Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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Yakuza Kiwami
The Goro Majima Show!

Platform: PS4 (also on: PC, Xbox One)

Playtime: 42:40

68/78 substories completed
SSS rank for Majima Everywhere

So, while this is my first proper, complete experience with the Yakuza franchise, it's probably worth noting that I also spent 15-ish hours with Yakuza Zero when that came first released. I thought about returning to Zero, but Kiwami was accessible via PS+ anyway, and I've heard that, as a follow-up to Zero, Kiwami is a bit disappointing, so I thought it'd be better to begin my proper trek through the series with this entry.

And really, what better entry to start with? Yakuza Kiwami (YK henceforth) is a PS4 remake of the original PS2 "Yakuza" in a new engine that was also used in Yakuza Zero, and features new cutscenes and additional mechanics in addition to changes to the presentation and mechanics to bring this old game back to life for a new generation. Players take on the role of Kiryu Kazuma, an ascendant 20-something yakuza who is on the cusp of running his own family. Tragedy strikes, however, when his pal Akira Nishikiyama kills their family's patriarch in order to save Yumi, a mutual childhood friend that the patriarch was attempting to rape. Kiryu convinces his friend to allow him to take responsibility for the crime. He's expelled from his family and spends ten hard years in prison. The bulk of the game is played when Kiryu is fresh out of the clink, now in his mid-30s, as he gets wrapped up in a mystery involving his old friends, an internal conspiracy within the ranks of the yakuza, stolen money, and a young girl who is looking for her mother that Kiryu takes under his wing.

YK is, at heart, a dumb 80's action movie cosplaying as a crime drama. For all of the talk about organized crime, it's impressive how little the player actually learns about the organization of it, or even engages with it at all. One might look at a game like YK and mistake it for a sort of Japanese GTA, where you play as a young thug who makes his way up the ladder of Japan's organized crime world, but nothing could be further from the truth. YK's plot, as gripping as the added backstory segments can be, is at bottom designed to facilitate fun action setpieces for our morally unambiguous criminal hero. And, yes, like any good action movie, the game ends with two men dramatically shedding themselves of clothing as they prepare to beat the tar out of one-another. This approach works for it, though: what YK's plot lacks in subtlety or originality it makes up for in passion. The game unironically wears its heart on its sleeve. The evolving father/daughter dynamic between Kiryu and Haruka, the young girl he cares for, is cliched but still pretty touching, in particular.

Really, it's amazing that Kazuma Kiryu was ever a member of the Japanese mafia at all, considering how upstanding he is. The man is far closer to a superhero than to any sort of fictionalized gangster I can think of: he's a morally righteous and unyielding force who dispenses pure justice with his fists in a largely lawless land. He's even willing to sacrifice his freedom and place in the world for a friend at the drop of a hat. It's difficult to imagine Kiryu engaging in the sort of thuggish activities that yakuza are known for. But, considering YK isn't really a crime drama, it fits that Kiryu isn't really a gangster.

But where would any decent hero be without a villain or rival to keep him on his toes? In this case, that role is filled by Goro Majima, an insane yakuza boss who sits in some uncomfortable middle-space between shounen anime rival, obsessed stalker, and thirsty ex-boyfriend who just won't take a hint. This dude wants to be the Joker to Kiryu's Batman, and has apparently made it his life's goal to help Kiryu attain his full potential as a warrior by keeping him on his guard 24/7. There's a major gameplay system in Yakuza Kiwami called "Majima Everywhere," and they mean 'everywhere.' You can hardly run around for more than ten minutes at a time without this psycho ambushing you: he'll pop out of trash cans, crawl out of the sewer, follow you into fast food joints, pretend to be a cop and stop you on the street, invade street fights you're having with someone else, etc. etc. It never ends. Goro Majima is the God of this little world, and he'll continually think up new ways to surprise you and force you to fight with him.

This aspect of the game ends up consuming a sizable chunk of the player's engagement time with the game. As you fight Majima out in the wild, you'll gradually level up a meter. Whenever you go up a rank, after a certain number of fights, you'll have a more elaborate, scripted encounter with Majima. Additionally, there appear to be scripted events that trigger at unexpected times, as well as scripted encounters that only happen when you engage with certain side activities. Chances are that, if you spend any amount of time doing something in the game, Majima will eventually invade that space. I'm still halfway surprised that Majima never showed up in the karaoke bar I went to, considering how often he pops up everywhere else.

The character possesses an almost Bugs Bunny-esque quality in this game in terms of how varied your encounters can be. Majima dressing up in gaudy disco garb and breakdancing as he attacks you? Check. Majima pretending to be a police officer and, ahem, patting you down so that he can find weapons and find an excuse to attack you? Check. There are at least four or five different forms Majima will show up in, and these changes aren't just aesthetic. His fighting style, movement patterns, and weapon use changed drastically as well. The level of variety is actually pretty cool. One of his forms is so weird and unexpected that it actually shocked me. Lengthy scripted sequences also accompany the initial appearance of new forms, which is also quite entertaining.

Of course, you're not fighting this dude for the hell of it. YK actually has multiple fighting styles that Kiryu can swap between on the fly as he battles, but one of his styles, the Dragon Style, isn't like the others. The "Rush (lightning fast, but each of your attacks does very weak damage), "Beast (super slow, but your attacks are staggeringly powerful when they connected), and "Brawler" (a balance of speed and power) styles are all upgradable with xp generated by completing side-quests, eating at restaurants, fighting punks, completing story missions, etc., but the Dragon style's upgrades are connected primarily to your fights with Majima, and you'll need to complete various scripted encounters, finish a number of fights with each Majima form, etc. in order to build up the power of the style.

There's also a sort of martial arts expert who can help you unlock a certain number of special techniques in the Dragon Style. Most of these end up being fairly impractical during normal battles, but you'll want to at least learn techniques up to the Tiger Drop, a powerful late-game technique that, with some patience and timing, largely trivializes most of the game's harder one-on-one fights.

I mentioned that there are multiple fighting styles in the game, but I have to confess that I wasn't really a huge fan of this approach. In general, with the exception of boss fights, I found that Brawler style featured the perfect balance of power and speed I needed to take out enemies quickly. I find myself wishing that the game had opted for a more cohesive battle system, instead of one splintered multiple ways. There are so many techniques and moves that seem like they could be cool but that I just flat out ignored because it was almost never worth switching to another style to bother with them.

The most notable (and entertaining) gimmick of the battle system in YK (and probably Yakuza games in general) is found in heat actions. Heat actions are special attack animations you can trigger when you've built up a special meter (which increases by attacking enemies and decreases when you're hit, which incentivizes damage avoidance) that usually involve exploiting an object or the environment in some way. As a simple action, if you're fighting the street and grab a baseball bat, if your heat gauge is high enough, you can trigger a heat action that involves viciously blundgeoning your opponent with said baseball bat. There are a variety of ultraviolent and honestly hilarious special attacks you can pull off in this way (the game isn't afraid to go full anime and have Kiryu destroy an enemy with a volley of supersonic punches akin to what you might see in a fighting game; I can certainly see why the Yakuza devs were granted access to the Fist of the North Star license). This obscene brutality doesn't even demand guilt on the part of the player: it might look like Kiryu just shattered every bone in some guy's body by slamming a 1000 lb motorcycle on his prone form, but, come the end of the battle, he'll apologize tearfully for jumping Kiryu and limp away like everyone else does (people only die in this game when the plot demands it, which is probably a good thing, as your environment would be filled with hundreds of corpses otherwise).

And you'll be fighting... a lot. Kamurocho, the lightly fictionalized setting of the Yakuza games, is one hell of a dangerous place. Kiryu can't run for more than a block at a time without attracting unprovoked assaults from groups of thugs or running across shakedowns, muggings, potential rapes, etc. practically every time he rounds a street corner. The crime stats of this city must give even cartel-controlled territories in Mexico a run for their money. What this means, functionally, is that, on average, you'll be getting into fights every minute or two as you play the game. You'll be getting into fights so often that even the game's hilarious ultra-violence will eventually seem mundane, and battering someone nearly to death with bicycles after curb stomping their friends will seem like a normal aspect of life, hardly more noteworthy than picking up a fast food order from the local Smile Burger.

Of course, this all makes sense when you realize that Yakuza Kiwami is like a very streamlined, miniaturized version of an open-world RPG. All the elements are there: the ability to explore an open environment where you'll stumble across a variety of side-quests (or substories, as they're called here), random-ish encounters designed to help Kiryu accrue skill points, random events that are designed to break up the monotony of getting from Point A to Point B, the ability to goof off to your heart's content between story quests, inns (restaurants are functionally similar to inns in this game, except you also gain some XP for using them), merchants who sell weapons and healing items, checklists and a variety of side activity to engage in, points of interest (if you're wearing the item that allows you to sense where substory trigger spaces are located), etc. Yakuza Kiwami is essentially The Witcher if you dramatically shrunk the scope of the environment and plot overall.

The meat of the side-content in YK is found in its frequent substories, which are small, optional quests that are automatically triggered when the player enters specific locations in the game (at first, you'll have to poke around to find these, but at some point in the game I found a very helpful item that allowed me to see the activation locations on the map, which made it tremendously easier to hunt them down). The substories in YK aren't as gripping, elaborate, or funny as what I saw of the substories in my brief time with Yakuza Zero (I game I played maybe 20% of three years ago or so), but the scripting still isn't bad for what is a fairly faithful remake of a PS2 game, and several of the missions here help to flesh out Kamurocho as well as aspects of the main plot that the game doesn't really touch on. Of course, even more are sort of throwaway events, like this series of substories involving thugs who keep bumping into Kiryu and feigning injury in order to scam money out of him. On the whole, though, I think they add to the experience.

YK also plays host to a variety of mini-games, from the mundane (you can play darts, hit balls in a batting cage, play pool, sing karaoke, etc.), to the irritating (Pocket Circuit, a minigame that involves customizing and racing tiny miniaturized cars, is perhaps the most irritating activity I've ever hassled with in a video game) to the outright bizarre (there's an extensive series of substories that can only be completed by engaging with Mesoking, a bizarre digital card game that plays like rock-paper-scissors and involves scantily-clad women dressed as insects wrestling with one-another; even more strangely, this game seems to have attracted an audience composed almost entirely of small children). These distractions can be briefly entertaining at times, but I quickly grew to resent the fact that achievements, substories, and the like were gated behind these largely unfun activities. There's also some sort of hostess dating feature in this game, but, to be honest, I didn't mess with it at all. Kiryu doesn't have enough room in his life for a woman AND Majima, after all.

Another downside in this game are the boss encounters, which are... pretty terrible, if I'm being honest. The combat system in Yakuza Kiwami kind of breaks down when you face a powerful boss enemy. They almost universally don't seem to stagger and, even worse, pretty much continuously break any kind of combo you use against them, often with attacks that take off a disproportionately large amount of your health. And this is just against single-target boss fights. Later in the game, you'll oftentimes face off against multiple boss enemies in a fight, and these miserable encounters almost always end with Kiryu being knocked unconscious every five seconds because it's nearly impossible to focus on whittling down the health of one target without another coming in to stab or shoot you. Unfortunately, despite all of the techniques, styles, etc. that Kiryu can utilize throughout the game, the one fool-proof strategy I discovered when faced with bosses was to switch to Rush style and begin the insanely tedious process of slowly knocking down the enemy's health bar by punching and dodging back, punching and dodging back, for however many minutes it took to get the fight over with.

Oh, and whoever thought it was a good idea to give these already irritating bosses the ability to restore health unless you use very particular heat moves on them (one of which you'll need to spend a ton of time grinding Majima fights to learn) should resign in shame. It's a horrible, horrible mechanic.

Thankfully, these complaints mostly apply to story bosses. Majima's encounters are often challenging, but in a much fairer way: once you learn the movement patterns he employs across his various incarnations, you'll be able to take him down while suffering only a minimum of damage. Additionally, the coliseum fights are a lot of fun as well, even if they become inordinately difficult near the end.

I want to mention that the final boss fight, which is presented in quite the emotional manner, is also probably the best single encounter in the game.

I also didn't appreciate the fact that xp accumulation stopped mattering 30 hours or so into my playthrough. Once you fully upgrade the Soul, Tech, and Body skill trees, xp ceases to unlock anything, but you'll likely still have a ton of Dragon-style upgrades to unlock. This would be less of an issue if certain Dragon style upgrades didn't feel borderline necessary in order for the last several hours of the game to not feel overly frustrating (I would NOT want to fight the final few bosses without the Dragon-style boss heat action unlocked, since they recover so much of their health otherwise), but one tends to end up playing for several hours longer than they need to, grinding the same Majima fights over and over in order. In general, I feel like the implementation of the Dragon style into this game was more detrimental than anything, and this would be a moderately improved experienced without an entire skill tree being tied to Majima fights.

This leads into an issue I had with the pacing of the game itself. While the actual plot is quite pleasantly snappy, this implementation of Dragon-style makes it difficult to play the game in a way that doesn't lead to the player halting main plot progression for long periods of time. From what I've heard, the elaborate combat style system was imported over from Yakuza Zero, and that actually makes a lot of sense: being a significantly meatier game with a much longer core campaign, the slow trickle of upgrades probably matches up better with the length and pacing of that game.

There's a decent level of post-game content to engage with here, though. One can start a NG+ file, start up their save file but choose to wander around Kamurocho cleaning up the available side content and tropies, and engage with a extensive combat-focused post-game mode that challenges players to clear out waves of enemies within a time limit. There might be more, but that's all I engaged with before moving on from the game.

Presentation-wise, Yakuza Kiwami is a mostly quite attractive remaster, but, as with all remasters, there are areas where the seams show. Sega has done an amazing job upgrading these faithfully captured old cutscenes to look presentable on a modern-gen console, but it's still pretty clear when the game is actually adding in new cutscenes that weren't there originally, because the character animation quality is noticeably improved. Moreover, while the story content is all presented quite attractively, background characters and details can take a pretty big hit. A lot of the people walking around Kamurocho look like something out of an early PS3 game when you stop to actually look at them, frankly. So, it's a great, but not perfect, remaster of a game originally built for the now ancient technology of the PS2.

The game holds up reasonably well musically as well, although I hope you enjoy what you hear of the battle themes, because you're going to be hearing the beginning of them a LOT, considering how many fights you run into (particularly this first track). Really, fights take up most of this game, and so battle tracks are the majority of what you'll notice in this game.

While I mentioned that most of the boss fights suck, it helps that the unique tracks you hear during many of those encounters are actually quite catchy as well.

Yakuza Kiwami, despite a significant visual and mechanical overhaul, is still a dated and somewhat clunky experience that's filled with a number of little niggles and issues, but it's one I have a hard time criticizing too strongly. The game is unique, has a fantastic sense of humor, a reasonably strong plot, fun set-pieces, and does a great job of revitalizing a Sega classic for a new generation of gamers. I've heard this fares poorly compared to most other games in the series, which is actually exciting to hear, because if this memorable little game is near the bottom of the list, I can't wait to see how good future entries are.

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Hyper Light Drifter - Special Edition

Completion status: Beat game, found between 4 - 7 key shards in all areas; no idea on playtime, but I comfortably beat it in three days, so it's extremely short. Obtained almost all of the optional upgrades from the town.

Platform: Nintendo Switch (also on: PC, PS4, Xbox One, and iOS)

I was reasonably optimistic about this one. HLD is one of those indie games that has enjoyed a modicum of positive buzz from critics and audiences alike since it launched on PC in 2016. This Switch port adds a couple new guns and outfits to the game, although I think the "special edition" branding is deceptive; relatively little work has gone into distinguishing this port from other versions of the game. I enjoy Action RPGs. I should have enjoyed this.

But, I'm afraid I just don't get it.

Things start off well with a cryptic but intriguing opening cutscene that seems to depict an apocalyptic event that decimates a different world than ours. You control The Drifter, a blue-skinned warrior who appears to suffer from some sort of terminal illness and will, periodically throughout the game, cough up blood. There is literally zero narrative beyond this point, though. Whenever you explore a new area, you'll typically find locations where characters communicate via fuzzy pictures showcasing... events of some sort. There's no dialogue in this game, so good luck sorting that sort of thing out without watching a fifty minute lore video on youtube. Functionally, this game is plotless, and the interesting set-up during the opening cutscene is completely squandered. There's an art to leading with a minimalistic narrative, so I won't allow that excuse to be used; Shadow of the Colossus (one of the many obvious inspirations this game wears pretty openly, alongside Ghibli films, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind in particular, which this game steals imagery from) was a famously moody and minimalistic piece of art that nevertheless told a complete and relatively comprehensible narrative with almost nothing in the way of explanatory dialogue. Filling your game with symbolism and strange art design doesn't make up for good direction, proper stakes, character development, etc.

But this is an indie Action RPG, not Dostoevsky, so the gameplay is really what matters, right? Again, it's... not compelling. The game is laid out as such: you have a town with an exit to each side of it. Within the town, there are shops that you can patronize which allow you to upgrade your health (and the number of health packs you can carry with you at one time), your dash abilities, special sword attacks (which feel largely useless), and upgrades for your guns that make them more capable and allow you to store more bullets for them at one time.

Each direction is its own little themed zone. Within a zone, you'll need to find and activate at least four devices that will give you shards which you can use to access blocked off areas as well as the zone's boss. Four of these devices are marked out on your map by the rare NPC you'll stumble across. You only need to find these four to 'beat' the area, but each zone also features four additional, far more hidden devices that you'll need to find if you want to collect all of the secret items in this game (I didn't). Getting to these devices in each zone involves descending into rather large and sometimes interconnected dungeons, where you'll find gears that allow you to purchase upgrades in town, collect health packs, and, more than anything, fight loads of enemies.

The combat is simple, but reasonably well-balanced and satisfying. Your Drifter will be able to dash around, slash enemies with his sword (you can even do a three-hit combo, although, unless that combo is going to kill the enemy, it's usually better to dash up, swing once or twice, and then dash away before committing to that third, heavier swing and allowing them to hurt you), and use a variety of guns to shoot enemies (invaluable for enemies perched on distant platforms). The Drifter can only carry so many bullets at once, but, for some reason, attacking enemies allows you to gain more bullets, so you won't be able to go into an area, camp somewhere, and snipe at enemies. You have to rush in and attack them head on.

Not a lot of thought goes into the combat, although you'll need to practice some level of patience when enemies armed with rocket launchers (!!!) are present. There are a lot of secrets in the dungeons, including hidden corpses containing keys that allow you to access more secret areas, but very little thought goes into actually finding them. What the game wants you to do, and it's annoying is hug walls and the edges of platforms to find hidden areas and invisible platforms suspended in the air. There don't appear to be any puzzles in this game, so it's all a lot of hugging the walls and dispatching enemies. If there was an EXP system involved, it might be more rewarding, but I generally found that the dungeons felt padded out, and weren't really interesting to explore.

Bosses are challenging, although definitely not overwhelming, and once you learn their attack patterns, you can usually dispatch them without too much trouble. The trouble with them is that, again, I didn't find them memorable or interesting at all. Their designs are boring. They look like enemies from any other random indie game, like Enter the Gungeon.

Once you beat the boss of a zone, you 'complete' the area, as far as story progression is concerned. Once you do this on all four sides, you activate some sort of square in the middle of town. You go into the square, find some random shadow monster to fight, and then, once you beat him, stuff starts crumbling, there's a brief sequence of events that are also cryptic, and then the game ends. Not only is the final boss less difficult than most of the bosses that came before it, but the ending is INCREDIBLY anti-climactic. Credits start rolling and, boom, the game is done.

Also worth mentioning is that, when you activate the four devices the game requires you to activate in each area (one area actually only required three devices to get to the boss, and I had to spend some time hunting down the fourth, interestingly), some Shadow of the Colossus weirdness will happen, black figures will surround your character, and The Drifter will see obscure visions of... something. They're never explained. I was intrigued at first when this happened, but, lazily, the visions are exactly the same each time, as far as I can tell, so I don't see why the game has you see the same visions in each new area when they don't add anything to the game.

This abstract art is what the game wants you to use to help you find your way around, lmao

Some other nitpicks about the game:

• People like to praise the pixel art in this game, but I wasn't a fan. Cutscenes look good, but the actual style is very messy in-game, and it often made it difficult for me to distinguish platforms from empty spaces, and textured backgrounds from platforms I could dash to. All things being equal, it's one of the worst looking indies I've played in quite a while.
• There's an in-game map, but the damn thing is useless. There's a more generalized map that's no help at all, and then there's a dungeon map that looks like a random collection of boxes and lines. Worst map I've ever seen in a video game.
• There's a dash upgrade that allows you to chain-dash multiple times, but the timing required to properly trigger it is weird. I eventually got the hang of it through sheer muscle mastery, but I see no reason why the game gives you such a random, specific window in terms of timing subsequent dashes.
• The performance isn't great in the Switch version, and the game will drop frames randomly during fights with a lot of enemies on screen at once.

One key area where the game excels is the soundtrack. Accomplished synthwave composer Disasterpeace, who previously contributed to the indie game Fez as well as the horror film It Follows worked on this project as well, and, honestly, it was a great choice. His moody, atmospheric compositions are a great fit for this game.

In conclusion, I was very underwhelmed by Hyper Light Drifter. It's a visually messy game with rudimentary dungeon-crawling and a practically non-existent narrative. It's definitely not a terrible game, but I do happen to think its reputation as a top-tier indie is utterly undeserved. I'm glad I bought it when it was on sale, but $10 was still too much to pay for this. Wouldn't really recommend this unless it goes super cheap, and even then, why spend your precious time on this?