Quick Thoughts - Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
Written by serialexperimenter
Decided to move my media twitter thread to short media blogposts instead cause sometimes I wanna say more and I feel like it. Going to limit myself to 250 - 300 words though.
After 7 years of going through the Yakuza series with my wife, we finally finished Yakuza 6 and thus the Kiryu saga. I went into this one not expecting much because I feel like people had a lot of issues with this one on release, but I really enjoyed it. The focus on fatherhood and families as well as both blood ties and non-blood ties I think was a good note to end Kiryu's story on. I do feel that the choice to end the game on Kiryu's letter to Daigo calling him like a son is a bit unearned given his complete absence from the rest of the plot, but I really enjoyed Kiryu's relationships with the Hiroshima crew.
It is a bit disappointing that we don't get to see hardly any of Daigo, Haruka, Majima or Saejima in the game, because of how the story is structured. The structure of the story in general does fray towards the end as the game feels like it has three endings in a row as they didn't quite weave all of their threads together. Still, I think it was a strong finish and I really loved most of the cast, Beat Takeshi did a great job as Hirose and Nagumo was a great Rikiya 2.0. On to Like a Dragon!
4 out of 5 heat orbs
