Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties | Review
The World’s Softest Bush
Boy, this one is going to anger longtime fans. It’s Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties. This remake of the third mainline Yakuza game is joined by an expansion. It is focused on explaining why it changed the game’s ending. I won’t say what the ending is. Just know that if you’re a fan of the series, that, yes, the rumors were true. I’m sure many of you will be pissed off. The anger will be joined by an annoyance at how rushed parts of this remake feel. A weak English dub, filled with mistakes and wooden performances, hinders what is still one hell of a fun game at its core. Let’s get into this, as spoiler-free as we can, and warning: while I quite enjoy the Yakuza series, I have not completed all of them.
Kazuma Kiryu
We’ll start with the main campaign. Yakuza Kiwami 3 is a remake of the 2009 PS3 title. It sees our protagonist, Kiryu, starting life anew with his adopted daughter. If Kiryu is the muscle, then Haruka is the heart of the story. The series’ classic setting of Kamurocho is here, remastered into a beautiful sheen (most of the time).
A large portion of the game takes place in a new setting, Okinawa. The island is a bit smaller than Kamurocho; it mostly looks good. There are a few areas where low-resolution textures are loaded in. This was fixed in the few areas I saw with a pre-launch patch.
I played through the title on Steam, Xbox Series X, and the ROG Xbox Ally X. It was my first time beating the game myself, though I had watched streamers play through before. The combat and upgrade systems have seen some major changes. Kiryu now has a ‘refined’ Dragon of Dojima moveset that boasts more variety than the original.
Alongside this is an Okinawan-inspired Ryuku move set. It utilizes various weaponry that Kiryu pulls out of thin air and is great for clearing larger groups. Gone is the experience-based leveling system of the original. In its place is one focused on money for damage and health upgrades, and a combat currency earned via fights for moves and other unlocks. Yakuza 1-6 were straight brawlers, and Kiwami 3 tightens things up while adding nicely to the variety of moves.
I preferred the new system over the old. It was straightforward and felt meaningful. In classic Yakuza fashion, there is a mix of scripted and random fights around each city. Every enemy you defeat drops cash, and Kiryu can do side missions to earn cash.
Do All The Things
In both locations, Kiryu can visit stores to stock up on health and heat gauge items to use during combat. The heat gauge allows you to do context-sensitive attacks that deal out massive amounts of damage. Early on, Kiryu will get a mid-2000’s appropriate cellphone. You can customize it with charms and stickers that let you focus on passive bonuses to enhance certain abilities.
Customization is a big thing, with hundreds of clothing items, cellphone pieces, and more available via shops, finding them around town, completing certain objectives, or finding LaLaLove boxes. The LalaLove system is a fun one. Kiryu can use his cellphone to connect with various residents around town in a Nintendo Street Pass-style system. You get rewards for getting more friends. There are boxes that you can interact with in a similar way, which give you hundreds more items.
There is a ton of content in the game. You can go bowling, play darts, arcade games, and a dozen more activities alone or with friends. I rolled credits roughly 25 hours in, but a 100% clear and seeing through Gang and Orphanage systems through would probably take me 25 more.
Bad Daddy Dragon
One of the main side systems in the game is the Girl Gang. Kiryu’s Okinawan friend’s daughter is looking to build a gang of girls who fight for good. Kiryu, being the old softie he is, helps them pound various sh1thead gangs around town into submission.
You are led into the system as part of the main quest and will have to get a fairway through it to complete the game. You can ignore it at one point, but I found it fun enough that I kept playing until the end. A lot of side and main quest characters will join your gang, eventually having a massive base full of people, some of whom had died in the main campaign, ready to fight with me.
There are upgrade systems for your gang’s outfits, motorcycles, and more. Every fight gains those who were a part experience, and if you’re willing to grind it a bit, then it is easy to out-level your current competition. There are three main types of Daddy Dragon fights. Those around town where you help girls escape from ruffians by beating the snot out of the jerks, huge motorcycle-filled fights where you go from point to point taking other gangs out, or all-out brawls in large fighting areas that play more like Dynasty Warriors than anything else.
I appreciated how much depth there was to all of it. I was never overwhelmed, feeling like this system was forced upon me when all I wanted to do was play the main campaign. It’s always available, but only forced at a few key times during the main quest chain. This is similar to running the orphanage.
Morning Glory
Kiryu has moved with Haruka to Okinawa and started up an orphanage called ‘Morning Glory’. A new system has been put in for leveling your relationship with all of the kids living there, cooking them dinners with produce you grow, catching bugs to sell around town, fishing, and more.
You can lose dozens of hours running your own little home base. Everything you catch or grow can be sold to the local populace to earn a currency that lets you upgrade Morning Glory itself. You can get pets like a dog, a cat, and a monkey. There is a small farm in the back that you can make a little bigger and upgrade the soil so that new items can be grown.
Cows, chickens, spears for fishing, and more are yours to grind out to see numbers go up. None of it is as weird, yet still oddly fun, as doing housework. Whether it’s cooking meals, sewing items, or helping with homework, the minigames are all fun. Seeing Kiryu attack, sewing a school bag with the same fury he approaches armed thugs is hilarious. The orphanage itself ends up being on land that, shocker, is highly wanted by some unscrupulous folk.
Land, it’s always land
A stalwart for the Yakuza series, the land that Morning Glory is on becomes the central plot point. No spoilers, but the reasons why some bad fellows want the land make sense at first, and becomes kinda nutso by the end. It gets big, has lots of terrible American accents in the Japanese voicework, and hits all the right emotional beats, outside of Kanda.
Kanda is the chairman of the Nishikiyama family, and he f*cking sucks. A murdering rapist, I hate him, and I hate even more how they kinda massage his character’s rough points in the Dark Ties expansion. All my homies hate Kanda. Outside of him, we have the recasting of Go Hamazaki. The actor whose likeness and voice are now tied to the character admitted to a sexual assault a few years ago. I have no idea why RGG felt so compelled to cast him in a role that was loved in the original.
In the original, the story got a little silly by the end, but nothing too nuts. Now, thanks to the world’s softest yet strongest shrub, it has gone into full Looney Tunes territory in this remake. If you saw the leaks before launch, it’s all true, and no, the Dark Ties expansion does not justify it.
Yong… eh
Yong Yea is back to voice Kiryu in the English dub. He’s better here than in his previous appearance, but it still feels off. I ended up swapping to the Japanese audio after a few hours. Talking with friends who were also reviewing, one constant was how the English dub had multiple flubbed lines or messed-up-sounding takes left in.
The Japanese audio was great overall, at least to my old ears. The music seemed familiar for the most part (it’s been over a decade since I played Yakuza 3), and the new tunes in Dark Ties were great. I just do not remember having multiple instances of voiceover gaffs make it into a finished product like this.
Maybe it’s all fixed in a Day One patch, but as I completed this review over a week before then, I cannot be sure. What I am sure about, however, is that Dark Ties is not good.
Mine-san, my son
This release is known as “Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties”. Dark Ties is a prequel to Yakuza Kiwami 3, where you play as Mine, one of the Tojo Clan (Kiryu’s old group) Lieutenants in the main game. You’ll get his motivations in a short backstory that took me 4 hours to complete.
If I had gone for a full clear, I’m sure I could have gotten the map emptied in roughly 10 at most. The majority of the expansion’s content is some of the most boring fetch quests and checklist clearing I can remember.
Mine is brought into the Yakuza by the aforementioned sack of garbage, Kanda. At one point, you’ll be tasked with improving Kanda’s rep around town, because he sucks and everyone rightfully hates him.
To do this, you’ll beat up randos, find cats, get people potato chips, and more of the most basic, boring quest design imaginable. The best part of the DLC, outside of the handful of main missions, is the Hells Arena fights.
There is an arena brawling section alongside a roguelike run-based series of fights in the Hells Arena. It’s a fight club where rich people pay to see poor people kill each other or get killed by the rich people’s minions.
The arena combat is the same as the rest of the game’s combat, basic brawling. It’s the survival mode that sees you completing tasks against a time limit, full of per-run items and permanent upgrades, which was the most fun.
Sadly, Dark Ties does nothing to help explain or justify the main game’s ending changes. Worse, it’s so full of Kanda and helping him that I wanted to punch my screen at least a dozen times after seeing this obvious dink ‘win’ over and over again.
Wrapping Things Up
Yakuza Kiwami 3 is a mostly competent remake of an original that needed an update. The combat and upgrade changes are welcome, though those in the ending and its attempt to justify the expansion are not. If you’re a longtime fan of the series, there may be enough here to drive you mad. If you’re a lesser fan like me or brand new to it all, there’s enough fun to be had here that it’s worth checking out.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties
Played on
Xbox Series X, ROG Xbox Ally X, and PC via Steam
PROS
- Mostly looks great
- Combat systems are fun
- Lots of minigames
- Upgrade changes make sense
CONS
- Kanda sucks and the expansion only makes it worse
- The ending change is baffling and, again, the expansion fails to justify it
