malvasia bianca

I don’t have a ton to say about Yakuza 6. It’s really good, and they fixed some of the weirdnesses with its three predecessors: they’ve aligned the difficulty much better between story battles and random battles, in particular. (And they’ve made it so you can change difficulty after starting the game, though I didn’t have to actually do that.)

A little odd to have this feeling that everything in Kamurocho is slightly closer together; maybe that’s my imagination, but I don’t think so? If it’s not my imagination, I guess they were using higher resolution assets because of a console generation change, and they didn’t think the work of updating all the buildings was worth the expense?

I was also surprised that the side missions were a little more hidden. Honestly, I don’t know what I think about that; mostly I think it’s fine, maybe even an improvement. But I was rather taken aback that there was a whole chain of stuff (a baseball team to run, if I’m remembering correctly) that I only discovered right before I was about to start the very final mission.

Plot-wise I mostly enjoyed Yakuza 6 quite a bit, and the characters we were introduced to in the new setting worked for me. And seeing Kiryu look after a baby was a nice twist; and it was pretty amusing how the game made sure to emphasize supporting a baby’s head: even during the scene when they tossed the baby across the room, they made sure to immediately support his head upon catching him.

Having said that, I wasn’t thrilled with what the game did with Haruka. And the very ending post-credits stuff felt off to me: I can imagine what problem the developers were solving with that, but it also felt out of character for me in some ways? Though, honestly, I’m actually not all that confident that it was so out of character, that character makes odd choices sometimes that are consistent with this choice, I just would like to have hoped that he’d have learned his lesson about that by now.

Anyways, very glad to have played Yakuza 6; despite the nitpicks above, a satisfying end to this arc of the series. I’ll be curious to see what the newer games in the series are like, now that they’re moving away from Kiryu as the lead and changing mechanics.