This year I continued to play aggressively long games, which is, of course, my own fault. It means I get to play less of other video games, though, which in some cases is a problem, because my library of games is also aggressively long. It is a dangerous concoction – but in the case of the following game, I think there was something to be said for enjoying it to the fullest, while also now realizing that I can let go.
2) Yakuza 5 | Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios 2010
“You’re obsessed with your tortured past. But true strength is more than that.”
If you’ve been following me, you’ll know by now that I’m a serious fan of the Yakuza games. Admittedly, I haven’t played all that much of the series this year, if just because it’s such a massive time investment. I like to complete these games to 100%. As far as I understand, nowhere is this more difficult than Yakuza 5.
Yakuza 5 is enormous. The website howlongtobeat has an average of 153 hours posted in order to 100% complete it. I keep going to recommend this fifth installment to people, because it’s just so multifaceted and interesting. Unfortunately, it’s not like any of the previous games in the series, if you ask me. I think you can jump in anywhere prior, and while something like Yakuza 3 is much lesser without 0, 1, or 2 under your belt, you can still enjoy it. Yakuza 5, by contrast, feels like it would be nothing more than self-referential gibberish. It brings together five playable characters (that’s why they called it Yakuza 5 of course) and features four massive cities. Previous games used two at the most, but it’s mostly just been Kamurocho. Now, there’s so much more to see and do. New restaurants, new substories, new minigames. The minigames are core to the Yakuza experience. Without them, the feeling of the game, frankly, would not be the same. That said, despite how important the minigames are, playing pool for hours and hours, beating harder and harder challenges, makes me wonder – why?
Yakuza 5 is just one enormous timesink, in a sense. You can get lost in a variety of side-stories, which lead you into the minigames, which lead you to the completion list, which leads you to spend hours and hours swearing at virtual claw games, or cursing your opponents in mahjong. Is this unwinding? Is this healthy? Sometimes, I’m not sure. But I think Yakuza 5, at long last, has broken my immediate urge to attempt 100% completion in each of these games. I’ve been getting less and less time to play video games. My output this year is proof of that, in a sense. While I’ll get some more time next year, it’s still been an eye-opener for me to play this fifteen year-old third-person action open-world brawler with hundreds of hours of side content. Yakuza 5, while still entrancing and enjoyable in so many little random facets, is a game with so many rabbit holes that eventually I had to concede – no.
The gameplay of Yakuza 5 is dizzyingly varied. Each of the chapters has a unique gameplay minigame. Kiryu is now a taxi driver, for starters. But instead of the taxi being just a vehicle for high-octane insane street races (because it’s that too), it is also part of an actual taxi driving minigame. Where, y’know, you have to obey the road rules. I found this surprisingly addicting, at times meditative, but when people just kept crossing the street I had to restrain the urge to floor it and – whew. Breathe. Yakuza 5 conjures road rage even in memory, it seems. But this, I think, is the traditional Yakuza experience. Not the road rage, but the subversion of expectations regarding gameplay. Just when you think you have a handle on where the game is going, and the limitations of the gameplay loop, Yakuza 5 says: “here, what about a hunting game?”
Because yes, that’s right, there is a hunting game as well, where you take another playable character, Taiga Saejima, deep into the snowy mountains in the north of Japan. It’s fully fledged, too, with hunting rifles to take out, charms to find all over the mountain, hunting huts to rebuild, snares to place, and an entire miniature narrative about one man’s hubris – and his quest to attain revenge against an enormous bear. Saejima fistfights the bear. I think that almost goes without saying, but yeah, Yakuza 5 has you fistfight a bear. I wouldn’t call this a jumping the shark moment because Yakuza has always, to me, seemed to be full of jumping the shark moments. The enormous underground casino run by homeless people in the original game. The money that flies of people’s pockets as you beat the stuffing out of them in Yakuza 0, or the tank-sized men that run around the cities in the same game to take everyone’s money. There are plenty more examples, but Yakuza 5 is not some moment we can point to and say, “wow, look how nonsense the series has become”! It’s always been happy to go where it wants, in a particularly melodramatic fashion.
For me, the appeal of the series is how I can get lost in the weeds. Yet I understand the trepidation of starting Yakuza 5, which takes about forty to fifty hours to just beat the main story and just a little bit of the side content. It’s a huge game, stuffed to the gills with cutscenes, plot twists, new characters, and plentiful combat encounters. It was a pleasure to become lost in the world of hyperreal Japan for many more hours this year, but I think it was also eyeopening to see just how much of my time I was really spending on a single game. Completion is still fun and deeply satisfying to me. Going through and ticking off the checklist is some kind of dopamine booster for me, I think. Yet for all my creative ambitions, Yakuza 5’s completion list also felt like a restriction. It was a convenient excuse to just turn my brain off and play mahjong for another three hours, rather than challenge myself by writing more of my novel when I knew I hadn’t worked on it in a while. Will I learn this lesson, truly?
Probably not. I will insist on 100% Yakuza when the temptation hits. But I think now I am more aware of how video games try to waste your time more than ever. Is locking a player into hours of minigames necessarily good game design? Also probably not. But Yakuza 5’s importance comes from its significant size and admittedly messy storytelling. There are moments that stick with me very strongly. Kiryu is at his angriest in the series yet. Some of his Heat Moves (essentially damaging supermoves that play out in cutscenes mid-fight) are particularly aggressive. Grinding enemies’ faces against cold concrete is nasty. We’ve already discussed how elaborate Saejima’s hunting is. I actually enjoyed it so much, was so immersed in it, that I finished all the hunting stuff as soon as it was available to me. And… I would be remiss not to mention Haruka.
Dance battling as Haruka is iconic. Having a virtual mum that did my makeup and took me shopping for clothes for a little while was surprisingly heartwrenching. It was nice to see the Yakuza games at least try to directly address the female perspective in a series that heavily privileges the male experience. That’s still true in Yakuza 5 – Haruka is the only protagonist who has to share her chapter with another playable character. But there’s at least an attempt there to really address how women are harassed in showbusiness, how they are forced to fit into small boxes, and how people think they can take advantage of women and control them. It was just… nice, to wander around a city that also wasn’t full of violent men, but instead other women who just wanted to dance. Maybe that’s the power fantasy I was really after. Because putting aside the absurdity of everything that happens on screen, there’s a story about people learning to love themselves and their pasts regardless of what that past contained. It is exactly the kind of story that I needed in 2025, to tell me that no matter the time that I feel like I have wasted, there is always the next day. And there’s always time to realize that while the past wasn’t what I wanted it to be, there’s truth to be found there anyway.
Oh, and Shinada the baseball player is a thing too, but I’ve run out of space to talk about him. Maybe another day. In summary… I like dance battles. Wait, is that the lesson I was supposed to take from today? Oh well.
It’ll do.
Horrorgameanalysis 