Hey hey folks and welcome to my critique of Yakuza Kiwami. It was great to play this remake of the first game in the Yakuza series after enjoying Yakuza 0 so much. I tried to keep my expectations in check, knowing that the writing of this game would not be as strong, but I still found myself engaged with the drama of the main story. This video is about learning to love the boss fights of the game, and why the fight against Nishiki is an encounter I’ll always remember. Enjoy!
Nishiki’s Importance
How often is the final boss of a videogame its best moment? It feels like I shouldn't have to ask that question. Like it should be a given that a game is always leading mechanically and dramatically towards its climax, ending with a challenge that leaves the player accomplished but also feeling a sense of catharsis. Thinking back on a lifetime of playing videogames, I can't recall too many instances where the final boss satisfied me on both a mechanical and dramatic level. Often by the time I reach a boss I'm wanting the game to be over, and let's be real, how many games have stories that affect the player during that final encounter, or at all. It reminds me how in many Japanese role playing games, there will be the mechanically difficult final boss often followed by a dramatically unsatisfying story boss.
Yakuza Kiwami is different. Fighting Nishiki at the end of Yakuza Kiwami might be my favourite final boss in all of videogaming. In terms of a JRPG he’s the story boss, as we just went through the Jingu fight which was mechanically annoying and exhausting (and I'll get to why later), only to come face to face with Kiryu's yakuza brother. Both have been traveling their own path the entire game, despite Nishiki throwing obstacles in Kiryu's way for his own selfish reasons. By the time this fight happens, the two are equals. They don't want to fight each other, but they must, and the fight itself reflects this. Not only are the two on equal footing, but through the special event cutscenes and all the flashbacks during this encounter, I felt bittersweet. Kiryu doesn't want this, and neither do I as a player, but we both can't let Nishiki have his way.
What makes it even more tragic is that even though the game portrays the two on equal footing in this encounter, Nishiki is no match for Kiryu. At this point after a game’s worth of leveling up, and after struggling with every significant boss encounter up to this point, I finally gleaned an understanding of the push and pull of boss combat. I was finally enjoying the mechanics of the fighting system while simultaneously being emotionally affected by the gravity of the situation Kiryu and I find ourselves in. And because I'm engaged mechanically as well as dramatically, Nishiki didn't stand a chance. It's too easy to build up heat attacks, too easy to counter a move, and even though I didn't understand what the game wanted from me during the Kiwami charges (only learning about them during my research), the recharged health bar wasn't a concern considering how outclassed Nishiki was in this scenario.
Of course the impact of this boss fight is in part due to the Kiwami remake itself. The fall of Nishiki, how he changed from Kiryu's brother into a ruthless psychopath over the period of 10 years is told in cutscenes parallel to the main story. These cutscenes are an addition to the remake. The original version on the PS2 didn't have them, and they are everything in terms of feeling sympathy towards Nishiki during his boss fight. We see him struggle, get disrespected, lose everybody, and then when he was about to take his own life, a chance encounter with his subordinate, the wrong words spoken, and Nishiki is set down a new path. A dark path. I found these scenes more compelling than Kiryu trying to find Mizuki, Yumi, and dealing with Haruka. So much so, this game feels like Nishiki's story more than Kiryu's. He even gets a moment of redemption at the end.
Learning to Fight
But returning to this idea of mechanics and drama being seperate (With how good the storytelling is in this game, it's different in my mind than just talking about gameplay vs story), while the core of the drama in Yakuza Kiwami is Nishiki's downfall, the core of the mechanics are Kiryu regaining his fighting prowess and rebecoming the Dragon of Dojima. And when I say that, I'm talking more about leveling up, then the sub-quest of fighting Majima over and over again to unlock abilities in the Dragon fighting style. Early on in the game, Majima hid himself somewhere in Kamurocho and I could never find him (not that I looked that hard), so while that part of the game was left on the backburner, the experience I earned by playing through the main story and a significant chunk of the side stories was more than enough to fill in all but the outer wheels on all three skill trees.
But that idea of starting small, out of my depth, and gaining mastery and power as I played through the game (one of my favourite things about playing any RPG) was most evident throughout the games' boss fights. If I hadn't stocked up on health drinks early on, I might not have been able to get through that first fight with Shimano in chapter 3. This fight is indicative of other tough battles I had, like with the Omi Yakuza in Ares, against Majima in the batting cage, or against Nishiki's men in the alley behind Serena. I just never found a good way to break defense. It seems at least in the early game the idea is to chip away at damage and hope you don't get caught in a counter-attack. If evades aren't perfect you end up taking damage, if an enemy brushes you with an attack you end up taking damage, and during this supposed push and pull, it's far too easy to get stunlocked. I theorised early on that if I had access to more heat actions and maybe some weapons things would be easier, and for the most part, that turned out to be true.
Part of it is what I see as a clash of styles. No, not just the ability to switch fighting styles with the press of a button, but it feels like the combat during random encounters and the combat during a boss fight are two different things. With the different sized yellow health bars on screen, the ability to pick up weapons, and the boss health bars changing colour, it's easy to see the Yakuza games as an evolution of the beat'em up genre so popular in the 90s. Games like Final Fight, where you'd walk into a crowd of tough baddies and mash the attack buttons with wild abandon. In a way the bosses are similar too. In those games they would have a lot of health, block attacks, knock you down, and hit for major damage. Of course back then the purpose was to get you to spend more money in the arcades by artificially inflating the difficulty, while in Yakuza I see these tactics as roadblocks to learn more about how the combat works, and to make sure one is adequately leveled up.
Once the player gets used to switching styles in combat, has access to more ways to generate heat, as well as stronger heat actions, the fights become a lot easier, but also more fun. By the finale of the game, I was enjoying the boss battles. The Majima fight in the soapland was a great push and pull between our styles, as was the fight soon after against Shimano (which I took as revenge for how infuriating I found the fight back in chapter 3). These fights can become annoying if flunkies are around, but there's always the Beast style's heat attack where you swing an enemy into his buddies, and knock everyone down like bowling pins. Of course that's if everyone is in melee range and you're not having to deal with a foe half a screen away firing a pistol at you.
That's what made the fight against Jingu and his subordinates so annoying. It was very similar to the fight on the rooftop against Arase when Kiryu was trying to save Reina and Shinji. When multiple foes have guns, and one of those foes is a boss, the game becomes exponentially more frustrating and that's because getting shot sucks. I mean, duh, but it's not as easy as just losing a chunk of health and focusing on the foe with the weapon. Getting shot is a stark gameplay interruption. The player drops, the sound and colour cuts out, and a button needs to be mashed to get back up. It brings the intensity of combat to a grinding halt. Now on the other hand, if you defeat an enemy with a gun and pick it up, it's a great way to clear the room. I just don't think the cons outweigh the pros regarding firearms.
Jingu and his bodyguards all have guns. Once you put the bodyguards down, they get back up, this time with knives, which is marginally better. If you add the gauntlet Kiryu needed to fight through to reach Jingu in the first place, this whole sequence is exhausting, and it's mainly for the same reasons the Nishiki fight is so great. We've spent the game seeing Nishiki's downfall. We're emotionally invested in him as a character, and we feel bad about having to put him down in the end. The finale of the game is the first time we meet Jingu. He's been talked about before, but not until we learn what was going on with Yumi. And once we learn about him, who is he? Some corrupt politician who is willing to kill a woman and her child in order to further his goals. Compared to Nishiki he's like the villain of a Saturday morning cartoon. Although the reason I hate Jingu so much has nothing to do with him as a character, it's because while trying to reach and fight him, Kiryu has had more holes put in him than a piece of swiss cheese. My hatred of Jingu is mechanical. It's how frustrating the combat is regarding him and his flunkies. Even though the fight with Nishiki was not easy, I was enjoying the back and forth because I respected him as a character and I was emotionally invested. I just wanted Jingu to go away.
Conclusion
So while joking about how so many JRPGs have the final boss and then the story boss, Yakuza Kiwami follows the same formula, and I love it. Because the final boss was not a fun fight, or a cool fight. It was not emotionally satisfying. That was all saved for Nishiki, the story boss. While I thought Yakuza 0 had better writing overall, I can't even remember the final boss of that game, but I think I'll always remember my fight with Nishiki. I wonder if the future Yakuza titles will have a final fight this strong. Thanks for watching.
