Reviews from

in the past


The bear hunting stuff is just so mind-numbing and Haruka's section desperately needed more songs.

The same as 4, I don't like having multiple characters each with it's own skill tree and tedious grinding, but Haruka is really fun and refreshing

has masato aizawa in it yakuza 5 stars

Estúpido de mi, que pensé que ninguno de estos juegos superaría Yakuza 0

Mi favorito de la saga hasta el momento y una mejora notable en todos los aspectos sobre Yakuza 4

Sé que es inconsistente con mi review del 4, pero este es el mejor juego de la saga a pesar de que su historia está escrita regular. Es EL juego de Yakuza. El combate es el mejor de la saga de Kiryu, tiene la mejor pelea final de la saga, la parte de Haruka es sorprendentemente divertida. Hasta la parte de caza de Saejima me gustó. Y tiene a Shinada, que es el mejor personaje de la saga no cap. Definitivamente recomiendo que si vais a jugar a un solo Yakuza, juguéis a este o al 0.


This review contains spoilers

Best game since Yakuza 0 and does everything that i wanted from yakuza 4 with being more consistent with its character's narratives.

This game brings another side of Kiryu's character perfectly complimenting the past games while expanding more on what it means to be a Yakuza and showing the culmination of his burdens and life choices throughout the past games. Saejima's arc was handled really well and follows on what happened with the last game with the consequences of murder and finding atonement, tho sometimes his chapters can get dragged and become repetitive. Shinada is an amazing addition to this game and is the most relatable character with one of the most emotional moments in the series for me.

Story has its ups and downs and this was really prominent for me with the final boss. On one hand it's up there as the best boss fight in the series so far but on another hand the build-up to it was almost nonexistent and only comes off as shock which takes away from the anticipation.

yakuza 5! this game gets hate from some of the fans but to me it's an amazing game and i had alot of fun with it! the game now features 5 playable characters!

the story, if my room was a story it would be yakuza 5, cuz there is so much going on in this game that it gets hard to keep up with stuff. seriously stuff could've definitely been scaled down a bit. with the characters kiryu has been great as always but definitely sadder as he has to be separated from his kids to protect the orphanage and keep haruka as an idol, saejima goes back to prison once again with him being bald now!(definitely the better look for him) i really liked him in this game and there's nothing else to say. the stuff haruka goes through in this game is pretty tragic and you try and root for her to pull through, i really liked her in this game except for 1 moment that i cannot for the life of me get her thought process on why she did what she did, people who played know what i mean. akiyama is as good as ever, though he does so little in the plot this time. and the new character shinada is pretty damn likable! his story comes out of nowhere but i still liked him when he was on screen. daigo is here too and hes good. i can't say ANYTHING about majima because that'd spoil stuff. and the main antagonist is eh(not final boss) overall as overwhelming as the story was i still really liked the story.

this game was the biggest yakuza game at this time period with many new locations and 5 playable characters

kiryu's combat is a significant improvement from yakuza 4! since i played 0 this felt familiar to me and i was able to enjoy it alot!

saejima feels better in this game, while still not my favorite character type i enjoyed the combat with saejima

HARUKA!! yes haruka is a playable character! not as a fighter tho, as an idol. her section is a rhythm game scenario where you press the buttons at the right time, while a total gameplay shift i still loved it because im a rhythm game enthusiast ]:)

akiyama is more fun here and he has AIR COMBOS, still really enjoyable

and shinada is..interesting. he's a baseball player so using weapons definitely helps, though i didn't really like playing as him that much

each character has a climax heat that is pretty fatal and pretty good

the bossfights were pretty good and the final boss, while out of nowhere, was ironically one of the best in the franchise


there is an absurd amount of side content in this game that you forget that you're playing a yakuza game, seriously it's insane i highly recommend checking them out. the soundtrack as always is a banger.

overall yakuza 5 is an amazing game that i highly recommend checking out.

La trama transcurre en los 5 personajes cuya historia no tiene nada que ver con los demás salvo pequeños enlaces que desemboca en una trama final entrelazada absolutamente magnifica. Esta vez la duración es bastante larga. De mis favoritos de la saga.

Annoyingly long and went in too many directions

tiene cosas que me gustan mucho (Haruka)
y cosas que odio (Shinada)

It was quite an experience. I understand why people complain about it being too long, but I actually enjoyed it, I found it to have a lot more ups than downs. It had its moments where it made me want to cry, moments where I got excited and moments where I got frustrated, as usual with the franchise. It makes me think that this game was very ambitious for the time it came out.

It was also my first fight against Amon, and he has hands, but I have more.

Anyway, Yakuza 5 is peak fiction again.

This review contains spoilers

First of all regarding this "remaster"...
Loads of minor visual glitches, shadows constantly flickering on characters, wobbly anti-alising, strange reflection on eyes that makes it look like characters are crying, animations bugging/snapping (probably related to framerate, I think 3 Remastered had the same issue but 4 somehow didn't) etc. A lot of the textures are also REALLY crusty.
Then there's a PC specific problem with pre-rendered cutscenes having severe artifacting issues.
Aside from that 5 has weirdly flat lighting, most noticeably during daytime which somehow looks worse than in any previous Yakuza game. Maybe something that could've been addressed in a remaster..
Anyway

-Story
Kiryu's part starts off slow with him trying not to get involved with any more Yakuza Drama and live out his days as a taxi driver. However, after a very trustworthy detective informs him that Daigo has been kidnapped Kiryu's father instinct kicks in and it really starts getting good. Watase's introduction is done so well, he pretty much makes Kiryu look like a clown without even lifting a finger, it's probably the closest we'll ever get to Kiryu losing a fight. Sure hope we see more of him over the course of this game! After a few more brawls, the final confrontation of part 1 happens, the 100 man battle which one may refer to as "kino" or "peak".

Saejima's imprisoned yet again. The cellmate dynamic is pretty good and you get a little bit of plot development but a large chunk of this section is just "talk to random NPCs to slowly progress the plot" which is pretty lame. After a little bit of torture and another prison escape, we get the twist of Baba being a double agent and the one that employed Kugihara which really doesn't make much sense because why did Kugihara then try to stop their prison escape? Better yet, why does Baba even threaten to shoot Saejima? Getting him to Tsukimino was his entire goal and he's supposedly integral to his Bosses plan. After all of that Baba asks "don't you wanna know who my boss is?" to which Saejima replies "I don't give a damn!" amazing writing.

Haruka's part is the least Yakuza a Yakuza game has been and while I'm not inherently against that, Haruka's idol life and Park trying to live vicariously through her was just uninteresting to me. Also seeing Haruka constantly do nothing while getting harassed by the shitty mean girls antagonists was annoying, just knock their fucking lights out!!! cmon you've lived with Kiryu long enough!! Aside from the Idol stuff, I did like Park's character but when I realized they're setting her up as a mother figure for Haruka I knew her days were numbered.
Akiyama's part is just there to explain how anything that happened in Haruka's part ties in with the rest of the plot and it does it surprisingly well considering you're mixing Idols with Yakuza drama. Unlike in the 4th game the twists are actually setup and well executed here!!

Shinada's part is even more disconnected from the rest of the story, feeling like a spin-off.
He does add a unique perspective to the series by being someone that just got randomly roped into the conflict and had his life ruined by Yakuza simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The dynamic between Shinada and his sadistic loan shark Takusagi is just great, easily a highlight of the game and I wish we could've seen more of it but the structure of the part definitely suffers from RGG having to cram a spin-off in the middle of the story like this. There's a lot of infodump, in-engine "cutscenes" with characters just standing around and they got a little boring to watch. The pacing towards the end also gets messy with the final confrontation being rushed and the Nagoya family being dealt with very unceremoniously.
While the part's significance to the overarching plot may be minimal, it delivers a pretty engaging, mostly self-contained story but it probably would've been better as a standalone game.

Finale Time!!
The totally not evil "detective" that shows up in all the parts turns out to be Kurosawa, the 7th Omi Chairman, who set up this whole bizarre convoluted scheme just to kill Watase, Katsuya, Kiryu and Saejima all in one place which is kind of ehhhhh stupid... Like the game acknowledges that he's just a twisted old man who's 1 foot in the grave and just wants to watch them die/kill each other because he hates them but after so much setup that doesn't really make it any less unrewarding.
Makes me ask why Kurosawa even joined an alliance with the Tojo in the first place.
Kurosawa being Baba's boss also makes Saejima's entire part completely fucking pointless. If it wasn't for Kurosawa meddling with The Ministry of Justice and Kugihara he would've been out on parole and then gone to Tokyo anyway (or Tsukimino first doesn't matter)??
At the end of chapter 4 Akiyama shows up and gives you an hour long info dump that's supposed to explain how all of this is connected, especially to Haruka's concert which is probably the most confusing part of the story. Who's trying to cancel it again? For what reason? Why is Kurosawa now targeting it? It's all just very convoluted and and in a way not worth remembering, TLDR is Kurosawa is threatening to kill Haruka so that the protags dance to his tune.
Well the concert goes on and so now it's final boss time to stop whatever Kurosawa is trying to do.
Saejima fights Majima, who has been missing for 99% of the game, because Kurosawa says so.
Shinada fights Baba to beat some sense into him. His whole crybaby assassin shtick comes off as even goofier than before. It feels like these scenes are presented as if Baba was a "deep" character but the game never even bothered to give him a backstory, explain his relationship with Kurosawa (if there even is one) or why he's doing any of this.
Akiyama fights a nameless grunt- I mean Kinai for the 5th time.
Which only leaves Kiryu and at this point I guess the writers realized he had nobody to fight since Kurosawa was dying anyway so in a sudden twist, it turns out, Aizawa of all people, was actually Kurosawa's son and Kurosawa has been doing all of this so that he could inherit the Omi Alliance and the Tojo Clan! Alright... Well the fight itself is at least good but everything else about it is just so... underwhelming.

In the Finale the game also wants to pretend that there is some sort of central theme here surrounding "Dreams" with characters mentioning the word dream every 5 seconds and Haruka's new idol band even being called "Dream Line", it's all very subtle. But the issue is that "Dreams" as a theme is way too vague to be interesting, all Yakuza games and most stories in general are about dreams, goals, ambition etc. there is just nothing of value being said here. YUME!!!

While the story may not be as egregiously stupid as 4, it does get incredibly messy with so many aspects of the story just not leading anywhere and a lot of characters not getting as much screen time as they deserved.
As much as I like their characters, Saejima and Akiyama especially have been mishandled so insanely hard in both 4 and 5.

-Side Stories
Kiryu's "Taxi Driver" is just amazing (even if the pedestrian AI is suicidal) and they could've stretched it out a bit with some more races, more customization options and maybe a 2nd track. The foundation is so good that it's kind of a waste.

Since Saejima just escaped prison and is now on the run from the police (again) his side-story job possibilities become more limited resulting in "Hunter and Killer" which, unlike the other 3, is completely disconnected from the main story. The "introductory" part of the side-story, which the game forces you to play to progress the main story, is too "hand-holdy" and sorta drags on. However once the game let's you hunt freely it does get pretty fun.
A slight gripe I had was that at first I thought inventory management was gonna play a big role with you having to balance rations, repair kits, game etc. but upon filling my inventory during a hunt I found out that the game just gives you the option to send things to the item box, at that point just give me an infinite inventory. The mode is just lacking in challenge.
Aside from the actual hunting you have the little delivery quests that spawn in the village in which, for whatever reason, you can't hand over items directly from your item box so you constantly have to walk back and forth to the hut to grab whatever animal piece you need. Tedious!

While I couldn't care less about Idols, Haruka's "The Road to Fame" is a pretty fun mini-game collection. If you do all 48 of the jobs some of them do get a little boring, the basic singing and dancing jobs feel like padding and I would've been fine with fewer handshake events.

Just like in the main story, Akiyama gets nothing.

Shinada's "The Cost of a Swing" is easily the least interesting out of the 4, it's just the basic baseball minigame with some small gimmicks and an unremarkable story attached to it. It's not bad but all the other ones clearly had a lot more love put into them.

-Gameplay
In previous Yakuza games enemies in city were spread out quite thin and you could pretty much completely avoid encounters if you wanted to.
Here they're quite literally everywhere and will come running at you at supersonic speed if they so much as hear you. You pretty much can't go 5 seconds without some dickhead screaming "CHOTTO MATTE" at you.
Kiryu gets a "beads of good fortune" (which turns them off) from a substory early on but the other characters just have to suffer.
Before the combat, there's the upgrade system that's worth mentioning. Soul Orbs return from 4 but instead of having a list of skills from which you can pick what to unlock, the skills were now split into 4 "paths" where you have to unlock skills linearly and you can't see the next skill in the path. No idea what the point of that was but it's just straight up worse.

Anyway, the combat is pretty good!
This is peak Kiryu. His gameplay is so smooth and he gets access to everything you could possibly want. Bounding throws also don't cost heat anymore so you can just chuck enemies all over the place in crowded fights, it's great. I didn't even use the new "Dragon Spirit" mode that much because base Kiryu already tears through the game.
Saejima already perfectly embraced the gorilla playstyle in 4 but here it's cranked up to 11. Grabbing enemies at their feat and spinning around like a helicopter, mowing down everything around you or straight up slamming into the ground, it's just pure dopamine. And then you have Herculean Spirit, the first time I read it I thought my eyes were deceiving me, no flinching in heat mode? With that comedy ability, the amount of HP you have and the damage you deal you can just completely turn your brain off. As the cherry on top, he even gets his own tiger drop, not that he needed it.
Kiryu and Saejima are so blatantly overpowered.
Akiyama is kind of whatever, he has the speed but his damage doesn't really compete and he's mostly the same as in 4. His new special technique, the "Launch Strike", just kind of sucks? In crowded it can be interrupted easily and bosses either don't get knocked up at all or seemingly "tech" out of it if you go for the combo. The best part about it is that the knock-up gives you easy heat actions follow ups.
Shinada is just weak and his moveset is disjointed. They want him to be the weapons guy when weapons in this series are clunky to use as well expensive as hell and his free, unbreakable weapons are complete dogshit. On top of that he then randomly gets a bunch of grappler abilities despite you not being able grab while wielding weapons and grabs generally not being that good either. Instead of the usual counter hit ability like tiger drop he gets a counter grab, which shockingly enough, the bosses will just break out of making it pretty useless. People will say stuff like "he's not supposed to be a fighter of course he's shit!!" as if that explains his incoherent abilities. The game also shows off he is able to keep up with Daigo in a fist-fight and it's also never explained why Akiyama's bum ass is randomly a taekwondo master.

Then there's the combat trainers, most of them are decent or unremarkable but there's definitely some stinkers.
The IF7 has been upgraded to the IF8 equipped with new 2D beat up stages! Shame is they're just not very good, not only is the mode incredibly simplistic but enemies can (and will) be knocked out of frame and you then have to wait for them to slowly walk back into frame making it a whole lot more tedious than it should be. Also the boss AI might be broken because the bosses don't really do anything. It comes off as a just proof of concept and I can't see anyone having fun playing this. The male protags do get "Flashback Battles" where you refight a certain story boss but for whatever reason they made it so each character can only do their specific battle and not all of them, like it was in 4, which is lame. Minamida really needs to go back to the drawing board because this is more of a downgrade than an upgrade.
Akiyama's trainer, Saigo, makes his triumphant return from 4 and his training is just as asinine as it was in that game making me wonder if they intentionally designed his missions to be annoying.
This also applies to the "breakthrough" trainers aka Sotaro and Sosuke Komaki. No idea how Akiyama and ESPECIALLY Shinada are meant to beat them without using some bullshit like guns. They just relentlessly clobber you and Sosuke can use his stupid "rage mode" like every 5 seconds.

Aside from exploration and combat there's the somewhat infrequent chase missions which were slightly changed from 4. Instead of the specific running gauge you now have HP bars and when you catch up to someone you can't actually, you know, catch them anymore but instead have to attack them and slowly whittle down their HP. It's clunky and it drags these sections out.

-Conclusion
The story very much took a back seat to cramming as much content as possible into the game. Thankfully that content is overall really good. The 5 cities are unique and fun to explore and the combat is probably the best in series.


fico na dúvida entre esse e o kiwami 1 mas puta merda que jogaço