@bluesforbuddha Nagoshi actually defended the controls in that game, being the same guy (and team) behind Binary Domain. Basically, he said he deliberately declined to re-gear Yakuza for shooter fans.

@cptcarnage Too bad I own all those games on one platform or another. Is this a good time for me to confess that Psychonauts didn’t impress me all that much?

You guys heard the stuff on Yakuza 5?

• Set in five cities with five playable characters
• Kabukicho, Sapporo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka
• Kazuma Kiryu, Taiga Saejima, Shun Akiyama, Haruka, and Tatsuo Shinada (new dude)
• Supposedly set five years after Y4 (so Haruka’s like 18 by now)
• Kiriyu is a taxi driver now
• Launches in Japan in December

@RedSwirl Ah well, still, nice video! I messed about in the original and Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan!, and it really does seem like Shenmue fans should stop wallowing in their unfinished saga and embrace the Yakuza series with full force. They’re the closest living relatives, and certainly benefit from the processing power of this generation – at least with my experience with Kenzan. Wish that’d be a Western release…Yakuza set just after Sekigahara in Kyoto?! Who wouldn’t be keen!?

Just finished off the main quest of Yakuza 3… and I still want to go back for more: sidequests, dating, hitman missions, tournaments, etc. It’s kind of amazing that I’ve spent most of all this time in one small section of a city, but it manages to have enough life and personality to keep me going for 40 hours.

Several major sections of the game, including the endgame, made me sad that we don’t see more Double Dragon and Streets of Rage-type shit anymore. Kicking the shit out of 25 floors of mobsters all the way up to the big boss never stopped being fun, and we’ve figured out how to do hack n’ slash in 3D with God of War and Devil May Cry. Hand-to-hand combat, co-op, ship it.

My two surefire purchases for March 2011 are actually Yakuza 4 and Okamiden. Also Crysis 2 IF Crytek releases a singleplayer demo and I like it (that’s what sold me on the first game). I don’t know if I’ll be able to jump right into Y4 after so much of 3, but we’ll see if the three additional playable characters and supposedly better storyline are enough. If I have enough time I might go for 100% (or close to it) on my current Okami playthrough.

I will probably not be grabbing Dragon Age 2 right away unless the Feb. 22 demo turns out to be off the chain, so I think I can take my time on Awakening. Plus, the new Witcher 2 screenshots outright humiliate DA2. I actually don’t care much about the consolization of the game. If DA2 can bring back the above average writing and character casting of the first game, then I’ll pick it up on a Steam sale somewhere down the line.

So I finally started Yakuza 3 last night after buying it at launch.

I’m really appreciating the big improvements this game makes over the last two as well as the storyline, but Japanese developers really need to figure out how to pull the reigns in on openings and prologue content. This is nowhere near Final Fantasy XIII, but today I finally just got to the actual start of the storyline after four hours of setup driving in the fact that the main subject of the story is parenthood.

There’s this, Persona 3 taking literally two hours between the time you hit “new game” and when you receive full control of your character, the three-hour tutorial in Kingdom Hearts II, etc. I understand that Japanese audiences are typically more patient with narrative pacing, but goddamn. I put this disc in so I could play a game!

Western devs are messing around with interactive storytelling right now – It’s great to see so many games trying to avoid breaking interface, even if they do it clumsily. Are Japanese devs ever going to break away from cut scenes and visual novel storytelling? I’ve seen absolutely no indication of it so far.

I mean, I can tolerate it in the case of Yakuza 3 which is looking to have an abnormally interesting storyline right now, but if it weren’t for the equally interesting core gameplay, I’d just be watching this game on YouTube.