Reviews// Yakuza (PS2)

You get to fight people an awful lot. In fact, we would go so far to say that battling is the most prominent gameplay feature in Yakuza, with about 90% of all missions and situations you face being settled with a smack in the chops. It really doesn’t matter though, because far from making the game appear tedious, SEGA's done what it does best and completely arcade-ified the fighting system. Battles take place in a set arena, with awesome pumping music that only this developer seems capable of consistently pulling out of the hat, pitting Kazuma (usually) against many foes.

Attacks are limited to Square and Triangle, yet with successive and consecutive presses you can form combos such as roundhouse kicks and faceplants. Circle is your grab and throw move, and Kazuma can use the attack buttons to smash his opponents while he’s grabbing them. You can lock-on, block and dodge attacks using the shoulder buttons. Hitting goons will increase a blue ‘HEAT’ meter, which can allow you to cause devastating moves once filled – for instance, grabbing an enemy, walking towards a wall, truck, car, railing, metal barrel (you get the picture) and pressing Triangle will have Kazuma ram his victim’s face against said surface, causing plenty of damage. You can even use items littered around the city and rooms as weapons – anything from chairs and bins to crates and neon signs.

It’s not a perfect system by any means – the lock-on can be a little dodgy sometimes as it doesn’t automatically direct your attention to a new enemy (or even the same enemy if they dodge and run behind you) and the analogue stick’s somewhat erratic nature can at times mean your assaults will not always be as accurate as you would like them to be – but you ignore the faults for one simple reason; It’s hilarious fun. When you defeat the last enemy and the slow-motion steps in once you’ve stomped on that enemy Yakuza’s face for the last time, you can’t help but feel overcome with a sense of joy.

And just like an RPG, you can gain experience points and "level up" too – three different upgrade factors can be filled in, from replenishing your HEAT gauge, to giving you more strength and earning you more attack moves. You can turn Kazuma into a real hardnut over time, and many new moves will be used to the maximum, such as a running drop kick. Make no mistake, you will get into a fight most times – to make the game less boring as you’re making your way around, street punks will step up and try to mess you up. It can be a nuisance sometimes if you just want to find something or get somewhere, but luckily they’re about as frequent as random battle triggers in Final Fantasy, and even then you can easily spot hoodlums as they’re standing in the street frozen until you walk past them. If you don’t want them to bother you can usually outrun them and be on your way.

Outside the story and the fighting, you can gamble in casinos, go to Club SEGAs and use the UFO Catchers (those claw-based fluffy toy grabbers) or even grab a drink in whisky bars where you can get drunk, shown via an indicator in the corner. If you compare this to another SEGA classic, Shenmue, there’s not really as much extra stuff to do if you don’t like gambling, but it doesn’t really matter because in most cases you’ll be wanting to do the story or a sub-quest you’re undertaking, rather than trying to see what else is on offer.

All in all, Yakuza is an extremely tight production, with a massive story mode - and an addictively engaging one at that. It has awesome music and a voice cast that, for a change, doesn’t suck, with Michael Madsen and Mark Hamill lending their lungs to the cast list. We cleared it in around 16 hours first time, just blazing through without accepting most sub-quests, but after that we were free to explore minor missions at our leisure, enter fighting tournaments or even playing through the whole game again.

What really happened to Kazuma’s Yakuza world while he was in the joint? Where did the girl you are currently protecting come from? Why is everyone trying to kill each other? It’s something you want to discover as you bond with the characters, scoff down some beef noodles, glug down some Staminan X and watch weird Japanese adverts on Theatre Avenue.


SPOnG Score: A

Toshihiro Nagoshi is really proving himself to be a formidable game producer. In Yakuza, he has created a game that rivals Shenmue in the story department, but is more like Streets of Rage in the gameplay side. A perfect blend of arcade beat 'em up action and engaging story-led plot devices.