Yakuza 4 thoughts

[temris]

I forgot to cross post my entries from my DW acc. Well, if it shows something, it’s that using three different blogs to post the same thing was a bad idea. I just don’t know which platform would be best for me. I think a lot about deleting DW and now I am contemplating it again lol (and I’ve already done that once!)

Anyway, the point isn’t my choosing problem. The point is that I finally finished Yakuza 4!

If it’s not apparent enough, Yakuza 3 was probably my favorite to play in the series. I had just finished off 2′s bonkers story and was more than enthusiastic to slip right into seeing Kiryu bonding with the kids in the orphanage. It was everything I dreamed of. The combat was so much fun. Revelations were an excellent addition and getting them was very fun also.

Not sure if it's because how much enamored I was with 3 that caused me not to fall back into the series with 4 soon, or the fact that I wanted to play the other games I wanted to inbetween, but it took me like 6 months to play this one. I had only started playing DMC3 then but that game was hard af, so I wanted to check if my potato PC could run Y4 - turns out, it struggles big time. First day, I played with the settings to get it to working and voila, hello, Akiyama-san.

I then (for no reason at all) went to play Splinter Cell and that was the biggest mistake of my life. Because I absolutely loved it. And couldn't think of any other game until I finished it around 10 days (hey, I suck). Anyway, that already has its own entry so I won't talk about it again. Then, I finished DMC3 and then finally went back into Y4 almost a month later again.

It didn't take me long to find out the problems with the excessive RAM usage this game is guilty for. The problem gets especially apparent once you get to the hostess clubs. It costs me two loading screen being stuck for me to finally understand that it wasn't because of my PC...

The different protagonists aspect of the gameplay is, well, interesting. But for my dumb brain, every time I got used to one fighting style, it changed and I was back to square one :D But that's on me, so not pointing fingers at the game here. BUT I WANTED TO PLAY WITH MY MANS so waiting to get to Kiryu was very challenging lmfao. I loved playing as Saejima since it reminded me of my favorite style to use while playing as Kiryu in Y0, the Beast style. I can see they got many of his heat actions and movement being slow, stuff like that, from Saejima's fighting style in this game.

Playing as Tanimura was my least favorite and while I didn't really have any problems with his arc or whatever, it wasn't fun to play at all. Same as Akiyama, but Akiyama at least has some more heat actions. Also... even though I completed all of Tanimura's substories (except for the hostess club one with the Mars Fighter) it didn't really affect his health bar, which made it really hard to beat his final boss. (For comparison: I barely used one health item during all of the final boss fights for Saejima or Akiyama, and probably used like two for Kiryu's, but for Tanimura's I emptied half of my whole item screen.) I'm thinking that I probably should have parried with that foreign detective in Little Asia but I just wanted to get on with this game as quickly as possible.

Now for the music...

I don't think many of them stuck with me, but that isn't to say I didn't like anything. Saejima's fight theme for one, stuck with me immediately. Same thing for this one, although it plays only once in the entire game! As always, the MEB theme was also in this game so I went in there just to listen to it as tradition of mine 😁 Another one is this one that plays in the table tennis minigame. It sounds like it could be from newer Persona games. I honestly think that vocalist is the same.

And the story... ummm??

It was certainly a very story. Don't know how else to describe it. As with the earlier games I played, at first, everything seems so random but then they all come together. But this one felt even cluttier than the rest. I didn't connect with any of the players in this game at all. But uh, that could be something to do with me. Because I rarely get emotional with these type of stuff. (But then again... I felt too connected to Rikiya in Y3 so...? Maybe it is with the story, idk.)

One last thing I'll add is that Saejima should have been able to sing smh! Neither Tanimura or him sings in the karaoke. Saejima doesn't even step inside the mf building!!

So in short... this game didn't really leave any impact on me and I'll probably forget about the story in like days. Actually I finished it last night and I don't even remember much. All I remember is that Kiryu smiled a lot in the later cutscenes during the final chapter so that was nice. I always love seeing him smile :)

Hey, he’s talking about me.