Game Reviews

Yakuza 3 is a game about mobsters but only in a peculiar, roundabout way. The series is often (ineffectually) sold as the Japanese version of Grand Theft Auto, and it often comes out looking shabby and underwhelming when looked at in that light. Of course, Yakuza 3 is nothing of the sort. It’s much more akin to a linear, pseudo-open action game, like Fable 2. It’s a game that wants to communicate what it’s like to be in a certain place, not give you an amazing place to do things. Lengthy cutscenes and frequent bouts of text make up a little more than half of the game. The other half is separated into a host of mini-games and distractions, the fighting game around which the game’s upgrade mechanics revolve and a circumscribed kind of world exploration.

Yakuza 3 wants to do a few things: it wants to tell a hilariously, bizarrely, and sometimes surprisingly well told crime story. It’s also quite keen on selling you on its deep brawling combat, which most players should welcome, given the sad state of hand-to-hand combat in most games that aren’t explicitly fighting games. These are the two things that Sega has chosen to highlight upon the game’s North American release. After all, lots of people who aren’t Japanese like Yakuza crime stories right? They also like beating up thugs and leveling up an amusingly dressed, fantastically sideburned hero, Sega hopes.

The thing that Sega isn’t advertising (and that the enthusiast press has latched onto with understandable glee) is the third key element to Yakuza’s unique charm: its rather rigorous reproduction of the sights and sounds of different bits of Japan (I assume, given my complete lack of experience in this area).It’s this idea (and the relatively fun combat and relatively entertaining story) that kept me hacking away at Yakuza 3 despite the fact that the first four hours were completely unbearable. The game starts out promisingly enough. You, Kazuma, are the famed Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan. Your history, as detailed in the outrageously complicated “Last Time on Yakuza” videos included on the Yakuza 3 disc, is too convoluted to explain. Suffice it to say that, as the game begins, Kazuma moves to Okinawa to run an orphanage. His companion is his adopted daughter, Huruka, the daughter of his long lost, dead love. Kazuma really loves children, as the game goes out of its way to inform us. For the first five hours of the game, Kazuma splits his time between exploring downtown Okinawa and getting into a ludicrous number of fist fights) along with solving problems back at the orphanage. These long, long hours of child-rearing are quite annoying, when playing a game that is ostensibly about beating up mobsters, watching people talk in serious voices, and exploring fastidiously rendered versions of famous Japanese urban environments.