RYU GA GOTOKU 3

Anyone that's been following Yakuza news knows that Yakuza 3 is going to be released in Japan on February 26, with currently no plans to bring it or the samurai spin-off, Kenzan!, to the West. This needs to change!

After some folks on Gamefaqs chatted up Sega, a hopeful response came through: "show us there’s a strong net community for Yakuza and we will think about releasing the games there".

That’s when a couple of members of the gamefaqs forums banded together and created Yakuza-3.com, currently being maintained by Pixel.

Let’s show Sega that there really are Yakuza fans in the USA, Europe and Australia and elsewhere in the world.

It has a good wealth of info, and while the site itself still has a lot of work todo, we already have forums up and a wiki, so the sooner people start pouring in, the better.

Our objective is to organize the Yakuza fans, currently spread over the various general gaming sites, and strive for our goal: to bring Yakuza 3 to the west.

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That said, I leave with you my own personal experience with the series so far (it's long):

I’ve been playing Yakuza 1 sporadically, ever since I got it, which was a good while before Sega started talking about finally bringing Yakuza 2 to the West. I read about the spin-off set in samurai times being released, and then the announcement that there would be a real Yakuza 3, continuing the story.

Yet, I haven’t finished Yakuza 1. Between getting a PS3 and playing some recent (and decent) PC games, Yakuza kept getting forgotten. But now I’m back to finish the job.

Yakuza is a game that doesn’t give a great first impression, at least from what I can tell from my own first reaction and my friends’. The game was released in 2006 in Europe, and while the cover looked awesome, the game didn’t really grab me. I mistook it for just another brawler, like Final Fight: Streetwise and the like, and probably a crappy one at that.

Huge mistake.

The fans of the series already know what makes it special, but for those that never played it, here’s the gist: details. The game is crammed with stuff to do, stuff to read, details to discover on your own. At its heart, it’s a fighting game, with a couple of combos that you will use from the beginning until the end of the game, but with plenty of new moves to learn at your own pace, using experience points gained after finishing enemies and doing side-missions.


The city looks gorgeous for a PS2 title

The game takes place in a neighborhood of Tokyo, a faithful recreation of Shinjuku. I don’t know how faithful it is, but it sure feels like I’m moving around Kyriuu (that’s the main character) in the crowded streets of the Japanese metropolis. There’s neon signs everywhere, lots of characters on screen, and you can even overhear conversations while walking around, displayed in dialog bubbles. When you bump on someone, they get knocked back and wind up a bit; it’s great for a game from 2005 on a PS2.

Wandering about you can reach various shops, bars and gambling areas of the neighborhood. It’s up to you if you want to run over to the next story mission, displayed in glowing red on the map, or if you want to explore the place and see if you can find characters needing help. While doing this you’ll have some random encounters, though since the enemies are already on screen when you reach them, the game really makes it feel like it’s not a random encounter, just some bastard that was already waiting for you up ahead.

And then the fighting starts. Like I said, it’s not terribly deep, but there’s enough realism and brutality in the fighting that it really feels as if you’re punishing some punks for pestering that girl. You’ll pull the two-punch, two-kick combo plenty of times, but when your special spirit bar is filled up you can do some different moves.
During these fights there’s usually some piece of furniture standing around, waiting for you to pick it up and bang it on your foes’ heads, a use meter making sure it’ll break quickly. If you have your spirit ON, you can use a special move that’ll show Kyriuu smashing the whole item on top of the enemy, destroying the object no matter how much uses it had left, and most of the time killing / knocking out the enemy right there. There’s an early mission that happens on a graveyard, and it’s awesome that you can pick up a tombstone and smash it on top of the poor folks ordered to kill you.


The fighting in the game is brutal

All of this is accompanied by great sound effects, every fist hitting flesh, every object breaking heads, and when you dispose of the last enemy there’s even a slow motion effect to show off your might.
Kyriuu is taller than his enemies, which is one of those details that really make you feel like a famous ex-Yakuza of great strength and might. Walking around amidst the smaller enemies, you’re a force to be reckoned with and can lift them easily, throwing them on top of other punks or headbutting them until they fall down.

This kind of atmosphere isn’t usually on display on games that feature brawling or beat em up gameplay. Devil May Cry is too floaty and light, while God of War, which is very brutish, is too supernatural to be compared to the “real” pain of Yakuza. Only No More Heroes achieves a similar effect, even with all the blood (or ash, in Europe’s case).

But the game isn’t just fighting. There are also diversions, like a batting minigame, and the hostesses, virtual girls that you can chat up and offer gifts and the like, hoping for some more intimate encounters. They don’t go very deep, finishing on a pink screen probably reflecting Kyriuu “getting it on”, but’s great that the feature’s there, even if it kind of reeks of dating sims. In Yakuza you really have to pay even just to chat with these girls, it really is a service that you’re paying for. And it isn’t cheap!

Other details worth mentioning is how you can buy real drinks in the various bars, a lot of them from Suntory (if you’ve seen Lost in Translation, you know what I’m talking about, it’s a very famous Japanese beverage brand), and every time you drink a beverage that you haven’t tasted yet, you gain a couple of experience points. It’s just cool that the game rewards you for trying out the drinks, reading their description and checking them out on the table of the bar.