Even treated as a stand-alone title, Yakuza 3‘s story merits playing, even if the game lacks refinements needed elsewhere. Yakuza 3 is sometimes treated as “the one that can be skipped”, but this would be doing subsequent games a huge disservice like all games in the franchise, each entry sets up as many plot threads and characters that bleed through to later entries as it resolves. This is what makes having all episodes playable under one console roof such a big deal. As Kiryu and those around him grow older, friendships are tested or fall by the wayside, and new allegiances are formed.
Over the course of the series, time marches on, spanning almost twenty years between Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6.
YAKUZA 4 REMASTER SERIES
Each game in the series sees Kiryu get dragged back into the life of crime he left behind, despite his many attempts to steer clear of it. In general terms, the series follows Kazuma Kiryu, an ex-member of the Tojo Clan’s Dojima Family, which he left after being imprisoned for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit. Trying to sum up the Yakuza series’ plot here would be a fool’s errand, not least because each game generally presents a self-contained story that’s encapsulated in the continuous digital universe the games are set in, with familiar faces and places frequently popping in and out of each game’s story at will. However, between graphical upgrades, improved translations to more seamlessly tie all seven games together, and some restored content that was trimmed from previous releases, there’s little reason for anyone - including those who already played the earlier releases - to miss out on this stylish yet cheesy Japanese crime saga. Each individual game in this collection earns the same high marks they’ve always received by virtue of being a part of the collective whole, though there are some rough spots along the way.
The series, when experienced as a whole, is an easy recommendation for those who love a good character-driven story. But the Yakuza series is a beast of a narrative that isn’t meant to be experienced out of order or out of context, and a substantial gap still remained for many gamers.Įnter the Yakuza Remastered Collection, which consists of remastered versions of Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, and Yakuza 5, making every single entry of the saga playable on one console (initially PlayStation 4, with other platforms added since). Even then, localized versions of the games were typically lagging one to three years behind their Japanese counterparts, so it wasn’t until 2017 that new entries and remakes of older titles started to become more widely known, first with the release of Yakuza 0, followed by Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza 6, and Yakuza Kiwami 2 over the next few years. It’s a shame the Yakuza series flew under many western RPGamers’ radars for so long it wasn’t until the series hit its sixth numbered entry that it started to benefit from an earnest marketing push.
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