Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (Review)

By: The JewphinYakuza 6 is an odd game where you can transition almost seemlessly between live chatting with stripping women and making silly faces at a baby to keep it from crying. While none of the gameplay features alone feel worth the price of admission, the wide variety of things to do combine with an engaging story for a game that is definitely worth playing.For players new to the Yakuza series, there is a lot of backstory to cover prior to the events of Yakuza 6. Fortunately, the game is instantly accessible due to some incredibly handy tricks by the developers. First, an option from the main menu allows you to review summaries of the previous 5 games - an option that I wish I saw more often in serialized games but used not at all. Second, Yakuza 6 starts out by giving you an epilogue to Yakuza 5, thereby helping to define Kiryu's motivations. Finally and most importantly, our protagonist appears to have memory loss from being hit in the head too many times. I have lost track of the number of times a character has said "hey Kiryu, it's me!" only for Kiryu to say "I have no idea who you are."It helps that motivations in Yakuza 6 are fairly straightforward. You are ex-Yakuza Chief and all-around good guy Kazuma Kiryu. After spending a few years in prison, you have been released to spend time with your adopted daughter Haruka and the family of orphans you sponsor. But when you arrive at the orphanage, Haruka has gone missing. It is up to you to wander the streets of Japan to discover what happened to Haruka in the years you were in prison.As demonstrated above, Kiryu is written to be a mix between a total badass and the best human being on the face of the planet. He sponsors the aforementioned orphanage, helps innocent bystanders for no benefit, and is generally loved by all manner of children, women, and cats. It almost feels like the game is trying as hard as possible to justify making a Yakuza clan member a good guy.Despite the many rhythm and QTE mini games, Yakuza 6 is primarily a brawler. The vast majority of guys you encounter want a piece of Kiryu. Enemies range from street thugs to other gang members, such as the Triad or opposing Yakuza. Each fight begins with a comic book style introduction of your opponents and ends with a satisfying slow motion crunch as you pound the last dude's head in. The fighting gameplay is serviceable if rarely interesting. Most fights boil down to the standard combination of light and heavy attacks with little nuance. I did not find the dodging or blocking mechanics to feel well integrated and won most fights by spamming the same combinations over and over.The combat alone would not have sold this game to me, but the combination of the combat and the leveling system kept me faffing about for hours instead of pursuing the main story. To level up in Yakuza 6, you need to obtain stat points. While you get a small amount of stat points by fighting people on the streets, the vast majority of your points will come from eating food. Each restaurant has a variety of dishes that will give you different stat points when you eat them. But to purchase these dishes, you need money. Where do you get money? Beating up thugs. So you beat up thugs to get the money to buy the food to make you better at beating up thugs. But wait, it gets better. If you're not hungry, you won't get points from eating the food. How do you get hungry? You beat up thugs! So you end up in this wonderful loop where you're beating up thugs to get hungry and using the money you take off their bodies to buy food to satisfy your hunger and make you better at beating up thugs. There were times where I'd walk out of a restaurant into a group of Triads, beat them up, then walk back into the restaurant for my next meal like some hungry avenger - saving the world one meal at a time.Unfortunately, none of the other side activities spoke to me as well as the combat dining loop. Each city has a variety of mini-games including karaoke, arcade games, darts, and live chat. And while some of the games were initially amusing (watching Kiryu attempt to type naughty things to a girl on live chat might have been the funniest thing I've seen in a game), there never seemed to be a reason to do any of them. They're just kind of there. You get some experience for completing them and there are achievements for each one, but they don't feel like they add anything to the game. You level up much faster by beating and eating then by playing the mini-games and achievements can only do so much to incentivize gameplay. Which is a shame because it also feels like a lot of effort was put into making each mini-game complete and enjoyable.Overall, I enjoyed my time with Yakuza 6. The game is beautifully made with a lot of interesting design choices that sell both the characters and the world. For instance, Kiryu never starts a fight against street thugs. In cinematic sequences, the thugs always throw the first punch after receiving several warnings that punching Kiryu is a bad move. But even outside of scripted events, you are unable to enter combat on your own. An enemy has to see you, decide to fight you, and rush you with his friends before you can punch him. This means that Kiryu can't ambush enemies or prepare for a fight by arming himself with a nearby bicycle. Even the mission text understands this, reading "defend yourself" instead of "kill the non-believers!"My one issue with Yakuza 6 is that the story feels like it has trouble finding its footing. Kiryu spends a good amount of story time doing more mundane activities like taking care of a baby or chatting with the new bartender (who loves you at first sight, of course). While the story eventually ramps back up, it was in these moments that I felt like the series was really reaching for plot.