Yakuza 3 Review (PS3)

Yakuza 3 takes us all back to Japan to deal with the problems of being a high-level Yakuza. Unfortunately, SEGA didn’t upgrade much in the game except the graphics. You can’t fast-forward through cut scenes, there’s loads and loads of reading and some seriously annoying sound effects for the text bubbles you are forced to read through in order to proceed.

On top of that, during actual gameplay the character models have horrible animations which are limited to perhaps two or three moves. Many characters in the game will gesture in ways that do not match what they are saying etc. It’s just downright distracting.

They also did not include a save-anywhere system and the game doesn’t really automatically save when you finish anything, so that means you have to go hunt down an out of the way save point, wasting time, in order to save your game if you want to actually progress. The game does offer the option to save after each chapter through.

Other small things really break the immersion. I took an elevator from the ground floor of Millenium Tower to the roof and it went from mid-afternoon to night, that must be one heck of a tall building or a slow elevator. There seem to be more cut-scenes than gameplaying time and the gameplay is broken up quite often by them.

During the cut scenes you have to read the subtitles unless you’re fluent in Japanese. This is made extremely difficult when you cannot do so because they are white lettering on very bright images. You might as well just skip them, oh wait, you can’t.

I got all of that in my first 30 minutes of play. Also there are zero sound options and only one graphics option - screen brightness. Truly I believe they used the exact game engine from the PS2 games in the series.

Eventually you get into the swing of things after some very basic and redundant tutorials and find out that Kazuma has some problems that need tending to aside from what’s up with Tojo Clan. The game is basically broken down into seemingly random encounters (fights with street punks) that then lead into the next big boss battle. After that you then generally have some long drawn out cut scenes and either move on to another small encounter or some sort of mission to find something. It’s all very formulaic and I was hard pressed to remain interested in the game at all. The constant breaking up of the action meant that you had to sit through too many cut scenes and while tehy ran in the background, I wrote this review. Sure, I’m missing out on the story a little by not watching them, but like I said, the game has a low interest level.