I’d been intending to go through the Yakuza series playing one game a year; but, for whatever reason — maybe I was just too busy with other games, maybe it was a subconscious affect of Yakuza 4 being my least favorite game in the series — I didn’t play any in 2023, and it actually took me until most of the way through 2024 before I started the next one. But I did indeed play Yakuza 5 in 2024; turns out that it’s a really good game!

And a really good game that, in retrospect, makes me actually like Yakuza 4 more? I’m still not convinced that the new lead characters added in Yakuza 4 are as good as Kiryu and Majima (a high bar, admittedly), but I actually was genuinely quite happy to see Akiyama again, and I like Saejima quite a bit more now that I’ve had two games with him. (And I liked Shinada, newly introduced in Yakuza 5, from the start.) And, if I’m being honest with myself: how much do I really like Kiryu as a character as opposed to liking Yakuza games, their world, and their ongoing stories? Not clear; I certainly don’t dislike Kiryu, I like him at least a decent amount, but, well, he’s no Majima.

 

The other thing I liked about Yakuza 5 is how much it experiments with gameplay (and how gameplay is situation). To be honest, I find it pretty boring to have people constantly picking fights with me while I wander around a section of a city; wandering is great, fights not so much! So it was a pleasant change of pace to have Saejima spend time in a small mountain town where he was going into the snowy contryside laying traps for animals, harvesting fur, gathering stuff, and doing a different kind of combat. (And, of course, doing plot-related stuff too.) I don’t know that I would enjoy a whole game like that as much as much as standard Yakuza gameplay (actually, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, because I really like spending time in the cities in the game, and small mountain towns aren’t the same), but I quite enjoyed it as an interlude.

But then we get to where we play as Haruka Sawamura (Kiryu’s adopted daughter). Honestly, when I first heard about her in the game, it felt a little off, with Kiryu trying to hide any connection between himself and Haruka so he wouldn’t interfere with her budding idol career. That didn’t feel right: it didn’t feel like something Haruka would have wanted, and the start of the section where you’re playing as Haruka continued to make me feel that the game was taking a misstep. (In ways that aren’t unrelated to my complaints about one particular side story in Yakuza 2 when I first played it 15 years ago!)

But, as that story evolved, the game’s treatment of Haruka got better; I’m still not going to say that I think it’s super well done, but at least the game dug itself somewhat out of that hole. And the big difference there is: Haruka doesn’t constantly get into fights with random strangers, she instead can opt into dance battles when wondering around town and she progresses through the plot and side stories via singing battles.

And, let me tell you: this is so much better. It’s not better because the combat gameplay is significantly improved: it is true that I generally prefer rhythm games over fighting games, but it’s also true that, honestly, the rhythm gameplay in Yakuza 5 isn’t particularly well done, being neither as rich as the fighting combat in Yakuza 5 or the gameplay in games that are rhythm games front and center. But the change of pace that the gameplay switch provides outweighs that downside; and the much much lower volume of battles (whether while wandering around town, where the battles are opt-in, or in the big plot points, where you don’t have to fight through an army of grunts before making it to the big boss) is such a huge relief.

 

So: yay to expanding the world and cast, both in Yakuza 5 and, retroactively, in Yakuza 4. Yay for sprinkling in little bits of experimental gameplay; yay for not only letting you play as Haruka but trying out a rather larger experiment there. The experiments weren’t all perfect, but that’s okay: that’s the point of experiments! And that’s also completely in character with the series: games in the series aren’t these immaculately elegant gems, they’re these amalgams of different materials that somehow manage to come together to make something wonderful.

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