THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

The frontrunner for the RGG game with the least amount of play testing done. Yakuza: Dead Souls is frustrating. It's not good, despite being a strange case study for the flexibility of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series and its characters. You can take these characters and place them in the most outlandish situations, but the tonal harmony the series really mastered makes it all feel believably in character in how they react to it. It's hard to take much of the game seriously when it's made clear from the get-go this is taken with light ridiculous fun. Playing this was initially interesting because there's some unique stuff here for fans of the series to experience first-hand. This is the first time you play as Majima before Yakuza 0, the only time I think we'll ever get to explore Kamurocho Hills, and jump-started an interesting trend where it feels like RGG wanted to bring back Ryuji Goda properly in the main series but for whatever reason, this is the compromise. None of it helps prop up Yakuza: Dead Souls into something more than mediocrity, though.

What kills it is a horrid framerate, whether you emulate it or not it's still never a stable experience, and gameplay that left me miserable. You play as four protagonists Yakuza 4 style and each time I swap around I just wanted this game to be over already. You aim your gun but chances are it always sways away in a different direction for no reason, zombies spawn almost indefinitely even if you take out the mini-bosses, and the closed-in camera that Yakuza/Like A Dragon adopt for tight brawler combat doesn't translate well for shooting swarms of zombies in mostly tight spaces where the framerate gets nuked. I dunno, what I got after finishing this was that RGG should never ever make a shooter again? But then again, this experience got me buying Binary Domain out of morbid curiosity to see how they did this kinda thing again. Anyways, probably franchise bottom tier.

The Trans Daigo substory was unexpectedly memorable alright.

more like Yakuza PEAK Souls

it really is basically just a Yakuza game but with shooting instead of punching, changing the controls the Japanese default of shoot on square really nailed it home for me. The normal "aim" is really more of a strafe button. Heat actions that aren't the tandem grenade throw feel pretty underpowered and companion AI is pretty stupid, but the core gameplay loop here is solid. In some ways this feels like the last hurrah of classic Yakuza, bringing back classic characters from 1 and 2 and being the last game the 3 iteration of the engine before it was overhauled for 5 to prepare for the next gen. It even ends on a little slideshow of moments from every game leading up to it.

Yakuza: Dead Souls is a really funny game, I love RGG studio's take on a zombie outbreak. It's all very silly and lighthearted for the most part, especially the sidequests - many of which are hilarious. The main story is quite weak for a Yakuza game, though, the villains are dull and their motivations shallow.

The main gameplay - running around shooting zombies - feels awful on first blush but once you get adjusted is functional enough. However, there is a lot of it and it does wear out its welcome. Particularly given how terribly the game performs, I found myself avoiding many attacks because they completely tank the game's framerate.

Still, this is a fun way to spend time in the Yakuza world. Great to see Ryuji Goda as a playable character and his arc is an interesting one (though his gameplay sections are among the worst). Majima's whole section is great. The other two characters don't have much going on in the story, but they have unique gameplay styles and a nice selection of sidequests. Overall I had a decent time with this one.

Well, this was somewhat to be expected. Before playing the game, I had heard a lot of mixed reviews about the game, and I have to agree and disagree on different accounts. On one hand, the game was reasonably fun. There's a decent amount of content, as this is essentially a slightly smaller Kamurocho from Yakuza 4. I enjoyed being able to fight through the sectioned-off town as it slowly expanded throughout the game. I also liked the variety of weapons, and the upgrade system was pretty easy to keep up with while not needing to grind too much for different upgrades. Combat was pretty cool and stands out from the other games in the franchise. And then there's some of the negative aspects. For one, aiming and trying to manipulate the camera doesn't feel great a lot of the time. While there are tools to help mitigate this issue in the game (like the head tracking skills), they don't work at every single moment in the game, and when they don't, the fights can be really annoying. Now, most of the time they do work, but those times they don't do stand out from the crowd. Each character comes equipped with their own unique weapon, which adds some personality to each character. However, after you finish a character's chapter (with the exception of Kiryu), you can never use that character or weapon again for the rest of the game. This can especially suck because you can upgrade each of those unique weapons, which is a waste of resources if you are only doing a single playthrough of the game. Also, after finishing Akiyama's part of the story, every character is required to always equip their special weapon and a specific handgun. This limits your other weapons to only two slots, which really sucks when there are many cool weapons to use, and the handgun really isn't that great of a weapon to have around for most of the harder sections of the game. You can't even re-arrange those slots how you like, so you just have to get used to where they are. The game is also plagued by frame-drops. There were many sections that seemed to overwhelm the system, mostly when there were loads of zombies in a single fight. This issue just go worse the farther I got into the game, as you would start fighting more and more enemies. The story was also somewhat mixed here. I enjoyed the flow of the story quite a bit compared to similar games like Yakuza 4 and 5. Each chapter felt like it built upon the last, and for the most part when each new character was introduced it felt right. Unfortunately, the overall plot was not particularly interesting, and it heavily overshadowed by pretty much every other Yakuza game I've played. There really isn't a lot to it, which sucks considering how well-paced the events are. And sure, there were some cool set-pieces throughout the story, but the overarching narrative wasn't really interesting in the slightest. While this score places this Yakuza title as the worst in the series, I do think it has some aspects worth appreciating. For one, it is essentially a full-blown entry, complete with sub-stories and mini-games that fans can expect from each main title. This is also one of the only games you can play as Majima, and is the only game so far to feature Ryuji as a playable protagonist. There is decent fun to be had here, and it is a good distraction for fans of the series, but ultimately it isn't a game I would put above any other Yakuza title I've played.