Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Time to bring on the next gen, October 30, 2006
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
Yakuza is a good game with some very fun elements, but suffers from camera and loading time issues.
In the game you are wandering around the Japanese entertainment district and getting into random fights. The only major problem with the overworld is the constant loading time. After 5-10 steps the camera switches to a different spot as you move down a street and loads up. Another few steps, more loading. Some street punk challenges you to a fight? 20-30+ seconds of loading time.
The fight control system is a bit cumbersome - you will often land the first punch of a series and then finish your combo by wildly swinging at the air. The camera is an issue since it mostly stays in place or shifts slightly while you are moving, rather than get behind you. You get used to the combat system quickly and some of the new abilities you can gain (like the ability to kick in any direction at the end of a combo) are designed to counter the flaws in the system. The real shining star in fights is the ability to use almost any item as a weapon: bikes, crates, signs, pipes, etc...
The story is a bit hokey and the voice talent sounds bored and passionless. Also there was no need for the amount of F-bombs that this game drops. I mean seriously, we get it - you are M for mature, but if there was no cursing I wouldn't be surprised at a Teen rating. Nothing more graphic than your average fighting game.
I look foward to Yakuza 2 (maybe in 07?). I have heard they got rid of most of the loading time, though I wonder why they couldn't have gotten rid of it here. If you don't get frustrated at the combat or long loading time than this is a great game.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Japan's Seedy Underworld Hits the PS2, October 13, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I really enjoyed playing Yakuza. The designers have taken a typical Japanese entertainment district and transported into the game, complete with convenience stores, hostess bars, strip clubs, pawn shops, etc - right down to the drinks machines on every street corner. They've also taken the criminal world of the Yakuza, stereotypes and all, and transported it into the game. Maybe it's because I live in Japan, but I got a real kick out of playing the "bad but honorable" main character in such familiar surroundings. The only real flaw is the camera control -- the camera gets flaky every once in a while. The player should have full camera control and the auto control could have used more polish. Also, the game earns it's M rating mostly due to language and sexual content and parents should exercise caution when considering buying it for children.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gets me in a personal soft spot, but objectively pretty good too., December 13, 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
I will concur with some of the other reviewers that say that this game is not quite what it could be. The gameplay is somewhat repetitive, but in a way that most brawler type gameplay is. It's a fun repetitive. It also has a nice modern-RPG feel to it, with the inclusion of certain aspects like buying food in restaurants or convenience stores to recover health, experience points, items, and the way money tends to work in the game. It's very cut-scene heavy at times, but the story and voice acting are surprisingly good, considering how bad both of those aspects have gotten to be in most recent games.
What I want to praise this game on the most is the detail and nuance with which it recreates its aesthetic setting. This was done absolutely superbly -- possibly the best representation of a real-world locale I have ever seen in a game. To compare, it is not as massively-accessible as the Grand Theft Auto games (San Andreas most of all), not as block-for-block tightly researched as True Crime or The Getaway, but it absolutely feels like the parts of Tokyo it sets out to feel like and it portrays not just a landscape that looks real but a living-breathing urban organism complete with crowd ambiance, realistic store fronts, and plenty of shops and businesses that can actually be accessed during the game. It makes the locales in the other games I mentioned feel generic and stale. I can't give this game enough praise for this aspect of its execution. It would be nice if the camera could be freely rotated while you wander around in the city (it can be rotated during battle sequences), and I would have liked the addition of some means of real-time transportation around a larger physical area (namely vehicles, whether cars or a subway), but it's easy to ignore the lack in these cases by how much is delivered within the lush, zoomed-in frame the game designers decided to take. I'd really like to see this game set the standard for future instances of games that have a player traveling around a large-scale urban setting (like GTA, The Getaway, True Crime, whatever) in terms of NPC activity, ambiance, and detail.
Why I don't give it five stars is because I think that this is the only part of the game worth praising so heavily. Nothing else about it is bad, but if it didn't have the fantastic attention to detail in setting and aesthetics, it would almost be a mediocre game. Gameplay consists of walking, brawling, and RPG-style two-or-three choice multiple-choice dialogues that effect side stories and certain scenes (something I'm happy to see in a game considering that the industry seems to stopped including details like these), and that's about it. The fight system is fun but could be better. All in all a good start for a franchise, and a real breath of fresh air cross-genre piece that's somewhere between Grand Theft Auto, River City Ransom, and Shenmue.
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