Year of Games #7: Yakuza 5 Remastered

God, I’ve played a lot of Yakuza games over the past couple of years. This is the fourth title I’ve managed to finish since last autumn, and it feels like I’m hitting a wall of sorts. I think it’s easy to get overwhelmed in the process of experiencing just one of these games. Everything from the setting to the side stories is so densely packed that the prospect of seeing most of it, nevermind the game in its entirety, just seems so daunting. But that’s not why I feel like I’m hitting a wall here.

The basic premise of most Yakuza games tends to follow a specific formula: the big players of the game are introduced, we learn of the crime at the center of everything, then the game makes you spend a dozen or so hours slowly building up Kiryu and friends’ power and unraveling everything until you reach the final showdown. The final showdown, by the way, fucking rocks every time, just from an emotional standpoint. But this is the formula, and even when RGG Studio has made modifications to the formula, the basic structure remains.

With Yakuza 5, we split our time between five separate characters in five separate cities: Kiryu in Nagasugai (Fukuoka), Saejima in Tsukimino (Sapporo), ex-baseball player Tatsuo Shinada in Kineicho (Nagoya), Shun Akiyama and Haruka Sawamura in Sotenbori (Osaka) and everybody gathering in Kamurocho (Shinjuku). Each character gets a roughly equivalent four-chapter section of the game, with their own set of side-missions and sub-stories. Each section is pulling some hefty loads, having to do a bunch of characterization and narrative moving-and-shaking at high speeds just to make sure everything makes sense and connects at the end. RGG Studio largely pulls it off, but not without some sacrifices, and this might be the closest game I’ve come to in the series (aside from Lost Judgment) where things just didn’t land for me.

What I can’t deny is that Yakuza 5 delivers on one of the things I look for in these games, which I will quote from my review of Lost Judgment: “the high melodrama of watching big beefy dudes brawling to protect the things and people they love.” You get that in spades here. Loads of peak emotional moments and surprisingly tender scenes featuring shirtless, tattooed musclemen throwing the fuck down for each other. It’s flawed, but easy to love.

This was also the first Yakuza game where I felt like I could see the Big Theme of the story – “Dreams” – from space. Dreams sit at the heart of every character’s motivations in Yakuza 5, from Kiryu’s deferred dream of living a life free of yakuza bullshit with his family to Shinada’s ruined dream of playing pro baseball to Haruka’s dream-in-progress of being a pop idol. Dreams: everyone has them, even the incarcerated Saejima. And the conflict in the game stems from each of these protagonists’ dreams coming under threat. Dreams are powerful; they can cause characters to make major moral compromises, betray each other, and even stand fully at odds with one another. Dreams are a source of strength and a major vulnerability. Dreams can motivate and utterly drain you.

But to what end do the characters in Yakuza 5 get to attain their dreams? Kiryu realizes he can never run away from his life as a one-time yakuza kingpin. Haruka gives up on being a pop idol to spend time with Kiryu – itself a dream that will end up unfulfilled. Shinada will never go back to baseball, even as his search for the truth is satisfied. Akiyama is the only fully-actualized person in the game, someone whose dream came true years before (during the final showdown of Yakuza/Yakuza Kiwami) and who now helps other people realize their own dreams. It’s never simple. It can’t be. As much as these games are absolute fantasies, their grounding in realism has to occasionally put in some work. There are no happy endings.

Whether it’s the scope, the repetitive nature of the story, or the incessant reminders that the theme of the game is “dreams,” Yakuza 5 finds itself often reaching for the stars but falling just short. However, its dogged earnestness and tender moments ultimately won me over.