The final chapter in the street-fighting saga of ever-scowling Kazuma Kiryu, Yakuza 6: The Song of Life serves up a crime story that’s hard-boiled yet, for the most part, far more believable than the more melodramatic tales of previous games. Delivered with a new level of visual fidelity, it also makes its Tokyo and Hiroshima settings double as a pretty effective ‘look before you book’ service for the Japanese tourism industry. However, disappointingly simple combat and a list of meaningful gameplay additions so paltry they can be counted on a single hand (one that’s missing a couple of fingers at that) meant that I didn’t want to stick around to smell the ramen after the main story wrapped.
Yakuza 6’s plot snakes its way through the typical arm wrestling matches and betrayals of the power-hungry clans in the Japanese underground, and in doing so introduces a number of new heroes and villains. I was a little disappointed that several of the series’ major characters, such as the maniacal Majima, were relegated to a couple of brief cutscene cameos, but overall I found Kiryu’s search for the perpetrator of a hit-and-run attack on his stepdaughter Haruka emotionally gripping throughout. It did eventually veer into ridiculousness in its final hours, though, which was an odd tonal shift after primarily playing it straight for so long.The large number of objects like armchairs and mountain bikes you can pick up and break over someone’s head during a brawl does add some variety, and there are also often a lot more bodies on screen than ever before, making for more chaotic rumbles. The downside is that since the grab button is used for both grabbing enemies and objects, trying to put an enemy in a headlock all too often accidentally picks up the nearest potted plant instead, and that means you’re likely to take a kick to the solar plexus while your defenses are down.The fighting system may be shallow and saddled with some control issues, but at least it’s smoothly integrated into the flow of gameplay. Unlike previous Yakuza games, when you come upon a group of thugs during your neighbourhood stroll in Yakuza 6, there’s no loading screen to disrupt things; it’s just straight into the scrapping (or, alternatively, straight into you legging it down the nearest alleyway to avoid the encounter entirely). Similarly, there’s no break when moving from an exterior into an interior, and it’s a treat when fights that start in the street crash into the aisles of a nearby convenience store (often ending with Kiryu shoving an enemy face-first into a microwave). Yakuza 6 settles into a better moment-to-moment rhythm as a result.
Once back in Kamarucho there’s certainly more to do, although it’s still substantially less dense with diversions than previous Yakuza games. Yakuza Zero’s minigames like pool, bowling, hostess bar management, RC racing, and more have been jettisoned, replaced with a handful of less interesting additions like the cat cafe, which is cute yet ultimately little more than another form of fetch quest in a slightly fluffier guise.The meatiest gameplay addition is the Clan Creator minigame, which lets you you switch to a god view and direct your gang members in a scrap. You can recruit special units into your clan (by meeting them and knocking the stuffing out of them, of course), and in turn they provide unique abilities in each clan battle, such as healing or more powerful attacks. It’s a clever idea, but it doesn’t contribute much to Yakuza 6. As far as real-time strategy games go, Clan Creator is pretty light on strategy and low on challenge, and to me it felt at odds with Kiryu’s character in general. Why would he hang back and give orders to a group of grunts when he routinely lays waste to streetloads of thugs with his own two hands? I didn’t really feel compelled to play that mode through to completion as a result.
I did, however, enjoy the bulk of the side quests. Most of them riff on more contemporary themes than those found in last year’s Yakuza Zero and Yakuza Kiwami. Almost all of these random encounters result in Kiryu getting caught in surprising and often hilarious situations, whether he’s rescuing a selfie stick-toting YouTuber attempting increasingly life-threatening stunts for views, or chasing down a drone that’s been dive-bombing citizens on the streets. I particularly appreciated the ‘Troublr’ app that’s installed on Kiryu’s phone that alerts you to situations occurring nearby, which brings a lot of these little side stories directly to you rather than making you go in search of them.