Kiryu's origin story hits harder the second time around

Yakuza Kiwami arrived in the West in 2017 as a remake of the 2005 PlayStation 2 original, built on the same engine Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio used for Yakuza 0. The timing was clever. Yakuza 0 had just introduced a huge chunk of the Western audience to Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima for what was, technically, the first time — a prequel that doubled as a very confident on-ramp. Kiwami came next, which meant players were being handed an origin story they already knew the outcome of, starring a man they'd already spent forty-plus hours with. That structural oddity is either Kiwami's biggest problem or its most interesting quality, depending on what you want from a remake.

The straightforward pitch is that Kiwami modernises the 2005 game: new combat system, rebuilt cutscenes, voiced dialogue throughout, a handful of new story scenes. What the pitch undersells is how much the original's structure resists modernisation, and how the development team responded to that resistance in ways that are more interesting than the marketing suggested. This is not a seamless remaster. It's a rebuild with visible seams, and those seams are worth looking at.

The Kamurocho problem

Kamurocho is a small district. That's always been the point — it's dense rather than wide, packed with hostess clubs, convenience stores, arcades, and the kind of narrow alley that exists in almost every Yakuza game as a reliable venue for a fight. By 2017 standards, though, the area was showing its age in ways that even the rebuilt engine couldn't fully paper over. Many of the interiors feel thin. The side content, while present, lacks the sheer volume and absurdity that Yakuza 0 established as the new baseline. Players who came to Kiwami directly from 0 would have noticed the relative sparseness almost immediately.

There are genuinely good substories scattered through the game — the series has always been strong at these small, self-contained character sketches — but Kiwami's roster feels shorter and less inventive than what preceded it chronologically. That's a product of the source material more than any failure of ambition. The 2005 game was working with different expectations. The problem is that a remake sets its own expectations, and Kiwami set them against a very high watermark.

What the four-style system actually does

Combat is where Kiwami holds up best, largely because it imports Yakuza 0's four-style system wholesale for Kiryu: Brawler, Rush, Beast, and the unlockable Dragon of Dojima style. Each style has a distinct mechanical identity. Rush is fast and evasion-focused, better against single opponents who move quickly. Beast turns environmental objects into weapons and rewards slower, heavier play against groups. Brawler sits somewhere in the middle. The switching happens in real time with the d-pad, and once you've internalised which style suits which enemy configuration, fights become genuinely expressive — more so than the single-style systems in later entries like Yakuza 6 or Like a Dragon: Ishin.

Dragon of Dojima starts deliberately degraded and requires specific in-game conditions to restore its moves — which ties into the Majima Everywhere system, discussed below. The intentional weakening of Kiryu's signature style early in the game does something smart narratively: it positions him as a man who spent ten years in prison and is genuinely rusty, rather than a returning protagonist who conveniently retained all his abilities. It's a mechanical choice that earns its place.

The heat action system, which lets you trigger flashy contextual finishers when a meter fills, still functions as well as it ever did. The animations hold up. Some of the environmental heat actions — slamming someone's face into a vending machine, specifically — remain oddly satisfying in a way that speaks to how much care went into the physical feedback of these interactions.

Majima Everywhere: the system that shouldn't work but does

Majima Everywhere is the addition that most people remember, and it deserves more design analysis than it usually gets. The concept: Goro Majima, established in Yakuza 0 as one of the most compelling characters in the series, appears throughout Kiwami in disguise — as a street vendor, a police officer, a zombie, famously as a cone on the road — and challenges Kiryu to fights. Defeating him in various contexts unlocks new moves for the Dragon of Dojima style. It is, mechanically, a grind system dressed up in character work.

What prevents it from feeling like mere padding is that the encounters are genuinely varied in their staging, and Majima's appearances are written with enough wit that tracking him down feels like participating in a running joke rather than completing a checklist. There's a real tonal argument being made here: the game knows you love Majima more than it can justify given Kiwami's original script, so it creates a system that lets him be everywhere without pretending the main narrative can accommodate that presence. It's a workaround that becomes a feature.

The main story's honest limitations

The central narrative — Kiryu released from prison after taking the fall for a murder he didn't commit, drawn back into the Tojo Clan's internal war over a missing ten billion yen — is the foundation on which the entire series rests. It needs to work. And it mostly does, though not always for the reasons a 2017 remake might want. The bones of the story are strong: the betrayal by Nishiki, the relationship with Yumi, the figure of Shimano as an antagonist, Kiryu's refusal to re-enter yakuza life even as the plot makes that refusal increasingly expensive. These elements were well-constructed in 2005 and they remain well-constructed here.

The weaknesses are structural. Several chapters feel compressed in ways that the new cutscenes only partially address. Characters who are clearly meant to carry emotional weight — Shinji, notably — don't get enough time for that weight to accumulate before the plot demands a reaction from you. Yakuza 0 retroactively enriches some of these relationships, which is part of why Kiwami benefits from being played second; but that retroactive enrichment is doing work the remake itself doesn't fully do on its own.

The final act holds together better than the middle sections. The confrontation with Nishiki is one of the series' genuinely affecting moments, and the remake's production values serve it well. New voice performances — particularly Takaya Kuroda as Kiryu — give the material a weight the original could only gesture toward.

Pacing and the legacy of the source material

Kiwami is not a long game by the series' standards. The main story can be completed in around fifteen hours with minimal side content; completionists will push that considerably higher, but the game doesn't demand it. Compared to Yakuza 0's sprawl or the roughly ninety-hour commitment of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, it reads as lean almost to a fault. Whether that's a problem depends entirely on what you're after. If you want density, the game will feel thin. If you want a focused story with strong combat and a manageable runtime, it's well-suited.

The mini-games — mahjong, shogi, karaoke, the Pocket Circuit racing, batting cages — are present but not as fully developed as in later entries. Pocket Circuit in particular was expanded significantly in 0, and returning to Kiwami's version can feel like a step back. These are minor complaints, but they accumulate into a general sense that the game is aware of its own constraints and doesn't always find creative ways around them.

Who this is actually for

The honest answer is that Kiwami is best experienced as the second game in a specific sequence: Yakuza 0 first, then this. Played that way, it functions as a kind of tragic epilogue to 0's story, filling in what happened to Kiryu and Majima in the decade between those events and the present day. The emotional register shifts from the prequel's momentum to something slower and more elegiac. You spend much of Kiwami watching a man deal with consequences. That's a less immediately satisfying structure, but it's a more interesting one.

Played cold, as someone's first Yakuza game, the experience is rougher. The combat remains excellent, Kamurocho is still an impressive piece of environmental design, and the story's big moments land. But some of the connective tissue is missing. The game was rebuilt assuming familiarity, and that assumption is baked into its decisions — the Majima Everywhere system, the Dragon of Dojima degradation, the way certain scenes play on knowledge of 0 without acknowledging it explicitly. These aren't flaws so much as design choices that reveal their intentions only in context.

Kiwami is a flawed remake that is, nonetheless, worth your time precisely because of what it preserves. The 2005 game had a story worth telling — one that shaped an entire series and a character who has, against reasonable expectation, become one of gaming's more enduring figures. The remake doesn't transcend that source material, but it does honour it, and occasionally it finds moments where the gap between 2005 and 2017 closes completely. Kiryu walking away from the Tojo Clan still hits. It hit the first time and it hits now, which is more than most remakes can claim about the things that actually matter.