My Experience with: Yakuza 3 – The First Chapter

[My Experience with is a series of posts detailing, well, my experiences with games. They're kinda like previews or quick-sees that I have and want to write about.]

Full disclosure: I’ve never played a Yakuza game before. I heard about it, I watched some cut-scenes and gameplay, and I read some reviews about how it’s a pretty good series. But I never played it myself, so I never got to get into the story, and I tried to keep it (mostly) spoiler-less before playing for the first time.

I started off the game on the Normal difficulty, and as of this post, I’ve played about 6 hours in the game (excluding the time it took to go through recaps). It’s pretty fun and interesting.

So far, after watching through the recaps of Yakuza and Yakuza 2, and playing through the first three chapters of Yakuza 3, I have a decent idea of how the series is. Today, I’ll just cover the prologue and the first chapter, which for me was about 2 hours long, but it really depends on how long you spend in the city.

I would recommend that you play the first two Yakuza games first, just to get a more detailed background on the main character, Kazuma Kiryu’s past adventures, and just who everybody is. Though the recaps do a pretty good job of getting you up to speed in a little over half an hour, it can be a bit confusing or difficult to remember everything.

The prologue, which is purely cut-scenes, starts off in an interesting way. Fish are caught, yakuza are attacked, and the dead come back to life… It definitely hooks you in the beginning, though you might not know who some of the newer characters are. You do get a gist of what is going on, though.

Chapter 1, you’ll find, actually starts BEFORE the prologue, and that’s when the game really begins. You play as Kazuma Kiryu, a man who plans to quit the yakuza life, going to Okinawa to run an orphanage. You gain control of Kiryu in Kamurocho, a town with bustling streets and stores, to say good-bye to close friends and associates.

I spent about 2 hours in this chapter mainly exploring what places I could with my adopted daughter, Haruka, and increase her trust level. It took a long while to actually level up my trust with her, as you can only boost her trust level by having her stop at certain stores she wants to enter and satisfy her wants, like buying food and toys. I have to admit, it was slightly irritating having her follow me around, as she ran/walked pretty slow, and in a big area, I wanted to run around and get where I wanted as fast as I could. I just couldn’t leave her behind, though. I would feel so bad if I did. But if I went too far away, she would constantly call out to me before catching up. It was definitely a minor annoyance.

However, this did let me see what Kamurocho had to offer. I saw many different places like stores, restaurants, and an arcade. I had to enter the arcade in particular, called Club Sega, to satisfy Haruka’s intense need for a stuffed calico kitten. And I ended up playing one of the most boring, frustrating mini-games of all time.

It was a crane game called “UFO Catcher 7 MAX”.

You know, playing crane games are fine and all, but a simulation of a crane game just doesn’t cut it for me; you don’t get any of the interactivity that comes with playing a crane game in real life, but with all the frustration that can come with it. I pressed one button twice and let the claw drop. That was it. Yet it was so annoying to constantly try over and over and over and over to capture just one calico kitten! I lost 3000-4000 yen trying to get it. It took me 30 minutes- 1 hour to succeed in my goal.

This is how they getcha. You get so close to getting that one stuffed animal, and it falls off the claw. And you hate your life. I pondered what I was doing with my life while playing. “Oh yeah, I’m playing a virtual crane machine mini-game.” Sigh.

After playing that terrible game, I promptly went around the arcade trying to find a better, more enjoyable mini-game. And I happened upon a game called “Boxcelios”.

It’s a side-scrolling shooting game where you play as an indestructible fighter ship. You get 30+ seconds to defeat enemy ships as fast as you can and as many as you can. It was an incredibly fun, amazing, and enjoyable experience. Plus, I loved the music. It definitely made up for the crane game.

Besides exploring, while following the story, I got into fights with some street punks. This is where the combat section of Yakuza 3 comes in, and it’s quite enjoyable.  You kick and punch the enemies’ hard and fast, and though they can block, you can often get some shots in. You can also use objects in the environment as weapons, too, and bash your foes with them.

I also got into a one-on-one fist fight with a man named Majima Goro. I’d consider this a boss fight, since it was certainly a step up in terms of difficulty from the punks before. But this wasn’t too hard, given that this was Chapter 1. All in all, the fighting is pretty sweet.

Before I’m finished, though, I have to mention the 2 things. First, there’s the sound. The sound effects are realistic and appropriate. The music is nice when it plays, like during battle sections, though I do like it when there are simply the ambient noises of the city and its people. It makes me feel more immersed in Kamurocho.

Second, the graphics are quite nice for a game that came out in 2009. Though it could be better, it’s acceptable. The graphics are much more vibrant during the cut-scenes, where there’s more detail to character expressions, and actual, well-done voice acting.

The start of Yakuza 3 is a good one. It definitely got me hooked and I wanted to play on to the next chapters, which I'll talk about in later posts!