Yakuza Kiwami 3 Feels Like a Completely Different Game, For Both Better and Worse
An Okinawa holiday.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 is Sega’s fourth remake of the cult classic crime series, and it’s by far the most daring “reimagining” that developer Ryu Ga Gotoku has had. Like the last two Kiwami games, this is a complete from-the-ground-up rebuild of the PS3 classic — but for all intents, Yakuza Kiwami 3 might as well be viewed as a new entry. After three hours of hands-on time I have no hesitation in saying this is one of Sega’s most ambitious remakes yet, looking to completely redefine Yakuza 3’s style and impact. While there’s a lot that has me excited, there’s equally a few worries that I can’t quite shake — a feeling of the series being homogenized in a way that I don’t like.
Yakuza 3 is an interesting game to talk about, as it’s essentially the point where the series started its meteoric rise — with the power of the PlayStation 3 allowing RGG Studio to do things the first two games couldn’t dream of. But it also hit at a transitional period, where a lot of developers were wrangling tech and gameplay innovations. With that, Yakuza 3’s surprisingly quaint story of Kiryu running an orphanage packs real emotional heft, but the gameplay of the third entry has not aged all that well. So there’s always been an argument to be made that Yakuza 3 might be the most deserving of a remake — and boy, is this a remake in every sense of the word.
Kiwami 3 doubles down on the delightfully slow slice-of-life elements of the original game.
Like Kiwami 2, Yakuza Kiwami 3 runs on RGG’s Dragon Engine, with a completely rebuilt world, new combat system, additional minigames, entirely new story sections, and more. Sega has been a bit coy about how deep those story changes run, but even in just the three hours I played, which was entirely focused on side content, it’s clear there’s a heaping helping of “new.”
In my short demo, I got to plant vegetables in the garden behind the house, then harvest them and do a cooking minigame where I made a meal for the household
In Yakuza 3, Kiryu has “retired” from the gangster life and now runs Morning Glory Orphanage with his adopted daughter Haruka, where they care for a gaggle of children. The opening of the game, quite literally the first six hours, are a delightfully slow slice-of-life story where you bond with Kiryu’s kids and explore the streets of Okinawa, before Kiryu’s past life inevitably creeps back up on him.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 has drastically doubled down on that slice-of-life approach, however, by fleshing out the orphanage and children with a whole new story, minigames, and more. Each child now has a bond meter that fills as you complete tasks and substories, alongside the aptly named “Daddy Level” for Kiryu. In my short demo, I got to plant vegetables in the garden behind the house, then harvest them and do a cooking minigame where I made a meal for the household — it’s essentially an enhanced version of Pirate Yakuza’s cooking minigame.
A host of new minigames at the orphanage give you new ways to build Kiryu’s bonds with his kids and build his “Daddy Level.”
Then, there’s the delightful sewing minigame where you fix the kid’s clothes, which plays out like a breakneck race as you try and keep the sewing machine’s needle on a track. It’s the perfect mundane activity given that Yakuza flair. But it’s not just minigames and activities that flesh out the orphanage, it’s a real emphasis on letting Kiryu spend time with these kids, and further explore the bonds he builds with them — something that we know basically becomes his guiding star for the rest of the series. Yakuza holds real untapped potential in exploring more slice-of-life elements.
The other major minigame I was able to play a bunch of is Bad Boy Baddie, where Kiryu becomes the leader of an all-female biker gang, fighting for dominance of the streets. This is themed a lot like previous minigames, such as Clan Creator, where you can recruit new gang members while out exploring, fine-tune the parties you like, then use them to fight massive battles with other gangs. And these Turf War battles have a fun little twist. Each one essentially lets you deploy four different squads, and you can zoom around on your motorcycle between the battlefield, helping squads out as they struggle.
Kiryu becomes the leader of an all-female biker gang, fighting for dominance of the streets
This, and a wealth of other minigame modes is, of course, propped up by the game’s new combat system, going back to the series’ action routes. If I were to compare it off the top of my head, I’d say Kiwami 3’s feels more in line with Kiwami 2, rather than the more recent spinoff, The Man Who Erased His Name.
The Biker minigame seemingly runs throughout the entire experience, letting you recruit new gang members from sidequets and out in the open world.
Kiwami 3’s brawler battles embrace the bone-crunching mayhem, and give Kiryu two different styles to switch between. The Dragon of Dojima is his standard style, made up of moves from across the franchise. This is a hand-to-hand style that’s all about decimating single enemies, beating them down with lengthy combos. The second style is a fascinating change for Kiryu. Called Ryukyu, this style uses over a dozen weapons from Okinawan martial arts, such as tonfa or tekko — and it largely focuses on crowd control and defense. It’s a nice way to shake things up.
Simultaneously, I was able to briefly play as the villain Yoshitaka Mine in the Dark Ties expansion. He equally puts a fascinating spin on combat with a distinct style that uses a mode called Dark Awakening and heart gauges to boost his power. He’s more lithe and agile than Kiryu, and honestly feels a bit like Akiyama from Yakuza 4 and 5.
Kiryu’s Ryukyu Style is one of the more interesting additions, a heavily defensive option for combat that feels genuinely different.
Now all this has likely sounded pretty good, right? It is. But there is one little issue that I couldn’t quite look past about my time — how Kiwami 3 sure feels a lot like every Yakuza game of the last five years. The series is, of course, built on the pillars of reusing assets and locations, and that’s not a problem at all. Part of the beauty of Yakuza is how different each game manages to be, while still using so many of the same elements. But I’m starting to feel Yakuza’s lack of true innovation more and more, especially from a tonal and aesthetic standpoint.
A big part of what made Yakuza 3 such a standout game is how different it is from pretty much anything else out there, even other Yakuza game’s. It’s deliberately slow opening hours open up to a dramatic epic about family and the most succinct view we’ve seen of Kiryu’s desire to leave a life of violence behind. At the same time, Yakuza 3 was a janky uneven game, but that was decidedly part of its charm — it had heart.
Yakuza has come a long way in technical terms, but for as revolutionary as 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon was — it feels like everything since then has been locked in its shadow. Tonally and stylistically, each entry since has tried to emulate what Like a Dragon accomplished, instead of veering off in wild new directions, like the series did before. And I don’t even have any problem with Kiwami 3 changing big story moments or plot points, remakes should feel free to be new interpretations. But even recurring elements like minigames have started to feel more like checklists of what a Yakuza game has to have, rather than thoughtful additions.
Mine’s combat style feels violent and aggressive, reflective of his character — and most of his side content revolves around battling.
But the point of all this is that by aligning Yakuza Kiwami 3 with the Yakuza 7-ization of the franchise, I worry that you might lose a bit of the original game’s heart. There are ideas I’m truly excited about here, especially expanding the orphanage stuff, but there’s a kind of grittiness and grunginess to Yakuza 3 that was special, translates through both the early PS3 era graphics and the chunky controls.
Sure, in a lot of ways I’d love a Yakuza 3 that both looks and plays amazing, but I do hope RGG Studio can keep the heart of the game intact. And that worry isn’t assuaged at all by the studio’s complete reluctance to comment on the immense fan backlash for Yakuza Kiwami 3, over casting actor Teruyuki Kagawa — who was convicted of accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019. The sheer lack of comment on the issue is something I feel needs to be pointed out, and whether it’s true or not, it gives off the impression of the studio being unwilling to change — which then, in turn, compounds my small worries of the Yakuza games being trapped in this same formula since the release of Yakuza 7 (which was also the last game series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi worked on before leaving Sega).
Okinawa remains one of the most visually distinct areas of the series, a look at what a calmer, peaceful life for Kiryu could be.
For the moment, I’m hopeful that Yakuza Kiwami 3 can be something special, it has the right ingredients. But I still need to see that the game knows how to put those ingredients together to make scrumptious dish. This updated version of Okinawa is visually stunning, and much of the side content holds real promise. But it’s also starting to feel like the series is trapped in a bubble since Yakuza 7, that it’s having trouble breaking free from.
