malvasia bianca

I probably should have written about Yakuza Kiwami more quickly after playing it, but honestly I don’t have much to say about it. The series has totally turned into comfort food to me: the familiar cast of characters, the familiar location, the familiar patterns of gameplay.

And the dance between Majima and Kiryu; I think that’s one of the things that was added in the remake? Honestly felt like a bit much at the start, and then a bit much in a different way at the end, but in the middle, I liked that quite a bit.

Which is a part of one thing that surprised me about the game in general: I was surprised about how much of the optional stuff (Majima Everywhere, the side stories, even some of the minigames) I spent time on.

Not sure how to compare Kiwami to Yakuza 0. Obviously they have huge amounts in common; I kind of miss Sotenbori (as a place, as playing Majima, as cabaret management), but there’s something to be said to just diving into Kamurocho. I liked Haruka as a character (and I think she shows up more in future games?); I’m a little sad how things turned out with Nishikiyama, but not necessarily sad in a bad way, the game earned at least some amount of the payoff there. It was kind of neat building your original fighting style back up, and also having an excuse to learn the other fighting styles in the meantime; I feel like that aspect of the game might have worked better here than in Yakuza 0? (At least once I realized that, yes, you really do have to change fighting styles, you can’t just stick with your original one: I had one very long miniboss battle before I realized that.)

Anyways: very good game, great series. I’d been thinking I’d play through the series at about a rate of one game per year, and that’s still my tentative plan, but I am getting more tempted to just mainline the series…