Egomaniac's LP is far and away the definitive Kenzan translation, with everything including all sidequests being translated and having a natural conversational flair, the full translated text superimposed onto the videos themselves, like the more well-known KHsubs LP but much better
The ASMR explanations of actual Japanese feudal history by an expert are a welcome bonus and genuinely made me feel like I learned something

https://lparchive.org/Ryuu-ga-Gotoku-Kenzan/

Playing this game with his LP on a second screen and pausing to sync up with the cutscenes is the best way to play this game and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it
What an immense amount of effort for something only a couple thousand people have appreciated after 10+ years
Reward his efforts and treat yourself to the best translation of this game that will probably ever exist

Great characters too, Sasaki Kojiro (the original Sephiroth!) will strike the fear of God into you and Marume Nagayoshi steals the screen every time he makes an appearance
Miyamoto Musashi (alias Kazumanosuke Kiryu) offers a compelling view into an alternate reality in which Kazuma Kiryu has a sex drive
The masters over at the Houzouin are more compelling than a lot of characters that were introduced in the other PS3 Yakuza games

If you're a fan of this series you're missing out if you don't play this, go to LParchive/Youtube, sync up those cutscene subtitles on a second screen when a cutscene starts and go to town

I went through this series in release order but played this after Dead Souls and before 5 because the anniversary montage in the Dead Souls credits showing beautiful cutscene cinematography from this game made me feel like I was missing out
And I was missing out, it's a great game and despite Yakuza 2 having insane production values and feeling like an excellently written movie that actual people would watch willingly, Kenzan was the breakout moment that ensured Yakuza would have more cultural staying power than Urban Reign or Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

As many have said this game will likely never get translated officially because a significant amount of the plot involves the implication that Haruka has been sold into slavery and you have to earn back her freedom, and at least once you will have to beat the shit out of someone infatuated with her
But this game was set before the turn of the first millennium and I felt like it did a tasteful job (for a Yakuza game) of empathizing with the women of the Tsuruya while not wallpapering over the historical reality that women did not have personhood in the Edo period
I don't know, I guess they could probably make it work in English if people wanted it bad enough, but that's the "Michael Jackson Sonic 3" "Beatles references in Earthbound" word on the street reasoning that people provide for the lack of a translation and who knows if that's real or if it'll ever get resolved

So don't hold out, if you're a fan of this series it's about time to boot it up, and if you play through in release order starting with the PS2 games like me, slot this one in-between Yakuza 2 and Yakuza 3 and you'll be glad you did, it has sidequests that tie into some from Yakuza 1/2 somehow, bespoke mechanics in the classic PS3 engine that would never reappear in a modern setting, and the PS3 era Yakuza games call back to this one enough to where it'll enhance your enjoyment of those later games, most notably one of Yakuza 5's locales is set in the modern-day Gion, where Kenzan was set over a millennium prior
And they do bold stuff in this game that they wouldn't be able to get away with using Kiryu because Kiryu is too on-model now, too manicured as a character
tl;dr: good game worth the trouble of playing in a kind of unnatural way, as opposed to not playing it at all, if you're hARDCORe like me it beats the hell out of not playing it

I've heard this game has been an absolute hood classic in South America, again proving they have superior taste to the USA due to the mainstreaming of piracy allowing them to develop really fine-tuned taste due to all the options they have available, and a good appreciation for the past due to using older consoles a lot, importing the newer stuff was often too expensive
They give us all the best homages to retro games because they know what makes them special due to having the whole library to play with (I love you Joymasher! What a great studio)
Anyway, do not sleep on this game, it's a 4 player arena fighter on the NES and it stars my sweet precious baby Kunio-kun who I would do anything to protect
Don't sleep on Kunio either, aka River City Ransom etc, I've been playing those games since I was a kid because despite living in the USA I stumbled into piracy and emulation and all that, boy he's done it all
If you only play two Japan-only Kunio games, play this and the hockey one, they have a knack for infusing every kind of sport with rule-breaking violence, like dodgeball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, track and field, baseball, soccer, falling block puzzle, as well as all the solo adventures like River City Ransom where they have to get their girlfriends back or the Like A Dragon Ishin-esque jidaigeki spinoffs or the Three Kingdoms spinoff or River City Girls from Wayforward where the girlfriends, obversely, has to get them back
A personal favorite of mine is Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, now known in the US with two official translations (localized and literal) as "River City Girls Zero" because you do get to play as the girls too, even with those two options of theirs I like the original fan translation I grew up with though because they say "fuck" and "shit" and "damn", I mean, they're high-schoolers and delinquents, so I guess they would talk like that
Just for the love of god whatever you do, do NOT play Stay Cool Kobayashi-san! A River City Ransom Story...worst mistake of my life

P.S. Yakuza is what happened when Shenmue's narrative aspirations and Kunio's bursts of dopamine split the difference
When will they follow in Kunio's footsteps and we get a Three Kingdoms Yakuza game where Majima is Lu Bu or something


Important information: if you want to play these games on modern platforms, M2 really went all out with the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle, where they officially translated a whopping 11 games for the first time, including 14 total, including the subject of this review, even retranslating River City Ransom while keeping its Japanese visuals and script intact alongside the original, as well as "quality up" versions that remove slowdown, improve control, and remove NES flickering
And...they locked their roms with DRM so you can't play them on a CRT display like God intended, which is a shame

shmups knock me on my ass so hard, especially R-Type, this game is like performing brain surgery with an Etch-a-Sketch, but the colorful understated body horror theming has always kept this series a favorite in my mind
where Final and Final 2 succeed is in being an orgiastic pleasure of beautiful backgrounds, alternate paths, and a long list of unlockable ships getting progressively more overpowered with all the design variation and power disparity of a DBZ roster
as sirpospin says in their review, the checkpoint system is pretty flawed, taking all your powerups away is really punishing, but if you're a shmup person you are probably used to this (I am not)
also, support Granzella who made this game
for those who aren't familiar, ever since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami took out all-time great studio Irem and got their then-upcoming games Disaster Report 4 and Steambot Chronicles 2 canceled
I always felt bad for them after that, and seeing them come back from the dead like a phoenix in the form of Granzella a few years later, remaking their canceled game, was cool enough that it makes me want to support them on principle
Granzella is a good developer you should buy their games and support them and their head Kazuma Kujo (well, even if this game has a billion level DLCs)

Add this game on your Steam account as a non-Steam game through RPCS3 as Yakuza Dead Souls spelled exactly like that, and boot up the game and set your in-game controls to control type B
Steam stores community configs for non-Steam games that you can easily download through Steam provided your non-Steam shortcut has the right name
Then go browse the community control configs and download my lovingly crafted input config that automatically induces a mode shift causing your right analog stick to be read as a left analog stick only when you press R2, therefore enabling Right Stick Aiming without messing with your camera controls or movement, like a modern game
I might revisit this idea for another Steam community control scheme that puts aiming on L2 and shooting on R2 respectively, relocating some of the other top inputs to make room (if I do I will also upload it to Steam, so check that space if you're interested), but for now I'm using a controller with two remappable back buttons to also put R2's aim onto the left back button, and Square's shoot onto the right back button, therefore approximating modern aim/shoot controls
And for emulating it I've found the most success and least crashes with a combination of undervolting my CPU to make it run stronger and cooler, using frequent save-states to mitigate the consequence of crashes, and setting my preferred SPU threads in the emulator to 2. I'm getting a wonderfully frame-paced 30fps in combat which is where a consistent framerate matters most, and at a beautiful 4K, using my i7-9750H CPU
Enjoy! This is a better game than people give it credit for with the control mapping issues and framerate fixed
Best played immediately following Yakuza 4 imo