Yakuza Kiwami

2025-12-28

It baffles me that RGG followed Yakuza 0–still the best of the series with its incredible combat of Kiryu and Majima flip-flopping through insane stances to variously smash a motorcycle over someone’s head to Babe-Ruth them into a three-decade coma with a baseball bat AND the best, most melodramatic, twisty-windy, and comic story AND the best minigames–with Kiwami, the most wet fart of a release in the series. I mean, sure, the story which I initially found so sleep-inducing I actually bounced off continuing through the entire series for years--that they can’t change. And it does get better. But holy habachi the combat, kyodai! Abso-lute butt hole.

Kiryu, our Dojima no Ryu, our legend, The Dragon, is paradoxically a punching bag built to be combo'd, stunlocked, and knocked down constantly by every swaggering schmuck wearing a bright ass silk shirt. Fighting a group of enemies is a bunch of just dodging around so you don't get hit and then poking them. Enemies have too much health and the only way to do reliable damage is to cheese by using Beast form and breaking motorcycles over their head (hilarious) or by legit spending tens of hours grinding battles with Majima and the coliseum to unlock OP moves. I was getting so fucking angry playing this game. Eventually turned it down to Easy and even then I still had to resort to cheesing to not lose my mind. Holy FUCK the combat is bad in this one.

In my notes from 2022 I wrote “Thankfully it sounds like this one has the worst combat in the series.” as a person who had yet to play Yakuza 3. And you know what? I actually stand by that statement. Because Yakuza 3’s combat, as bad as it is, at least gave me one of my favorite moments from the entire series by letting me stunlock the final boss through all his health bars with a sack full of handguns. So, yeah, congrats on the Worst Combat award, Kiwami 1. You did it!

And that’s especially baffling writing this in 2025 after I’ve played up through everything including The Man Who Erased His Name because not only did Kiwami 1 follow Yakuza 0’s best-in-class combat but they also put it before Kiwami 2’s incredibly competent combat. It’s like they just decided to forget how to make fun combat for one game just to see if people could stick with the classic Yakuza soap opera story when it finally ramps up. And I did and I’m glad. But sheeit, talk about eating your vegetables first, huh?