Developed/Published by: Sega CS1 R&D / Sega
Released: 15/03/2011
Completed: 18/12/2024
Completion: Finished the story and all substories (other than the hostess club ones.)
Well, it’s taken me five years to play another game in this series, thanks to a global pandemic meaning my PS3 was in storage miles and miles away from me, and because one of the main roles, Masayoshi Tanimura, was recast for the remastered version, I absolutely refused to play it first (it’s like wanting to play a Lucasarts adventure in EGA. You want to see the original author’s intent!)
Anyway, it’s a good thing too, because–as I mentioned the last time I was on the Insert Credit podcast–Yakuza 4 takes ages to install and while it’s installing it’s the only place you hear the vocal version of the main theme, “For Faith” and it absolutely slaps. They literally just play it about ten times in a row, setting a precedent where I play it ten times in a row. I find it hard to believe there will be a better track across the entire series (though I’m excited to find out if there is) because I have to be honest that nothing from 1, 2, or 3 stuck with me.
You should listen to this while reading the rest of the article, right?
Unfortunately, outside of one of the most hype tracks ever, Yakuza 4 is… kind of a mess? It’s not actively the fault of the Yakuza core, which is all there and accounted for, but simply that the game feels like it’s a billion hours long and the narrative is… genuinely nonsensical.
Taking place a year after Yakuza 3, with Kiryu still running an orphanage in Okinawa, the plot hinges on a massacre of 18 yakuza in 1985 in a botched hit on a clan chairman. We play and follow the stories of Shun Akiyama, a loan shark(!), Masayoshi Tanimura, a corrupt cop(!!) and Taiga Saejima, the guy who did the massacre(!!!) gradually unravelling the mystery of what happened and why it connects their lives, before Kiryu has to show up and (ostensibly) pull all the threads together in a humdinger of a climax.
This does not, exactly, go as you might hope. First let me say that one of my absolute favourite thing about the Yakuza games is that it is a rule that you are playing the kindest, nicest person who ever lived, but who will also, at a drop of a hat, beat you within an inch of your life with the nearest piece of roadworks. It reaches absolutely absurd levels here as our loan shark turns out to be giving his money away without even charging interest [“come on man, at least charge inflation”–Investment Ed.] our corrupt cop turns out to be shaking people down to support and protect immigrants who otherwise have no legal recourse, and our mass murderer turns out to (spoilers!) have never killed anyone at all!!!
This “our heroes are the most honorable men to have ever lived” gimmick is especially funny here because if you look a bit deeper it gets a bit confusing. Our loan shark does a surprising amount of funnelling desperate people into sex work as a condition of a loan (sex work is work, but it definitely feels like coercion) our corrupt cop turns a blind eye to some seriously fucked up stuff to get kickbacks, and Saejima… definitely intended to kill those dudes!
The problem ultimately is that compared to the (relatively) straightforward stories of 2 and 3, 4 gets lost in a web of increasingly unbelievable twists even as it should be following a fairly straightforward episodic form. You have never seen any piece of media where this many characters get shot to death and then turn out to never have been shot at all. Indeed my favourite bit in the game might be when a character says “ok I’m going to kill these two people now” before a cliffhanger, only for one of the characters you just thought were shot to show up in basically the next scene and for another character to attempt to explain away why he said that. It doesn’t work.
The game was written by Masayoshi Yokoyama as the other games have been, but I have to wonder if the script was in flux for a long time, or if there was meddling from the top down. Notably, Kiryu feels absolutely inessential to the plot here. His chapter front loads about an hour of cutscenes and he doesn’t really do anything except any substories you choose to do. It’s possible he wasn’t originally planned to be included, but maybe they just liked the idea of the fourth game having four protagonists.
The game generally feels unbalanced–the first character you play, Akiyama, does seem to have the most interesting stuff to do, and he’s the most charming, interesting non-Kiryu protagonist–and I was disappointed in the substories this time around. Maybe it’s just that I’m four games in, but “go to place, beat up guys, go to other place, beat up guys” isn’t that interesting the hundredth time you do it, and the stories generally aren’t interesting enough to make up for it.
As usual, there are a zillion mini games, but this time round managing hostesses is made as tedious as possible (you have to walk around the club listening to people and constantly dressing your hostesses differently???) and the only other in-depth mode is a martial artist manager that I wasn’t too excited for either.
This is still a Yakuza game, though, and it’s still entertaining! I love strolling Kamurocho and I still enjoyed the fighting even if I didn’t love having four different fighting styles to remember in the climax. The issues really do relate to the story, which constantly undercuts any opportunity to be moving by constantly being confusing or ridiculous. The game actually ends with an intense one-on-one battle for each of the protagonists to a different arrangement of For Faith and it should have made me so hype but for at least three out of four battles I was confused as to why they were happening.
Unfortunately, I’ve heard that Yakuza 5 doesn’t make massively more sense, but hopefully it won’t take another five years to get to it.
Will I ever play it again? Of the Yakuzas I’ve played, this definitely feels like the most inessential to play. 1 and 2 have Kiwami versions (although I believe that 2 has some cuts and visual downgrading in its remaster) and 3 was chopped to ribbons in localisation, whereas this one has everything in the remastered version. So probably not!
Final Thought: Actually, it might take five years to get there, considering I’ve got two PSP exclusive Yakuzas and Yakuza Dead Souls to get through first. There are so many of these!!!
