After last year’s swashbuckling Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii triumphantly hoisted the black flag, this year developer Ryu Ga Gotoku has set its sights on elevating the Yakuza series’ black sheep. While well-received critically upon its original 2009 release, Yakuza 3’s sluggish combat and uneven story pacing has seen it age about as well as leftover sashimi, leaving it to linger at the back of the pack while the Like a Dragon series has pushed forward into exciting turn-based twists and experimental spin-offs. Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, then, is a much-needed retooling that ratchets up the fun factor of its fighting and smooths out most of its unwanted story creases, resulting in an enjoyable return to the largely underused island setting of Okinawa – even if not all of its changes and additions were powerful enough to uppercut me off my feet.
Although it received an HD remaster in 2019, I must admit I haven’t revisited Yakuza 3 since it first debuted on PlayStation 3 because I couldn’t bear the thought of once again battling my way through its annoyingly block-happy hordes. The bulk of Yakuza 3’s enemies were so stubbornly resilient to Kazuma Kiryu’s attacks that getting further than a few hits into a combo was a struggle; instead of gleefully breaking jaws, Yakuza 3’s fighting felt more like painfully pulling teeth.
Thankfully, that has all changed with Kiwami 3, which dramatically speeds up enemy encounters and endows Kiryu with two flexible fighting styles to cover all his thug-bashing bases. His default stance is classic Dragon of Dojima, a mix of satisfyingly weighty combo attacks and wrestling-style grapples that hit harder than a shotgunned can of Suntory Highball. As entertaining as that is, however, I found myself largely relying on his secondary stance, which arms him with eight different weapons. Those range from the baton-like tonfa to inflict stun, a pair of scythes to inflict bleed, brass knuckles to break guards, a shield to deflect blades and bullets, and a pair of nunchucks to regularly look like a total badarse with.
It’s a versatile and violent fighting style that transforms Kiryu into a lightning-fast, leisure suit-wearing shinobi, and it’s supremely intuitive to pick up. There’s no manual weapon switching or inventory management to fiddle with, since everything in his sharp-edged arsenal is triggered by a seamless combination of tapping and holding the three main attack buttons, allowing you to go from slapping a group of gangsters with a wooden boat oar to flinging a pointy pair of sai at their throat without even the slightest pause in the action. The original Yakuza 3 may have ultimately had more weapons to choose from, but given how quickly they would break I rarely bothered to actually use them, and thus I found Kiwami 3’s Swiss Army Knife-style fighting stance a vastly improved method for dealing out wanton destruction using the contents of a Ninja Turtle’s toy chest.
Kiwami 3’s combat doesn’t just feel smoother and more satisfying, it looks a lot flashier too. As was the case with the previous Kiwami remakes, Kiwami 3’s visual design has been boosted to bring it inline with the more modern entries, from the vastly improved character models to the firework-like particle effects that spark off Kiryu’s furious fists. This aesthetic overhaul extends to the environments too, and I was particularly pleased to explore the remodelled slice of Okinawa that features heavily in Kiwami 3’s opening half, since it’s a region that’s rarely been revisited in subsequent Yakuza and Like a Dragon adventures. Its sun-kissed coastal town vibes contrast nicely with Kamurocho’s hustle and bustle, making it akin to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii – albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
What’s the Story, Morning Glory?
While Kiwami 3 broadly retains the same outline of the original game’s story, which centres on a spiteful turf war in Okinawa, the developers have treated the plot like a street thug and given it a good punch up. In the original Yakuza 3, certain chapters confined Kiryu to the Morning Glory orphanage he runs for lengthy periods of time, presenting precious little beyond slowly paging through text-based conversations with its pint-sized residents. Thankfully, Kiwami 3’s structure has been reshuffled to make these sleepy seaside sections entirely optional beyond an initial set of mandatory tutorials, meaning you now have the choice of either taking the time to forge bonds with these little Okinawan Oliver Twists, or just hurrying back to black-belting the Pocari Sweat out of every mobster yakuzin’ for a bruisin’ in the world outside the orphanage’s walls.
If you’d have given me the option of skipping these slice of life segments in the original Yakuza 3 I’d likely have taken it, yet surprisingly in Kiwami 3 I found myself growing more invested in the plight of Morning Glory’s munchkins than I ever did before. That’s thanks to a smart use of snackable mini-games that transform humdrum domestic chores into stimulating diversions. You can complete the kids’ algebra homework against the clock, go spearfishing for flounder and then transform those ingredients into a meal in an energetic burst of Cooking Mama-inspired culinary chaos, or, my personal favourite, steer a sewing machine needle around a Super Hang-On style circuit made of fabric in a delirious bout of high-speed hemming that regularly left both me and the handcrafted tote bag onscreen in stitches. As I ticked off each enjoyable household task, I found myself bonding with these little wide-eyed waifs in a more organic manner. That meant the stakes felt appropriately heightened later on when Kiryu’s criminal past inevitably catches up with him.
That’s not to say that Kiwami 3 completely sharpens the original’s storytelling, and there are still some of the series’ signature attention span-stretching conversation cutscenes present here – including one marathon meeting room exposition dump in its ninth chapter that’s so comically drawn out it actually gives you the option of taking regular breaks for Kiryu to stretch his legs by walking around a tiny office he can’t leave. There’s also a surprising twist in Kiwami 3’s post-credits epilogue that will likely raise a few eyebrows among series purists (though was really neither here nor there for me), but by and large Kiwami 3’s main story has been reworked for the better and it kept me hooked for the 17 hours it took me to reach its cathartic, combat-heavy climax.
Japanesey Rider
Elsewhere Kiryu goes from playing daddy to slaying baddies in Kiwami 3’s other major addition to its main story, Bad Boy Dragon. This biker gang-based riff on the Devil Flags subquest from Pirate Yakuza tasks Kiryu with rescuing new recruits from bullies on the streets, splitting them into squads, and accompanying them into large scale clashes against other rival leather-clad clubs, from the easybeats of Okinawa’s streets to the more fierce fighters from Tokyo’s Night Terrors outfit. In between battles you can hold gang rallies to boost the XP of your members, customise your gang colours, and invest in special attacks to unleash in a scrap, from humble hand grenades to spectacularly silly stampeding bulls.
However, Bad Boy Dragon’s novelty wore off far sooner for me than Pirate Yakuza’s equivalent seafaring mode did, because Kiwami 3’s gang-based brawler is considerably more repetitive by comparison. Whereas Pirate Yakuza featured a healthy mixture of cannon-based naval warfare and on-land scraps, Bad Boy Dragon is mostly just a series of samey skirmishes held in copy-and-pasted warehouses that quickly blur into each other. Despite the fact you’re in a biker gang, there’s very little actual biking to be done – you can’t get stuck into Road Rash-style battles on Tokyo’s expressway like in Lost Judgment, for example. Kiryu’s chopper is strictly used to rapidly ferry him between the four squads under his command before resuming the button-mashed biker beatdowns. Bad Boy Dragon ultimately feels a little half-baked – if you’re going to build a mode around biker gangs, you really need to go the whole chrome-covered hog.
Still, even though I parked Kiwami 3’s biker mode fairly early on, I found plenty of other things to do outside of the main story. In one moment I’d be struggling to deliver towering ice cream cones through streets lined with waddling sumo wrestlers, while in another I’d be customising my 2007-era flip phone with dangling tchotchkes to boost Kiryu’s health and damage. Later I found myself posing as a host at a cabaret club and disappointing the customers with terrible jokes, as well as indulging in optional mainstays like karaoke and the baseball batting cage. Sure, at this point a lot of these amusements have been repurposed more than the fabric of Marge Simpson’s pink Chanel suit, but I was pleased to find that collectible Game Gear games have been included for the first time in the series – even if it is a bit odd that handheld Sega classics like Columns and Sonic Chaos can only be played back at Kiryu’s hideout rather than pulled out of his pocket on the fly. (Perhaps that’s a tacit admission that the Game Gear’s godawful battery life made portable play too impractical?)
Admittedly I was surprised to find the substory count in Kiwami 3 had been whittled down to 31 from the original game’s 100 or so, but then I remembered how many of Yakuza 3’s optional quests were just clones of the same small handful of ideas. Kiwami 3’s substories focus on quality over quantity, and I have no objections to that approach.
The Ties that Grind
Outside of its remodelled main campaign, Kiwami 3 features an entirely new story mode called Dark Ties, which puts the player into the shoes of the sharply dressed and amusingly sardonic antagonist, Yoshitaka Mine. Dark Ties explores Mine’s first steps into the Tokyo underworld, his reluctant alliance with the lecherous Tojo clan heavy Tsuyoshi Kanda, and the complex motivations behind his devastating actions in Kiwami 3’s main campaign. It also allows us to let loose with his ferocious ‘shoot-boxing’ fighting style, which blends fast flurries of punches with acrobatic flip-kicks and the ability to pinball off one enemy and completely redirect your attack towards another to seamlessly continue your combo. He can also unleash devastating ‘Dark Awakening’ special attacks, such as spiking an enemy’s skull into the ground and dragging their faces along the pavement like a bloodied bowling ball.
Mine is limited to the one fighting stance, however, and his skill tree is stumpier than a yakuza’s left pinkie. That’s because his quest simply doesn’t last long enough to allow room for any real evolution of his abilities. Dark Ties has been marketed as a fully-fledged game in its own right, but that seems slightly disingenuous given it only features three chapters versus Kiwami 3’s 12, restricts the action to the same Kamarucho setting that Yakuza fans know better than the calluses on the back of their face-mashing fists, and pits you against just two bosses in two fights a piece.
To be fair, it still took me just over five hours to roll credits in Dark Ties, but that runtime didn’t feel as substantial as it sounds since Mine’s mode regularly gates its story missions behind the arbitrary completion of agonisingly menial tasks. During Dark Ties’ prolonged middle chapter in particular, the advancement of Mine’s story is dependent on performing good deeds for Kamarucho locals in order to slowly boost the reputation of his unlikeable cohort Kanda. A few of these are genuinely entertaining, like being asked to pose as a bouncer outside an adults-only club and evaluating the clientele, but the bulk of them are boring chores like legging it to the nearest convenience store and back so that you can bring a hungry man a bento box.
Tasks like these are made all the more arduous given that Mine isn’t equipped with the same segway-like Street Surfer that Kiryu can whip out on a whim to speed things along in Kiwami 3. I wanted to enjoy Mine’s calculated ascension towards the top of the Tojo clan, but for extended periods, Dark Ties made me feel less like a dragon and more like a dogsbody.
Mine does have one ace up his pinstriped-suit sleeve, however, and that’s the dungeon-brawling roguelike minigame unique to his adventure. Dubbed ‘Survival Hell’ – despite the fact that ‘Roguelike a Dragon’ was sitting right there – this strictly-timed dash for cash and collectibles takes place across five underground arenas, each consisting of four floors of increasingly challenging goons and culminating in an imposing boss fight. Die during a run and you lose it all, but each floor has an optional exit point should you wish to bank your winnings early and invest them into buffs like special weapons and CPU-controlled bodyguards to better your chances of survival on subsequent runs. It’s compelling, chaotic, and stuffed with countless surprises. Having rolled credits on both Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties, Survival Hell is the one feature of either story that is still calling me back for more.
