Developer: Sega of Japan
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: Out Now
Players: One
Words By:
Imagine if you will, as you read this review, that every time you come to the end of a sentence you have to press SPACE on your keyboard. Then imagine that the next sentence appears at a speed that would be ideal should you be getting a young child to learn to read accompanied by a grating sound effect that's rather like a typewriter. Finally imagine this happening over and over… and over again for well over 2 hours! Got that? Sound irritating? Brilliant, You are now some way of knowing how I felt during my first few hours on Yakuza 3.
Yakuza 3 is a game I was actually looking forward to, having fond memories of the first game on the PS2 – it is, as the name cleverly suggests, the third in the Yakuza series and the story follows on from the previous two titles (if you have not played them you can recap the stories in-game here). As before it’s an adventure game set—supposedly—in a living breathing world full of unique clever and fun things to do. I say ‘supposedly’ as, to be fair, it does pretty much what Shenmue did years back and uses “mini games” to try and overcome the dullness that soon creeps in as you walk around a world that again does its best to mimic Shenmue by not looking much better than the Dreamcast classic.Sadly our hero, Kazuma, isn't as likeable as Ryo was either.
As you can see I personally have not been taken by Yakuza 3. It got me off to a bad start with the dialogue thing. The vast majority is all in text boxes (speech is only used for actual cut scenes) the text slowly filling up the box accompanied by the previously mentioned “most annoying sound effect ever”. Pressing ‘X’ speeds this up to an unreadable skip and it’s no word of a lie that my entire first 45 minutes of the game was pretty much this nonstop, text box after text box, annoying sound after annoying sound, with me just tapping X as much as I could.
I persevered though, and eventually got to my first bit of the actual game, a tutorial fight with three of the most stereotypical Japanese goons you could hope to meet. The fights, to be fair, are rather enjoyable, it’s rather easy to button bash but you soon learn how to create some impressive looking combos. The fights are also made more fun by being able to use the environment as a weapon against the bad guys and, unlike the dialogue, bouncing someone's head off a lamp post never gets old or boring. As the game progresses you earn XP which you can use to increase your character’s moves and attack potential—these start off good so imagine how they can end up.
It’s a good job though that the fights are enjoyable, you seem to be in one every five minutes or so, if you’re not tapping X to move the dialogue along you’re in yet another fight with a generic bunch of fools. And that's the main problem with the game; it’s just so repetitive, one section of the game actually sees you spending the best part of an hour wandering around trying to make a dog happy! It would have been better if the outcome of this “quest” was actually rather good, but it’s not, it’s bad (and also rather illogical).
That’s my problem with the game as a whole, it’s just far too much going from A to B with far too many random encounters which soon prove the old adage of “too much of a good thing”. The game world is huge but that does not matter as despite some fun side games it’s just too boring and repetitive, there are far too many invisible walls that form the borders of locations that look much bigger than they actually are, and travelling from one location to the other is often done in a loading screen - GTA: Yakuza this isn't.
Never did the game actually grab me, never did it suck me in and make me want to continue playing. As with every other game on the market right now QTEs make an appearance and add some variety, but the only reason I persevered was because I was writing this review and wanted to see if things would get better. Looking around the net I realise I am in the minority, and that the game does seem to have gained a large following out there, but I personally fail to see why. The game is slow, the script awful (like one of those badly dubbed movies you may have watched as a kid) and the whole experience is just laborious. My gaming hours are precious, so if I boot up a game I want to be able to know I will enjoy myself, I don't mind investing hundreds of hours into a game (as I have done with likes of Oblivion or Fallout 3 for example) as long as I get rewarded. A game in which almost nothing happens but dialogue box after dialogue box for an hour or more is not one I imagine drawing gamers in.
Yakuza 3 really feels like a last-gen game, and as if that wasn't enough us UK & European gamers have had twelve-month wait for it to be released. The game does get better as it progresses but I am talking six hours or so, and this is just too long to be expected to play again before anything of note or merit happens. Yakuza 3 is a confused game that just doesn’t know what it wants to be and it’s up against some very stiff competition from other PS3 exclusives right now, from games that share gameplay elements with Yakuza 3 but are all vastly more impressive both technically and visually, and also play better (Heavy Rain, God of War III and the latest Final Fantasy).
Best Bits
- Well… the fights play well.
Worst Bits
- Awful, slow text dialogue. - No option for an English language soundtrack. - Far too dull and repetitive. - Characters that moonwalk.
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