Topic: Yakuza Kiwami

It's one of those series of games I had always heard good things about yet had never played. The closest I got was playing Lost In Paradise for a little while. Well, now I'm a little over five hours in, and I can see what all the hype is about. 10/10 in terms of world building, interesting characters, and what seems to be an intriguing story. The combat...is a little on the floaty side; for example the 3D brawlers from Koei Tecmo like Dynasty Warriors and their various spinoffs feel a little more grounded.

But I feel locked in. This is better than your typical collectathon. Yakuza ties power progression to mini game engagement. A sneaky way to pad the game's time-to-beat, but I'm all about it. Despite some PS2-era jank when it comes to interacting with the world, I can see this ending up as one of my favorite games I played this year.,

Knowing what I know now, I need to add Stranger Than Heaven to my wishlist on Playstation Cinco.

@Magician Always love to see a new Yakuza fan. Glad you're enjoying the series so far and in my opinion, it only gets better from Yakuza Kiwami. As I'm sure you've heard before, 0 and Kiwami 2 are absolute peak when it comes to the series and there are some mini games that you find yourself spending 10's of hours in and completely neglecting the main story.

I'm currently on Kiwami 3 and loving it!

Is it possible to ignore the story in this series and just do side content and minigames, or do you need to play through the story to unlock that stuff? I'm not really interested in crime stories or brawler gameplay but I like the sound of all the other random things you can get up to in these games.

@Dogorilla From memory, I think you have to reach a certain point in the story before everything completely opens up.

@CinnamonRobin Gotcha thanks, I'm probably better off playing something else for minigames then!