After playing and somewhat enjoying Yakuza Kiwami, I wasn't feeling very motivated to go into Kiwami 2, a few years later I decided to give the original Yakuza another shot and I was surprised at how well this game holds up, in fact, I believe the original is the better game when compared to it's remake, not that Kiwami is bad, mind you, it's just way too bloated with content, and that bloat muscles it's way into areas of the game that needed more room to breath to keeps it's sense of momentum and flow going, if I were to draw a chart, Yakuza 1 would be a line continually going up till the credits roll, whereas Kiwami would be full of peaks and valleys, it has good ideas, but it's good ideas robs the original game's good ideas time in the spotlight, I still maintain that it's a good game, but it shouldn't be seen as a a new starting line, but as a pit stop for long time fans.
With all that out of the way, what did I think of Yakuza 1? Well, it's good innit? Combat is a bit basic but that's easy to forgive considering it's the first title in the series, and it's already doing so much, specially for a PS2 game from 2005, what's important is that hitting enemies and landing HEAT moves feels good, and it does, but I'll admit that I was growing tired of the lack of variety in the combat by the end of game, made worse by the fact that moves that can bring variety like the Tiger Drop being very difficult to land, and to add insult to injury, Kazuma feels very stiffy in this game, something that can and will happen frequently is missing an enemy and spends a couple seconds punching the air, with no way to reposition.
The combat itself is my only complaint really, graphics wise this game looks absurdly beautiful to what it's accomplishing, characters are very detailed and expressive, and using a emulator or the HD Collection you'll see all of the work that dev team put in that was hidden by the original's rather low resolution (but if you already know japanese, I recommend either the HD Collection version, even emulated, it has less bugs and looks better than PCSX2).

After Tekken 7 which, while good, felt like a budget title at times (what with it's long loading times and characters that looked very "Unreal Standard"), Tekken 8 brings back the series to full form, amazing graphics, amazing soundtrack (the character select theme will be stuck in my mind for the rest of eternity) and delicious combat that made me want to dive deeper into it's mechanics in a way that no other FG ever since Tekken 5 made me want to.
Absolute masterpiece, the best Tekken game since Tekken 3.