Yakuza 4 -- All-In-One.

It's been a while hasn't it? I haven't been slacking. I just stepped into a black hole named Yakuza 4. Magus threw down the gauntlet with Yakuza 3 by earning the platinum trophy. So I had to earn that as well. This time around I started Yakuza 4 day-one and decided to take things one step further and threw my own gauntlet down. Not only was I going to get the platinum trophy for Yakuza 4, but I was going to get 100% percent completion. Which means the bastard was going to have to get 100% completion. Earning 100% completion in Yakuza 4 took me 166 hours. Earning the platinum trophy beyond that added three or four hours to complete the Ultimate Skill mode, which is a set of thirty-five challenges similar to the Crazy Box in Crazy Taxi. And another ten hours playing through the game two more times while skipping all dialog and cutscenes so I could unlock Ex Hard mode and complete it. That's roughly 180 hours. Wow. I'm glad to say that Yakuza 4 is a vast improvement over Yakuza 3. The story is far more focused and personal. It doesn't spiral out to some ludicrous CIA conspiracy the way Yakuza 3 does. The motives of the antagonists are also much better this time around. When Yakuza 4 was first announced and it was revealed that there would be four playable characters I was rather turned off. Having fully played the game now, I can say that this approach was great. It breathed new life into a series that really sort of needed it. I just didn't know how much it needed it until I played Yakuza 4. Yakuza 4 was fresh and interesting. I also like how heavily it tied back in to the original game. Graphically the game has never looked better. The world is extremely busy visually. There is always something to look at. The facial animation in the cutscenes are among the best in the industry. You're getting some great subtleties. The Japanese voice cast is phenomenal. Having the game be in Japanese with English subtitles really adds a sense of place that is so needed for a game like this. Musically the game is more varied than it has been in the past. You still have Hidenori Shoji's great techno rock score fused with a collaboration of numerous composers. They've added a blues-jazzy sound like you'd hear in the Lethal Weapon films. It works very well and helps in making Yakuza 4 feel as fresh as it does. The game's combat is still the most brutal fighting experience you're going to get in video games. But now you have four distinctly different styles further adding to the freshness of Yakuza 4. I enjoyed all four fighting styles. There is one area where Yakuza 4 still fails. And that's how it's still one of the worst game structures in existence. I'm talking about having redundant confirmations and strange loading breaks and other antiquated structural designs. It still feels like the framework is from a few generations ago. Say you wanted to pick up a locker key off the ground. Instead of just walking over to it and hitting X and picking it up you get something like the following. You walk over to the flashing light on the ground. You get 'hmm, what's this?', you hit X and get 'you found a locker key' and are prompted with 'do you want to pick up the locker key?'. You hit X again, and you'll get the animation of your character picking it up. Then you'll get 'you picked up the locker key' to which you must hit X a third time to make the message leave the screen. You had to hit X three times instead of just once as it should be. Yakuza 4 is rife with such old Japanese design. The further the series goes on the more glaring it becomes. They really need to rework the entire system and streamline it up to modern standards. Hopefully Yakuza: Of the End will be the final game so stuck in the past. Hopefully Yakuza 5 is brought up to modern design levels. The actual in-game content is awesome. It's just built on ancient and outdated Japanese design philosophy. I truly enjoyed Yakuza 4 and I'm giving the game a 9. I sort of hope Yakuza: Of the End doesn't come out until next year though. I've put in nearly 300 hundred hours between Yakuza 3 and 4 in the last couple of months. I need a Yakuza break. Next up for me will be something considerably less heavy. I really need something smaller. A little more bite sized.