yakuza kiwami 3 - 0/10
kiwami means extreme... ly bad
went about 'acquiring' this game - don't worry, not a single cent has been passed along to the assaulter-platforming hacks who churned out this dogshit. even setting that aside - which you shouldn't, by the way, and if you are, you're part of the problem! - this is a game that is so blatantly uninterested in being the very thing it is advertised as. this isn't yakuza 3, this arguably barely qualifies as yakuza; it wears its skin, masquerades off of the 20 years of good will that yakuza developed, and attempts to cash in it, but this sure as shit is not the franchise that i, and countless others have grown to develop such a strong affinity for.
firstly, the story changes. as one of the people who genuinely enjoys gaiden and infinite wealth, and thought that the daidoji could have been something cool if they kept it as an ongoing plot thread, they are now, with the advent of this game, reduced to naught but a device through which we can torturously prolong the lives of characters who have lived out their arcs; not only through mine and kagawazaki in this game, but indeed, in the run-up to this game, yokoyama just sort of... off-handedly dropped that hanawa is morinaga from yakuza 5? genuinely curious to know: what the fuck for? what does this add? nothing; it actively subtracts. that's all that it is, it reduces the weight of any death you perceive in these games, any potential death could just be explained away through anything they like. 0 director's cut resurrected lee for no fucking reason despite the fact that it actively hampers what many will argue is one of the strongest emotional beats this series has ever produced, because fuck it. it was already questionable that like a dragon just randomly had kashiwagi as a bartender.
in fact, yeah. famously, yakuza 3 is the game where kashiwagi gets gunned down by a helicopter, isn't it? i wonder, in their journey to provide as little weight as possible to the deaths of literally every character in this franchise, have we received any light on how the fuck he got away from - again - HELICOPTER-MOUNTED TURRETFIRE THAT SWISS-CHEESES HIM?
imagine my fucking surprise when that cutscene played, and that chapter ended earlier than in the original yakuza 3. imagine my fucking stunned gasp of pure defeat knowing that they're not doing this to put more conspiratorial plot threads in the back to tug on and actually make it somewhat compelling. no. people can just be Alive Again now. deal with it and if you want any explanation then fuck you.
the retconning is one thing. these recasts though? fucking jesus wept.
the obvious one is kagawa - fucking god, this is the hill yokoyama wanted to die on so badly? replacing an, at-best, c-tier villain with a e-tier performance? he sounds like a fucking chainsmoking goose now. you threw away TWENTY YEARS of goodwill for a sexual predator to deliver an AT BEST mediocre performance for a character who, ultimately, doesn't even really fucking matter. hamazaki in yakuza 3 was already tertiary at the best of times, mostly put in to be a red herring as Evil Bastard McGee to throw you off of the scent of the mystery for a little bit, but now you've drawn so much attention to him by making a casting choice that is so utterly boneheaded and actively endangering. all for it to still not fucking matter anyway.
that's the one that most people focused on, rightfully so. but oh my fucking god. i cannot explain the hatred in my soul that i have for liquid rikiya. because that ain't my fucking rikiya! that is a planted replicant human that doesn't even try to capture the same energy that the original rikiya had, doesn't even try to be as iconic or have nearly as much emotion in his performance, or personality oozing from his every little mannerism, no. it's just a case of "we need the game out, the original actor is busy, fuck it, get a likeness actor". literally everything about rikiya in yakuza 3 is ruined in this. it feels akin to those recasts in the brady bunch, where they're given the same lines as the original actors, but there's something so blatantly lost to where these new actors, no matter how good their own performance, they will forever be marred with the weight of being an imitation of a beloved character. it's ironic, really, that these games have a rather popular substory thread of fake kiryu using the name to get clout despite so blatantly not being him.
slightly less impactful to most people is the nakahara recast. like, just why? he doesn't look like a lovable grandpa anymore. the drawing that saki does of him doesn't have nearly as much joyful weight in this game because it just looks off. it sucks so badly.
and so, at last, we arrive at the gameplay in this video game. and i gotta say, i didn't believe that the dragon engine could get much worse, but here we fucking are!
style over substance reigns supreme here. you could lock on, but why bother when your fists have magnets inside of them? i'm serious; if you have the game, test it yourself, the game locks on better for you whenever you just hit light attacks better than the actual lock-on does, to the point of trivialising combat entirely. if that wasn't enough, there's also still the same dragon engine staples of basically any upgrades immediately making the game piss-easy, it being all but impossible to die if you have played a video game before, and just generally being unengaging. that's perhaps unfair; gaiden and certainly what little i played of lost judgment very much attempted to make the combat interesting by opening up a lot of mixing options to the player to use as they see fit, but a lot of the sauce is lost in this game thanks to overly long flashy moves that do all the work for you.
and speaking of removing all of the work, hope you didn't like the large scope of yakuza 3, because OVER HALF OF THE CONTENT IS GONE. substories, full sections of the main plot, revelations, several trainers, all fucking vanished. hope you didn't want to learn the famous Komaki Tiger Drop from Sotaro Komaki - nah, bitch, you getting that Miyazato Tiger Drop. yummy temu edition! it's not like it's THE MOST FUCKING ICONIC MOVE IN THE SERIES or anything. it's not like KOMAKI WAS LITERALLY IN INFINITE WEALTH AND HAD CLOSURE STRESSED AS HAVING GREAT IMPORTANCE TO KIRYU or anything. no totally not. not at all! it's not like a great swathe of the things removed from the game, actually, are also referenced in infinite wealth, and so they'll be entirely unintelligible to those who move onto this game as opposed to playing the original yakuza 3! totally not at all! i love sarcasm!
it's just such a fucking shambles, man. already, by getting this heated, typing this much, i have put more thought and effort towards this game than RGG has. this game spits on the legacy of not only 3, but indeed the entire prior yakuza franchise up to this, somehow fucking including infinite wealth.
my advice? take the timeline split theory and run with it. either you play yakuzas 1-5 and believe that kiryu bled out in the snow, or play the first two kiwamis and veer clear of this and accept that the yakuza franchise died in 2025 with pirate yakuza in hawaii. this game is a desecration of all you could have enjoyed of the plots of the games leading up to here, and a massacre of any remaining shreds of hope or goodwill i could have towards rgg studio. easily already the worst of 2026 beyond a shadow of a doubt. what a fucking shame, dawg.
and i thought kiwami 1 and 2 were disgraces!
