AND YET IT MOVES PC REVIEW SERIES

There’s a kind of rough ‘n’ tumble innocence to everything he does. Dunnn! It's wonderful.Īt the same time as being a champion of the people, our boy is also a laughably easy mark. In its soapiest moments, whenever some secret or plot twist is revealed, the camera zooms into the faces of its characters, as their eyes widen to the sound of a big dramatic “dunnnn!” Ten billion yen has been stolen. It swings from silliness to melodrama to heavy stuff in a way that can sometimes be jarring, but is mostly gratifying. But the nonsense side quests and daft plot unfolding throughout. It isn't the fighting that sells it (although that does get more satisfying and varied as you unlock new moves in a skill tree). This piecemeal boy scout questiness is why I’ve been happy to punch my way through it, when any other GTA-like would likely make me shrug. If you balled all of his helpful acts together and put them in a big enough bath, they would float. The density of his good deeds is so high, it reminds me of that oft-quoted fact about Saturn. You can't walk 100 meters on the street without stumbling on a person in need, whom Kiryu will obviously help. The golden standard for strongdads everywhere. Yakuza’s creators do not want to establish Kazuma Kiryu as a goodie, they want to establish him as THE goodie. You spend one minute cracking skulls together in this fight scene and the remaining 10 minutes of the quest buying dog food and putting water in a dish. Without hesitating, you are tasked with beating 10 of these street thugs senseless in retaliation for their animal cruelty. But it's not enough for Kiryu to take an adoptive daughter under his wing, because the minute they leave the crime scene he is faced with some lowlives throwing rocks at a puppy. In one chapter, Kiryu rescues a little girl from a blood-spattered crime scene, and keeping her out of trouble while trying to find her mum will be central to the plot. He is also the good lad who holds the whole story together. Kiryu is a beast, but he’s not a monster. Sometimes you will suplex them into a railing. Your enemies will bleed a lot, they will fly several meters when you land the final blow. If there is a motorcycle nearby, you can pick it up as if it were made of polystyrene and bash your opponent over the head. There’s a slime gun that slips up thugs, a giant marlin with a bazooka in its mouth, baseball bats, wooden katanas. Within five minutes, you are knocking a loan shark across his office with his own golf club. Yet there’s just enough boisterous physical comedy to the brawling to forgive its jank. You get four fighting styles to swap on the fly (the quick-fisted “Rush” style, the heavy-hitting “Beast” style, etc) but it’s mostly a chaotic free-for-all. It’s hard to single out one baddie in a crowd, and years of Batman Arkham copycats have trained us to expect enemies to take turns hitting us in some discernible pattern, with warnings or slowdowns offered to make us feel like minor deities with quick reflexes. This fighting is a vaguely satisfying mix of button-mashing until all your foes are knocked out, and pulling off special moves when a particularly strong enemy needs to be walloped in a specific way. This snake-skin jacket psychopath lurks in the streets and alleyways, screaming “Kiryu-chan!” with glee, as if he too knows this is just a stupid videogame about fighting. It’s basically an open-world soap opera featuring cartoonishly ugly crime bosses and an unhinged hit man called Majima who chases you around the streets of a fictional Tokyo red light district with comical tenacity. You get out and proceed to run about the district of Kamurocho, doing story missions between a bounty of minigames, side quests and semi-random fist-fights.

That 15 hours hasn't seen me to the end of the story yet, but to explain its opening briefly: our boy takes the blame for a high-profile murder and goes to the clink for 10 years. But after 15 hours of hitting thugs with bicycles and rescuing defenceless animals from the street, it has certainly produced another Kiryu acolyte. It does feel dated at times, and repetitive. Being a newcomer, I can’t say with authority that this remake of the mid-2000s Yakuza for PlayStation 2 is the best introduction to this realm of pugilistic do-goodery. It should be called “Helpful Strong Man Versus Tokyo”.

AND YET IT MOVES PC REVIEW SERIES

That SEGA ever called this series “Yakuza” is a wondrous misnomer. He helps people find their glasses, he gives coats to the homeless, and he beats up hundreds of bad people. Yakuza Kiwami is a world of outlandish violence in which you play a kind of unmasked Batman in an out-of-date suit.

And yet it moves pc review