Yakuza 3 Review

I just finished , and I'm pretty sure that I love it. The game looks a bit dated because it was released in Japan a while ago and SEGA took its sweet time getting it over here, the "beat all these guys up" gameplay can get repetitive, and the entire thing's in Japanese so you better be ready to read some subtitles. But, despite all of that, Yakuza 3 is a blast.

A blast where my first playthrough clocked in at more than 20 hours and I only completed 11 percent of everything there is to do in the game.

Yakuza 3 continues the adventures of Kazuma, a former bigwig in the Japanese mafia known as the Yakuza. After two games of dealing out beatdowns, Kaz has retired to the sunny shores of Okinawa to found an orphanage and live out his days rocking Hawaiian shirts. However, when a resort/military base proposal threatens his home for kids and some of Kaz's friends get shot by a guy that looks just like his dead dad, this former Yakuza chairman is out of retirement and busting jaws to get to the bottom of what's going on.

I've previewed Yakuza 3 a lot, but I think I've finally settled on describing it as a Grand Theft Auto/JRPG love child. You're getting this intense story about Japan's seedy underbelly that's set in an open world where you can take all sorts of side quests, but as you do so, random battles are popping up, you're earning experience points so you can level up your moves, and you can take stuff from your extensive inventory list and craft new weapons and armor. There are no cars or chocobos, but you see where I'm going with this -- one minute you're slamming a crowbar into a guy's face or tearing off a fingernail with pliers, and the next minute, you're taking photos to blog about or on a fetch quest to find a certain fish.

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It's a delicate balance between the two genres, but for the most part, it worked for me thanks to the game's three strong points