Yakuza Kiwami
After Yakuza 0, series prequel from 2015, it was a perfect time to dive into Yakuza Kiwami, the remake of the first game in the series from 2005, which was (re)created with the assets and gameplay mechanics taken straight from Yakuza 0. Because of that it kinda feels more like an expansion to 0 then a standalone game, but at least developers themselves were aware of that, so they priced the game fairly instead of selling it for the full price, like some other publishers would do.
Kiwami begins seven years after the story of Yakuza 0. The bubble burst open and Japanese economy took some serious hits, thus ending country's golden era, however on the other hand our main protagonist Kazuma Kiryu doesn't do bad at all for himself. His career as a Yakuza member goes fairly smoothly to the point that he's on his way to become a patriarch of his own Yakuza family. That is until a certain incident which leads to his friend murdering a prominent figure within organisation. To protect him, Kazuma takes the blame for the crime and spends next 10 years behind bars. After finally leaving prison, he finds familiar world of the criminal underworld turned upside down, and the whole Tojo Clan, who he is a part of, is now on the brink of civil war over stolen 10 billion yen. Obviously Kiryu finds himself in the centre of this whole mess, in which a crucial role plays a certain little girl, Haruka, whose fate ends up being tied to his.
The original story was recreated very faithfully in the remake, with all the prons and cons of such an approach, even many cutscenes were taken from the original game 1:1, just with a higher quality visuals. Of course, the quality of the story is not even nearly as high as that in Yakuza 0, but that's understandable, seeing how 0 was a sixth Yakuza title developed by this team, while Kiwami is still just their first game of this series in a new clothes, so of course plot of itwon't be as good as later games. One of the biggest issues I found with the main story was it's pacing, which in certain moments feels way to fast, while at other moments it suddenly jumps to a subplots with barely any relevancy to the main plot, which would work a lot of better as a sidequests.
Despite that, for the game originally released in 2005, the story overall still pretty decent and characters fairly likable, especially with the additional story scenes added in Kiwami. Remake greatly expanded the role of Kazuma's best friend, Nishikiyama, and fan favorite Goro Majima, who in Yakuza 0 acted as a second playable protagonist, in order to reconcile different ways those characters where depicted in the first game in comparison to the later games in the series, for example in the original game Majima was basically a two dimensional psychopath who was obsessed with Kiryu for unknown reason and appeared in merely three scenes (and two of them were boss battles with him), but in the later games he gained a lot of depth and became a sort of friendly rival to Kiryu, so Kiwami decided to make his personality consistent with the future/past games. However sometimes I had a feeling that developers trying to make a faithful remake on one hand and to expand the original story on the other sometimes result in a certain dissonance between the scenes from the original and those added in the remake, especially in case of Majima's story.
As I said, gameplay mechanics were lifted directly from Yakuza 0, so I won't be focusing too much on them again and instead I talk about some of the changes. This time Kiryu from the start has an access to every combat style from the previous game (Brawler, Rush, Beast, Dragon), but after 10 years in prison, he simply fell out of shape, which explains why we need to relearn most of the skills related to them. Fortunately developers didn't simply copied progression system and skill tree from Yakuza 0, but instead completely redesigned it. This time instead of money, we buy new skills with a classic experience points, earned for fighting, quest completion and certain activities, which I liked a lot more then the system from Y0. The only exception here is Dragon Style, which we can relearn only with the help of... Majima. Majima Everywhere is a new in-game system, which comes down to Majima being able to attack us at any point during exploration and fighting him allow us to learn skills related to that particular style. We can encounter him searching us across the streets, attempting sneak attacks on us, joining our battle with random thugs and sometimes organising a special events for Kiryu, which always end up being a riot. Does it somewhat contradicts scenes related to him in the main story? Sure, but that system is fun enough to render it as a rather minor issue.
A new addition to the combat system are so called Kiwami actions. When boss or special enemy suffers enough damage, he can enter a state in which his health begins to regenerate, which we can interrupt with Kiwami Action. Each style has a different one and we need to adjust it to our opponent, but in the end it doesn't differ much from regular Heat Actions and stretches out the boss fights a little too much, without adding anything meaningful gameplaywise. Speaking of bosses and special enemies, there are some really annoying fights in the game, which were equally obnoxious in the original game as well (who was the genius who thought it would be cool to have a boss fight with discount Dante from Devil May Cry series in a game focused on hand to hand combat, I will never know), which were pretty tedious to get through, but I guess it's possible that my troubles were the result of me being impatient and choosing an incorrect approach.
Just like 0, Kiwami offers quite a lot of side content and side activities, mostly directly lifted from the previous game. So we have a various gambling related minigames, bowling, underground combat arena, karaoke, UFO catchers, mahjong, shogi, various bar and shops (it's kinda cool how due to the economical downfall you can see there is less of it available then in 0, similar to the number of phonebooths, which are used for saving the game), darts, billard (with addition of puzzles), Pocket Circuit racing (with added track editor), and from the "new ones" we have hostess dating and mix of the card game with fighting game called Mesuking, with an... interesting character design. I wrote new ones in quotation marks, because the first one was already a part of the cabaret club minigame from 0, while Mesuking is a reworked version of another minigame from it. Overall we have less side activities in Kiwami then in the previous game (for example, arcade games and disco dancing is missing), but lack of some of them is somewhat justified by 17 years long gap. Sidequests are another thing that is much weaker aspect of the game in comparison to 0, which again is the result of the original game age, but developers tried to improve them by removing more generic sidequests, combining some of them with each other, turning some of the main quests into a side quests and even adding some new ones, which reference events from Yakuza 0 and expand the main story. So it's not like side quests in this game suck, but they are much less consistent in terms of quality and creative then the ones in it's prequel, but there are still some pretty good ones.
Yakuza Kiwami is not as good as Yakuza 0 and I don't think it could be, after all it's still just a remake of the first, more janky game from 2005, which becomes obvious in a inconsistent story pacing, outdated parts of the gameplay design and fairly repetetive sidequests, but despite that, thanks to the new content and various improvements, it's still a best way to painlessly. Due to the issues I listed above, I wouldn't recommend it for your first contact with the series, but if you already played Yakuza 0 and liked it's world, as well as characters, Kiwami will provide you with several dozens of hours of good entertainment. If you take it as an expansion for Yakuza 0 and given it's reasonable price, it is worth buying.
My rating: 7+/10