Happy Holidays everyone!

Yakuza 2 is a game I have waited a while to get my hands on. I never played the first one, but around the time it was being released over here, I got hyped up from people familiar with the title. I was waiting to get my hands on this game before retiring my PS2 for a while (until nostalgia kicks in). So I gave the game a few hours of my time and here are my thoughts after the jump.

I remember when my friend first showed me Shenmue. I thought that was the future of gaming. The game was deep, varied and had an interesting setting. Sadly the trilogy died (seemingly, Sega doesn’t seem ready to get working on a third one) on its second game. When am I bringing up Shenmue? Well the game has a very similar feeling to it. If Shenmue would have its own genre, then Yakuza would fit into it.

The game relies heavily on three things. First and foremost is the story. Since it’s the second game, the developers went all of their way and included an optional recap of the first game. It is also divided in multiple parts so that you don’t have to watch it all if you want to see only a little part of it. The game depicts a very engaging story that picks up about a year after the event of the first one about the Yakuza (Japanese’s pseudo-equivalent to the mafia) world. Since I haven’t gotten that far in the game, I only saw the beginning of the story, but I liked what I’ve seen of it. The cutscenes rivals in length and dialog even Metal Gear Solid 4. The full dialog is subtitled in English and voiced in Japanese only, with no translation, Sega probably thinking it would ruin the experience to give an American accent to the characters.

The visuals for the PS2 title are up there amongst its best, very close in feel to MGS3. That might just be me though, since one of the last PS2 games I played before that was just that, before MGS4 came out to refresh my memories. Also, being playing on an HD TV, it feels kind of weird to look at PS2 games, when I’m quickly getting used to the PS3’s output graphically.

On to the second thing the game relies heavily on: walking around, talking to people and interacting with the environment. A bit like in Shenmue, you have plenty to do there, but from what I’ve seen of both games, hard to say which has most. Shenmue had old school Sega arcade games, which I haven’t seen in Yakuza 2 (yet might still be existent?), but this one has Pachinko, mah-jong and crane games amongst other stuff. The mah-jong was looking interesting, but sadly, I was disappointed that nothing was done to help American gamers to play the game. The Man tiles could have at least be identified by numbers. Even after playing casually with friends, I still can’t distinguish most of them without the numbers on the tiles, and here, those are absent. You also walk around in town

Finally, the fighting is the last part you’ll spend on the game. The mechanic is quite satisfying, truly. Not too simple, but not too complex either, with lot’s of variety and the possibility to interact with your environment makes it much fun. Add to that a level up system, which let you decide what you want to upgrade, this makes for one of the best brawler on the console.

I’d really like to say more about this one, but I can’t with the little play-time I got on it. I was cleaning up my room and was tired of having my PS2 lying on the floor so I thought it was time to move on and store it for the time being. Now let’s just hope PS3 sees a firmware update for PS2 Backward Compatibility on the software side.

David A. Console, Games, impressions