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Could have been worse, and could have been a whole lot better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: September 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Yakuza is one of those games that's loaded with promise but ultimately comes up short in it's delivery. The fact alone that we have a violent beat 'em up revolving around the murderous Yakuza is the recipe for some good gaming, and while Yakuza isn't a bad game one bit, it could have been so much more. Those who remember the original Shenmue from way back when will no doubt recognize gameplay elements here (which shouldn't be surprising considering this is from SEGA) as you're out on a mission of revenge against those who have wronged you. The game looks good enough despite some small glitches here and there, but the controls are unresponsive to a point. Not to mention that the in-game camera will sometimes go schizoid on you without warning, which needless to say detracts from the gameplay. Yakuza's storyline is interesting enough, and the vocie actors (including Michael Madsen, Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamil, and Michael Rosenbaum) do well, but the dialogue that they have been given is atrocious. There is so much cursing in Yakuza that this is easily the most foul mouthed action game to come along in a long time (and that's saying something) which also detracts from the gameplay as opposed to giving it a gritty environment. However, there's a lot of upside to Yakuza as well. The small RPG elements work well, and the fighting engine used is fairly good, and the game has some length to it as well. All in all, Yakuza is definitely worth a look, but this game surely could have been much better.

Japan's Seedy Underworld Hits the PS2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: October 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

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.

An excellent suitable game for Play Station 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: September 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

In this game your player's name is Kiryuu Kazuma who is also known as "Dragon of the Dojima Family". In this the people of different families will try to beat you if you go near them and they will say "Hey! You". In this you will also face Street Punks, Yakuza etc. In this you can beat your enemies with Golf Sticks, Bats, Iron Bars, with heavy objects and much more. In this there is our friend 'Nishiki' who later becomes our enemy. In this you can by yourself food, weapons and armor for your protection etc. You can play lice and some other video games in the clubs. For eg. SEGA Club. In this you will enjoy beating up punks or gangsters. But you will get tired after some time beating them up and up. You would be enjoying power upping or upgrading your player. In the first stage we have to collect some debt from a finance president. This is actually a training level. You will see that it we can play the game in freestyle mode wherever you want to go. This is a secret that I'm going to tell you now that in the game you will start with normal difficulty which can be turned into easy difficulty by losing some of the battles and keep retrying for that fight, after certain time it will ask you that whether you want to change it to easy difficulty or not. IMPORTANT thing is that you cannot reverse it back to normal difficulty. Advantages of easy difficult are as follows:

1. Lesser enemies.

2. Enemies will do minimal or less damage to you.

This game is not recommended for children as in the game there are very abusive languages used. THIS REVIEW WOULD BE HELPFUL TO YOU!

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

Get ready to rumble...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Ever wanted to live the life of a yakuza enforcer without worrying about losing a finger due to a moment of dishonor? Yakuza for the PS2 gives you the closest experience you're likely to have. This blend of Shenmue with a GTA-lite touch (eat to regain health) immerses you in a sprawling Japanese city that has you trying to solve the mystery of what happened to your old "family" and who stole 10 billion yen of yakuza money. Along the way are side missions, mini-games and random fights with street punks to help build up your stats. Wander the streets, romance some ladies, beat the snot out of some thugs and play some games or gamble - it's all good.

As other reviews have noted, the fighting engine is a bit whack but is easy to compensate for after a few battles (and to be fair in comparison, it's still better than melee fighting in GTA although there is no lock-on feature). Locking into certain animations when you miss your target can leave you open to counter attacks, but the same goes for your foes, so it all balances out in the end. The battles are still a lot of fun, whether using strategy or button mashing to eliminate your enemies. And of course it's always fun to pick up objects - bikes, lanterns, metal pipes, golf clubs, etc. - to beat your smart-mouthed opponents into subservience.

As also noted in other reviews, this game is rated M and NOT for kids - primarily due to the language. Seriously, many of the characters drop the f-bomb every three to five words in a sentence - it's almost as if Quentin Tarantino wrote the dialogue. Overall however, this game is a fun romp through gangland Japan. A sequel is set to be released December 2006 in Japan and should appear in North America late 2007 - hopefully the minor problems have been fixed. Either way, I'll be looking forward to playing it when it arrives.

Time to bring on the next gen

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: October 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

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.

One of the last greatest PS2 games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: September 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I picked this game up yesterday and once I started playing I couldn't stop. The game is very realistic and you can go anywhere you choose. You can go to the batting cage, or the casino, or talk to ladies. Most of all however, you can fight with puncks and gangsters. While fighting, just about anything around you is a weapon. Bats, Bikes, trashcans, golf clubs, and much more. And if you are a story fan, then Yakuza has a fantastic story. I'll let you see that for yourself. Even if I have been saying all these great things about it, it still has problems. Load times are so annoying and there is just to much language, it gets so old. This is not a game for kids. Overall Yakuza is one of the best PS2 games left.

Yakuza

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: September 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

THIS GAME IS AWSOME!!!!!!!!!!!Pros:Great combat,movie-like,Terrific Dramatic stoyline.Cons:Terrible camera,michael madsen just doesn't fit the voice of a crime boss,bad language gets old.But this is still a good game,I like the freshness the most,though

Good story which suffers from rather poor delivery

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Yakuza follows the life of Kiryuu Kazuma, a Soldier in a prominent Yakuza family. After his beloved Yumi is kidnapped and nearly killed by the Oyabun of the family, Kazuma covers for the murder of the Oyabun by one of his friends. After emerging from prison 10 years later, the story really begins, as Kazuma searches for Yumi, and 10 billion yen stolen from the Yakuza families, while fighting off other Yakuza out for revenge, not to mention his former friends, who've turned into cold blooded monsters while he was incarcerated.

Anyone who has played the Bouncer or Fatal Fury, or any other progressive brawler will like this. The controls are overly simplistic, but it does present a challenge if you don't play it smart. People will jump you in groups of twos and threes, and attack with enviroment weapons such as chairs and golf clubs (You're in Japan. Golf clubs count as part of the environment pretty much). There're many well done special attacks, and your character progresses at a decent pace, learning new attacks and abilities.

The problems are more with control and camera work. The camera is somewhat static and oddly placed at times, and is impossible to move at times. The fighting controls are somewhat haphazard, and you frequently launch attacks at an enemies side rather than striking them. Some aspects aren't explained well, and you could easily be lost in the new cultural concepts of the Yakuza, not that it makes any difference to the game itself it seems, but it'd be nice to know why you are getting bows and groveling one moment, and bullets in your back the next.

Overall, the game is solid, with a good story, and rather inventive sidequests, though the constant attempts at mugging get old very quickly (who in their right mind robs a gangster to begin with) and several moves are fun to watch (the special attacks with the Thermos and the umbrella in particular). Considering this is retailing new now for around $20, it is worth the price.

Gets me in a personal soft spot, but objectively pretty good too.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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.

Entertaining to the max

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Yakuza is really a work of art. Its an awesome Japanese theatrical-style game that could be compared to grand theft auto, but its really quite different. You are Kazuma, this dude that just finished his 10-year prison sentence for murdering his boss(which he didn't actually do). There is an awesome plot and some really talented voice actors. You can progress with the game as you please, fighting people and doing other cool stuff on the side. When not progressing through the plot, you can go to bars and get Kazuma hammered, go to the arcade, fight people, and check out babes at hostess bars. Lots of cool secrets and items. The whole game is just amazing and its taken me quite some time to beat it. I'd definately recommend renting or buying this. Can't wait for yakuza 2 to be released in the US

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