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Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (Yakuza, Judgment, Binary Domain + more!) Discussion Thread

Alphons

Cipher
Joined
Nov 20, 2019
Messages
2,557
The real Judgement on PC were the friends we made along the way.

Fist of the North Star on PC when?
 

Alphons

Cipher
Joined
Nov 20, 2019
Messages
2,557
I'm currently on Chapter 6 of Yakuza 3 and it's alright.

Combat feels more difficult (I've played all on Hard) with enemies blocking majority of my frontal combos and bosses punching really hard. Had to change my tactics a bit (using throws a lot to build up Heat).

Unless it really drops the ball with story/ combat down the line, it'll probably end up next or slightly above Kiwami 1 in my ranking (from top 0->K2->K1).
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
Yakuza 4 boys! Holy shit the combat themes in this one are fucking ace. Not sure if I dig having so many different characters to control (Aki is a huge favorite) but let's see how that goes. Combat feels less stiff than in 3, with fewer enemies that are stagger-resistant. Glad to be back!
6EA4E8F6DFD9A9C1C3D643E7A2378C73C7AD7B96



 

TheImplodingVoice

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
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Oct 29, 2018
Messages
1,955
Location
Embelyon
Yakuza 4 boys! Holy shit the combat themes in this one are fucking ace. Not sure if I dig having so many different characters to control (Aki is a huge favorite) but let's see how that goes. Combat feels less stiff than in 3, with fewer enemies that are stagger-resistant. Glad to be back!
Stagger-resistant my fucking ass. Yakuza 3 was a blockfest. Stagger-resistant is the understatement of the year
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
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Location
California
I question putting 2 below 3 just b/c of Kauro + Riuji alone (though I do love me the kiddos)
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
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California
"Kiryu can't sing 'Judgment' b/c it's just not the same without Nishiki"

Also, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed Kiwami 2, particularly due to its cast. IMO it might have been the last game that really needed Kiryu in it. Not sure I feel his inclusion in 4 was all that necessary (yet!)
 

Alphons

Cipher
Joined
Nov 20, 2019
Messages
2,557
Finished Yakuza 3 (still have to finish Completion List and Substories/ Hitmen and Legend).

Shame that the main story goes downhill near the end during the half an hour exposition dump, because it started pretty interesting.

Cast on the other hand was good- really liked the Ryudos, Kanda, Mine and Wesker (RUFF).

Orphanage was alright- kinda strange that boys had pretty minor problems like getting bullied, allergy, having a crush and helicopter mom, while girls were racist, stealing and working for counterfeit credit card dealers.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Developer
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Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
kinda strange that boys had pretty minor problems like getting bullied, allergy, having a crush and helicopter mom, while girls were racist, stealing and working for counterfeit credit card dealers.
Just shows that girls are just fucked up beings from a young age who you cannot trust.
 

Ivan

Arcane
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Jun 22, 2013
Messages
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Location
California
Yakuza 4

This one left me pretty lukewarm. While I enjoyed the charismatic crew of heroes you play as, I found the story to be forced, especially toward the ending where the game tries its damn best to present you with 4 baddies to square off with at the end. That said, I still found plenty of heart and comedy in the sidequests/revelations. The music is especially good (combat themes), although I did notice that there was none during most of the substory dialogues (makes me wonder if they started doing that in Y5). Not a fan of the way they expanded Kamurocho, while I appreciate them adding new locales to do battle in, I found most to be sparse and boring to navigate. The rooftops lost their charm once I saw how narrow they were. Navigating the town felt much more fatiguing this time, maybe b/c I had to retread so much ground while switching characters. I wish we'd be able to fast travel to Purgatory + Hideouts. Combat felt easier than what I remember. Only some verry aggressive/defensive AI is reserved for endgame bossfights, so most of it was a breeze.

I'm kind of trepidatious about Y5. I hear it's the San Andreas of the Yakuza games. At the very least, I look forward to more Akiyama+Hana.

Score: 7>0>>>2>1>3>4
 
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MpuMngwana

Arbiter
Joined
Sep 23, 2016
Messages
336
5 is simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst games in the franchise. There’s a lot to love here(the multiple cities, the generally improved combat, some great side content, Shinada’s loan shark buddy) but the main story is probably the weakest so far. The final villain reveal was bad especially, feels like they wrote like 90% of the story, then threw a dart at a board with all the character names and made up a bunch of bullshit to justify him being the final boss.

Also Akiyama gets only half a chapter to himself and that is unforgivable.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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MCA Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Yea, the mastermind twist and the hoops they jump through to get a final boss are kinda weak. There's also that whole thing they tried and failed at with retiring Kiryu, both 4 and 5 miss the mark in the attempt because the stories don't really focus on him being Haruka's crimedad. 6 (even if I think the little compromise they do at the end is kind of a bizarre non-copout) really gets this by focusing the story thematic core entirely on Kiryu being crimedad (crimegranddad now), and also figuring out that they can't really escalate Kiryu's opponents anymore (Yakuza 3 and 4 already foreshadowed how absurd it would eventually get if they tried that) so they instead play the pretty good angle that because basically everyone from Kiryu's generation is either dead or in jail everybody in the new guard can pull the "oh the Dragon of Dojima stories must be exaggerated" "oh god oh fuck the Dragon of Dojima is even tougher" card which I felt worked great.

EDIT: Also a thing to note about Shinada's loan shark buddy who is fantastic, he's voiced and facecapped by actor Sho Aikawa, who is one of the main characters in Miike's Dead Or Alive films (also Zebraman). He's great.
 

Rean

Head Codexian Weeb
Patron
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Nov 14, 2020
Messages
1,910
Strap Yourselves In
5 is awesome. It's obvious they decided to turn everything up to eleven for it with experimental gameplay and all the different locations and characters. Honestly don't want to finish it cause I doubt 6 will measure up to it.
 

Deflowerer

Arcane
Joined
May 22, 2013
Messages
2,052
5 is awesome. It's obvious they decided to turn everything up to eleven for it with experimental gameplay and all the different locations and characters. Honestly don't want to finish it cause I doubt 6 will measure up to it.

6 was actually very refreshing after the bloat of 5 in almost every way.
 

Rean

Head Codexian Weeb
Patron
Joined
Nov 14, 2020
Messages
1,910
Strap Yourselves In
I don't see any bloat in 5. If anything, it needs more stuff. The biggest problem is the save system, which negatively impacts certain longer sections at times. The hunting sequences with Saejima could get a bit annoying, but it's obvious that was a deliberate design choice. I did it all, even the fights against the stupid god of the mountain.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
A good way to know if you can get into 6 comes from how you felt about Kiwami 2, if you played that one, same engine, combat system, way of getting EXP and even some minigames like the bland "RTS" one, only without Majima dancing while workers sing at the end and thus infinitely worse.

Overall, Kiwami 2 is better but i just prefer the story there, also, again, one big kinda minigame in 6 lacks this:
 

Terra

Cipher
Joined
Sep 4, 2016
Messages
896
Finally got around to wrapping up Kiwami 2. Playing this (well, re-experiencing the story of Y2 I guess) reminded me that I was always kinda miffed that Kaoru just vanishes from the series after a bit part in Y3, even after she was being set up as a love interest throughout Y2. Hell, in a roundabout fashion, Majima got better closure with Makoto in this game than Kiryu ever gets...

Aa a big fan of the original Yakuza 2 on PS2, I was disappointed that not everything made the cut over to the remake. Kiryu's Club ADAM section as a host was very humorous, and I recall liking the original (vastly different) hostess club management a bit. I think a VERY brief location (a city, very small playable area though) was cut from the remake too. I think it kinda gets back to the whole "HD Towns are hard" comment from SquareEnix, and the developers couldn't be bothered to recreate that area for such a small amount of gametime. But then most Yakuza iterations employ asset reuse for the major locations quite heavily, so it was still disappointing to see this area missing from the game. It seems that visiting hostess clubs as a guest is also missing in this game (which is weird, given you can clearly see the two clubs from Yakuza 1 are still very much there in Kamurocho). These seem to have been replaced with/hybridised into talking to the girls in the Cabaret you manage instead, which isn't bad, but it's a different dynamic, so essentially visiting any hostess club as a guest has been removed from Kiwami 2 it seems. Unfortunately, there's quite a few "reimagined"/fudged together hybrisations of old content in Kiwami 2 and I can see why I've seen people comment that it was made on the cheap. My memory of Y2 isn't so great as to call out any more "missing" content offhand, but even 15+ years after I first played it, I could tell some of it wasn't there in this remake.

Majima Y0/Y2 spoilers:
That said, Kiwami 2 has brought some really nice additions to the table; a lot of it being in the form of wholesome Majima content payoff, building off of Y0. Majima's eventual meeting with Makoto was nicely done, I felt, and helped cap off & add closure to his downer of an ending from Yakuza 0. I felt it drew a line under that chapter/arc quite nicely (whilst also writing out/shipping off a potential love interest for a (kinda)protagonist yet again, though it's better handled here than with Kaoru I think).

Secondly I liked how the playable Majima side arc teased his reunion with the Club Sunshine/Four Shine crew (where he's *almost* spotted outside Four Shine by Yuki) but didn't follow through with it until later in Kiryu's story, provided you go through with the Four Shine story. Really nice payoff there when Majima shows up and sees Yuki/Youda again. And again, I really liked the cabaret management minigame here as in 0.

Onto the bad aspects; aside from the missing content from Y2, there were a couple of technical issues - plenty of wonky physics moments when you defeat the last enemy in a group and you transition back to regular gameplay - the transition is often a catalyst for the defeated guy to fly through a bunch of bicycles, ricochet into a nearby wall then bounce off halfway down the road. Just exaggerated physics abound in this game really, and even when Kiryu is knocked down he'll often ragdoll into some truly comical manoeuvres.

Likewise, as I mentioned in a prior post, they really didn't have a handle on disabling their crowds and keeping them out of bounds of a cutscene in Kiwami 2. SOOOOoo many times, you'll start a substory and you'll have crowds of people in the way/not where they should be. There's a very obvious invisible boundary system implemented most of the time, which in itself becomes kinda distracting as you witness 20 different people walking along, phone in hand, suddenly turn on a dime and walk back the way they came just to avoid two people talking on a bench. It can be distracting just in terms of how ridiculous it looks having all this random shit going off in the background. I even had Haruka fly in from offscreen & drop into the canal in Sotenbori when that merchant appeared on his boat.

On combat, playing on hard at least, plenty of Jingweon dudes liked to step your first hit then whack you before you could recover. This was a common tactic throughout the game tbh and Kiryu definitely felt a bit sluggish in his responsiveness in the Dragon Engine compared to prior games. A lot of enemies felt very damage spongey till the last few chapters, by which time my Heat moves were dealing so much damage the most efficient way of winning was to simply wait for an enemy to approach and press the Heat command whenever it appeared. Having a weapon in hand and/or making judicious use of parries merely accelerated this process further. Ryuji went down way too fast in both encounters as Heat moves just obliterated his HP bar.

The original Y2 was my favourite entry in the franchise for a long time, at least prior to playing 0. After playing 0 (I walked away deeply impressed) I decided to wait until I finished Kiwami 2 before deciding which I liked better (a comparison which K2 unfortunately messed up by being an imperfect remake). Ultimately, 0 does so many things right though, and with its themes, story, characters, 80s setting and metric tonne of fun minigames that I just found Kiwami 2 coming up short. Yakuza 2 (Kiwami 2) just isn't as good as I remembered Yakuza 2 being. I still think Yakuza 2/Kiwami 2 is one of the better entries, but aspects like the positive ending with Kaoru have been diminished now due to how Y3 carried it forward, the numerous bits of missing/changed content also further muddy the waters... It's just tricky, there are some good additions here, the best additions debatably benefit Majima, rather than strengthening Kiryu's story.

While still fun, 0's plethora of fun minigames has really just outstripped 2 in this department, which is lacking the 80s vibe and much of the fun shit like the disco, bowling, etc. I was dreading the "Haruka's request" section when she'd want me to ace Crazy Golf or the bloody 3D mech game in the Sega Arcade. Didn't really find many fun returning classic minigames this time around - no Boxcelios sadly and Virtua Fighter 2 wasn't really doing it for me. Toylets was just bad, don't think i ever managed to do it successfully even once.

I found Majima Construction minigame to be a bit too much, the Cabaret club is already a big enough timesink by itself as it is, and having yet another seemingly sizeable minigame wasn't too appealing tbh. For whatever reason i just couldn't really be bothered with this one, I blasted through 6/7 of the missions right at the end, but I'll have to go back and do the rest in Premium Adventure somewhere down the line. Having your "Dream Team" combination of your favourite friends and enemies all on one team was really fun though.

So I don't know where Kiwami 2 sits versus 0 for me now, on the face of my above list, you've think 0 would be the winner, but there's still something about Yakuza 2 that I really like. Ryuji was/is a cool villain, and I'll always have positive memories of exploring Sotenbori for the first time back in Y2. I think one of the reasons I've come away disappointed with Kiwami 2 is that Yakuza 2 was such a great step up from Y1 back at the tail end of the PS2 era. Hell, I still remember hoping that we'd get it at all, as Sega really weren't playing ball with Yakuza fans around the time of 2 & 3. I think the fact that 2 came over at all might have elevated the experience somewhat for me back in the day. Now, both with Kiwami 2's missteps and 3 (onwards) ditching of Kaoru, it kinda lessens the second game's story in Kiryu's arc somewhat. Kiwami 2 is still a good game, and I've had fun with it, but I can say it wasn't everything I hoped a remake of Yakuza 2 would be.

Will be moving onto Yakuza 3 remastered next, I played the original back in the day so this'll be my first time through the game with all that cut content finally restored (except the tranny side story). I'll be interested to see if my opinion on it has changed over time and with the additional content now restored.
 
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Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
Every Yakuza game:
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01767A59982ED17D7EDB7F966E57B35F85C14D23


So far I'm absolutely loving it. I immediately feel the much improved pacing compared to the mess/hodgepodge that was Yakuza 4. I'm having a blast with Kiryu following his day-to-day life in a town. It's this down-to-earth POV that's really working for me.
 

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