Back to basics story, trash to basics structure.
The soft reboot of God of War does a good job of bringing the narrative forward in a way that's both approachable to new fans but provides a nice little award for long-time players, where it falls apart for me is that insistence on turning this in some to some sort of Zelda/RPG ,as Kratos constantly collects gear upgrades moves and searches for cash to craft better gear, it's not as obnoxious as many of great action game devs who filtered their hands into the gross sludge of the RPG rive, lacking random loot and many of our worst traits of RPG genre, but it still feels like a big step down, certain gear contains cool extra combat abilities but you're chuck it quite quickly because a higher level piece of gear comes along and it's really useless to be dragging around something which can't compete, also despite the simple narrative the game is just too long often feeling like it's simple story would have been better served with a 12-hour game than the 30 to 40 one, so could the gameplay really, many of the bosses and enemy types grow stale and it's just to big for what it has to show you.

1/2 of kiwami is the solid action-adventure game from years back, the other half is a grind heavy mess a terrible pace, repetitive combat encounters, "you will spend more time refighting Majiama than all the other bosses combined" and balance issues all over the place, Kiwami is what happens when you carelessly try and shove as much fan service into a game as possible while also trying to triple the playtime, could probably cut this thing down and have a pretty decent remake of the first but it's hard to recommend it over original when enjoyable gameplay requires an insane amount of grind which ruins the pace of the story, Ultimately Kiwami feels like it would have been better off had it been split into chunks, one a faithful remake of the first game and another, a fan service heavy expansion pack that could be unlocked at the end.

Sega temporarily end Kiryu's story with a solid high-point yakuza 6 cuts the fluff ignoring the numerous side characters and stories to focus on just telling one solid orc which wraps up in a satisfying way and provides a solid send off to Kiryu, rather than plates of gratuitous and poor quality fan service which a good chunk of the people who dislike this game would have likely preferred along with that the gameplay is not amazing but solid enough for its runtime, there are more action stages and the game is better paced than most RGG titles, you can pretty much upgrade and collect or the moves your need by the end of the game without grinding or playing any shitty mini-games, which is a blessing when you consider how obnoxious that could get in later entries, a solid return to form for the series, paced like the PS2 game's but made with PS4 tech and budget, if you're sick of the series feeling like a RPG with melee combat this is the one to try, also it doesn't force you to play the same stage of the same mini game over and over to progress, looking at you Lost Judgment.