Alexa play 'Daddy Issues' by the Neighborhood.

Family is complicated. Yakuza 6, ultimately is about Kiriyu. To be honest, I wouldn't have given this game the rating I gave it if the plot wasn't so personal to Kiriyu. Above all else, this game is about Kiriyu Kazuma, and the lessons this story teaches him about family, the different types of family and how the game made him reflect on his own version of fatherhood, which gave us one of my favorite Yakuza scenes ever: Kiriyu's letter to Daigo. I won't talk much more about how much I love the plot but this game made me feel things I haven't felt in a Yakuza game since 0 and is such a perfect sendoff for Kiriyu. Although I know, and you know that killing off Kiriyu was never something that seriously crossed RGG's minds. But that doesn't matter, what this game really makes me mourn is the end of an era. This game closes the chapter for now on the Dragon of Dojima as we know him.

Now, this game isn't perfect. Onomichi, while very pretty was completely lacking in side content, the game expects us to care about this side content while we're figuring out what happened to Haruka. I don't care about the pirate ghosts, I don't care about time travel, I don't care that some rich girl and her boyfriend swapped bodies or whatever. I simply do not care. Kamurocho was a little better, introducing the cat cafe system and the internet cafe minigames along with some more interesting sub stories too.

I see a lot of people complain about the return of the Kiwami 2 combat system and while their complaints are valid, I just can't bring myself to hate it. The progression system is meh, I mean it wasn't much of an issue for me after I got the hang of it again after forgetting about it's existence for 3 games but the individual skills we have to get exp for is a system I'm not completely in love with. Like I said, adaptable but far from perfect, especially because the game is so hesitant to give out technique exp for absolutely no reason.

In Yakuza 6 we're welcomed with a lot of companions joining Kiriyu on his final adventure as the Dragon of Dojima which is cool at first and makes for fun cutscenes and dungeon sequences but this quickly wears off and too many cooks spoil the broth. Similar to Yakuza 5, the game loves to throw you in a big arena with like 10-15 enemies which is great, love that. BUT when you're trying to pull off different combos, throw enemies into eachother, pull off cool heatmoves but then Nagumo or Yuta or whoever comes in and starts grabbing enemies aggro'd on you, often times completely pushing you out the way to land some hit that does minimal damage, or get the enemy you've been trying to tiger drop for like 2 minutes and headlocking them, It gets old quick.

But despite all of that, Yakuza 6 is a very special game and is such a good send off to Kiriyu, his family and the world we've grown to fall in love with.

I left my heart in Kamurocho.