Yakuza 2

I had been meaning to play the Yakuza games for years now. Like a decade or more. I feel like it was around 2011 or so that the Yakuza games were presented to me as pretty much the spiritual successors to Shenmue and so I meant to play them. I meant well. Heck, I even bought several of them. I just never got around to playing them. And so my entry into Yakuza was very late to the game. I jumped in with Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth in 2024. That's what - the ninth mainline game? Better late than never I guess.

But I loved Infinite Wealth so much. And so I figured I should go back and start playing some more of the series. And so I did the most obvious thing in the world and jumped straight to Yakuza 2 next. Alright, yeah that's stupid. But I don't know. I am a complicated man I guess. And so yeah I decided to jump from nine to two and just confuse myself even more.

Luckily there was a bunch of flashback movies to catch me up on things. Like there was probably nearly an hour of flashbacks available just in the first chapter. It's insane. They're not mandatory, though. So most gamers who started at the beginning probably skipped them. They were nice for me, though. And even if I can't fully follow all of it, I do love the soap opera yarns that this series weaves. 

All I can really say is that Yakuza 2 was immediately awesome. I haven't played much of this series, but I definitely consider myself a fan now. While the Shenmue analogy is perfectly apt, Yakuza also feels to me like a modern day River City Ransom. It's far more realistic of course, but still the comparison makes sense in my mind.

While I adored (and preferred) the turn based combat of Infinite Wealth, I can't deny that the earlier games' beat-em-up combat is sublime. Fights feel fluid and over-the-top. There's something to be said about grabbing a nearby bat/knife/bicycle and just beating the tar out of street punks. Heck, you can even grab a street punk and use him to beat up another street punk. It's great. 

And yet Yakuza 2 is still an action RPG at its heart. RPG mechanics are definitely important here. Grinding, leveling-up skills, equipping new weapons and armor, having a stash of healing items - all of this matters. I mean you can approach it like a beat-em-up, but you're not going to get far unless you acknowledge that it is ultimately an RPG.

Y'know what RPGs have, by the way? They have sidequests! I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to stumble upon a Sega arcade out there in the world. I actually ducked into one to avoid a roaming street gang and ended up spending the evening playing Virtua Fighter 2 instead. (I'll talk about Virtua Fighter 2 on its own another time, though). I also dabbled with Virtual On: Cyber Troopers a bit, though I didn't love it and wasn't that interested in improving. But I'm glad that it exists in this game. It's another thing I love about the Yakuza games. While Sega seems keen on only re-releasing compilations of various Genesis games, the Yakuza games have done a solid job of recognizing Sega's arcade and 8-bit history over the years, which is rather important to me from a historical standpoint. 

Anyway, back to Yakuza 2. While I may refer to the series' storylines as being soap opera-ish, they work because they are absolutely gripping stories with so many layers and pulled off with great acting. There's so many threads to keep track of, and so many characters to get familiar with and its daunting but in a good way. Sometimes you need to concede that you don't really know what's going on, but it still feels compelling nonetheless. By the time you get to Infinite Wealth, there's probably hundreds of characters (I'm exaggerating, but maybe I'm not) and I just love how gripping it all feels even when it shifts from super serious to super silly on a dime. 

Going back to me saying that Yakuza 2 is truly an RPG at its heart, though - the boss battles are legit hard and feel like actual skill checks. You can keep reloading a save and hoping to brute-force your way through, sure. But probably you didn't grind enough before this point. 

Eventually I got to a boss battle that I was just not prepared for and eventually rage-quitted after half-a-dozen attempts. Also it seems that I had forgotten that this was a PS2 game that was lacking auto-saves and so I also lost nearly an hour of progress. I have to admit that that didn't make me feel great about myself and also slowed down my desire to push forward for now. So yeah, I ended up bailing on this one for now. But I'll keep my save in case I want to give it another go sometime soon. 

But like I said, I am officially now a fan of Yakuza/Like A Dragon games. Like I love them really hard. I want to play all of them. And I know me - I won't finish most of them. Maybe I won't finish any of them. I don't know. But I do want to check out the whole series because they are incredible and fascinating games. Yakuza 2 is no exception.