I'll review the story for this game. The gameplay itself is fine. All the Yakuza games are good. I can't not recommend this to a fan of the series. Combat is neutered, but it flows well. There's less minigames, but the ones that are back have gotten an overhaul and are more fun than they were before. Instead, let's talk about the story.

Without giving anything away: it's a mess, plain and simple. But it didn't have to be a mess. There's some things this story does right. Let's rewind back to 2005: Yakuza is released. The story is very personal. The Yakuza/real world politics take a backseat to the relationship between Kiryu, Nishiki, and the other cast members. The stakes Kiryu has to face are personal, they involve people he consider his own family and even the woman he loves. Things are constantly moving, it's never stuck in one spot with a bunch of executives and Yakuza big shots dumping exposition on you for what feels like an eternity. This approach continued for Y2.

Then Y3 happened. And that's when the plots started getting very political. The CIA, the military-industrial complex, the cops, politicians...all of it is based on real-world events happening in Japan at the time, which is kinda cool, but that doesn't make for the most exciting story, and unless you're actually Japanese, it's not going to do anything for you. Kiryu had the orphanage and all its drama, so they kinda tried to add personal stakes, but starting here, said stakes really took a backseat to the overarching political drama involving the criminal underworld. Yakuza started out feeling like they meant for it to have mainstream worldwide appeal, but I guess when it didn't, they went all-in on the Japanese aspect of it. This continued into Y4 and Y5, the latter of which had so little in the way of anything for the player to actually give a ♥♥♥♥ about that your eyes will glaze over while playing. It still had very likable characters, like Saejima and especially Akiyama, but the things they do in the story don't actually involve them on a personal level, and there's not much character development for them.

But then, Y0 was released. Sega's last-ditch effort to appeal to the American market. A fresh start for our characters, an appealing setting, a new (amazing) localization, and dialing things back to Y1's storytelling. And wow, it paid off. There are so many fans that consider it the best story in the entire series, that they were invested in what was going on, and while Kiryu's half still had a fair bit of politics in it, they didn't overstay their welcome, and his relationship with Nishiki and Kuze were enough to pull it through. And Majima's half was just fantastic, there was romance, real character development, loss, redemption, tragedy, a true hero's journey. THIS is the stuff Western fans want in their stories, and what was missing from the games for so long: emotion.

So now we arrive at Y6. The writers at Sega have seemingly learned their lesson, and are going to add some real emotion and interpersonal drama between the cast this time. The Yakuza are no longer the subject of the story, it is simply the context. Except, not really. It takes one step forward, and two steps back. They learned the wrong lessons from Y0's success. They tried to do what Y1 and Y0 did and have a new plot, new setting, a new cast, and few returning characters. Ok, well, here's the problem there: this is Kiryu's swan song. This was consistently marketed as the big finale, the culmination of a journey Kiryu's had for 10 years. He's had an (adopted) daughter, he's raised a bunch of kids in an orphanage, he's singlehandedly taken down several organizations and saved not only the Tojo Clan but Japan itself multiple times. He has met and become close friends with a lot of people in that time.

So he gets closure with all those people, right? I mean, this is Kiryu's final game. You want it to tie up all loose ends and see all your favorite characters back for one last showdown, the most fan-satisfying conclusion possible, right? Well, forget it. All those characters you like? Majima, Saejima, Daigo, the kids, even freaking Haruka? They're not present for 90% of the plot. Some have no interaction with Kiryu at all, and the ones that do were never that close to Kiryu. You get Akiyama and Date. That's it. And Akiyama feels like an afterthought, he never feels like he needs to be there. Even series mainstays don't show up at all. Where's the Florist? Where's Komaki? Where's Hana?

Instead, you have new characters, the Hirose family and a woman in Hiroshima. I like them well enough, especially Beat Takeshi's character. They're certainly more likable and deep than a lot of other Yakuza characters over the years. But they're the kind of characters they should've been saving for a spinoff or a prequel or Y7 or something other than Kiryu's big finale. There's a new villain who's fantastic and could've easily been the main conflict and the final boss, but he gets shafted halfway through for a villain who doesn't parallel anything about Kiryu's character at all.

But I'd be fine with that. I'd be fine with the new characters and making it mostly about Kiryu himself, if it wasn't so boring. It really, really tries to humanize Kiryu and make the conflicts in the story more relatable. He suddenly realizes he's a grandfather, has to take care of a baby, and his daughter is missing. That's a great setup for a Yakuza story. It had a lot of mystery and intrigue into what was going on. There were new twists at every turn, and questions kept getting answered with more questions. I was confident that the game would answer all of them by the end, but boy was I wrong. By the last third, the story gets so convoluted, so confusing, so political, that I just stopped caring. It keeps throwing new, exciting setpieces at you, but they're fleeting.

Hitchcock once described so many films as being just "photographs of people talking" with very little cinematic camera work. For a game that prides itself on being like a Japanese crime movie, there's very little cinema going on here. Scenes just go on and on and on with static camera angles of characters dumping so much exposition on you, I mean good god. It got to the point where I was speedreading and skipping through the dialogue not even bothering for the voice acting to catch up. Another thing is that it feels like 20 pages of the script got cut out. I won't spoil one of the game's biggest twists, but a major character is ruined in a way that absolutely should not have gotten past an editor, with their actions never being explained nor justified despite so many characters bringing them up, and it made me want to pull my hair out. They added romance as an element, except the romance here was just creepy and awkward.

All that makes me want to call this the worst story in the franchise, but I can't, next to Y4 and Y5, because there are moments where I actually found myself invested. I cared about a lot of these new characters, and I cared about Kiryu, enough that by the end, I got choked up, purely because they injected real, relatable emotion into it and had that emotion explode on-screen. When the cinematics are good in this game, they're really good. And if none of the other characters were treated well, Kiryu totally was. His ending was fitting for him.

Basically, Y6's story left me conflicted on whether to feel satisfied or not at its conclusion. It's inconsistent, and convoluted, and yet it has more personal stakes and emotional storytelling than anything in Y3-Y5. It feels like it deserved a lot better than what we got. This, plus the lack of returning cast members, can probably be attributed to Sega's budget being blown on the Dragon Engine, which while technically impressive was not worth sacrificing the game's story (nor its gameplay for that matter, which I can't go into much here due to character limits).

I'll review the story for this game. The gameplay itself is fine. All the Yakuza games are good. I can't not recommend this to a fan of the series. Combat is neutered, but it flows well. There's less minigames, but the ones that are back have gotten an overhaul and are more fun than they were before. Instead, let's talk about the story. Without giving anything away: it's a mess, plain and simple. But it didn't [i]have[/i] to be a mess. There's some things this story does right. Let's rewind back to 2005: Yakuza is released. The story is very personal. The Yakuza/real world politics take a backseat to the relationship between Kiryu, Nishiki, and the other cast members. The stakes Kiryu has to face are personal, they involve people he consider his own family and even the woman he loves. Things are constantly moving, it's never stuck in one spot with a bunch of executives and Yakuza big shots dumping exposition on you for what feels like an eternity. This approach continued for Y2. Then Y3 happened. And that's when the plots started getting [b]very[/b] political. The CIA, the military-industrial complex, the cops, politicians...all of it is based on real-world events happening in Japan at the time, which is kinda cool, but that doesn't make for the most exciting story, and unless you're actually Japanese, it's not going to do anything for you. Kiryu had the orphanage and all its drama, so they [i]kinda[/i] tried to add personal stakes, but starting here, said stakes really took a backseat to the overarching political drama involving the criminal underworld. Yakuza started out feeling like they meant for it to have mainstream worldwide appeal, but I guess when it didn't, they went all-in on the Japanese aspect of it. This continued into Y4 and Y5, the latter of which had so little in the way of anything for the player to actually give a shit about that your eyes will glaze over while playing. It still had very likable characters, like Saejima and especially Akiyama, but the things they do in the story don't actually involve them on a personal level, and there's not much character development for them. But then, Y0 was released. Sega's last-ditch effort to appeal to the American market. A fresh start for our characters, an appealing setting, a new (amazing) localization, and dialing things back to Y1's storytelling. And wow, it paid off. There are so many fans that consider it the best story in the entire series, that they were invested in what was going on, and while Kiryu's half still had a fair bit of politics in it, they didn't overstay their welcome, and his relationship with Nishiki and Kuze were enough to pull it through. And Majima's half was just fantastic, there was romance, real character development, loss, redemption, tragedy, a true hero's journey. THIS is the stuff Western fans want in their stories, and what was missing from the games for so long: [b]emotion.[/b] So now we arrive at Y6. The writers at Sega have seemingly learned their lesson, and are going to add some real emotion and interpersonal drama between the cast this time. The Yakuza are no longer the subject of the story, it is simply the context. Except, not really. It takes one step forward, and two steps back. They learned the wrong lessons from Y0's success. They tried to do what Y1 and Y0 did and have a new plot, new setting, a new cast, and few returning characters. Ok, well, here's the problem there: this is Kiryu's swan song. This was consistently marketed as the big finale, the culmination of a journey Kiryu's had for 10 years. He's had an (adopted) daughter, he's raised a bunch of kids in an orphanage, he's singlehandedly taken down several organizations and saved not only the Tojo Clan but Japan itself multiple times. He has met and become close friends with a lot of people in that time. So he gets closure with all those people, right? I mean, this is Kiryu's final game. You want it to tie up all loose ends and see all your favorite characters back for one last showdown, the most fan-satisfying conclusion possible, right? Well, forget it. All those characters you like? Majima, Saejima, Daigo, the kids, even freaking Haruka? They're not present for 90% of the plot. Some have no interaction with Kiryu at all, and the ones that do were never [i]that[/i] close to Kiryu. You get Akiyama and Date. That's it. And Akiyama feels like an afterthought, he never feels like he needs to be there. Even series mainstays don't show up at all. Where's the Florist? Where's Komaki? Where's Hana? Instead, you have new characters, the Hirose family and a woman in Hiroshima. I like them well enough, especially Beat Takeshi's character. They're certainly more likable and deep than a lot of other Yakuza characters over the years. But they're the kind of characters they should've been saving for a spinoff or a prequel or Y7 or [i]something[/i] other than Kiryu's big finale. There's a new villain who's fantastic and could've easily been the main conflict and the final boss, but he gets shafted halfway through for a villain who doesn't parallel anything about Kiryu's character at all. But I'd be fine with that. I'd be fine with the new characters and making it mostly about Kiryu himself, if it wasn't [i]so boring.[/i] It really, really tries to humanize Kiryu and make the conflicts in the story more relatable. He suddenly realizes he's a grandfather, has to take care of a baby, and his daughter is missing. That's a great setup for a Yakuza story. It had a lot of mystery and intrigue into what was going on. There were new twists at every turn, and questions kept getting answered with more questions. I was confident that the game would answer all of them by the end, but boy was I wrong. By the last third, the story gets so convoluted, so confusing, so political, that I just stopped caring. It keeps throwing new, exciting setpieces at you, but they're fleeting. Hitchcock once described so many films as being just "photographs of people talking" with very little cinematic camera work. For a game that prides itself on being like a Japanese crime movie, there's very little cinema going on here. Scenes just go on and on and on with static camera angles of characters dumping so much exposition on you, I mean good god. It got to the point where I was speedreading and skipping through the dialogue not even bothering for the voice acting to catch up. Another thing is that it feels like 20 pages of the script got cut out. I won't spoil one of the game's biggest twists, but a major character is ruined in a way that absolutely should not have gotten past an editor, with their actions never being explained nor justified despite so many characters bringing them up, and it made me want to pull my hair out. They added romance as an element, except the romance here was just creepy and awkward. All that makes me want to call this the worst story in the franchise, but I can't, next to Y4 and Y5, because there are moments where I actually found myself invested. I cared about a lot of these new characters, and I cared about Kiryu, enough that by the end, I got choked up, purely because they injected real, relatable emotion into it and had that emotion explode on-screen. When the cinematics are good in this game, they're [i]really[/i] good. And if none of the other characters were treated well, Kiryu totally was. His ending was fitting for him. Basically, Y6's story left me conflicted on whether to feel satisfied or not at its conclusion. It's inconsistent, and convoluted, and yet it has more personal stakes and emotional storytelling than anything in Y3-Y5. It feels like it deserved a lot better than what we got. This, plus the lack of returning cast members, can probably be attributed to Sega's budget being blown on the Dragon Engine, which while technically impressive was not worth sacrificing the game's story (nor its gameplay for that matter, which I can't go into much here due to character limits).