Two months ago, I finished Lost Judgment. I started Yakuza 5 back in the third week of August, and it’s now December. I took a break from Yakuza intentionally, so I’d be fresh for Lost Judgment and so I could let Y5 breathe a little. As a result, it feels like I’ve been playing this behemoth of a game for my entire life. As befitting of the game, this review is going to be very long, I expect. But, in short, one of RGG Studio’s crowning achievements and a great experience overall. Spoilers ahead.
I’m going to tackle this by chapter, since that makes the most sense. So, first up: Kiryu. This game starts off a lot more cinematic than maybe any other game in the series, or even Judgment. There’s a lengthy cutscene showing Suzuki / Kiryu’s daily routine from waking up, seeing his girlfriend(!?), going to work at the taxi company, and finishing out the day at a ramen shop. It’s incredibly well-done, and sets up the idea of each chapter as its own individual story. The framing for Kiryu is great - separated from Haruka and the other kids for an unknown reason, arguably at his lowest point. IMO this very intentional pacing goes a long way in making this game hit home. It’s not present in every character’s section, but it does a great job differentiating this from the rest of the series, especially Yakuza 4. Kiryu’s story is compelling, with him trying to avoid the responsibility of helping the Tojo after seeing Daigo, and then avoiding the Tojo guys that investigate Daigo’s disappearance. It introduces Watase, who’s a very fun character and one of the stronger Omi guys in the series. Kiryu’s section features two great fight sequences: the rather good fight in the branch Omi office and the absolutely incredible and infamous Kiryu vs 100 Tojo officers. What a great way to cap off his section.
Every character in Yakuza 5 has their own bespoke minigame tailored to their story. Kiryu’s is taxi driving and taxi racing. The game actually breaks these up into two parts, “story” and “side” missions. In Kiryu’s case, the story is about taxi racing, and the side is about taxi driving. I found the latter honestly pretty aggravating, and I couldn’t be bothered to do more than the introductory one, but the former is great fun. RGG managed to make a serviceable driving physics engine, relatively similar to Mario Kart, once you get to know it. The story of this section is quite good, and it cemented my intention to do the sidestories for each character.
Kiryu’s location is Nagasugai, and it’s probably in my top 3 or 4 locations in the series. It’s well-realized, pretty big, and feels different from Kamurocho. It also feels graphically impressive, and is a real step up from Y4’s Kamurocho. The ramen minigame is super fun (even if I only did it once), and it just feels like a lived-in city. Collecting the garbage is a funny little way to bring that home, even if the garbage is just the same shine effect for every ground thing in the series. Overall, Kiryu’s section feels like a mini Yakuza game. If you had just packaged it for $25 with all the substories and content in the city and ended it after the final fight, I’d be alright with it.
Saejima’s section starts off terribly, repeating the prison sequence from Yakuza 4 for no real good reason other than the plot demands that Saejima be back in prison. It’s a scary prospect and worried me that the game was about to nosedive in quality, and, while it does for a few minutes with the minutiae of prison fetch quests and nothing but uninteresting dialogue, the prison sequence is far better than Yakuza 4’s, and serves a much better purpose. Saejima’s escape with Baba is a terrific portion of the game, and leads to the bear and the mountain. The arc of Saejima helping look after Baba and investigate the town is excellent and aside from the next chapter, one of the bigger departures from the norm that the series has ever done. You have a very small “city” part with the village and a larger open world with the mountain, and that’s it. It feels claustrophobic and open, and Saejima is even more of an outsider than usual. One minor complaint I have about this section though is actually in its localization. For anyone aware of Hokkaido history / culture, the village is clearly a Matagi village, bear hunting and animal worship included. In fact, they SAY Matagi at one point (either Saejima or a villager), but the localized subtitles cut it out, and just refer to them as “ritualistic hunters” or some such thing. I get that when Yakuza 5 first came out, there was still the belief that gamers in the west didn’t care about Japanese culture or history, and the game itself almost didn’t release, sure. But this is Yakuza 5 Remastered, released in 2019, and the team did go back and make changes to the script in other locations, so it’s very disappointing that they left this cultural tidbit unknown to people who don’t speak Japanese. Putting that aside, I love this section and the hunting minigame. Again, I only did the main story and not the side ones (which are more like hunting substories, really), but going up against Yama-oroshi is really satisfying and the gameplay of the hunting is quite well done. I lost about a week to just playing an hour or so of that a night. Saejima’s actual plot-relevant section in Tsukimino is pretty forgettable, as is the stuff with Baba. Tsukimino is a bit weaker as a location than Nagasugai, IMO. The mountain is so weird and fresh by comparison to everything else in the entire series that Tsukimino’s relatively standard layout is a bit less interesting. The pervading snow and Christmas feel is a nice touch, as is the snow festival, but I just didn’t find myself getting too attached to it on the whole. Combat-wise, Saejima is a bit more interesting than he was in 4, although he quickly becomes completely OP with the Herculean Strength ability, which renders him immune to all flinching and interruptions when he’s in heat mode. It makes every boss afterwards a bit of a joke, honestly. Otherwise he’s got more cool double finishers and charged moves, plus the ability to pick up big stuff and swing people around. His heat actions are pretty brutal. Both he and Kiryu are absolute demons in this game, you genuinely feel for the random goons they dispatch.
Haruka’s section is probably the single best “chapter” in the studio’s history. What an incredible stroke of genius it was to take the relatively rote formula expected of a Yakuza game (beating up dudes, running around town, etc.) and completely turn it on its head with a character that the audience has developed a bond with over multiple games. To get mechanical for a second, it just goes to show how ingrained certain parts of the yakuza formula were by this point that by the simple act of removing them you get some really fresh perspective. Haruka being able to explore Sotenbori and do stuff at her own pace without running into punks every 8 seconds is such a minor thing but it adds so much. Haruka’s idol training is brutally fun, including both the surprising variety of side stuff and her mainline Princess League story with its rhythm game gameplay. And it’s not just fun, it’s a very smart twist on the perspectives of the main characters. Much in the same way that it worked for Judgment with Yagami as an outsider to yakuza struggles, Haruka is not going down the path of the Tojo Clan. Her perspective and approach to the world is vastly different from Kiryu and the gang’s. Her story is interesting, too. The characters introduced in this section are some of the best in the game, and the twists and turns of the chapter are exciting. Mirei Park is a fascinating character, and her connection to the broader story is both surprising and clever. And then Haruka’s section gets even better! Akiyama comes into the fold! Some people complain about his inclusion being too minor, but I disagree. Akiyama lends such a grounded personality to any scene he’s in, and acting as Haruka’s guardian (especially when things kick off) is a great bit of fanservice and character building. Akiyama is, notably, a slacker and something of a ladies’ man. Having him buck up and protect Haruka when it’s necessary is a great bit of growth - arguably better than some of the other mainstays of the series have ever gotten. Haruka is a badass in her own right, this section makes that plenty clear. She lives on her own in Sotenbori, works and trains really hard, and takes no shit from anyone. The part where Katsuya explains to Kanai that Haruka is essentially a hardened yakuza from her years around Kiryu, Ryuji, Nishiki, etc. is fantastic.
Shinada is super weird. He’s obviously the odd one out in terms of his connection to the story and because he’s the only new character. I was sort of ready to be underwhelmed by his section but it’s pretty good overall! It focuses a bit less on the yakuza politics and little more on the individual story of Shinada, which is compelling. His side activity is sort of meh, but it’s not terrible. I wish he had had a real baseball minigame, but I think that’s something in Y6? Shinada’s part is quite funny, and Takasugi, the lender that hounds Shinada for the length of it, is a really great character. The details of the Nagoya family were lost on me a little bit, if I have to be honest, the game refers to a bunch of people by name several times and I had forgotten who they were. Shinada’s weapon trainer is fantastic, Ayanokoji is a funny guy with some really fun fights and a hilarious arc. Shinada’s city, Kineicho, is probably the weakest in the game, lacking the quality worldbuilding and layout of Nagasugai and also lacking the definitively different vibe of Tsukimino. Ultimately it kind of just feels like a mini Kamurocho, which is in turn a little disappointing since you’ll be in Kamurocho in a couple hours for the finale.
The finale is weird. Firstly, it’s 5 chapters long, so it’s like multiple finales wrapped together. The first ones are basically just giving the context for why each character comes back to Kamurocho, which means that Kiryu’s first chapter is like 8 minutes long. Shinada and Akiyama meet up, which is cute. The 3rd chapter finale is the first real one, with the big rooftop fight between Saejima, Kiryu, and Watase and Katsuya. I really like this fight and the leadup to it, just very stupid meathead stuff, reminiscent of 2’s ending. The part afterwards is pretty bad, however. Maybe the weakest cutscene in the whole game, where Kurosawa’s plan is revealed and Y4’s gun shenanigans return as every person on the planet shows up on this roof to shoot each other. It sucks. But then the real finale starts once Shinada is brought into the fold of the main gang. The finale finale is pretty darn good, IMO. RGG does the smart thing and switches between several perspectives throughout it, giving us a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in Kamurocho. The first cutscene is EXCELLENT - Kiryu and Akiyama fighting outside the Millennium Tower is a real highlight. To get negative for a second, Y5’s final bosses are all… mediocre. Saejima’s fight is just Majima, which at least is explained sort of okay by the game (it’s still pretty dumb though), but it’s not an interesting fight. Shinada’s fight is thematically interesting, as he and Baba are very different people. Baba is running from the responsibility of his treason against multiple people and grappling with his past while looking to give up on his future. On the other hand, Shinada has never shied away from responsibility, and cannot abide Baba’s threat against Haruka, even if he doesn’t go through with it. It’s a pretty dull fight though, since this is the 3rd or 4th time you fight Baba and he doesn’t make for a fun antagonist for Shinada’s moveset. Akiyama’s final fight is awesome from a context perspective, with an all-timer cutscene after it, but the fight itself is dull as hell. Kanai is a boring character to have be the final boss and his gameplay is just lame. Not very hard but not very fun. Then… Aizawa. The guy who really shouldn’t be the final boss. His fight is, again, very cool from a setting and QTE standpoint, but it’s not that cool narratively and I found it absurdly easy. Playing this game on normal was perhaps a mistake as Kiryu’s upgraded tiger drop shreds Aizawa at insane speed. The final scenes are interspersed with Haruka’s moments on stage, as the whole finale has been. After the fight with Aizawa, Haruka reveals her intent to quit the idol biz. While I really don’t have the problems that some people do with her decision making and choice here, I think it was a missed opportunity from a gameplay perspective. They already made the effort to overlap Haruka’s last song with the final fight, so they really should’ve made it a playable rhythm section. Haruka is the only protagonist that doesn’t get a “final boss” and I think the game suffers for it. I’m sure it would’ve pissed the people who disliked her gameplay off even more, but I don’t care. The after credits cutscene is nice, and seeing Haruka and Kiryu reunited after the whole game apart is great, although I felt like a full 5-protag final cutscene might’ve been more effective.
To give some broader thoughts on the story, I think it’s alright. It’s quite strong in the individual pre-finale chapters as a mystery, slowly unwinding on this unknowable plan. It builds like this throughout the game and then just… sort of… stops. The game more or less ties up every detail, but it ultimately just comes down to “a guy wanted to take over / crush the Tojo and Omi(?)” and doesn’t get much more interesting than that. The bigger picture stuff with Park, Majima, and Katsuya is not so much a new thread but a get out of jail free card. Majima doesn’t refer to Park or Katsuya in the ending, so it basically just served the purpose of setup and tying up the loose ends of “why did that guy do that?” instead of making any real meaningful addition. On the whole, I felt like each individual chapter was better than the finale, and the slow drip of plot content in those chapters was pretty effective - Kiryu finding out about the Omi and Majima, Saejima hearing about Majima and getting expelled from the Tojo, Haruka being let in on Park’s past and Katsuya’s ambitions(?) with Akiyama at her side, and Shinada hanging out with Daigo. Those individual stories are probably better than the sort of disappointing Kurosawa and Aizawa team that ends the game, but that’s okay. Yakuza 5 is essentially a collection of 4 separate games and stories with a broader interconnected plot and I’m alright with the broader one being just whelming. It felt like there were several moments where a cutscene could’ve been added to help sell various parts of the finale, but I imagine that at a certain point RGG just wanted this behemoth of a game to be done, so that’s fine.
Quick bullet points of other positives that don’t fit into any section: Taiko no Tatsujin!!!! The photography guy! The chef guy (who is a real professional chef)! Santa Saejima! The karaoke options! The Akiyama dance battles! Shrimp Shinada! The substories are really good!
I know I’ve forgotten tons of stuff. This is a MASSIVE game, almost to its detriment, and it’s a given that I can’t mention everything. I have no idea what my final time ended up being because the suspend feature on PS5 breaks the gametime tracking in the Remastered Collection, but I’m sure it was upwards of 70 hours. Despite that, I ended up getting only ~32% completion. Insane.
This is the game that essentially closed out Yakuza as a massive, multi-character experiment and led directly to the end of Kiryu’s story (through both 0 and 6), and what a way to go out. There are parts of the overarching story that don’t land perfectly, sure, but the individual stories do work. The oddities of the universe are the best handled they’ve ever been, the writing is consistently funny. It’s ambitious, maybe even dangerously so, but it succeeds on those ambitions 9/10 times. It wormed its way into my brain and has some of the best character moments in the series, as well as remarkably solid gameplay from start to finish. Not to mention the absurd scale of the content available. I may have been a little all over the place in this review, but I want to be clear that this game was like a drug for me for 3 months and I think it’s excellent. I ended up making a lot of memories with this game, oddly mostly about food. We had salads one night after I started Kiryu's section, I played Saejima's hunting section nightly while we worked through this gigantic cake someone bought us, and we had tacos from this new place on the night I finished it. It's weird how you can attach memories to parts of games like that, but it really does add something to the experience. Overall, one of the strongest efforts in the series, and easily my favorite mainline entry, just ahead of Yakuza 3.
Up next: Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin!
I’m going to tackle this by chapter, since that makes the most sense. So, first up: Kiryu. This game starts off a lot more cinematic than maybe any other game in the series, or even Judgment. There’s a lengthy cutscene showing Suzuki / Kiryu’s daily routine from waking up, seeing his girlfriend(!?), going to work at the taxi company, and finishing out the day at a ramen shop. It’s incredibly well-done, and sets up the idea of each chapter as its own individual story. The framing for Kiryu is great - separated from Haruka and the other kids for an unknown reason, arguably at his lowest point. IMO this very intentional pacing goes a long way in making this game hit home. It’s not present in every character’s section, but it does a great job differentiating this from the rest of the series, especially Yakuza 4. Kiryu’s story is compelling, with him trying to avoid the responsibility of helping the Tojo after seeing Daigo, and then avoiding the Tojo guys that investigate Daigo’s disappearance. It introduces Watase, who’s a very fun character and one of the stronger Omi guys in the series. Kiryu’s section features two great fight sequences: the rather good fight in the branch Omi office and the absolutely incredible and infamous Kiryu vs 100 Tojo officers. What a great way to cap off his section.
Every character in Yakuza 5 has their own bespoke minigame tailored to their story. Kiryu’s is taxi driving and taxi racing. The game actually breaks these up into two parts, “story” and “side” missions. In Kiryu’s case, the story is about taxi racing, and the side is about taxi driving. I found the latter honestly pretty aggravating, and I couldn’t be bothered to do more than the introductory one, but the former is great fun. RGG managed to make a serviceable driving physics engine, relatively similar to Mario Kart, once you get to know it. The story of this section is quite good, and it cemented my intention to do the sidestories for each character.
Kiryu’s location is Nagasugai, and it’s probably in my top 3 or 4 locations in the series. It’s well-realized, pretty big, and feels different from Kamurocho. It also feels graphically impressive, and is a real step up from Y4’s Kamurocho. The ramen minigame is super fun (even if I only did it once), and it just feels like a lived-in city. Collecting the garbage is a funny little way to bring that home, even if the garbage is just the same shine effect for every ground thing in the series. Overall, Kiryu’s section feels like a mini Yakuza game. If you had just packaged it for $25 with all the substories and content in the city and ended it after the final fight, I’d be alright with it.
Saejima’s section starts off terribly, repeating the prison sequence from Yakuza 4 for no real good reason other than the plot demands that Saejima be back in prison. It’s a scary prospect and worried me that the game was about to nosedive in quality, and, while it does for a few minutes with the minutiae of prison fetch quests and nothing but uninteresting dialogue, the prison sequence is far better than Yakuza 4’s, and serves a much better purpose. Saejima’s escape with Baba is a terrific portion of the game, and leads to the bear and the mountain. The arc of Saejima helping look after Baba and investigate the town is excellent and aside from the next chapter, one of the bigger departures from the norm that the series has ever done. You have a very small “city” part with the village and a larger open world with the mountain, and that’s it. It feels claustrophobic and open, and Saejima is even more of an outsider than usual. One minor complaint I have about this section though is actually in its localization. For anyone aware of Hokkaido history / culture, the village is clearly a Matagi village, bear hunting and animal worship included. In fact, they SAY Matagi at one point (either Saejima or a villager), but the localized subtitles cut it out, and just refer to them as “ritualistic hunters” or some such thing. I get that when Yakuza 5 first came out, there was still the belief that gamers in the west didn’t care about Japanese culture or history, and the game itself almost didn’t release, sure. But this is Yakuza 5 Remastered, released in 2019, and the team did go back and make changes to the script in other locations, so it’s very disappointing that they left this cultural tidbit unknown to people who don’t speak Japanese. Putting that aside, I love this section and the hunting minigame. Again, I only did the main story and not the side ones (which are more like hunting substories, really), but going up against Yama-oroshi is really satisfying and the gameplay of the hunting is quite well done. I lost about a week to just playing an hour or so of that a night. Saejima’s actual plot-relevant section in Tsukimino is pretty forgettable, as is the stuff with Baba. Tsukimino is a bit weaker as a location than Nagasugai, IMO. The mountain is so weird and fresh by comparison to everything else in the entire series that Tsukimino’s relatively standard layout is a bit less interesting. The pervading snow and Christmas feel is a nice touch, as is the snow festival, but I just didn’t find myself getting too attached to it on the whole. Combat-wise, Saejima is a bit more interesting than he was in 4, although he quickly becomes completely OP with the Herculean Strength ability, which renders him immune to all flinching and interruptions when he’s in heat mode. It makes every boss afterwards a bit of a joke, honestly. Otherwise he’s got more cool double finishers and charged moves, plus the ability to pick up big stuff and swing people around. His heat actions are pretty brutal. Both he and Kiryu are absolute demons in this game, you genuinely feel for the random goons they dispatch.
Haruka’s section is probably the single best “chapter” in the studio’s history. What an incredible stroke of genius it was to take the relatively rote formula expected of a Yakuza game (beating up dudes, running around town, etc.) and completely turn it on its head with a character that the audience has developed a bond with over multiple games. To get mechanical for a second, it just goes to show how ingrained certain parts of the yakuza formula were by this point that by the simple act of removing them you get some really fresh perspective. Haruka being able to explore Sotenbori and do stuff at her own pace without running into punks every 8 seconds is such a minor thing but it adds so much. Haruka’s idol training is brutally fun, including both the surprising variety of side stuff and her mainline Princess League story with its rhythm game gameplay. And it’s not just fun, it’s a very smart twist on the perspectives of the main characters. Much in the same way that it worked for Judgment with Yagami as an outsider to yakuza struggles, Haruka is not going down the path of the Tojo Clan. Her perspective and approach to the world is vastly different from Kiryu and the gang’s. Her story is interesting, too. The characters introduced in this section are some of the best in the game, and the twists and turns of the chapter are exciting. Mirei Park is a fascinating character, and her connection to the broader story is both surprising and clever. And then Haruka’s section gets even better! Akiyama comes into the fold! Some people complain about his inclusion being too minor, but I disagree. Akiyama lends such a grounded personality to any scene he’s in, and acting as Haruka’s guardian (especially when things kick off) is a great bit of fanservice and character building. Akiyama is, notably, a slacker and something of a ladies’ man. Having him buck up and protect Haruka when it’s necessary is a great bit of growth - arguably better than some of the other mainstays of the series have ever gotten. Haruka is a badass in her own right, this section makes that plenty clear. She lives on her own in Sotenbori, works and trains really hard, and takes no shit from anyone. The part where Katsuya explains to Kanai that Haruka is essentially a hardened yakuza from her years around Kiryu, Ryuji, Nishiki, etc. is fantastic.
Shinada is super weird. He’s obviously the odd one out in terms of his connection to the story and because he’s the only new character. I was sort of ready to be underwhelmed by his section but it’s pretty good overall! It focuses a bit less on the yakuza politics and little more on the individual story of Shinada, which is compelling. His side activity is sort of meh, but it’s not terrible. I wish he had had a real baseball minigame, but I think that’s something in Y6? Shinada’s part is quite funny, and Takasugi, the lender that hounds Shinada for the length of it, is a really great character. The details of the Nagoya family were lost on me a little bit, if I have to be honest, the game refers to a bunch of people by name several times and I had forgotten who they were. Shinada’s weapon trainer is fantastic, Ayanokoji is a funny guy with some really fun fights and a hilarious arc. Shinada’s city, Kineicho, is probably the weakest in the game, lacking the quality worldbuilding and layout of Nagasugai and also lacking the definitively different vibe of Tsukimino. Ultimately it kind of just feels like a mini Kamurocho, which is in turn a little disappointing since you’ll be in Kamurocho in a couple hours for the finale.
The finale is weird. Firstly, it’s 5 chapters long, so it’s like multiple finales wrapped together. The first ones are basically just giving the context for why each character comes back to Kamurocho, which means that Kiryu’s first chapter is like 8 minutes long. Shinada and Akiyama meet up, which is cute. The 3rd chapter finale is the first real one, with the big rooftop fight between Saejima, Kiryu, and Watase and Katsuya. I really like this fight and the leadup to it, just very stupid meathead stuff, reminiscent of 2’s ending. The part afterwards is pretty bad, however. Maybe the weakest cutscene in the whole game, where Kurosawa’s plan is revealed and Y4’s gun shenanigans return as every person on the planet shows up on this roof to shoot each other. It sucks. But then the real finale starts once Shinada is brought into the fold of the main gang. The finale finale is pretty darn good, IMO. RGG does the smart thing and switches between several perspectives throughout it, giving us a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in Kamurocho. The first cutscene is EXCELLENT - Kiryu and Akiyama fighting outside the Millennium Tower is a real highlight. To get negative for a second, Y5’s final bosses are all… mediocre. Saejima’s fight is just Majima, which at least is explained sort of okay by the game (it’s still pretty dumb though), but it’s not an interesting fight. Shinada’s fight is thematically interesting, as he and Baba are very different people. Baba is running from the responsibility of his treason against multiple people and grappling with his past while looking to give up on his future. On the other hand, Shinada has never shied away from responsibility, and cannot abide Baba’s threat against Haruka, even if he doesn’t go through with it. It’s a pretty dull fight though, since this is the 3rd or 4th time you fight Baba and he doesn’t make for a fun antagonist for Shinada’s moveset. Akiyama’s final fight is awesome from a context perspective, with an all-timer cutscene after it, but the fight itself is dull as hell. Kanai is a boring character to have be the final boss and his gameplay is just lame. Not very hard but not very fun. Then… Aizawa. The guy who really shouldn’t be the final boss. His fight is, again, very cool from a setting and QTE standpoint, but it’s not that cool narratively and I found it absurdly easy. Playing this game on normal was perhaps a mistake as Kiryu’s upgraded tiger drop shreds Aizawa at insane speed. The final scenes are interspersed with Haruka’s moments on stage, as the whole finale has been. After the fight with Aizawa, Haruka reveals her intent to quit the idol biz. While I really don’t have the problems that some people do with her decision making and choice here, I think it was a missed opportunity from a gameplay perspective. They already made the effort to overlap Haruka’s last song with the final fight, so they really should’ve made it a playable rhythm section. Haruka is the only protagonist that doesn’t get a “final boss” and I think the game suffers for it. I’m sure it would’ve pissed the people who disliked her gameplay off even more, but I don’t care. The after credits cutscene is nice, and seeing Haruka and Kiryu reunited after the whole game apart is great, although I felt like a full 5-protag final cutscene might’ve been more effective.
To give some broader thoughts on the story, I think it’s alright. It’s quite strong in the individual pre-finale chapters as a mystery, slowly unwinding on this unknowable plan. It builds like this throughout the game and then just… sort of… stops. The game more or less ties up every detail, but it ultimately just comes down to “a guy wanted to take over / crush the Tojo and Omi(?)” and doesn’t get much more interesting than that. The bigger picture stuff with Park, Majima, and Katsuya is not so much a new thread but a get out of jail free card. Majima doesn’t refer to Park or Katsuya in the ending, so it basically just served the purpose of setup and tying up the loose ends of “why did that guy do that?” instead of making any real meaningful addition. On the whole, I felt like each individual chapter was better than the finale, and the slow drip of plot content in those chapters was pretty effective - Kiryu finding out about the Omi and Majima, Saejima hearing about Majima and getting expelled from the Tojo, Haruka being let in on Park’s past and Katsuya’s ambitions(?) with Akiyama at her side, and Shinada hanging out with Daigo. Those individual stories are probably better than the sort of disappointing Kurosawa and Aizawa team that ends the game, but that’s okay. Yakuza 5 is essentially a collection of 4 separate games and stories with a broader interconnected plot and I’m alright with the broader one being just whelming. It felt like there were several moments where a cutscene could’ve been added to help sell various parts of the finale, but I imagine that at a certain point RGG just wanted this behemoth of a game to be done, so that’s fine.
Quick bullet points of other positives that don’t fit into any section: Taiko no Tatsujin!!!! The photography guy! The chef guy (who is a real professional chef)! Santa Saejima! The karaoke options! The Akiyama dance battles! Shrimp Shinada! The substories are really good!
I know I’ve forgotten tons of stuff. This is a MASSIVE game, almost to its detriment, and it’s a given that I can’t mention everything. I have no idea what my final time ended up being because the suspend feature on PS5 breaks the gametime tracking in the Remastered Collection, but I’m sure it was upwards of 70 hours. Despite that, I ended up getting only ~32% completion. Insane.
This is the game that essentially closed out Yakuza as a massive, multi-character experiment and led directly to the end of Kiryu’s story (through both 0 and 6), and what a way to go out. There are parts of the overarching story that don’t land perfectly, sure, but the individual stories do work. The oddities of the universe are the best handled they’ve ever been, the writing is consistently funny. It’s ambitious, maybe even dangerously so, but it succeeds on those ambitions 9/10 times. It wormed its way into my brain and has some of the best character moments in the series, as well as remarkably solid gameplay from start to finish. Not to mention the absurd scale of the content available. I may have been a little all over the place in this review, but I want to be clear that this game was like a drug for me for 3 months and I think it’s excellent. I ended up making a lot of memories with this game, oddly mostly about food. We had salads one night after I started Kiryu's section, I played Saejima's hunting section nightly while we worked through this gigantic cake someone bought us, and we had tacos from this new place on the night I finished it. It's weird how you can attach memories to parts of games like that, but it really does add something to the experience. Overall, one of the strongest efforts in the series, and easily my favorite mainline entry, just ahead of Yakuza 3.
Up next: Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin!
Pangburn
2 years ago