Make no mistake, despite the low score I actually had a great time with the original Yakuza! However, it's also not hard for me to admit the game does kinda suck.

For context, I recently played through Yakuza 0 and absolutely fell in love with it, so I've decided to do a sort of marathon of the series. A friend of mine gifted me a PS2 copy of this along with Yakuza 2 for my birthday. If you're reading this bro, thanks again, man! Sorry if you may not agree with everything I'm about to say though.

I kinda pity those who started with either Zero or Kiwami and didn't like the combat from there, because ho boy, they really don't understand how far the series has come. Combat in this game is kind of a clunker. Kiryu is noticeably slow in this game in both turn-speed and frame-data. When you attack in this game, he will commit to swinging his fists in that direction, but the enemies you encounter are very slow too, so I can't say the game isn't designed around Kiryu's slow moveset. However, the main problem is that Kiryu doesn't have a hard lock-on like in other action games. He has to rely on a soft lock-on that doesn't give an indicator to when it activates and isn't very intelligent, as it will often break mid-combo. Combine that with the uncontrollable camera in battles, battles will often look like drunken fisticuffs where Kiryu clumsily whiffs his fists 40 degrees away from someone right up in his face. This becomes a problem when in the later half of the game you fight crowds of people with bats, swords, or god forbid guns and you get wobbled around in hit stun because your big kick didn't combo properly. Combat is still relatively easy though. Most of the problems Kiryu faces can be solved by hitting square 4x > triangle and it will eat their guards and knock them down most of the time, where you can walk up to them and hit triangle for a heat execution move. This was my end-all-be-all strategy for about 90% of the encounters in the game, which isn't exactly very engaging. By around the halfway point of the game, I would actively try to avoid walking into encounters in Kamurocho (which by the way, the encounter rate is comically high in this game, like Final Fantasy IV bad.) because they weren't exactly pounding my pulses anymore.

Speaking of walking around in Kamurocho, I was surprised to see just how hard they nailed the atmosphere in this game. The streets of Kamurocho are often dark and littered with trash, only brought to life by the illumination of neon signs and dim street lights, and the bustling crowds of noisy people. The fixed camera angles while walking around also make the city seem daunting, as the camera angles often pan above Kiryu to make the city seem larger than he is. It's absolutely fascinating stuff, and you combine that with the side quests you can find while talking to NPCs on the streets (which unfortunately most of them are fetch quests, with a scant few being memorable side stories) you really get the feel Kamurocho is a living, breathing metropolitan, crime-ridden, red-light district.

As for the story, it feels like a great proof of concept. I was surprised to see how briskly paced it all was, baring one chapter which mostly felt like filler. Maybe a little too brisk. I feel the cast of characters introduced here the devs haven't decided what to exactly do with yet, so they end off coming off more like prototypes for the larger narrative than real explored characters yet. One of the few characters that actually do get some scenes of character development outside of Kiryu and Haruka, Detective Date, gets his scenes in the aformeantioned filler chapter. It doesn't tie into the main story at all, but it was also nice to see a side character with his own struggles with the themes of family in this game.

Unfortunately, that may also be because this game has a quite frankly hilarious dub. I miss when Sega was the kings of shitty awkward dubbing, and this game offers plenty of lines that made me burst out laughing. It's still unfortunate because the actual good performances in this game like Mark Hamill as Goro Majima still have to wrestle with the horrid sound mixing. The dub does kinda ruin the mood of some scenes that were genuinely cool, there are still a lot of hype moments in this game that unfortunately get bogged down by bad voice direction or bad sound mixing. Let me share some of my favorite iconically bad lines:

"I did feel the urge to hit some balls today... I suppose yours will have to do"
"Go! Kill this arrogant mo-ther-fuck-er!"
"Women: "Are you fucking [R slur]?" Kiryu: I'm not as stupid as you."

I know this whole review seems kinda negative so far, but I was being genuine when I said I actually still had a great time with Yakuza despite all these flaws. Perhaps it was the brisk flow of the story, the atmosphere, and the discovery of all the little side content within the streets of Kamurocho is that kept me engaged throughout this experience the most. It's rare to see a game attempt to experiment with a bunch of ideas and still come out with something unlike anything back in the day.

The entire experience actually reminded me a lot of when I played Demon's Souls last year. Both games were born from internal company failure and both directors set out to create a new ambitious idea to lay the groundwork of a now iconic series, rising their studios to fame. Both games do feel a tad clunky and maybe less-fleshed out than they should be, but both games still feature experimental mechanics and atmosphere unlike anything else from their respective series. It's special to play a game like that, but I would argue Demon's is a more polished game overall, which is why I've played through that game three times as of writing this.

I'm not sure when I'll return to Yakuza 1, because while I did have my fun with it, I can also see this as a hard game to come back to if the other games deliver as much as people say they do. Yakuza is a beautiful messy blueprint and I'm ready to see how they'll iron out these kinks of this pretty solid game in its sequels.