I don't know if I can properly "review" this game because i've played it in several ten hour bursts every like six months for the last three and half years and that's a difficult way to get one's head around a long story's Whole Deal so I guess in a quick and scattershot way I'll say that while this is certainly the messiest and most overtly stupid installment of the first three games, it's also BY FAR my favorite. You can really feel the change in writers, and this is clearly the start of the Vibes Road the series is gonna continue down for better and worse. We're in full soap opera mode here and while I think that really muddles the potential this series had to homage the yakuza cinema it so often overtly loves and loves to pay respects to (steal from?), I don't think these games have ever worked particularly well as the awkward blend of first and second wave yakuza movies that they so clearly want to be so I can't say I miss it SO much.

The plot of this game is unfocused and often nonsensical but what this means is that it plays more like a collection of smaller stories that are actually often really good? The early drama with the Ryudo family in Naha, the mini-Tojo power struggle with those three really great asshole weasels in the midgame (sidenote it's very funny that every game sees the Tojo Clan's fortunes somehow fall lower and lower, some of the most perennial losers in all of gaming, truly cruel of Kiryu to take advantage of his relationship with Majima to handcuff him to that sinking ship lol) , spending a night showing Rikiya around town, and of course, two separate, very long stretches of nothing but Running Your Orphanage, being the best paternal figure Kiryu knows how to be, wearing a COMICALLY inappropriate Sonatine cosplay all the while.

The orphanage content is far and away the best stuff in the game, probably in the series up to this point. Where these games always portray Kiryu as a guy whose life in the yakuza has a lot to do with how closely he values really really old timey values that never really existed in real life but would make him a perfect fit for the chivalrous ninkyo eiga films of the 50s and 60s, Yakuza 3 I think tends to overplay his Essential Goodness and overstate how much his value system is worth materially. He is a borderline messianic figure, giving speeches about the literal powers of friendship, extolling virtues of forgiveness and belief in his fellow man no matter what even in moments where he believes he’s actively dying as a result of his own misplaced trust. Other adult characters revere him for this, almost everyone he knows has mythologized him beyond the level of his famous deeds in previous games. These games have been critical of Kiryu before, and having played 0 I know that this same writing team will someday get a lot of dramatic irony out of the fact that application of this exact ideology will completely destroy his life and kill everyone he loves more than once, but in this game particularly it’s played up ridiculously.

When he’s acting as the paternal figure for the orphanage is the only time we see a truly naturalistic side to our guy. He is still able to solve every problem, charm every person, and get it all done by the end of the day in time for a good family supper, but we often see Kiryu obviously out of his depth. He’s one of those adults who feels like he’s just always existed fully formed in his mid-40s and does not remember what it’s like to be a kid, and as much as his honesty and realness with them is a generally good thing, Kiryu is also brash and temperamental and prone to honest mistakes. He’s a good guy though, and because you have access to his internal monologue at all times you see a lot of his anxiety. Big picture stuff, like making sure the kids feel at home and like they are part of a real group in a society that places particularly high value on traditional family dynamics and where orphans face a really intense stigma, like making sure they can all afford to eat and to live on the land their building sits on. But small stuff too, like fretting over how harshly he chastises kids for small infractions sometimes or how stupid he sounds when he’s like “i’m gonna scold all nine of them for this thing” only to realize halfway through that three of them don’t really have anything to do with it. It’s also good to see the game formalize the parts of Kiryu that are warm and friendly and solve problems without his fists? That stuff is so often reserved for side content that putting it front and center for the first long chunk of the game and again towards the end is really refreshing.

The orphanage has wider thematic implications for the game too; a lot of stuff plays out there in miniature that the game will return to over and over again. One kid is bullied at school and also by one of the OTHER KIDS at the orphanage for his dark skin and this is treated like normal racism and addressed but it’s a specific racism that comes from Japan’s long imperial history in Okinawa (this kid specifically has mixed African heritage but his story echoes the racism present in other parts of this game and certainly in real life). This tension is represented in the main plot by the orphanage being threatened by a government land deal that wants to place EITHER a resort complex (the tourism industry destroying indigenous culture in the pacific islands damn such a familiar tune) OR a US-backed military defense complex (I feel this does not require elaboration lol). Okinawa’s culture being slowly erased from its own land is an omnipresent motif in the substories that take place in the game’s Naha map. Mainlander scammers selling cheap imported pork at premium prices with meaningless but exciting marketing gimmicks that undercut a longstanding local industry. When someone asks the owner of a long-closed local juice stand to make a cup of a famous drink for them, Kiryu is asked to retrieve the ingredients but the juice lady lists the names of the ingredients for him in Okinawa’s native language rather than Japanese, and the kid who wanted the drink, himself a native Okinawan but a very young one, has no idea what any of the words mean. It’s all creeping away but it’s not happening naturally, it’s happening by force. There’s not much anyone can do about it individually in real life but in Yakuza 3 Kiryu can certainly punch enough people that eventually that fucking resort won’t get built and displace all his neighbors and children.

There’s more right, there’s so much more – the way the ultimate villain’s story mirror’s Kiryu’s but also Haruka’s (who is becoming old enough that her Childish Wisdoms are giving way to adolescent naivete as she enters a world she cannot academically apply herself to beneath the notice of everyone else because she's being actively coerced into participating it as a teenager who is recognized as preyable by the systems that exploit vulernable people) and every other kid at Morning Glory’s. The dark echoes between Taichi’s asthma scare and the advice of “don’t do more than you can do now and burn out before you have a chance to do anything” and an adult character’s story being cut tragically short because they couldn’t overcome their impulsive need for yakuza justice. It’s incredible stuff all the way around, I would love to see these characters grow up alongside Haruka for the rest of the series but I assume they’ll be relegated to cameos at best; ideas this un-formulaic rarely stick and with what I must assume is a reduced presence for Kiryu in the coming multi-character entries I can’t imagine there’s a lot of room for them.

I think the villain is a much better anti-Kiryu than Goda from Yakuza 2, there’s a lot more to his character and being driven by specific ideology makes him much more effective as a moral and intellectual counterpoint to our guy. He’s cool and scary and he has one moment in particular that I think is absolutely incredible A+ shit (it’s when he says “you’re all his victims” and the stuff that comes after that it rules so hard.)

uhhhhh what else what else

oh yeah the combat right uh the blocking sucks and how unaggressive enemies are sucks but really if you take the time to unlock the moves on offer via side content you can get around that stuff pretty easily, I think this is, again, the best combat in the first 3 games. No Yakuza has much depth to the fighting but you get a ton of options and it starts to open up the versatility space in a way that will be elaborated upon significantly by 0’s time.

So I dunno clearly I ended up writing a lot actually but I don’t have a coherent point like I said I played this game weird but obviously it’s floating around a lot in my thoughts. I think there’s a lot on this game’s mind and maybe part of why I can’t come to a point here really is because I don’t think the game does either? It certainly ESPOUSES a point very clearly right at the end but that point is STUPID and NONSENSE and BARELY FOLLOWS the events of the game lol. That’s okay though. A thing doesn’t have to be clean to be good, and if nothing else I have a hard time imagining Yakuza is gonna be this INTERESTING for at least checks to see when Dead Souls came out one more game lol.