The third reimagining of the series in as many games. Everything is new: gameplay, sound, look, and tone. The first game to use the Dragon Engine, but they clearly hadn’t quite figured out how to take advantage of it.

This was… a weird one, for many reasons.

I talked in my previous review about how Yakuza 5 was going to be a huge turning point for the series. However, it was short lived, lasting only for Zero (as far as main series games go). Yakuza 6 does this again, and it lasts for even shorter: just this one game. Though, both games also impacted one Kiwami game each with their styles. Kiwami 2 is by far my least favorite entry in the series so far though, so it actually benefits Yakuza 6 more for me to ignore it.

Everything in this game is new, and it’s all a mixed bag. Fortunately, it seems like they found only the good elements to bring forward after this and Kiwami 2, and abandoned the rest. I was dreading this game after hearing that it was the main influence on Kiwami 2. I’d also heard very mixed things about the story.

This game does have some redeeming qualities though, and I’ll get to those below.

Overall, I enjoyed this game more than I expected.

The Review#↑

Visuals#↑

One of the best things this game has going for it is its look.

The Dragon Engine really shines when it is set up with assets designed specifically for it, instead of hacking together older assets and hoping the new engine can somehow cover for them.

Kiwami 2 also has an infamous green filter over everything that looks horrid. I’m glad to say that Yakuza 6 not only lacked this, but the color balancing looked very solid throughout.

What impressed me most were the characters’ faces, which got plenty of closeups to show them off. They were extremely natural looking and conveyed more emotion than the series has managed with any other entry.

The other thing that impressed me was the lighting. It’s not necessarily the most accurate lighting, but that’s okay. I don’t really care. What I care about is whether or not it looks good, and it does. It adds a ton of dramatic flare to cutscenes and makes the game a treat to look at from all angles.

This engine also has an obsession with particle effects, and I kinda love it. It gives the game a really distinct look, especially with how much slow-motion it uses. What’s cooler than kicking a boss and he falls over in slow-motion? Kicking a boss and he falls over in slow-motion, but he’s got red energy flowing out of him like steam and you’ve got blue energy burning off you like fire, in slow-motion.

Not everything is great though. This game features multiple cutscene styles, like the rest of the series. However, while the cinematic cutscenes are the best they’ve ever been, the others really suffered. There’s a lot of time spent where characters stand perfectly still, with only their mouths moving along with what they’re saying. This was true in older Yakuza games as well, but it was sold better by the simpler art style back then. Seeing these much more lifelike characters communicate like robots in this way is so much more uncanny and distracting. Half the time they aren’t even aiming their faces in the right direction. There were some scenes that would have been really emotional but were absolutely ruined by this. It’s a shame, especially considering how well improved the rest of the cutscenes are.

Fortunately, it seems that future games fixed this up more and more over time. This was just the awkward first game released on this engine.

This is the visual style that has persisted throughout the rest of the series. They were on the right track here. They just needed more time to cook.

Audio#↑

It felt like there was more voice acting in this game than in any other in the series so far. I really appreciated that. The voice acting is extremely good, as I expect from this series. Lots of extremely intense emotion is brought to life by these actors. These characters also felt like they had a lot more personality than usual Yakuza characters, and that came across in the voice acting too.

Unfortunately, I can’t really gush about this soundtrack like I did for the previous entry. I just found most of it forgettable. Even after finishing this game, I still have the soundtrack for Yakuza 5 stuck in my head. I don’t really remember a single song on the Yakuza 6 soundtrack.

So I went back to listen to it all while writing this, to see if anything stuck out. There were a few things, which makes me think the blame lies with the game’s terrible audio balancing. I could hardly ever hear the music when I wanted to, even if I went into the settings and turned up the music alone. It seemed like those settings were applied situationally, and sometimes were completely ignored. Sometimes the music was too loud, too, even if I turned it back down. Like a quiet conversation between a couple people indoors, talking about some very serious topics, but I can’t hear anyone talking over the sound of this “oooo drama mysterious oooooo” track that has just a little too much energy. I can’t think while this is hammering on my brain.

I think the music direction was very solid, though. It’s a little different from what I am used to from other Yakuza games, but it’s solid. The problem is perhaps that it’s a little too directed. The music all fits together in a consistent style so much that none of it jumps out from the rest. It all kind of blends together into overall good sounding music. There are just no super good standout tracks. By equalizing everything this much, it’s smoothed out all the edges and charm the previous soundtracks had. It also probably contributes to the “soft” background music being a little distracting, as it got equalized “up” in hype levels to get it closer to the rest of the soundtrack.

Still, a few tracks did stick out:

DESTINY
Town Bully

Story#↑

Whew. This was all over the place. It lost focus a lot of the time, and has some flaws, but I overall really love what they did with it.

There were some really cool parts. I liked how many callbacks there were to the start of Kiryu’s story. We revisited some locations that we haven’t really been back to since the start. The overall plot is about a lot of similar things: someone dear to Kiryu becomes a mother, and he has to take care of the kid even though the father is maybe an enemy, maybe not? We’ll figure that part out over the plot. Jumping in front of a bullet to save someone else, only for someone else to jump in the way ahead of you, only this time it’s Kiryu being shot. There are tons more, too many to cover here. It’s clear that they were trying to bring the story full circle.

The major theme of the story is obviously parenthood. It repeatedly asks what it means to be a parent, what makes a parent, how parents impact our lives, and so on. All the characters have different answers, and ultimately a lot of the clashes that happen in the story were caused by differences in those answers. Characters are redeemed by prioritizing parenthood in the end. Characters show their true, corrupt colors when they reveal their lack of prioritization of parenthood. Parenthood is hammered into the story even more than “dream” is hammered into Yakuza 5’s story (which is frequently criticized for repetition).

I love all of that. It’s very touching, it’s very fitting for Kiryu’s story, as parenthood has been a running theme in the background for Kiryu the whole time.

Unfortunately, it’s not only about that. There’s also a ridiculous, absurd plot about a hidden record-breaking warship funded by the embezzlement and war-crimes of basically the illuminati that extremely frequently takes over the story for a bit before returning to the good stuff. I found this plot beyond stupid. People keep defending it with “oh no, you just don’t understand your history”. Bro, I do understand, actually. I went to high school too. It ain’t that deep. I can’t wait for this world-shattering raising of the stakes to never have any impact on any future story in the world because the writers also realized how fucking idiotic it was. This plot breaks the world so deeply that it could never function again and only works if this was the finale of the series forever. Even then it would be stupid, but at least it would be the series going out with a bang. Maybe at one point that’s what they planned, but Kiryu fakes his death at the end and obviously the series has more games.

There’s also a plot about The Tojo clan having a leadership struggle, again. Because it’s tradition, I guess? Nothing comes of it. Not really. All it does is occupy literally every character you’ve ever seen in the series except Kiryu. Oh wait, they throw Akiyama in there for a few minutes too, because he’s not technically involved with all that. This game, supposedly about Kiryu’s past, has so little to do with his past and so much to do with the seven thousand new characters and threats it must continue to introduce. It, again, feels like a game at the start of a whole new series. Bizarrely, they even give you a big introduction of a ton of characters in the series at the start, as a refresher or in case you are new to the series. Then 90% of those characters appear in the game for a few minutes if they’re lucky.

Most egregiously, this game about Kiryu’s relationship with parenthood puts Haruka in a coma . We get incredibly little interactions between them. Even when Kiryu is taking care of the kid, that lasts for all of 2 chapters before the kid is a rare, random background element, sidelined for the rest of the plot. Even Daigo , who Kiryu also feels like a father to, only gets a few minutes of screentime.

Instead, we get tons of time with new characters who are probably going to be discarded after this game. We spend tons of time on side plots that will have no impact on the series after this game. Literally every single character from Kiryu’s past is sidelined to allocate more time to new stuff. Even when it does make sense for those characters to be involved, they are ignored and abandoned, as if they never existed or had any impact on Kiryu or the world around him. Where was Tanimura when little asia was burning? Again? Could Shinada have helped at all, since he’s not involved with the Yakuza plot? Maybe he could have at least been mentioned when baseball was a minor arc? At least we got to see Akiyama , but he gets approximately 7 minutes of time on screen even though he would be perfect to bring along.

This story felt like it tried to be 4 things at once. It tried to be a new Yakuza that players could get into without playing any of the other games. It tried to be a fitting end to Kiryu’s story. It tried to be a grand conspiracy adventure story with stakes higher than ever. It tried to be a story about parenthood. It stretched itself too thin, and some of these things are fundamentally incompatible. It could have gotten away with two of those things. I know which two I’d have preferred, and I’m resentful of the other two for taking away from them. A new Yakuza that new players could enjoy about a grand conspiracy sounds like a great side game. In fact, that’s what they did next! Judgment! I wish they held off on the desire to make that game until this game was done.

I also have mixed feelings on the ending. Kiryu gets all this character growth. He gets set up for the perfect ending to his story. Throughout Kiryu’s life, he’s repeatedly sacrificed himself for his family, especially by separating himself from them. Finally, at the end, it feels like he has grown as a character and will choose family over everything, only to tragically die while defending them. It’s a great setup for the last arc of such a storied character. Then, Kiryu throws it all away and fakes his death. He chooses to sacrifice himself by separating himself from his family, all over again. This is exactly what he did in Yakuza 5. It didn’t work then. He’s learned nothing. He hasn’t grown at all. What I like about this is that I don’t think this game was a fitting end for Kiryu, yet. He deserves a better game to go out on—a story more focused and less distracted trying to be a secret spinoff. I like that this gives him a second chance at a fitting end. I look forward to seeing how that plays out. With how this feels hacked in at the end, I think that was the intent behind this writing choice.

Still, the parts I loved really shined. The elements of the story that were about Kiryu and parenthood were truly touching. Even if the side content was mostly a distraction, the characters were some of the best and most personality-filled the series has seen so far. The moment-to-moment storytelling was top notch even if the overarching plot was cluttered. I enjoyed my time.

Gameplay#↑

This game shares most of its gameplay with Kiwami 2. It’s a bit controversial. Some people absolutely love Dragon Engine combat in any of its forms, and just find it more smooth and free-flowing. The rest find it to be too imprecise and floaty, with buggy procedural animations and goofy ragdolls. I’m in that latter camp.

Personally, I hate this iteration of combat. People use Yakuza 3 as the punching bag, as it is the oldest and also the AI has a tendency to block a lot, leading to longer fights. However, I find these early Dragon Engine games even worse. At least I felt like I had precision in Yakuza 3. I could predict what my button presses would do, and play around that. In Yakuza 6 (and Kiwami 2), every button press felt like it was up to the whims of the physics engine pseudo-RNG. Will I dodge out of the way of this swing, or just limply slide an inch backwards because there’s a nearly invisible spec of debris on the ground behind my feet? Will this knockdown punch put the enemy in the perfect place for the combo finisher to hit them if I time my inputs right, or will it ragdoll them in a completely random direction 30 feet away (sometimes into the air) and make every single one of my other attacks miss, robbing me of any combo potential? Will this attack miss me because I’m out of the way, or does it have a bus-sized hitbox to try and cover for the abysmal physics based combat imprecision? In every situation, the game picks the more annoying, less fun answer to these questions. It’s infuriating.

Yakuza 6 is actually worse than Kiwami 2 in a few ways.

It lacks a lot of the core moves and heat actions, limiting the moveset quite a lot. It’s the worst and least complete iteration of Kiryu’s fighting style in the series.

Additionally, the designers realized they could show way more enemies on screen than in previous titles due to changes in hardware limitations, so they did that without adjusting the gameplay for it in any way. Kiryu’s moveset is clearly designed for situations the previous games laid out, and then forced to fight in situations that just feel bad for it. You only have a few, very unreliable moves that help with crowds at all. So you spam those. Over. And. Over. And. Over. It’s the entire game.

This game also made Kiryu bounce off of enemy blocks, interrupting combat flow and removing the last shreds of possible combo opportunities. This is compounded by the crowds of enemies and the hilariously large attack hitboxes that were clearly designed to try and patch up the awful procedural combat animations. If you swing at someone in a crowd, chances are somebody behind them will be blocking and you’ll bounce off them. Your combo is now ended, and one of the crowd members is now attacking you back before you can get your own block up.

Bizarrely, this game also set the durability of every weapon in the game to exactly 3. No more variety. Less ability to use weapons to deal with those crowds. It feels like this was only done to make the player have less fun. Gotta be more “hardcore” or something. I guess that must have been the trend of the time.

The one thing I had fun with was Extreme Heat mode. Mostly because I was giggling at how utterly ridiculous and overpowered it was. It absolutely trivialized the game and made literally everything else worthless. It also had goofy animations, but at least less goofy than the ones in Yakuza 5. It felt like I should only engage with this combat mechanic and ignore all the others. I found myself getting annoyed whenever I accidentally triggered a Heat Action, because I should have saved that for more Extreme Heat. Really unfortunate state for one of the most iconic features of the franchise to be in.

Absolutely the worst combat in the series so far. No contest. It isn’t close.

It goes beyond the combat. This game has the most bizarre progression system in the series, too. Kiwami 2 patched it up a little bit, going from “straight up bad” to “annoying at best”—but Yakuza 6 has the initial, worse version.

You earn xp in one of 5 categories. Different activities give you different amounts of each of these. Combat usually gives you only 3 of these, and is generally extremely stingy with the other two. Kiryu can also eat food to gain xp in these categories, with a stupidly complex/arbitrary-feeling system determining what xo each meal gives. Some extremely heavy, expensive meals give barely anything, while simple cheap meals give loads for no reason. This is a very repetitive activity that bloats playtime without feeling satisfying. Meanwhile, every upgrade in the game costs some combination of these xp categories. So you might have 7k “strength” xp and want to buy a new attack that costs 500 “strength” xp, but you can’t, because it also costs 10 of every other xp type, and you just ran out of “charm” xp. The game also doesn’t seem to balance or plan out these purchases at all. I ended the game with literally thousands of several xp types and single digits of the others, because I was constantly blocked from purchases by running out of those rare xp types.

This game also brought back an invisible stamina system for sprinting. Just in case you were getting around the world a little too quickly. Gotta make sure the player is slowed down and inconvenienced at every possible turn.

On the positive side, this game did introduce the Dragon Engine’s coolest feature: seamless world. Is it necessary? No. Does it really change things that much? No. Will I miss it if future games don’t have it? No. I already didn’t miss it in the games after Kiwami 2. Is it still kinda nice? Yes.

Final Thoughts#↑

Rating: 7/10
Playtime: 20 hours

I really would have preferred they finish Kiryu’s saga strong with the old style. Yakuza 5 worked really well for me, and I would have adored a finale in that style. Instead, we got the growing pains of what feels like the first game in a whole new series, right at the end. It was an unfortunate choice. They kinda fumbled it.

Still, there’s a lot to like about it. Out of the Yakuza games I’ve played so far, it doesn’t make it into the top half, but I’d put it at the top of the bottom half.

I’m very glad that Kiryu’s saga isn’t really over yet . This is not a fitting end, in my opinion.

The story carried this game. Though flawed, there was a lot of love put into it and the high points were very high.