I played Yakuza Kiwami 3 and now I’m making it your problem, too.
Perhaps I was never going to love this remake because Yakuza 3 was my first game in the series, and it’s one that I’ve returned to several times over the years even as I gritted my teeth at the ugliness and the jank of it all because it holds a special place in my heart. But I went into this thing hoping that they would show me something new and interesting — maybe expand on some plot points and character interactions that felt half-baked in the original and give me a Daigo model that didn’t look totally busted. I was optimistic that I could still find some fun in there since my money was already spent. And I may be a hater, I thought, but at least I’ll be an informed one.
Let’s set aside the fact that the studio hired a known sex pest to be a face scan for Hamazaki and completely ignored protests from fans and requests for comments from journalists. We’ve discussed this to death and the studio has told us that this discussion doesn’t matter. Even if RGGS hadn’t hired a huge piece of shit to voice this guy, the game would still suck in a bunch of interesting and totally baffling ways, and that’s what I’m focused on below the cut.
It seems to me that the studio had a couple of goals with this release, and they did in fact succeed with the first one: to give all the villains more cutscene time. Whether you like the new cutscenes or find them heavy-handed is a matter of taste, but to me, RGG is at its best when it’s allowing its cast of huge dickhead villains to chew the scenery, and everyone in the rogues’ gallery gets to do this more extensively. Kanda gets a bonus scene and a whole additional boss fight on top of his role in Dark Ties; Hamazaki further illustrates how pathetic and ineffectual he is when he’s not able to pull people’s strings; Mine gets an entire spin-off. The high point of the game is, for me, that segment around chapters 6-9 when all the villains are scheming against one another and tussling with Kiryu and the studio gives their plotlines even more room to breathe.
I would have liked to see all this extra material without Hamazaki’s casting leaving a horrible taste in my mouth. I also find it distasteful in a game and a series that’s so frequently disrespectful of women that Kanda should get a bonus scene where he strangles a woman to show you the player that he’s violent and angry and a Nasty Bad Man. (It’s reminiscent of that time we watched Awano casually murder a woman in Y0.) However, it’s not exactly out of character for Kanda to do this, and RGGS’s treatment of women is the subject of an entirely different essay. Broadly speaking, I like what they did with these mid-game expansions and the various other little cutscenes peppered throughout the story. It feels like there was a lot of attention to the connective tissue between scenes from the original game.
The studio’s second goal was, I think, to address the friction involved in playing the original Yakuza 3, and there, too, I think they succeeded, but at the cost of ripping out so much of what gave the game its identity. To illustrate what I mean, let’s start with Y3’s pacing problems — specifically, its meandering in the opening chapters and its devotion of so much game time to Kiryu’s children’s mundane problems. I sympathize with this criticism but I don’t actually agree with it, because it constitutes a refusal to pick up what the game is putting on the table; the entire point is that Kiryu is torn constantly between the mutually exclusive demands of his two families in the Morning Glory children and the Tojo Clan. You need to see those competing demands, to be required to address them both, to feel them pulling our guy back-and-forth. Still, it’s a complaint that I’ve read from fans of the series since Y3’s original release, to the point where people would recommend that new players just skim through it on easy mode or skip over it entirely since it “didn’t really add anything.” And let’s say that you do think that constantly being wrenched away from clan drama to spend time with Kiryu’s children was a bear. YK3 over-corrects in a way that’s so comprehensive as to be baffling.
In Kiwami 3, every event with Kiryu’s children after Kiryu’s chat with Izumi on the beach has been sectioned-off into the side content around Morning Glory, which you can do or ignore as you please. Early on in the game, you’re required to run through a demo of all the new Morning Glory minigames, after which the narrative will never force you to interact with Kiryu’s family again. You can complete everything there is to do at the orphanage in one extended sitting if you want, leaving you with nothing to do with Kiryu’s family for the remainder of the game. When Kiryu finally returns to Okinawa from Tokyo, he declares that he should spend some time with his family — but there are no story segments with the children (goodbye, Dragon Mask!), and if you’ve cleared all the kids’ side stories, there’s really nothing for you to do but harvest your garden items one more time and then tuck our guy into bed and plow forward with the plot.
This all stands in stark contrast with the rhythm of Y3, in which Kiryu would find himself pulled-on by the usual Tojo bullshit but end up needing to devote an afternoon to golfing with a city councilman to solve a bullying problem. K3 pays lip service to the idea that Kiryu’s children are a priority for him, but the game never dares to inconvenience the player by requiring them to act on that sentiment. Worse, K3 turns the act of caring for your children into an early 2010s RPG “insert gifts to increase affection meter” number-go-up system, except that when the number goes up, you get a heartfelt talk with an orphan instead of having a love interest finally reward you with a clunky romance scene. I hope you’re ready to grind the cooking and sewing and bug-catching minigames if you want to see how Taichi fares in his next sumo tournament. It's not that the minigames are bad (sewing is fun!) but that I resent the requirement to play them to access things that were once treated as important enough to be part of the game's main story.
Generally speaking, the skits with the children that you’re now required to grind points to watch are lesser versions of what was there in the original game. Kiryu’s kids are not allowed to be petty or mean; at worst, Taichi is arrogant about his sumo victories and Koji is overbearing with his sports teammates. Take, for example, Ayako. Her original storyline in Y3 involved the other children stealing from her and taking advantage of her, which she quietly accepted until Kiryu dug into her problems. Her new story in K3 has her nearly give up running because she fears that working toward her dream (running professionally and attending a private school to train) would require the other orphans to make sacrifices for her. Riona no longer makes a casually racist remark about Mitsuo that requires gentle correction from her father figure; instead, Mitsuo himself declares that a girl wouldn’t want to date a dark-skinned boy. The children are endlessly loving and supportive of one another despite their own hang-ups and uncertainties in a way that is sweet but that also makes everyone feel less human because less flawed.
As for Haruka, the little arc in which she takes it upon herself to try to make money for the family has been cut completely from the story, and Haruka herself is basically nonexistent in the remake. It’s revealed to the player that she’s been doing all the work around Morning Glory. This is clearly just a contrivance to introduce the minigames that Kiryu will play to help out with chores around the house, but the effect is to make her into a bland, benevolent, uncomplaining Junior Mom (and to make Kiryu look stupid and incompetent as a caretaker). Haruka doesn’t even get a points grind and side story of her own; the culmination of Kiryu’s cooking efforts just involves having the children help him to bake her a cake to show their appreciation for everything she does for them.
But getting back to the effort to reduce the player’s obligation to engage with Kiryu’s kids, K3 is so careful not to bother you with minding Kiryu’s children that later events of the game lose their impact because the player has little to no reason to care about the people involved. Let me get a little granular here with one example. The main story segment in which Mikio and Izumi find Mame and coax him into living at Morning Glory and become friends has been cut; you have Mame from the start, and Mikio just shows up to build a doghouse one day. Why, then, does the camera linger on Izumi as she kneels over Mikio after he’s nearly died defending Mame’s home from Tamashiro’s goons? Why is she hanging back to tend to him when all the other kids are clustered around Kiryu? Why should we care about Mikio in the first place, when his substories have been cut entirely and his role in the main story has been gutted? These two aren’t friends; the player barely knows Mikio and may not really know Izumi, either, if they haven’t bothered to do her side story.
With all of this context, it rings especially hollow to me that all of Kiryu’s children leap so quickly to calling him “Dad” in the side content that the game doesn’t care whether you complete or not. Call me a nitpicker and a hater, but I appreciated the hesitation in the original game to have characters state it outright. Most of Kiryu’s children remember and love their biological parents, and Kiryu seems hesitant to overstep his bounds by referring to himself as their dad. His dialogue about fatherhood tends to either redefine what families can be (see, for example, the scene in which he comforts Izumi by telling her that “having a ‘real’ mom and dad isn’t what matters,” that she means the world to everyone at Morning Glory, and that this is what makes them a family) or acknowledge his role as a father figure but shy away from claiming the Dad Title for himself (he tells Daigo, "Those kids depend on me as they would their actual father"). Later games also depict him as uncertain as to whether he belongs in this parental role at all — he worries, especially, that his ties to the Tojo Clan and his personal failures make him unfit for it, that his past will always dog him and hold his children back. (This will make him vulnerable to Park’s prodding in Y5 and drive him to exile himself and fake his death in Y6.)
I should also note: this refusal to require the player to interact with Kiryu’s kids is all the more galling because the game requires the player to engage with the girl biker gang minigame at least twice as part of the main story — and possibly a third time if the player happens to progress their storyline enough to make them move to Tokyo before Kiryu himself ends up there. RGGS was more concerned that you play their dull and repetitive reskin of Gaiden’s Hell Team Rumble than bond with Kiryu’s children. I am a certified hater of most of RGGS’s recent Five Kings of Thing storylines (if there are no Dondoko Island haters left in the world, know that I am dead) and this one was no exception. They got this formula right in Y5, where each character’s side game was related to what was going on with them in the main story and offered the player little crumbs of information about other characters within it. There is none of that here.
The need to make Number Go Up in order to access the children’s stories is part of what a lot of reviewers have noticed with recent RGG entries (though not necessarily in these words): meter and checklist fatigue. The world is full of people whom you can zap with your phone to get tidbits of information that you almost certainly won’t read. The people around Ryukyu who collect Kiryu’s delivery items from the Morning Glory shop exist as icons on the board to dump stock on and make a meter go up until it’s full and they give you a piece of clothing. (They can be found around town, but they have nothing to say.) The little storyline involving Kashiwagi’s Honest Living Association has been reduced to a series of bounty-hunting tasks. Instead of multiple sources of skills and upgrades that the player has to find scattered throughout the world (Komaki, Mack, Yonashiro, Minamida), there is one dojo that you visit to get new moves from time to time when you fill a training meter to another stage. As countless other people have noted, there are no revelations that you need to find by exploring the world — everything is just purchased from the skills menu or that one dojo.
(As an aside, the new trainer is an Okinawan guy who teaches Kiryu to use traditional weapons, but Kiryu comments that he just started this training to stay fit, and the game never deigns to offer the player even a bit of cultural flavour text beyond the weapons' names. It's a huge missed opportunity; they're dumped on you all at once as cool buttons to press.)
This is to say nothing of all the substories that have been cut. Why on earth did we retain all of the bumping scam substories and add two separate stories about Kiryu trying to hide a smutty magazine, while the ones that featured people and places around Okinawa — like the substory involving Mikio and his father, or the Seven Mysteries of Ryukyu chain — were axed? This on top of condensing all of the training activities into one place makes the game’s world feel less lived-in; K3 trades heart for conveniences.
The game also takes great pains to ensure that you as the player are never in danger of missing anything. I realize that this is probably a controversial take, but I don’t like that Rikiya’s tattoo substory is part of the main game; it should be something that a player can miss (because they didn’t notice it, because their Kiryu is too busy dealing with clan bullshit, etc.) and come to regret when the narrow window of opportunity has closed. Heaven forbid that you fail to wrap up the orphans’ storylines before Mine and Tamashiro’s goons demolish Morning Glory; all those delivery NPCs you barely know will show up to help repair the orphanage in the time it takes for Kiryu to fly to Tokyo and back so that you can tie everything up before the final battle.
I can feel myself getting increasingly sour in an unproductive way, so I will just say a few more things. K3’s gameplay is acceptable but insultingly easy and the new style is so clunky that I never found myself using it. Complaints about the aura system seem overstated to me; I appreciated the rhythm it created along with the encouragement to perfect-dodge or -guard. I don’t care for the other character recasts or the reworking of Rikiya's character, but whatever issues I have with these casting changes pale in comparison to my disgust at Kagawa’s inclusion in this game. His voice acting isn't even good! And, of course, the post-credits is a pile of absolute horseshit that not only walks back Mine’s attempt at redemption in the finale but also throws a wrench into the game’s continuity with Y4. If Mine’s moustache-twirling speech to Hamazaki is meant to be sincere, it’s a wild misunderstanding of Kiryu’s character and his struggle that makes me question whether or not the writers understand their own characters. Also, it’s dull, which is the gravest sin that RGG can commit. I will not dignify any of this with further analysis. I’m taking the last 5 minutes of the game and dunking it into the trash and slamming Mine back into a pancake on the road below Touto Hospital.
As a final note, Dark Ties is a fantastic pack of cutscenes that I’m not sure most reviewers realized was based entirely on two stories from RGG’s Japanese-exclusive gacha game. If you enjoyed that game, please thank whatever undoubtedly underpaid staff writer on RGGO came up with the main story scenario. (You can read the fan translations on tumblr.) Absent the context of The Kagawa Thing, Mine grudgingly rehabilitating a sex pest's image for his own ends is a fine crime drama plot; it's very unfortunate with that context. I probably have a whole other post in me about how much I enjoyed Mine’s characterization in DT — specifically, the writers’ adamant refusal to give the player any choice in the matter of Mine’s sexuality — but this post is over-long already. I wish that they hadn’t made Kiwami 3 and that they’d instead fleshed out Dark Ties into something closer to the length of Gaiden and given us one very good game instead of a travesty and a missed opportunity. Next time I want to be Island Dad, I will simply replay Y3R and cap it off with a replay of everything but the last 30 seconds of DT.
