Finished Yakuza 5.

It’s great. Also kind of a mess.

The gameplay is excellent and it’s a joy to play, though the new Climax Heat feature turns out to be completely useless due to the fact it’s mapped to the same button as regular Heat moves, so you’ll inevitably end up wasting it on a mook who’s already near death.

The individual fighting styles are nice and diverse, though Akiyama gets the short end of the stick, since all his best techniques require him to kick someone into the air first, which never works on the bosses, though to be honest, apart from Kiryu’s, none of the heat modes are really worth using.

The difficulty wasn’t very impressive. I was playing on hard and the only thing I found even slightly challenging was Akiyama’s final boss, which was largely due to Akiyama’s combat style not being very great for bosses. Meanwhile, Saejima was an absolute beast in combat, and Kiryu (though the improved Komaki Tiger Drop completely broke bossfights) and Shinada could handle themselves just fine.

The story starts off great, with highlights such as the 100 Tojo Brawl, Saejima fistfighting a bear, and all of Shinada and Takasugi’s interactions, but they don’t really manage to tie it all into the finale, and it just falls flat. Only two out of the four final bosses have any real impact, and to be honest, using Majima is cheating given that he’s always been awesome ever since the first game, but at least Baba’s scene was great.

Other than that, the plot just ends up growing overly complicated and full of needless twists throughout the final chapter, to the point where I just stopped caring about any of it.

Haruka’s chapter, though, is probably the worst part of the game. I enjoyed her gameplay sections, but the story’s just a mess. The weakest part is probably Mirei Park’s character, since it feels like they just didn’t know what they wanted to do with her character. Her character ends up trying to be both a surrogate mother figure to Haruka but also a thoroughly unpleasant and dishonourable figure that makes the yakuza look good by comparison, but you can’t really have someone lowkey threaten the orphans and also try to be a mother figure at the same time, so she just comes across as the worst protagonist-aligned character in the entire game.

It doesn’t help that while her death, while not deserved, is ultimately the consequence of her own willingness to screw other people over for her personal gain, and given that she apparently had a falling-out with every single dance instructor in the area, I have a hard time believing the fault was with Ogita and not her. And it’s pretty bad when your murderer ends up coming across as more sympathetic than you do.

Worse yet, after her death, everyone just keeps talking about how great and amazing she is, and how they all want to fulfil her dream through Haruka, which is probably my single most hated kind of writing. It’s not helped by the fact that Haruka’s supposed dream to be an idol came out of basically nowhere, given that there wasn’t really anything in the previous games to support it, so even that looks like Park was just projecting her own dream onto Haruka.

Her character is just a mess all around.

Also, they really should’ve given Haruka a gameplay segment in the finale, because after spending her entire chapter hyping up the big concert in the Tokyo Dome, and then making it absolutely central to the plot, before making the actual song just a cutscene that doesn’t even feature any real dancing, is just entirely wasted potential. They could’ve easily fit it in between some of the final boss fights, but now she just ended up feeling out of place in the protagonist lineup.

Really though, like I said, Yakuza 5 is great, but they could really afford a better scriptwriter, because it’s just been a massive mess after Yakuza 2.