This isn't a great game, but it is a very good one. Telling a simple story of one gang's missing ten billion yen and the men tasked with its retrieval, by the end of the game you've experienced a traditional and yet refreshingly bonkers take on the difference between duty and honor, love and loyalty, friendship and partnership.
It's a weird game to play prior to Yakuza 0 perhaps, but I don't think there's one right way to do it, really. Having played Kiwami first thanks to PS+, I spent much of Zero looking forward to how they would sow the seeds for all that was to come here (perhaps worth noting, as I did in my Zero review, that I'd watched Giant Bomb play through the entirety of Zero three years prior so I was also a little more familiar with Nishi and so on than some others would be). Likewise, Kiwami was a really solid primer for all that I should expect to see later on, in a package half as dense and far less complicated in terms of storytelling and gameplay mechanics.
More important than anything, though, is that I devoured this game in a single week, including one marathon session to close the game out that, judging by trophy ping times, spanned a session from 9:19PM until nearly 7AM, a nearly unheard of binge in my adult days. And I capped that binge off by walking out the hundreds of kilometers of hand-in-hand hanging out I owed Haruka, something only 1.5% of PS4 players, uh, "accomplished".
Let me tell you, friends, that doing so is incredibly boring. But I felt Yakuza Kiwami earned it, and that feeling has lingered with me ever since.
It's a weird game to play prior to Yakuza 0 perhaps, but I don't think there's one right way to do it, really. Having played Kiwami first thanks to PS+, I spent much of Zero looking forward to how they would sow the seeds for all that was to come here (perhaps worth noting, as I did in my Zero review, that I'd watched Giant Bomb play through the entirety of Zero three years prior so I was also a little more familiar with Nishi and so on than some others would be). Likewise, Kiwami was a really solid primer for all that I should expect to see later on, in a package half as dense and far less complicated in terms of storytelling and gameplay mechanics.
More important than anything, though, is that I devoured this game in a single week, including one marathon session to close the game out that, judging by trophy ping times, spanned a session from 9:19PM until nearly 7AM, a nearly unheard of binge in my adult days. And I capped that binge off by walking out the hundreds of kilometers of hand-in-hand hanging out I owed Haruka, something only 1.5% of PS4 players, uh, "accomplished".
Let me tell you, friends, that doing so is incredibly boring. But I felt Yakuza Kiwami earned it, and that feeling has lingered with me ever since.