Yakuza 4 Is Good, I Think
While Yakuza 3 illustrated the growing pains of an unplanned repeatedly continuing franchise, Yakuza 4 shows the benefits of having a lot of pre-existing material to work with.
That feels like it’s often an implicit topic of discussion in public consciousness. In some major pop cultural touchstone like the MCU, it’s possible to see the benefits and excitement one is able to generate with multiple entries of buildup, as well as the fatigue of a story that has gone on much too long.
Yakuza 4 is at a good spot to reap the benefits, even as much of the story is wholly original elements introduced in this game.
For the first time (or first time since 0, depending on where you’re counting from), Kazuma Kiryu is not the sole playable protagonist.
Shun Akiyama: Unsteady Venture (Capitalist)
I don’t understand why the game starts with Akiyama. I really don’t. He’s not a pre-existing character like Kiryu, or connected to existing facets of the world the way Saejima is. And yet he doesn’t work very well as a fresh face to push as a new protagonist. It’s obvious that’s what Tanimura is. So… why are we here?
Akiyama’s story is not particularly interesting. The central character is “Lily”, but this is before you learn anything noteworthy about her. All that this route really has is the mystery, and it’s a lot of lukewarm setup. Frankly, I found absurdly minor character Hana feeling frustrated with Akiyama’s codependent relationship with her more intriguing.
Akiyama as a character is… fine? He’s sort of funny and charming at times. And the premise of his character is inherently kind of entertaining to think about. I do feel like he wasn’t intended to come off nearly as creepy as he sort of does, though. Alas.
If the game continued like this unchanged, it would end up squarely in the valley of mid. But it does not.
Taiga Saejima: Heavy Hitter (Hitman)
Saejima is also a new character, unless you started with Yakuza 0 wherein he appears in a flashback for two seconds.
The sworn brother of Goro Majima who spent 25 years in the joint, Saejima adds an interesting layer to the matrix of pre-existing Yakuza character relationships. I’m spoiled for Majima depth through my understanding of Y0, but at the time of its release, this was adding an entirely new dimension to a character who was mostly “the joker for whom violence is a sex thing”. They also pretty clearly parallel Kiryu and Nishikiyama, which is cool.
Saejima’s solid in his own right, though. The way he grapples with guilt and regret is compelling, as is gradually unraveling how this badass inhuman monster is actually kind of deeply pathetic. There’s some general themes in the game about justice and redemption I could maybe ramble about, and they’re supported excellently by Saejima’s route inexplicably dragging up and repurposing a completely pointless Yakuza 3 character to use for a core piece of its story. I love it.
It’s also just an interesting fish-out-of-water narrative to see someone trying to adapt to the world after so long isolated from it. The prison system is kind of a little bit evil, huh.
This is the best of the four parts of the game and it’s not particularly close.
Masayoshi Tanimura: Detective (Detective)
Tanimura is a really fucking funny character.
So, firstly, there’s the meta angle of this. Tanimura shows up out of nowhere — Akiyama does as well, but his backstory technically relates to Yakuza 1. And after Yakuza 4, Tanimura is not in the series. He does not show up in person once, with only occasional references. Which is kind of absurd. Y0 through Y2 had a massive amount of continuity, with characters basically only entirely disappearing if they die, and Y3 at least has an excuse in a bunch of more minor guys being in a completely different location. Even Sayama, a major character written out in an absurdly egregious way due to conflicts with her VA, at least has a formal scene where they write her out. Tanimura gets nothing. He vanishes into the aether immediately after the story of this game ends. It is so funny.
On the subject of VA issues, the man who is both Tanimura’s voice actor and the model for his face was accused of cocaine use, and although these accusations never amounted to anything, the experience left him disillusioned with the industry and caused him to leave it. One would think this provides a perfect explanation for why his character just vanished, but nope! All this drama happened after Y5 had already released. The decision to evaporate Masayoshi Tanimura was just an entirely unrelated creative choice, I guess. And one which coincidentally saved them on the trouble of replacing him later on.
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For a little while, at least. Eventually, Yakuza 4 received a remaster, and they gave Tanimura a new voice and appearance. So now he just looks like a different fucking guy.
All of this adds to the absurd energy of Tanimura’s existence.
In the game, he’s… okay, as a character? He feels like the character with the most setup to be a protagonist in the future, which is part of what makes the aforementioned absence so funny. Like, Saejima kind of wraps up all his existing plotlines in this game. Akiyama implodes his premise during the climax. Even Kiryu is debatably given some vague amount of closure for his character. But all three of them reappear in the next game.
Also… like, okay, there’s apparently some discourse about if Yakuza 4 is “copaganda”. I wouldn’t really know the specifics, I’m pretty detached from whatever communities exist around this series. In my eyes, it definitely isn’t, but the way in which it isn’t is fucking amazing. Yakuza 4 believes the police are an incredibly fallible institution, capable of performing unreasonable cruelty or giving absurd penalties to men they know are innocent. And that corruption in the police is infectious — that it just takes one Bad Cop higher up in the hierarchy to necessitate everyone who works under him is just as bad. Ultimately, police are even willing to make dealings with criminal elements, blurring the line of what purpose they can even be argued to accomplish at the most charitable take on them. This insidious evil is so damaging because it inherently cannot be taken down via the law.
The solution Yakuza 4 poses is that more cops should be like Tanimura, who is the best cop ever. Tanimura spends work hours gambling instead of doing his job, beats the shit out of someone for spreading the word that he was doing this, and has no qualms about using extreme force on suspects. But he has HEART.
This is such a fucking funny takeaway devoid of any real political application that I have a hard time imagining anyone getting seriously mad at it. I love it.
Tanimura’s section is an enjoyable mystery thriller. Nothing incredible, but I liked it.
Kazuma Kiryu: Dame Da Ne Guy (Finale)
Kiryu doesn’t do much in this game?
It just feels like it doesn’t add much to him as a character, and since it happens so late, most of his involvement in the plot is showing up to gather everything together for the conclusion.
I’m going to talk about that conclusion now, so the rest of this section will have full spoilers.
There’s a lot to like about how Y4 wraps things up; the excitement of disparate threads finally connecting, the stupid hype nonsense they do, and even some more interesting stuff for Saejima. Taiga, that is. I like the other Saejima too, even if it feels like the focus and clarity with her story is all over the place.
It’s fun that the conspiracy conclusion here ties into the events of Y1, even if it feels a little unnecessary. It helps make this feel more meaningful for Kiryu. Apparently some of the substories do more for following up on his connections in Kamurocho. I wouldn’t know.
All four of the final villains have something to them, a bit more than just some foe to fight. Munakata has a chance to tout his ideology about why law and those who break it are both necessary, Arai is a fucking lunatic who betrays everyone like five times for his own ideals and this is very funny, Daigo’s had multiple games of buildup by this point, and Kido talks about balls.
I find myself wishing there was a bit more, though. Daigo in particular should conceptually be the most interesting part of this game, as the weight of the pressure placed on him causes him to make decisions that conflict with the beliefs of Kiryu. But by the time it’s at all clear what his role in anything is, it’s boss fight time and the time to say anything has ended. It’s difficult to process in the moment what he was even trying to do or why he’s fighting us now.
Which is maybe a good microcosm of the game as a whole.
The Yakuza 4: Review
All in all, I just enjoyed my time with this one. The story always felt like it was going somewhere, there’s some interesting character work spread throughout, and it’s a fun game all around.
I wish I could say I liked it more, though. I’ve mellowed out on some of my enthusiasm through the process of writing this review. It never feels like it goes all the way with any of its ideas. It might be the best of the games I’ve gone through thus far, but it could’ve conclusively beat 0 if it just tried a little harder.
Balls out.
Yakuza 4 doesn’t get a 4/10, because I liked it more than that.
