Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first Yakuza game. It’s an open-world, minigame-packed beat-em-up where you get to play as a goody-two-shoes Yakuza. It’s a cool comfort game — it’s fun bashing through hordes of goons and solving heavy problems with your fists. The minigames are also a lot of fun, and there’s a creature comfort to blowing your money on fancy food and bars. However, it’s let down by slow, unskippable cutscenes that take themselves way too seriously, and the Murakami-esque little girl character. Combat is also a bit of a question-mark for me. After playing Fromsoft games, it’s difficult to ignore how scuffed the difficulty curve of the game is. Downtown, you are constantly harassed by trash mobs that you can button-mash through, while harder enemies are rare, but require appropriate use of your moveset — a moveset that you have to grind to acquire pieces of. This creates an unpleasant juxtaposition of feeling like you can mindlessly plow through most enemies but must grind to deal with the harder ones, neither of which feel like they’re driven by player skill. In the end, I dumped most of my skill points into health and damage, leaning on HP regeneration powerups and cheesy amounts of kiting to get through most of the boss fights. I would have more patience for this if the game felt better, but enough parts of the game felt dated that I just wanted to get it over with and move on.

Overall, it’s a fun piece of history but the more modern entries are probably a better bet.

Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first Yakuza game. It’s an open-world, minigame-packed beat-em-up where you get to play as a goody-two-shoes Yakuza. It’s a cool comfort game — it’s fun bashing through hordes of goons and solving heavy problems with your fists. The minigames are also a lot of fun, and there’s a creature comfort to blowing your money on fancy food and bars. However, it’s let down by slow, unskippable cutscenes that take themselves way too seriously, and the Murakami-esque little girl character. Combat is also a bit of a question-mark for me. After playing Fromsoft games, it’s difficult to ignore how scuffed the difficulty curve of the game is. Downtown, you are constantly harassed by trash mobs that you can button-mash through, while harder enemies are rare, but require appropriate use of your moveset — a moveset that you have to grind to acquire pieces of. This creates an unpleasant juxtaposition of feeling like you can mindlessly plow through most enemies but must grind to deal with the harder ones, neither of which feel like they’re driven by player skill. In the end, I dumped most of my skill points into health and damage, leaning on HP regeneration powerups and cheesy amounts of kiting to get through most of the boss fights. I would have more patience for this if the game felt better, but enough parts of the game felt dated that I just wanted to get it over with and move on. Overall, it’s a fun piece of history but the more modern entries are probably a better bet.