It’s almost cruel, in the way that it rips Kiryu with a paradise where he can spend his time fishing on a private beach and hanging out with his kids. Yakuza 3 opens with Kiryu having retired to run an orphanage on Okinawa – the equivalent of fleeing to the most remote corner of the country possible – only to almost instantly be drawn into the politics of the Okinawan yakuza, and from there back into the entire world of the crime mob. There’s far too much plot to talk about in a single review here, but what’s pertinent is that the arc from chapters three through five see Kiryu try, time and again, to get out of the world of the yakuza, only for it to have a habit of pulling him right back in.
However, each title still looks lovely in the state that it’s in, and given that it brings the entire narrative of series protagonist, Kiryu, onto the one device, the concession of necessity (there’s no way SEGA had the resources to do a “Kiwami” update to all three of these games), is worthwhile.
Naturally, these games also don’t look up to the same standard as Yakuza 0 and 6, which are native PlayStation 4 titles. On the other hand, those first two titles were PS2-era releases and 3 through 5 are in much a much less aged state from the outset. Right from the start it needs to be said that these games don’t have the visual fidelity of the PlayStation 4 remakes of the first two titles in the series ( Yakuza Kiwami and its sequel). Yakuza 5 was a late-stage PlayStation 3 release, while Yakuza 3 and 4 were from the beginning of last decade. The collection contains HD remasters of Yakuza 3, 4 and 5. There isn’t a moment across these three games where they lose focus on the vision, and it takes playing them back-to-back, like you will with this set, to truly appreciate that. Yakuza games have become beloved because they offer a finely-honed balance of crime drama and truly oddball humour, breaking up the (always reasonably serious) main plotline with side quests and minigames that range from the absurd to the truly ridiculous. Thankfully, sprawling is okay when it’s not about shoving content at players for the sake of it, and there’s not a second across the trilogy in the Remasetered Collection that feels like it’s content. Related reading: Yakuza 0 is the best place to start with the Yakuza series.
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