The best yakuza game I ever played

[MachineGod]

Should I play any of the others?

I only played sleeping dogs but I don’t think they related

[Bankai9212]

They aren’t comparable to sleeping dogs, you can play them in order issue is while zero is great the rest varies since the combat changes in kiwami 2 then 3-5 and back to 6. They’re a great time but it depends if you willing to look past some rough edges.

[Lar Dass]

you absolutely should, start with yakuza 0 and make your way up, it follows the story of kazuma kiryu so if you felt his legendary status was intriguing then 0-6 explains it all

[Bankai9212]

Id argue he takes a major back seat in 4 imo.

[Captain Flappy]

I love 0 (I started with 1 on the PS2 and have played them all at release in the west), but I slightly preferred 7 and Infinite wealth gameplay wise tbh.
I think the early games had a very different feel though, in a good way. 7 and 8 don't feel like Yakuza anymore, they feel like different games now.

The actual Yakuza as an organisation feels shoehorned in now, and with Kiryu being a secret agent etc it just feels a little like they jumped the shark story wise.

[Bankai9212]

They were dissolved in 7.

[Regal Hog]

Originally posted by Bankai9212:

They were dissolved in 7.

The two largest organisations were dissolved at least.

[Bankai9212]

Originally posted by Regal Hog:

Originally posted by Bankai9212:

They were dissolved in 7.

The two largest organisations were dissolved at least.

Guess that’s fair, most are just street gangs at this point.

[PlagueBrain]

Originally posted by Captain Flappy:

I love 0 (I started with 1 on the PS2 and have played them all at release in the west), but I slightly preferred 7 and Infinite wealth gameplay wise tbh.
I think the early games had a very different feel though, in a good way. 7 and 8 don't feel like Yakuza anymore, they feel like different games now.

The actual Yakuza as an organisation feels shoehorned in now, and with Kiryu being a secret agent etc it just feels a little like they jumped the shark story wise.

There's both in-universe and IRL reasons for that, to be fair. The anti-yakuza laws in Japan talked about in 7 are quite real, and did a lot to weaken the yakuza from their heyday that the early series was set in. The world changed (and that was a big theme of 7).

For what's a primarily-Japanese audience, having the organizations play a bigger role in the modern settings are going to be very "alternate universe," and less grounded, because of that.

Though ironically IRL those laws led to some unforseen issues on the part of the Japanese gov't, and in-game - it may well be leading toward a kind of power vacuum scenario going forward.

The series always has riffed heavily on then-current events and pop culture as much as anything else. Most of the West just doesn't really get the references (and one of the reasons the series itself very nearly didn't make it out of Japan, and it took this long to get modern releases on PC).

But the Ichi arc is meant (and overtly) to be a reboot/refresh/season 2 of the franchise.

Personally, I think they missed a big opportunity for some variant of RTWP combat after 7 (where it makes sense with the in-universe ref to Dragon Quest and the turn-based combat) but still.

[Benchwarmer]

I started to play 0 again after 7 years. Still awesome!

[E↗↗↗↗YA↗↘↗↘HA~~~]

the older games need love to play because the graphic is really outdated, I think you should buy Gaiden and 8, if you still have time then go back to the whole story

[Bankai9212]

Older games have aged pretty well outside of 3-5 in terms of visual fidelity.