The '80s bubble economy is long over, and money is harder to come by-no longer flying from the bodies of beaten up thugs or earned in the millions thanks to the chicken you assigned to manage your real estate holdings. Purists may argue that having to travel to a savepoint was more philosophically in keeping with the way the series attempts to ground Kamurocho as a physical space, but I don't mind sacrificing that if it means not accidentally losing hours of progress.Ġ's colourful filter is gone, and the streets feel greyer and less vibrant. Perhaps the biggest quality-of-life improvement is that Yakuza Kiwami autosaves your progress, and even lets you manually save from the menu without having to visit a phonebox. Attempting to manipulate the camera with the mouse is an exercise in frustration. The game warns you to use a gamepad when it boots up, and it's just the more comfortable control scheme. As with Yakuza 0, though, a controller is the preferred way to play. There's plenty you can tweak, from UI scaling to remappable gamepad and keyboard inputs. Even with everything on maximum, though, this is not a game that cares about perfectly rendered high-resolution textures. There are a handful of graphics quality settings-SSAA, FXAA, texture filtering, and shadow and geometry quality.

Yet it's still a joy to discover how the setting has changed in the 20 years since the events of Yakuza 0-realising the significance of Millennium Tower in relation to 0's main plot, or discovering what lurks beneath West Park's homeless camp.Įxpectedly, Yakuza Kiwami runs smoothly-easily maintaining 165fps at 1440p resolution on my GTX 1070. Every Yakuza game features the district, but most offer new perspectives, or balance it alongside other locations. It's by no means a bad game, but expectations need to be managed. Perhaps it's better to think of Yakuza Kiwami as an expansion pack to Yakuza 0. It's a relic from a time before the series fully knew what it was, dressed up in the clothes of Yakuza at its best.

As a remake of a 13-year-old game-even one with extra features-Kiwami takes place entirely in Kamurocho, and offers fewer side activities and less playful substories.

You don't need to have played 0 to understand what's happening in Kiwami, but it's the bigger, better and more well rounded experience.

Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first game in the series into Yakuza 0's engine-its story ever-so-slightly tweaked and expanded to better integrate with the plot points of the '80s prequel. If you haven't played Yakuza 0, go and do that first.

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