Originally the Yakuza franchise was a series that was never meant to be. With the massive failure that was the Sega Dreamcast during the late 1990s, Sega stopped producing their own consoles and decided to publish their games on the hardware of their former competitors. Sonic, the rival of Mario, was now having games released on the Nintendo Gamecube and more mature Sega properties were being released on the Playstation 2. Things were rough for the company, but one day they were approached with a new property by Toshihiro Nagoshi. He dreamt of creating a game that focused around the drama and experiences of the real world. A game that was willing to get dirty under several mature themes, but tell a powerful narrative. He would even base it off of real world crime games, the Yakuza as they are known in Japan. Sega didn’t approve at first, because they believed a game that focused around such a violent group as the Yakuza probably shouldn’t be shown to the public nor normalized. They felt certain aspects like crime and sexual content which was not present in any of their previous games should not be featured. They were getting ready to give Yakuza the thumbs down, but Nagoshi threatened them saying if Yakuza wasn’t brought into the land light then he would stop working at Sega. Afraid to lose yet another worker, especially during trying times, Sega gave him the approval and fundings to make Yakuza. The game was released in Japan in 2005, and shipped worldwide one year later after translation. Yakuza should have been a massive failure, but surprisingly it wasn’t. Yakuza became really well acclaimed in Japan and there was a cult following over here in the west. There was an audience who wanted more of it, and so Sega cashed in on their new gritty crime series. Allowing the franchise to grow with time.
The Yakuza franchise has been going on strong for almost 18 years now. Eight mainline entries with a ninth one currently in development, several spin offs some of which aren’t available in the US, and other games such as Judgment being made by the same developers and following a very similar formula. Yakuza is probably Sega’s most successful franchise, and I would say the praise it’s gotten over the years is well deserved. Despite basically being the Assassin’s Creed of Sega, Yakuza has always managed to tell intriguing stories and build upon its characters. It is a game about life, the struggles we as human individuals face, and learning to persevere even when so many things hold us down. They are games about brotherhood, family, honor, sacrifice, and so much more. I’m not surprised if people have an emotional connection to this series. Not because of how long it’s been going for and how fans who stuck around since the early days grew up on it, but because of what the games represent as stated. Video games should be about something, and the games that manage to convey emotions and feelings to the player are what I consider art. Yakuza is art and that’s why I’m willing to overlook the fact they keep churning out new entries in the same way Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed is being mass produced. This may contradict everything I just said, but I’m not a veteran of the Yakuza franchise. Haven’t played every game, but love it nonetheless. Yakuza 0 was my entry point back in 2020, and my review captures how confused I was with my first entry. I did like the game, but didn’t quite understand why so many people love it. Then I played Yakuza: Like A Dragon later that year, the JRPG conversion of the action brawler franhicse, and it finally started to click.
I absolutely love Yakuza: Like A Dragon. It has its flaws like the unbalanced endgame, and although being the eighth major entry in a long running franchise graphically it looks a bit dated. However, I can forgive it for where it falters because everything else is really good. It’s a fun turn-based JRPG packed full of the type of content seen in other Yakuza games, but the story, cast of characters, and new lovable protagonist Ichiban Kasuga drags you for a thrilling ride from beginning to end. With incredible writing, politics, and an ending that almost made me cry, this is the pinnacle of the entire Yakuza franchise. It made me fall in love with Yakuza and eager to go try the other games. One of which we are talking about today. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. The seventh mainline entry and the final chapter to the Kazuma Kiryu saga, or at least it was the final chapter until they announced Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. Dear god, that is a very long title. I’ve been meaning to play Yakuza 6 for a long time now, but kept putting it off due to how loaded my backlog is. It wasn’t until recently that I bought it during a sale and sat down to play it. Almost five years later, does Yakuza 6: The Song of Life still hold up? The answer is, “Yes, of course it does.” Yakuza 6 is a breathtaking experience. At the time, it was the final chapter to Kiryu’s story and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio tried to end it with a bang. There were high, lows, and questionable decisions, but I would say they succeeded. Yakuza 6 was also when they tried to incorporate more RPG elements into the Yakuza formula, and the staples they set up here paved the way to Like A Dragon. The game isn’t perfect, but it’s outstanding nonetheless. Today we’ll be talking about why I love Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and why it deserves your attention. Let's head back to Kamurocho once again and see what's up.
Story
Yakuza stories are well known for being complex, and the ball doesn’t get rolling until you are at least two to four plus into the game. Yakuza 6’s plot gets going around chapter four or five, and it would be a shame for me to spoil the first few hours of the game. If you haven’t played Yakuza 6 yet I would recommend doing so, because I am about to summarize the first four chapters of the game. Continue reading if you don’t care about the opening hours, but otherwise you have been warned.
We follow Kazuma Kiryu, a former yakuza member who has spent a majority of his life fighting people of the criminal underworld and protecting those who are close to him. The one place he cares about the most is Morning Glory, a small orphanage located along the beachside and where a young girl named Haruka grew up. Kiryu is basically her father. She is the daughter of Kiryu’s former lover who died, and means the world to him. He served as her guardian figure and did whatever he could to provide a bright beautiful future for her. However, their lives are always in danger due to the yakuza running rampant in Japan, and Kiryu always somehow gets sucked back into convoluted conspiracies. Still, he stands tall and fights the corrupted fools in the world because it ensures the safety of Haruka and his friends. Yakuza 6 takes place straight after the events of the fifth. Haruka became a world renowned idol, but resigned after the night of her most successful concert. Kiryu and his friends won an epic fight, I don’t because I didn’t play the fifth game, but anyways they won a big fight. Kiryu manages to survive the injuries, and while he’s lying unconscious on a hospital bed a group of police officers approach him. Kiryu is to be put in jail for his actions along with Daigo Dojima, Goro Majima, Taiga Saejima who have been accused of arson. Kiryu spends three years in prison and Haruka goes back to Morning Glory to help the orphans there. Three years pass, Kiryu is released, and takes a taxi back to reunite with everyone at Morning Glory. However, he discovers some time ago Haruka left and she has not returned since. Kiryu begins to question why and journeys back to Kamurocho to find answers.
While investigating around Kamurocho he runs into a couple of old friends. Those people being Shun Akiyama; a businessman who closed his company and went into hiding, and Makoto Date; an ace detective who secretly works with Kiryu and his pals to discover what’s going on in the criminal underworld. They catch up, but it’s eventually reported that Haruka got caught in a hit and run. She’s struggling to recover from her injuries and nobody knows who ran her over. What they do know is that she was carrying a baby, her own baby, and she managed to protect it during the attack. The boy’s name is Haruto and Kiryu believes the reason why Haruka mysteriously left the orphanage has something to do with the baby. He decides to take the baby for himself and travel to the last known town Haruka was in. A small coastal town located in Hiroshima named Onomichi. He heads to a bar where befriends the owner, Kiyomi Kasahara, and he begins to ask her for help. However, their conversation is halted by Tsuyoshi Nagumo, captain of the Hirose family. If you don’t know, yakuza organizations tend to have what are called “families.” Small clans, otherwise branches, within the organization. The goal of a family is to contribute through the form of money and preside over whatever territory they live under. Nagumo isn’t friendly to Kiryu at first due to him talking to his crush, but one fateful night Kiryu manages to obtain his trust. The Yomei Alliance is the organization for which Nagumo’s family belongs, and the money he owes them is quite a bit due to how he is not willing to take it from Kiyomi.
Nagumo praises Kiryu and welcomes him into the Hirose household. Here we meet the members which include Naoto Tagashira, Takaaki Matsunaga, Yuta Usami, and old man Toru Usami who is the patriarch. All four of them quickly adjust to Kiryu’s presence, but Kiryu eventually asks them of Haruka. All of the Hirose members attempt to act like they don’t know, but later at night Kiryu is approached again by Nagumo. He reveals that Haruka had been in Onomichi for quite some time. The entire town knew she was an idol, but kept quiet about it so she could be able to live in peace. Something happened and she left town. The real mystery now is figuring who the biological father is. It’ll involve investigating members of Yomei Alliance, traveling back and forth between Onomichi and Kamurocho, dealing with an enemy from the past, uncovering yet another huge conspiracy, and much more. Time to get cracking once again.
Gameplay
Yakuza 6 plays similarly to previous entries in that you wander around the streets of Kamurocho and Onomichi, beat down anyone who starts a fight with you, pursue whatever objectives you have, and occasionally engage in a wacky side activity. There’s a lot of stuff you can do in these games and the one aspect I always love about Yakuza is how condensed down the play space is. It’s better to have a small sandbox with a ton of things to do rather than a big one, because the bigger a playspace is and the more content it has; the more overwhelming it feels. The content of Yakuza games are also pretty unique. Both side quests and mainline quests follow the design of “Talk to NPC, fight some dudes, and get a reward,” but it is always the stories they revolve around. You can play some minigames, go to an arcade, fish, buy a drink at a vending machine, or just walk the streets and enjoy the setting you are placed in. The cities of Yakuza are inspired by real world places and they are made ever more lively with citizens wandering about freely. There’s even a first person mode for if you want to feel more immersed. Where were we again? Oh yeah, so you run doing whatever and eventually you are thrown into a fight. Some fights you can attempt to outrun, but in the case of quests they are unavoidable. You just have to pucker down and get a little dirty, and the combat of Yakuza allows you to get dirty as possible
It’s third person brawler combat, and if you’ve played a game like Streets of Rage or maybe Sifu you may know what to expect. Beats down groups of enemies, use fancy attack combos, objects in the environments to get the edge, and maintain your ground.There’s a dodge button to avoid attacks or distance yourself, you can arm guard to block attacks, and you attack mainly through punching furiously or kicking precisely. Basically, one is your light attack which can be dealt in rapid succession, and the other is your heavy attack which is slower but deals more damage and can potentially stun foes. When you get hit you take damage of course, and your health can be recovered in multiple ways. You can obtain medicine bottles and chug them down, or eat food which is bought from restaurants and convenience stores. Although Yakuza 6 has a mechanic known as the stomach system where if you eat too much you can’t eat for a while. Meaning you have to drink around for a certain period of time to eat more, and you have to be careful when you fight as you may not be able to heal for a while. Everytime you win a fight, complete certain quest objectives, or consume certain items you will obtain experience points and this is where we move towards the RPG aspects of Yakuza 6 which there is quite a lot to mention.
There are five types of experience points you can acquire throughout the game; strength, agility, spirit, technique, and charm. You can spend these points on stat upgrade, new combat abilities, perks, and more. Your stats include maximum health, attack power, defense, how easily you can evade attack, and the rate for which your Heat Gauge fills up. I forgot to talk about Heat and how that works during combat. Returning from Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 5 is heat, this special blue bar that fills up the more you beat down enemies. Heat can be triggered to activate what is basically a rage mode. Your attack power is increased significantly, and if you wail away on a single foe for a certain period of time you get to perform a powerful maneuver that drains a jack ton of their health. However, Heat can also be used to perform special maneuvers and takedowns. Some of which can only be performed if you unlock them, but you can do things like perform a takedown near an enemy with a blunt object or when you have an item in your hand. Perform one when grab them by the collar, dodge them when they dash towards you, or after contouring. It allows you to vary your approach a bit, and I love games that allow you to get creative with combat.
Going back to spending experience points, you don’t just upgrade stats. You can also spend these experiences on new Heat Actions like I just mentioned, new abilities, and perks. You are going to wank a good chunk of these as some of them are needed for combat to work. Like being able to dodge more times in a row, parrying attacks, having a higher Heat Gauge, being able to run for a longer period of time, recovering quicker when your guard is broken, and much more. The RPG systems they have here have been handled pretty well, and there’s even charm you can equip so that you can increase your stats further. You aren’t making a build, but what you are unlocking here for Kiryu is stuff that’ll help him survive longer. Especially once you get later into the game where they throw elite enemies at you more casually and the bosses get even tougher. There’s more motivation to fight enemies wandering around the world and engage in side activities, as you will need as many experience points as possible for when the game gets harder. Besides that there isn’t much else I can talk about. Hopefully you can find the father and stop a greater evil.
Thoughts
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is a fantastic game. It has quite a few shortcomings, but my time with it was well spent and what it mainly wanted to achieve was done really well. Near the end of my Yakuza 0 review I vaguely remember saying the brawler combat of Yakuza isn’t that great to me. That I found it to be somewhat repetitive and performing attacks felt a bit finicky. Well some of those opinions I still do agree with and there’s a couple more problems to go along with it. Your attacks still feel a bit finicky and trying to perform combos early in the game can be difficult. It seems like there is a high focus on using Heat Mode, especially during the endgame where brutal boss fights will kill you within seconds but you can get the edge on them by annihilating half of their health bar. Dodging never felt like a good option because the distance you dodge is really small, blocking is pretty much useless during huge group encounters, and parrying doesn’t work all too well. The brawler combo of Yakuza is already failing in a lot of areas people consider major, but trust me when I say I like the combat. It’s fun to play and they went back to the basics instead of having the stance system from Yakuza 0. Your attacks are finicky, but they do feel impactful. Wailing away at enemies using Heat Mode or performing Heat Actions feel epic as well and I like the team takedowns you can perform when fighting alongside allies. A complaint I do have is any group encounter that has more than ten enemies tends to get annoying quickly. There’s no proper lock on system and it can be hard to maintain ground as enemies surround you. Still, it’s satisfying when you survive a tough encounter and boss fights are a true highlight of Yakuza 6 as you face higher ups in the Yomei Alliance and [redacted]. Still trying to keep this spoiler free, but last note is that some boss fights get repetitive as they reuse them for the story. I get these idnividuals are important to the plot and they want to do whatever it takes to stop Kiryu, but why face them three to four times? It devalues theencounter, because you know they'll show up again at some point.
The RPG mechanics I think were incorporated really well into Yakuza 6. It’s not Like A Dragon where there’s different classes and playstyles, but Yakuza 6 is a satisfying action RPG to progress through. You are encouraged to partake in as many side activities and battles as possible, because you want to raise those for later fights. Everything you unlock feels like a meaningful upgrade, and slowly combat begins to work more as you learn new abilities. I wanna compare progression in this game to that of Ghost of Tsushima where the game is pretty rough at first, but with time becomes a joy to play. The cities you wander around are well realized and I love how Yakuza handles the open world. Having these smaller play areas with tons of unique things to do rather than have a big bloated open world that feels overwhelming. Side quests are fun and I like the stories I ended up partaking in. I encountered a couple who pretended to swap bodies, helped a young girl who dreamed of being an idol like Haruka, starred in a Oni-Michio show, and much more. Some are easily forgettable due to the ongoing plot, but it’s a nice break for the emotional rollercoaster that is the plot of Yakuza 6. The story of Yakuza 6 is brilliant, and it may as well be one of the best stories to come out in 2018. It explores the themes of fatherhood, how your past actions end up affecting the future of your loved ones, what you’ll do to protect said loved ones, and being able to find peace. One mistake I’ve made in my past Yakuza reviews is that Kiryu is a pretty boring protagonist. Yakuza 6 made me love Kiryu more and understand why he is the way he is. The reason why he is stern in front of everyone he sees is to show he’s not afraid. To show he is not afraid he must not express emotion, but at the same time he does not feel at peace with himself. For his past life as a yakuza, for the people he upset, and how what he sees as family is always in danger. Much like Kratos and Arthur Morgan, he wants to redeem himself and hopes by the end of his journey all his struggles will be worth it. The moment Kiryu does show a bit of emotion in this game is when he knows Haruka is safe, and it gets emotional at times.
The story is an exhilarating tale, the politics are interesting, most of the characters are likable, and the plot twists throw you off guard. Yakuza 6 has an amazing story, but I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect one. I just said “the plot twists throw you off guard” and by that I mean they really throw you in a loop. Not gonna spoil it, but when the game reveals who the father of Haruto is I kind of just sat there and went “Whaaaaaaaat?” It wasn’t a bad twist. The game eventually built on it and made it work with the story, but it’s one of those moments that feels uneven at first. This feeling of “Whaaaaaaaat?” can be applied to almost every single major twist in the game. There’s a core reason as to why Yakuza plots are hard to summarize, and the twists are always a key reason. Yet again, you can say this about a lot of plot twists in video games. I have a couple more gripes. The frame rate tends to tank at times, and I mainly found it occurring in Kamurocho as the city is full of little details and there’s more NPCs wandering the streets. The game, despite looking better than past entries, still feels a bit graphically dated, and part of the reason is because the dev of Yakuza really love to reuse assets across their games. I understand why, but who knows how many times they’ve used the same neon sign model and vendings machines across all the games. Facial animation is pretty poor as anything outside of cinematic cutscenes has robotic mouth movement and the one thousand yard stare. Despite all of these problems, I do love this game. I really want to say it’s excellent, but you know what? Being close to excellence is good enough for me. I recommend this game and find it yet another worthwhile entry. I give Yakuza 6: The Song of Life an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
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