7.5/10 – 17 hours
Addendum
Lol Kiryu ain’t never gonna rest. This really did not end up being a sendoff. Infinite Wealth gave a slightly better effort in retiring Kiryu, even if random with the cancer. Kiryu is probably still not done though.
Review as written on 7/07/2022
Not the most fitting end to Kiryu’s story, but my god has this series been a journey. Bittersweet.
The dragon engine is gorgeous but the gameplay loop is so unnecessarily hard. I somehow didn’t find this to be much of an issue in Kiwami 2, but that doesn’t excuse the mechanics at their core. Leveling is way too complicated and dull, and every little thing needs to be unlocked, Kiryu at the start is incredibly weak and sluggish, and the upgrade system itself is needlessly complicated . getting upgrades won’t even help when you get ratio’d by the shitty physics. I’d take 3’s combat over this any day. Combat is also slow and repetitive, and there are hardly any practical heat actions, most need some item to be held.
Onomichi, while being GORGEOUS, has nothing to do in it, and half the shops close at night. On the plus side, the karaoke is fire. I always admire how the Yakuza series uses Karaoke as a way to highlight the characters’ ways of processing the events of a game, and Today is a Diamond and Hands are some of the best examples. Before playing the game they seem like cheerful, funny juxtapositions to the hardass characters, and after completion paint an amazing characterization picture.
The story itself is pretty good, though i wish the game focused more on the main characters rather than the ins and outs of Hiroshima’s
conflict, and the secret of Onomichi doesn’t do a damn thing to help the story. That ending got me choked up tho. I think about it all the time.
The game suffers from lackluster gameplay and padding, which is a shame that they didn’t seem to go all out for Kiryu’s swansong besides creating a new engine. But the Dragon of Dojima’s story was still wrapped up in a memorable way, and I can’t wait to see how the future of the franchise gets laid out.
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