Yakuza Kiwami 3 spoils an interesting remake with odd changes and an abysmally misjudged recast

I adore the Yakuza games. You explore a small slice of Tokyo, get into constant OTT fistfights, and help weirdos with bizarre problems. Like, say, distracting a bunch of children so a living statue can sneak off to take a dump without traumatising them.

2009’s Yakuza 3 sees recurring protagonist Kazuma Kiryu quitting the yakuza (oh, has it already been a week?) to run an orphanage in a small seaside town. This new equilibrium doesn’t last and soon Kiryu is wrapped up in yet another absurd plot involving many furious men punching each other, killing each other, and slapping each other around with bicycles.

Sorry, did I say ‘soon’? That implies a level of pacing that Yakuza 3 sorely lacks. It’s plagued by endless exposition-heavy cutscenes and simulates a boring seaside town far too well. Throw in stiff, repetitive combat and you have a game that’s too often about as fun as seeing what happens after you call an actual yakuza a cuck. Too crass? You might not like the remake, Yakuza Kiwami 3, then, because that’s now a thing that happens.

Kiwami 3 is not just a nice visual makeover. It massively expands on the original, filling a slightly empty game with all the nonsense modern Yakuza has to offer. So Kiryu now gets a handset upgrade that lets him shoot pink lasers from his flipphone to become ‘Lalala friends’ with strangers. Tons of new side quests have been added, so you can’t even walk past a burger joint without a lovesick dope begging you to help him woo the checkout girl.

Instead of being a sedate seaside resort, Okinawa now boasts rival girl biker gangs, and guess who gets roped into being the de facto leader of one? Plus it’s now technically a 2008 period piece, which the writers have a lot of fun with. One tech bro smugly brags that he’s working in the exciting field of 3D television which is clearly going to be the future. Oof.

It’s thrown a bunch more fights into the critical path, with combat that’s about five million times more fun than it was in the original. There’s all the usual punching, kicking, and burying-a-bicycle-in-someone’s-skull-ing, along with a joyously dumb new combat style. I particularly like Kiryu’s AOE attack where he slaps punks around with a giant oar he pulls out of nowhere.

It’s a lot easier than the original, but most of the original’s difficulty came from it being a dick. It loved throwing bosses at you with long combat combos that would obliterate your health bar, or spawning gits who would smack you with chairs repeatedly. Kiwami 3 has less teeth—just gums really—but at least I’m not lobbing a PS3 controller furiously at my screen anymore.

The orphanage is the beating heart of the original game, but also incredibly tedious. Too many fetch quests or ‘search the town for the child’ missions with absolutely no guidance on where the little bastard could be. I had a good feeling they’d nail Kiryu’s relationship with the children in this go-around. Because right at the very start, when Kiryu and his adopted daughter Haruka explore, he now holds her hand whenever you slow down (if you’re not tearing up reading this, find a therapist).

All the children’s fetch quests are gone. Instead, the orphanage is now where you’ll find most of the minigames. You can farm crops, cook meals, sew clothes, help with homework, and even play a Game Gear in Kiryu’s room, if you fancy reminding yourself why no one should be nostalgic for the Game Gear.

Some of these minigames are getting very familiar—you’ll recognise the cooking if you played Pirate Yakuza last year—but the children do give them more charm. Doing an exam in recent Yakuzas is fine, but it's a lot more endearing as ‘homework help’ here, with one of Kiryu’s younglings constantly chipping in with the wrong answers and cheering with you when you get it right.

Success in the minigames gradually increases your ‘daddy rating’ (uh huh) and helps you bond with the children, opening up their new quests. A nice idea, but bonding takes a little too much busywork for my liking. I got tired of bug-catching and hacking Kiryu’s poor fingers open on the sewing machine long before I’d bonded enough with all the kids to see their stories. They can’t help feeling sidelined now they’re all off the critical path, too.

One thing they really should have kept was the excellent photography sidequest. You’d get texts in Yakuza 3 telling you about some oddball to track down. Highlights include a grandma who’s too horny to keep her eyes on the road, and a father desperately trying to stop his son dragging him into a toy store (it sells adult toys, y’see). Witnessing these amazing events would reward you with a new combat move. They were Yakuza 3 at its sublimely silly best.

And they’re completely, bafflingly absent from Kiwami 3. Instead, you get the same boring ‘take photos of stationary locations’ task that’s been in the last three Yakuza’s. This is remake philosophy at its worst, sanding down interesting bits of an original to create something more consistent with your modern titles. Indulge in too much of that and you just end up making all your games feel the same.

Considering how much of Kiwami 3 plays around with and remixes key moments, the smart choice would have been to bundle it with the Yakuza 3 remaster. Instead, Sega are inexplicably pulling that from individual sale. Kiwami 3 instead comes bundled with Dark Ties, a new short campaign played from the perspective of Mine, one of the key villains.

There’s some novelty in playing as the bad guy, and I do like Mine’s kick-heavy combat style, which lets you send enemies flying into the air and keep punching them before they’ve hit the ground. Mine’s story follows his rise through the yakuza, something he achieves by teaming up with Kanda, possibly the most repulsive character in the series’ entire history.

Kanda is introduced in the main game, both in the original and the remake, assaulting a woman off-camera. In Kiwami 3 he now also strangles a woman to death. A lot of Dark Ties is spent trying to improve the reputation of this monster by doing odd jobs around town, like bowling a strike because a woman wants to see one and her boyfriend can’t seem to pull it off.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. Tasteless? Ditto, and this is usually the part of a Yakuza recommendation where I cough and stop making eye contact with you. Where I concede the games use women too much as victims of appalling crimes purely for character motivation or to establish its villains as irredeemable. “B-but the script is so funny and progressive otherwise!” I’d usually weakly whine. “It’s heart is in the right place.”

That argument isn’t going to work this time. Because a major part in Kiwami 3 has been recast with an actor, Teruyuki Kagawa, who was revealed to have committed sexual assault involving groping a hostess in a nightclub (warning that if you follow that link, the details are really grim).

And now he’s starring in a game where his character mocks another character for serving time for sexual assault crimes. A game where one side quest has Kiryu exacting street justice on someone for groping a hostess in a nightclub. This series once wouldn’t let Kiryu appear in crossover fighting games because they didn’t want him hitting women, but this is fine?

So Kiwami 3 ends up being a remake that I’d feel grubby recommending. If you don’t want to support a game that’s cast an actor like that, then given this bizarre interview about Kagawa which addresses none of the reasons why people are angry about his casting, perhaps consider giving your money instead to the best unofficial Yakuza game starring Kazuma Kiryu from last year.