Recent reviews by Rozark

Unlike Yakuza 3 where most of its problems lie in how the Remastered port functions (or, fails to), Yakuza 4 was a pretty alright time. The game is essentially one giant expansion to Y3 minus the part where you're stuck in only Kamurocho the whole game, and being just a few months off of finishing Y3, I sorely miss Okinawa (or at least having a second city). My initial playthrough was on hard, 100% completion.

The combat functions well enough, the minigames are mostly fine, and the multiple characters helps keep the experience from becoming too stale. I can't really say the same about the story, as when it's time for all the pieces to start fitting into place, they start forcefully pushing corner pieces into the center stage. Motives start to become blurred and characters feel like they're constantly changing allegiances, which just makes things a bit tiring to keep track of. This game is essentially Tanimura and Saejima's story, with Akiyama as a nice side dish and Kiryu for.. what? He's just kinda there because of some Y1 ties, but he's still very much appreciated. The finale fights are cheesy as hell, yet despite this, they still feel necessary. They feel good. They put a smile to my face.

My only real minigame complaints are with darts, fishing, and table tennis. Darts and billiards insane difficulty seemed to have swapped between 3 and 4, resulting in a far harsher darts experience this time around. Table Tennis, with or without using the "heat generation" function, takes a long time to complete an actual match. As for fishing, man. I like the system that exists here, but pulling trash every other pull (especially at distances of like 100m+) starts to get really annoying quickly. Every guide on what fish to find where is wrong - I'll often find them never within the day or distance provided and the bait you choose actually matters (I don't mind this, I just hate being lied to). A lot can be said about each character's unique side content (Hostess(es)/Fighter/Dispatch/Gangs) taking a long time to do, but since I was 100%ing it anyways, I just took them for what they were.

Outside of those few sore spots, I don't really have much to say. Game is solid. They are definitely the Yakuza Four(some).

Ahh.. ♥♥♥♥. -CIA Operative

I went into this knowing about all the "Blockuza" memes and people hating on the orphanage segments. I knew most of the relevant plot (about 90% of it) was going to be dumped on me about 4/5 of the way through the game. I figured I'd give it a shot since I'm 100%ing the completion list in all of these anyways. I was optimistic. Full disclosure, I played using an overhaul mod - Like a Dragon 3. It fixes some stuff the remastered port screws up (IE: Evasion/Dodging, which I barely ended up using for reasons you'll see why)
and tries its best to improve on the combat.

Speaking of - the combat? It's worse than I thought. If you're playing on normal, doing just the main story, or playing ultimate match, yeah, sure, enemies don't block as often. You are not going to encounter the problems you see everyone else talking about, and if you do, they aren't that much of an issue. It's when you play on hard, legend, or do the coliseum that you begin to "understand". Enemies throw up their block more often, and by often, I mean after a normal 1-2 light attack, they're much more likely to block the rest of the string. What do you use then? Well, throwing exists. Dropkick exists. Dropkick DEFINITELY exists. Tiger drop is there along with an easier to use parry. Funny thing is, these issues are only on the remastered ports too. Original 3 is completely fine. That's probably why there's such a huge argument about all of this online. Everyone has different opinions on it depending on the version + difficulty you played at.

The coliseum itself is where the game's combat begins to really crumble. The coliseum forbids items (normal/used to this) but it also bans equipment (???). It eventually devolves to the point where:

A) The enemy is big and you cannot grab them. Ever. Applies to all instances, even outside coliseum.

B) You are in the coliseum and cannot grab in most instances. Enemies are given boss grab resistance. You might be able to get a standing grab in, but you definitely aren't getting a grounded grab in.

BII) This effectively cuts the amount of feasible heat actions you can do down to just a small handful. I ended up using the rolling attack a bunch because it did reliable damage and it could be done fairly easily.

C) Enemies are given super armor, meaning they don't fall to the ground after finishing a combo, effectively making dropkicks (and normal combos, of course) extremely dangerous. Speaking of dropkicks, if you do another while they're getting up, you can trap them in a loop of sorts. Works on bosses. Useful to know.

D) Enemies won't attack you. Sometimes you're waiting for a tiger drop or an opening so you can head around and hit their back or something, but nope. Sometimes the AI just flat out won't attack first, and instead, is reactive to your own moves. This leads to a strat I did where I had to bait out their attacks with heavy attack, in hopes that they would respond with an attack of their own and I pull off a tiger drop. This bit can happen outside the coliseum too, but since you can use most of your moveset there, there's at least more ways around it.

E) Enemies lock on to your evasion or react instantly to it, making it so that you're better off instead exclusively using guard to build heat.

In turn, you start tiger dropping more or holding heavy attack and do the funny lotus flipkick that builds heat. Once you get enough heat, use rolling heat attack, rinse repeat. With the only effective moves being dropkick and tiger drop, this game shouldn't be called "Blockuza", it should be called "Dropuza".

Needless to say, but grinding points for one of the sacred tree parts (for a more manageable Amon fight) and a part of the rage set (for more effective dropkick damage) broke me. I figured the minigames wouldn't be so bad. It was on par with the combat. 60FPS broke many minigame physics and 30FPS is too ugly to look at. Bowling is unsatisfying; only leaving a small wooden dink when you hit the pins as they begin to defy gravity. Darts and Billiards are in their own world. They use the PS3 controller's sensitivity, so even the lightest amount of power has a high chance to make your shots skew off target. I ended up using my controller to aim and a mouse to fire the shots. The expert billiards AI (Seiji Nakazato) is a dark wizard more powerful than the top 5 wizards you know of. This man will shoot his shot from off the side of the table, bounce over another ball, bank the normal walls 3-4 times, then sink in a pocket you didn't even know existed. If you miss a shot, he's likely going to steal the entire game from you. Thankfully, the Lucky item set can help manage this AI by causing him to miss sometimes. Beating him was one of the most painful things I've ever done in one of these games. Golf is fine after a few rounds and I wish RGG would bring back a traditional 9-holes again and not just the "Near the Pin" challenge.

Not much to say on the story. It's passable, I guess. About as much of a mess as 1/K1 with only the idea of "Kiryu loves his orphans" really living on past this game. Everything else gets tossed to the side. People misunderstand a certain character's death all the time and it bothers me. It's not because of how long Kiryu knew them, it's because Kiryu is at his breaking point. That person could've literally been anyone and Kiryu most likely would have had the same reaction.

Honestly, if this port did a better job and fixed combat/minigames, the game would be fantastic. I know it's never going to happen, but this game really does need a Kiwami 3. The benefits and honest reputation gains it would receive (not just pity ones) would be tremendous. At the end of the day, despite all its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with it and what it tried to do.

P.S. There is a nice audio bug waiting for you the second you get into Okinawa (not the Orphanage). You're going to want a patch/mod to fix that.

Once upon a time, I was given a choice to play either this or a Generation 8 Pokemon game. I ended up being gifted this, and, I can wholeheartedly say, I `definitively` made the right decision.

I don't think I would've played this game for this long if it wasn't good.
Actually, that's a lie. After all, I play League of Legends.

It's so full of atmosphere and flavor that it's really hard to not recommend this to anyone who wants to take a plunge into a deeper narrative game. If you're not hooked by the end of Chapter 1, then you can call me a fraud.

I destroyed my camp partway after I unlocked chapter two just to make it look pretty. Bombass soundtrack. 10/10. Only personal downside is that I've thoroughly destroyed this game and now have to wait for potential updates to continue enjoying it.