the undercooked turn-based combat.¹ I dumped all my stock then and avoided the current souring of the fanbase post-Infinite Wealth. Even once I hit Yakuza 5, my pace slowed in the face of its gargantuan scope, piling what felt like four separate games worth of content into a single package. While the side stories formed little worlds unto themselves, especially with the taxi driving and the hunting,² the substories began losing their own identities. The questionnaire-style substories took over the lot here, occasionally peppering in a fight or minigame playthrough to mess with the flow but otherwise locking the series into the repetitive side content it’s known for now.

Yakuza 3 never had that issue. Despite the absolute deluge of side content pulling the player in all directions throughout the game, the game never fully compartmentalizes, and the developers pay just as much attention to one-off substories as they do the bigger side modes. A surprising amount of these have bespoke game mechanics: take the ice-cream carrying minigame, for instance, or threading the needle through a crowd of old women to get an autograph from a celebrity. The Murder at Cafe Alps substory goes as far as providing a special case book for you to peruse in an open-ended investigation, making Kiryu conduct his own legwork to exonerate a wrongfully accused man. Some substories use the opportunity to add twists to the pre-existing mechanics: in the film set substory, a combat encounter is guided by a memorized script that specifies which heat actions should be used and lines should be read, although hamming it up gets an even better reaction with the director. Likewise, activities such as hide-and-seek with your orphans or a search for a particular shisa for some tourists open the player’s eyes to the minutiae of the area around them. These moments transform the disparate subsystems of Yakuza from purely instrumental mechanics into elements that feed into the life of the game’s world. Without them, the streets degrade into a glorified menu for repetitive side content.

This goes for the primary plot as well, something the later games strictly segment away from the side content.³ In these early entries, substories have the opportunity to flesh out the machinations of the clans and the personalities of the individual characters in ways that would disrupt the main plot. The pair of soldiers from sleepy tourist-trap Ryukyu, Rikiya and Mikio, steal the show with a few choice substories that help contrast their life against the highly financialized Tojo Clan. For the former, taking him back to Kiryu’s tattoo artist of choice (the location of which the player will know from the first game) lets him finish his back tattoo, giving him a moment to prove himself in the process. My favorite, however, is Mikio’s collection run, where his extortion duties end up as a stroll around a fresh market, getting fawned over by the elderly stall owners and scarfing down free samples as he collects tributes. The candor of the scene, exposing how trivial and congenial the duties are in such a small, safe community, hits a different register than the modern melodramatic or fully comedic modern substories. It asks a real question of the world they’ve created and concocts an unexpected answer, but it’s one that stays honest to Mikio’s character without fully exploiting him for laughs, as the exchange for protection money has grown a warmth of its own over the years prior.

From these and so many other sources of narrative and play throughout Yakuza 3 – the hitman missions, the revelations, multiple different trainers with unique minigames, and more – all compose a tapestry of life on equal footing with one another, in contrast to later entries, which bare their structural skeletons and distinguish between filler and craft. Yakuza 3 has constant new events by comparison, either strewn densely throughout the world or layered on top of one another through a web of triggers. In Yakuza 5, I could see the incredible breadth, but the separation between areas, characters, and available events made each set of chapters feel smaller at the same time, without the ever-expanding cast of characters of Yakuza 3. Its side stories are clearly marked, and its substories settle for being grist in each section rather than special activities unto themselves. The series never really captured Yakuza 3’s spirit again.

Why Kiwami 3 decided to axe so much of this is perplexing, at least from an artistic perspective – I’m sure the scope made getting everything remade tricky, although one questions why they bothered to create Dark Ties if this was the case. The demo and its immediate, virulent backlash hit a bit harder than most remake-related despair. I’m a remake agnostic in general, and while I’m muted at best now on both Kiwami and Kiwami 2, I’m disappointed that Kiwami 3 seems to have released so feature-incomplete and disjoint from its original game as to have thrown away all of its unique qualities, among other issues. Ultimately, this disaster resulted from how far they’ve deviated from Yakuza 3’s visions in the many years since it released, potentially to the point where they’re no long able to make a game in this style. If I wasn’t already completely out on this series, this would have likely done it.

But to return to Raph’s original question, by this point I can only barely imagine returning to Yakuza 3! Besides the opportunity to boot the PS3 for a bit, I’m so divorced from this kind of checklist design that I’m not really interested in squandering all of the great time I had with it with a replay. I guess, in that sense, I’m willing to ignore the high-level gameplay in Yakuza 3. If I ever revisit this topic, I’d rather choose a game that I actively play at a low-level instead of any Yakuza title… although maybe I’ll come back in a couple years to get fresh eyes on the combat on Hard mode.