Yakuza 3

If you’re a mature gamer of several year’s standing, you’ll know what it feels like to be patronised. A The sort of entertainment regularly served up by this industry for what are supposed to be adults indicates that the companies involved see you as anything but, and Yakuza 3 is a yet another example. In the year it has taken for the game to finally be released outside of Japan, Sega has decided to excise several of the game’s features: a Japanese history quiz game that wouldn’t “make sense” to Western audiences? We can live with that; every hostess bar and their attendant minigames out of a concern that the concept wouldn’t “resonate” outside of Japan? Sega, how very dare you.

Yakuza - The Panto. He's behind you!

This speaks to a contradiction at the heart of the Yakuza series that neither of the previous two games managed to resolve: on the one hand, it’s a hard-bitten, operatic trawl through the labyrinthine underworld of Japanese organised crime, punctuated by flourishes of brutal, crunching violence; on the other, it’s a soufflé-light celebration of procrastination, brimming with odd minigames, silly caricatures, pointlessly over-stuffed shops, and tin-eared jokes. The problem is that it has never entirely followed through on either part of its split personality, and Yakuza 3 only reinforced that dichotomy.

The loss of the hostess bars isn’t the point, but a symptom of the larger problem. Yakuza 3 is more confused about what it’s supposed to be, and the audience it’s supposed to be for, than either of its predecessors. This is shoved rather inelegantly in your face by the game’s absurdly long first act, which sees the bullet-hard Kazuma Kiryu doing little more than tidying up after the children at his orphanage as the plot slowly grinds into gear. It’s a gruelling, winsome, six-hour misstep that seriously undermines the story – traditionally one of the series’ major strengths. Things drastically improve when the action shifts to Tokyo, but doing so takes a strong stomach, and an open-door policy on your time being pointlessly wasted.

An example: Kazuma had to tame a particularly stubborn dog in an effort to keep one of his mewling orphans happy. We hunted for something for it to eat, only to discover that, in Yakuza 3, dogs won’t eat anything as prosaic as dog food. We travelled all the way back to the orphanage under instructions to fetch a rubber ball, only to discover on our return that this particular dog wouldn’t stoop so low as to play fetch.

Inspirational, emotive dialogue. Can be found elsewhere.

The solution to this riddle? To run pointlessly back and forth enough times to trigger a cut-scene that provided the dog with a menacing henchman’s leg to bite, and a reason to finally come out of its shell. We’d call it infuriating, but by the time the mission reached its conclusion we were too bored to register such a powerful emotion.

Indeed, there is no part of Yakuza 3’s impressive play-time that entirely avoids these sluggish, meandering encounters. Shortly after arriving in Kamurocho – Yakuza’s vibrant facsimile of Tokyo – Kazuma receives a call from a loyal underling, fresh off the plane from Okinawa. What follows is a mission to locate Kazuma’s bewildered ally somewhere on the gaudy, crowded streets, with only the knowledge that he’s “outside a convenience store” to help you. There are five possible locations, and we had high hopes of finishing the search without checking each one.

… continued