When I played Yakuza Kiwami 2 I said “I’m definitely not going to leave it as long to play Yakuza 3”. That was a year and three months ago! It’s technically true though, I did try to play Yakuza 3 remastered quite a while ago but found it a real slog. The games I had played leading up to this one were the “Kiwami” remakes in a new engine. Yakuza 3 was the first game I played in its original form. The fighting was very frustrating, lacking the depth of the previous entries I had played. All the enemies seemed to block every attack without much opportunity to do anything about it as well. Recently Sega released this version, a proper ground-up remake of 3.
The female police officer from 2, Kaoru Sayama, was effectively written out of this game. In the beginning section she tells Kiryu that she is moving to the US for her work, and then is not heard from again. That felt pretty disappointing. I particularly liked their relationship.
In this game Kiryu moves to Okinawa with Haruka to run an orphanage. Okinawa is a beautiful sunny place with a gorgeous beach. Kiryu is cooking, helping the children with their homework, talking them through their life struggles, and leaving his Yakuza life behind. This was all extremely charming and relaxing. Obviously this was never going to last though, and the local Yakuza family end up needing his help. This ends up leading to a story involving politicians planning to tear down his orphanage to build a resort and military base. It turns out that this is a plot to root out a secret arms smuggling organisation, and involves a traitor in the Tojo clan that Kiryu used to be the chairman of.
There are several new characters in this entry. Rikiya is the young and eager captain of the Ryudo family, and Nakahara is its patriarch. There are a variety of antagonists back in Kamurocho. Kanda is the psychopath head of the Nishikiyama family, and there are also Mine and Hamazaki, who are both scheming to be the new patriarch. Mine is an interesting character. He grew up with no close loved ones and had learned not to trust anyone. He gets his own backstory in the Dark Ties expansion. In it Daigo Dojima sees the potential in him when he is helping Kanda rebuild the Nishikiyama family. He finally teaches Mine that there are people out there that do not treat everyone as a commodity to be exploited.
I particularly liked this entry. The orphanage was frequently touching, the setting was beautiful and I enjoyed the sub-story about running a local girl gang. This time I really plan to move on to Yakuza 4 more quickly than I did for this one.
