Episode 24: Tokyo Highway Battle (uncut commentary feat. ChaosArgate)
Or maybe Yokohama Highway Battle, I’m not sure which end of the highway we are on at that point after rescuing Haruka from the Snake Flower Triad (which, in true Kazuma Kiryu fashion, involves beating up a restaurant full of gangsters… well, beating up the gangsters inside the restaurant, not the building itself although that still seems plausible enough). However, instead of doing battle in the form of illegal street races, we have an absolutely terrible rail shooter section to get through. ChaosArgate joins me once again for this exciting road trip.
As I’ve said a few times lately, I mostly prefer the original game to Kiwami. I realize the latter is objectively superior in many ways (certainly from a technical standpoint) but the low-budget remake that uses the Yakuza 0 engine and recycles many of the assets from 0 simply isn’t as interesting to me as this flawed but ambitious late-era PS2 game that laid the groundwork for the series. That being said, this rail shooter segment is almost unplayable in the original version and should have never made it into the released game, because even for the PS2 this is some dire shit. I would call it reminiscent of weird PS2 budget games, but that would be an insult to the likes of Earth Defense Force because at least that is fun to play.
Oh yeah, and when I start rambling on about Yakuza being intended as a competitor to GTA, I obviously mean in the west where they clearly were going for the GTA audience with all the “gritty” swearing and celebrity voices. In Japan, Ryu ga Gotoku simply started out with Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi making the kind of game that he himself wanted to see, and nobody expected much from it at first.