Ranking the Yakuza Series: ‘Yakuza 3’
Yakuza 3 kind of sucks. Or, at least, it’s easily the weakest entry in the series. To be clear, Yakuza 3 is a perfectly competent video game. But when stacked against the giants of Yakuza 0, Kiwami, and Kiwami 2, all of which we have covered here at Epilogue, Yakuza 3 holds no candle to its predecessors. Part of why I think Yakuza 3 is so obviously inferior as a game is due to its moorish setting. Unlike the earlier games, Yakuza 3 takes place at an orphanage in Okinawa. While it’s admittedly adorable that Kiryu has set up and run a safe environment for children that are growing up the way he did, the opening several hours are tedious and, frankly, boring. Kiryu’s interactions are almost entirely fetch-quests at first, with no combat to speak of. For a series that is partially defined by its action combat, it took more than half of the game’s total runtime for me to face any serious test of Kiryu’s skills.
Another reason Yakuza 3 is such a weak entry in the franchise is the narrative pacing, which is all over the place. The opening orphanage section takes far too long to develop; by the time Kiryu makes his way back to the mainland, I had already spent more hours than I’d have liked with this game. With Kiryu back in Tokyo, combat finally returns to the game’s focus and the story’s pacing evens out at last. That being said, the downgrade in combat is jarring throughout Yakuza 3. With only one playable character and a limited set of moves, every fight feels stiff and clunky. Perhaps I can’t help but view Yakuza 3‘s combat critically due to how I played this entire series back-to-back in a few short months, but these gameplay limitations don’t cohere with the rest of what the series has to offer. Given the game’s initial abandonment of the combat, I felt like I hadn’t truly unlocked all of the skills I would have wanted Kiryu to have by the endgame.
What Yakuza 3 gets right, however, redeems some of these faults. The relationship that Kiryu establishes with the orphans, Haruka in particular, can be touching at times. Some of the story beats involving the yakuza clans on the mainland are thematically compelling and feel right at home with how the previous games in the series told their stories. There are even some silly gags that, despite my reluctance to spend time in Okinawa, cracked a smile on my face. Yakuza 3 has a clear vision that it mostly delivers on, but I’d argue that the remastered collection doesn’t quite redeem this title. It would instead be ideal to one day see Yakuza 3 get the Kiwami treatment.
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