Far Eastern promises

Tokyo tales

Well that was never going to last. At the end of Yakuza 2 handsome antihero Kazuma

Kiryu renounced the world of organised crime and shacked up in Okinawa to look after a bunch of orphans. Orphans! But everybody knows gangsters never really retire, and within minutes of Ryu ga Gotoku 3 (as it’s known in Japan) he’s drawn back into the pleasingly stylised violence of Tokyo’s murky underworld

We’re not talking about the kind of amoral, sandbox-style city used as the backdrop for most western crime sims, though. Yakuza 3 takes a traditional Japanese RPG design and applies it to a contemporary setting, demonstrating the gulf in taste between Japanese and western gamers in the process: there’s more watching cut-scenes and scrolling through dialogue boxes here than there is stealing cars. But approach the game with an open mind and you’ll be delighted by the scale and variety of its ambition, and its occasional utter craziness. In-between all the dialogue, you explore

the painstakingly recreated streets of Tokyo and Okinawa, interacting with NPCs and fighting random battles with various street hoodlums. Fights are less complicated than in a fully-fledged beat-’em-up, but also more varied, featuring golf clubs, shotguns, nunchucks and head-stomping, nose-crunching moves.

Kit offNevertheless, in spite of all the violence (and an abundance of macho posturing that sees men taking their tops off at the slightest opportunity) there’s another crucial difference between Yakuza 3 and its western counterparts. Whereas, say, Rockstar’s brand of violence is full of

moral ambiguity, Sega’s vision of the criminal fraternity is an altogether more morally upright one. It might borrow from Yakuza movies like Sonatine or Boiling Point, but the morality here is much more cut and dried. Indeed Kiryu spends the first several hours tending to the domestic problems of his orphanage. The contrast with this domestic triviality makes it all the more creepy when the narrative wrenches you back to a Tokyo crime boss chopping up animal carcasses – but it also leaves you in no doubt as to who the good guy is. Looking after orphans and old ladies, finding missing dogs, helping tourists carry ice-creams, dealing with the school bully:

Yakuza 3

Y3 is visually striking, but hard to understand if you no speak the lingo.

Influences Component parts of Yakuza’s gang culture

Okinawa Beat Takeshi GTA Shenmue Booze

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InfoFormat PS3 ETA Japan import Pub Sega Dev Amusement Vision Players 1-2 Web ryu-ga-gotoku.com It’s like Grand Theft Auto, only with less car-jacking and prostitutes, and more billiards and orphans.

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The game kicks off with a double murder, sparking a complicated whodunnit mystery.

Non-natives will struggle with some of the Japanese references. And the karaoke.

You can’t beat up pedestrians like in GTA, but the action is still pretty brutal.

In what is an unlikely twist for a game about violent thugs, you spend a lot of the game looking after kids.

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With such an abundance of content, it’s perhaps no surprise that the quality veers all over the place, from sublime brilliance to simple-minded idiocy and back again, with detours via the bizarre. But that sums up why Yakuza 3 is so entertaining: this is no cookie-cutter game that’s

dropped off the end of an assembly line; it has spilled out of the mind behind Super Monkey Ball and Shenmue. It’s a game that is bursting with as much ingenuity as it is eccentricity. The new chase/pursuit battles, for example, are terrible – holding down a button to sprint then wrestling the controls to dodge obstacles. But it’s easy to forget this while you’re taking part in an actual honest-to-goodness game of hide ’n’ seek with some kids (which, in a game about the convoluted politics and treachery of nefarious crime gangs, feels pretty bonkers). Or there’s the way you unlock new combos, by taking photos of civilians and blogging about them.

The narrative is similarly schizophrenic. From a western perspective, it feels a little bit too preachy. But while it feels saccharine and occasionally patronising, it also covers fairly mature themes like racism and Japanese domestic politics. The thing is,

those domestic politics might not be quite so interesting if you’re not Japanese, which is perhaps one reason why there’s no news – yet – of a western release. On the one hand, that means that they won’t butcher the game by imposing a terrible dub on it like they did with the first Yakuza. On the other hand, it means you’ll need to learn Japanese if you want to play it.

If Sega doesn’t release this in the west, however, it would be more

criminal than anything the real Yakuza has ever done. Well, maybe. Because, for all its minor flaws and occasional craziness, Yakuza 3

is an amazing game. David McCarthy

GirlsAs well as wooing attractive girls with the art of conversation, you also manage your own hostess (known as kabakura in Japan).

LOVING HATING

SportsOkay, so the putting is a little off, but the golf and billiards games are on a par with many dedicated sports sims.

NoodlesAs well as being able to eat ramen noodles in the game you can now eat them in real life, thanks to Yakuza- branded foodstuffs!

RunningKiryu turns like an oil tanker when he runs, so the new chase sequences are irritating. Luckily they don’t appear too often.

This is how you spend the first part of the game. At one point Kiryu even has a meeting with the PTA representative.

Turning JapaneseKiryu’s world teems with life – the level of incidental detail is staggering, from the Boss coffee ads to the Okinawan sanshin music that comes and goes on the breeze as you pass restaurants or shops. When you finally reach Tokyo, Shinjuku’s red light district is brought to life more realistically than the first two games. And when you’re not following the main story, there’s so much to do! Playing darts might feel like controlling a drunkard but who cares when there’s an entire golf game in here. There are billiard games that would put many specialised snooker titles to shame. There’s mahjong, gambling, baseball and fishing. There are dating games – you can even choose to manage your own hostess girl, dressing her up and training her in the art of conversation to attract clients.

“Fights are full of nunchucks, golf clubs, and nose-crunching moves.”

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