This review is for the PlayStation 2 version of Yakuza.
Yakuza is the brutal, gritty story of a man with a dark past who just wants to make amends and get back on the right path, turned into a hilarious farce by a truly once-in-a-lifetime shitty English dub. It’s lightning in a bottle; you have some very famous, very talented actors being forced to deliver lines in hilariously shitty ways in an effort to match the audio to the movement of the characters’ mouths. You have a translation that adds literally thousands of instances of “fuck” and “shit” to a language that doesn’t have any swear words. You have the deeply uncomfortable fact that all the lowlife thugs you meet on the streets talk in African-American English for reasons I truly don’t want to dive into. There is a genuinely wonderful moment, during the story’s climax, when a man says “motherfucker” by clearly enunciating each of the four syllables with equal emphasis. I absolutely adore the English dub of this game and I’m so glad that there was no easy way for me to play the original version in Japanese, because then I would have missed out on the delightful clusterfuck to which I bore witness.
And the best part is that the game’s good, actually. Most of the big, serious story moments are undercut by the dub and transformed into comedy, but that doesn’t stop the atmosphere from working really well. Nearly the entire game is set in a single neighbourhood—a claustrophobic set of streets based on Tokyo’s Kabukichō district, and the relatively small size of the setting makes it feel really fleshed out and lived-in, especially compared to the open world settings of a lot of similar settings. I liked that you can go into nearly every building; if you want to buy food or medicine you can actually go into a restaurant or pharmacy and talk to the guy behind the counter instead of just opening a menu. It’s fun that there are random encounters where you’ll get stopped by goons looking for a fight, and it’s even more fun that these encounters don’t start until they catch you, so you can jog down the main road with like, nine different guys desperately trying to keep up.
The combat kind of sucks, but I’m not super bothered by it. I think the control scheme and general flow of melee combat might’ve been designed by a person who has seen a game controller, but has never used one or seen what human hands look like. It’s good that there are dumb, over-the-top moves and that you can pick up most objects and just fucking hit people with them, but it’s bad that there are boss fights that seem to be designed for a much more maneuverable character than the one you get.
If I didn’t like the bad dub so much, I would like the story, I think. It’s probably a little long and it’s hard to tell how serious they want it to be taken (it’s a hard-boiled crime drama but there’s also a weird underground city run by a crime lord and government agents rappel in from helicopters only to fight you bare-fisted), but the length helps to make me like the characters more, and the goofy bits just add to the uniquely uncanny and peculiar vibe that the game has.
I think Yakuza’s a pretty easy recommendation for me. I’m not interested in seeking out the frighteningly huge amount of side content, but if you are… well, it’s there. I like the story, I like that the story’s butchered by the dub, I like the dub itself, and I don’t hate the bad combat enough for it to get in the way of those things. I’m glad later entries in the series moved more towards the silly elements, but the weird incongruity of this one is so unlike anything else that it’ll keep a special little spot in my heart.
Dylan's Morsels 