About the playable character(s)

[Zaldun]

I loved playing the earlier yakuza games because i was playing as kiryu and was interested in his story primarily and by extension the ones he got involved with, but i'm not a huge fan of the playable character so far in yak 4 and i heard there will be others but kiryu being playable for only a very short time, is this true? didn't want to google to deep in fear of hard spoilers so hoping for some vague yes/no answers.

And if so, will 5 be the same in terms of playable characters?

[Eyesfall]

There are 4 playable characters, who each has 4 chapters so I wouldnt say Kiryu's playable less then others. However he is the last one you get to play as.

After you finish the game you can switch to him as long as you want to tho.

Hope that answers your question.

[Sekera]

Kiryu's part in Y4 is kinda short. I mean, one of his chapters is literally just "Walk towards the Millenium Tower and watch a cutscene. End of chapter." It's overall very slapped together and looks like he was not even supposed to be in the game originally. To be fair, Y4 overall is one of the shorter games.

Y5 does this even worse. That game is essentially split into 5 parts. Part 1 is with Kiryu and is pretty good, but then you get to play 4 other characters in parts 2-4, most of which are pretty irrelevant. Then you get to play as Kiryu again (and the others too) in Part 5.

Thankfully only these 2 games do this. Yakuza 6 goes back to just Kiryu.