Yakuza 5 Remastered Review - Talk to your family Kiryu

Why can't the Yakuza just leave Kiryu alone?

After playing some awesome indie games in between, the Yakuza-thon continues with Yakuza 5 Remastered.

As with Yakuza 3-4, 5 is a remaster of the original console port rather than a remake. While it runs extremely well on PC, the game itself is still missing some quality-of-life improvements players would be used to from Yakuza 0-2. However it's noticeably improved over 3-4.

Plot

Yakuza 5 starts off a little different to previous games. Rather than an epic, heart-pumping fight/chase intro with great tunes, we begin with a tense standoff between rival Yakuza families lining the street and civilians getting the heck out of there.

After the party eventually breaks up, Tojo Clan leader Daigo leaves his guards and hops in a taxi. Switch to long-time protagonist Kazama Kiryu who is now a...taxi driver?

The writers for this game seem to have gone hard with the mysteries in the intro and they've done well. Important people go missing, war is brewing and no-one knows why.

Kiryu just wants to live in peace but of course it's all up to him to sort it out as he gets dragged back into his role as the fourth chairman of the Tojo clan (he's retired guys!).

Throughout the game, the player controls 5 different characters in 5 different cities, each with their own story that all links together to form one big chaotic mess. The game spans the staple Kamurocho and Sotenbori, adding 3 new areas all based on real Japanese locations. Tsukimino (Susukino, Hokkaido), Nagasugai (Nakasu, Fukuoka) and Kineicho (Nishiki district, Nagoya).

We've previously taken a tour of Kamurocho and Sotenbori's real-world cities on stream via street view and did the same with these new locations. It's interesting see how the developers have scanned each location, modified them to suit and built them into the game.

Gameplay

As in Yakuza 4, each of the 5 playable characters has a primary minigame mechanic that you progress to unlock their respective story. While you can leave part way through each minigame to move on with the main story, there's the usual sidestories and lore to explore by continuing them. As well as achievements of course.

Being a Yakuza game, as you progress some people tend to not like your characters and said people need a rapid and forceful attitude adjustment to the face. Each combat character has their own fighting style which you develop by levelling up and training with various NPCs. Purchasing skills as you level can be done manually, or there's a toggle to just let the game do it automatically, which seems to work well.

Y5 adds something new to random battles where enemies can escape, lowering your reward for finishing the fight, or calling in reinforcements.

The traditional SEGA arcades, minigames, key lockers and hostess dating all make an appearance and function much the same as in previous games. The expected achievements are also still around including eating out all the restaurants in the game. Thankfully the QoL improvements include being able to order multiple meals at once instead of having to buy each meal separately.

Tech

Yakuza 5 ran brilliantly on PC with no performance or audio issues. I did have one instance where tabbing out caused the game window to minimise on another monitor and I had to mess with it to bring it back, but couldn't replicate it again.

I also had a couple of instances where a cutscene played the audio from a completely different scene. luckily the subtitles were still correct. It seems it's a codec issue with the videos. Swapping to GE-Proton 10-8+ fixed it.

Yakuza 5 Remastered has a Gold rating on ProtonDB and is Steam Deck verified meaning it will run smoothly. Real Yakuza use a controller and it plays just fine using my Xbox Elite, although you can play with keyboard/mouse and controls can be rebound if required.

Recommendation

It's Yakuza, grab it. Will be diving into Yakuza 6: The Song of Life soon.

One playthrough of the base game mode reached 65 hours on stream.

• Purchase Yakuza 5 Remastered from Steam