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Yakuza 3 (PS3)

What would happen if you took Shenmue and changed it's setting to a modern fictional redlight district of Tokyo and replaced its main character with a badass Yakuza? Well not this, shut up.

 

Yakuza 3 is the 3rd main entry (duh) in the Yakuza franchise and the first on PS3. Now I'm sure someone who cared would check out when it was released but I'm not that someone so I'll just take a wild guess and say it's an early PS3 judging by the graphics.

So here's the thing; after 2 games of being an awesome badass gangster, Kazuma Kiryu decides it's time to retire and run an orphanage by the sea. A bit of an odd choice in career you may say, but you see Kazuma himself was an orphan and I guess running orphanages is eventually what all orphans do or something. Anyway the game starts as you try and help the children of the orphanage in their little situations. If you think that sounds a bit boring... Then you're right, it is. Thankfully the shit eventually hits the fan and oh no! Evil Yakuza are trying to force you to sell your land so they can bulldoze the building and build a holiday resort/US naval base on there. This all spirals down to a story of twists and turns and stupidity. I don't want to go into it too much to avoid spoiling anything since the story is, despite being a bit dumb, enjoyable enough for you to want to keep going. 

So how does one stop the eventual demolishing of their orphanage? Well through RPG elements and dicking around. If I had to describe Yakuza as a series I'd say it's a sandbox RPG set in a city instead of Middle-Earth. Yes RPG, it has equipement, sidequests, npcs you can talk to, leveling up and stat customization and even somewhat random battles. Seperated into chapters with their own objective to advance the story, Kazuma will find himself walking around either Kamurocho or Okinawa. From there you can either follow your way point or more likely completely cock around either talking to people to do sidequests, finding bounties, or playing crane games/arcade games/pool/gambling/darts/kareoke and so on. Yakuza has a lot of stuff to do in it but I feel it suffers slightly from being a jack of all trades but a master of none. It dips it's fingers into too many pies and rather sloppily. A lot of the minigames just aren't executed well, which is fine right? As long as the main gameplay is brilliant, right? Well no. The core gameplay which like many RPGs is the battle mechanics plays out a little like a 3D brawler, and while this is okay there's a lot of room for improvement. Like I mentioned before; battles are somewhat random, just running around the city some person, who clearly sick of living, will decide to fight Kazuma for various reasons. 

Graphically Yakuza is, hm, not good. While both cities look pretty decent they both seem to be occupied by weird wax people. The main characters do fair somewhat better graphically though hair is still a problem and some of the kids just look plain creepy. Like I said, I want to say this is an early PS3 game but I really can't be sure. Load times aren't that bad at least.

Music is good, and some of the karaoke songs can be quite catchy. Much like Yakuza 2, this game doesn't have any english voice acting (well okay... it does) which is probably for the better. 

So I guess I can't really avoid mentioning it, yes the game has missing content. So okay the japanese quiz is understandable and isn't really a massive loss and I'd probably say the same for the hostess clubs. However Shogi and Mahjongg? I see no reason why these were cut out when you can still play games like Koi-Koi. It's a real shame these are missing but hey, at least it's still in Yakuza 4 (except quiz x quiz because no one cares about that shit).

Overall though Yakuza 3, for all its faults is enjoyable enough. It's pretty guilty of a quantity over quality mentality, but even though the minigames are flawed they're still fun. Infact the same could be said about the entire game including the combat and the story. So if you can look past the flaws and just want a quircky and somewhat refreshing addition to the RPG genre then you may as well go for it.

3/5

18th March, 2012 - 22:48 GMT SimonShirley Article viewed 791 times 0 Comments

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