Which means you can unlock special moves with names like “essence of guitar” or “essence of comedy” in which that ally will throw you a useful weapon in the middle of a brawl, with which to knock out some teeth. After helping a person-in-need on the street, they sometimes pledge themselves as an “ally”. Although some techniques do compliment the wackiness of fights. But here it’s replaced by a plain, workmanlike table which makes levelling-up an unexciting exercise of picking the next vaguely useful technique you can afford. It laid everything out in a cheery map of punching techniques. The skill tree behind those styles is also gone. So the disappearance of that variety box of moves makes dust-ups feel leaner but less colourful. In Yakuza, the biffing is repetitive by its nature, and you basically have to swap things around and try out newly unlocked moves to stay sane. I miss swapping between those different punchforms. ![]() The different fighting styles (the hulking Beast style, the speedy Rush style, and so on) are all gone, replaced with one straightforward style of pugilism. There is a major and, I’d say, lamentable difference in the brawling. “You always try to punch your problems,” observes one of Kiryu’s early frenemies. Those context-sensitive finishing skullcracks, screen-shaking finales of assault and battery that see you breaking a litter bin over a man’s cowering body, or crunching his head into the nearest van. You can still pick up traffic cones or plant pots or bikes and use them to smack your attackers over the bonce. You can hold down ‘Y’ to charge up a special dropkick attack (“REAL YAKUZA USE A GAMEPAD”, as the game screams in its opening splash screen). ![]() You perform light punches, heavy kicks, and grabs, wild throws that launch foes into wooden benches. Street-fighting is still the universal problem solver, and it’s a bit less wild to control this time. Not that Kiryu will admit it, he’s too busy being a gold-hearted thug with fists of steel. Like the previous game, you team up with a cop, but this time it’s a hardened orphan-turned-detective Sayama, who normally likes to incarcerate her mobsters, not work with them. This time Kiryu is trying to prevent all-out war between the two major Yakuza factions of east and west Japan. “Now he knows not to trust anyone,” the conspirator explains to a lackey. It has a plot so refreshingly stupid and elaborate that, at one point, a cool-headed crime boss hires a man to shoot at you from a rooftop – but purposefully miss - just to keep you on your toes. A melodrama of slow zooms, brimming over with orphans, secret bookcases, no-nonsense matriarchs, wise old men and any other archetype or cliché you can throw a giant comedy vase at. It’s Grand Theft Auto, except there are no cars and the protagonist is not an unlikeable asshat.Īs the opening moments suggest, it is another outlandish criminal caper with all the incredulity of a telenovela. It’s the second entry (or third - it's complicated) in the story of Kiryu, a former crime man who punches his way through the fictional city district of Kamurocho. Yakuza Kiwami 2, for those even slower than I, is another remake of the old Yakuza games. I’m so glad to have embraced these soapy games of chucklesome violence. And those spasms have kept coming, ten hours into the rib-cracking and advice-dispensing. This is how the first big laugh of Kiwami 2 attacked my torso. But the yes or no choice in the middle of a grave visit, the suggestion that this is how memory works, that you can just tap the d-pad in your cerebral cortex and select “no” - it’s all too much. It’s offering a catch-up video to watch, a kind of “previously on Yakuza Kiwami”. “Remember the events of one year ago?” it asks. In that same opening scene, before the bad men show up, a giant dialogue box pops up as you inspect one of the graves. ![]() Yakuza games, I have happily learned, are a tour de folly, as ridiculous as they are lovable. Then a bunch of mobsters with guns show up and you kick them all in the belly. You bow your head and inspect the graves. It’s a sombre moment, a cemetery visit with your adoptive daughter to pay respects to loved ones killed in terrible circumstances. As caring dad hero, Kiryu, you’re visiting the resting place of those who died at the end of the previous game. ![]() The first thing you do in Yakuza Kiwami 2 is walk through a graveyard.
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