Yakuza 6 - The Song of Life PS4 Review
Posted on: 2018-04-10
Our rating:
You owe yourself to play this game it will make you laugh and it will make you cry, it is one of the finest examples of interactive story telling...
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life PS4 Review
A franchise I had a rocky start with was the Yakuza series, but at the start of 2017 I had the opportunity to review the prequel Yakuza 0. I instantly fell in love with the series, as it has lovable characters, despicable villains and engaging stories that make me a bit emotional with the powerful voice acting and convincing delivery. I’m back again to review Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, which is a stunning conclusion to Kazuma Kiryu’s exploits in Tokyo.
We once again step into the shoes of the hardened ex-gangster Kazuma Kiyru, who is not as young as he used to be as he is now 48 years old he realises the old order of the Yakuza can no longer thrive in modern society. He is not in great shape due him being mortally injured after the events of Yakuza 5 where he was fatally stabbed, he ends in hospital knocked out when he awakes he is in a prison cell charged with attempted murder and criminal damage. His adopted daughter Haruka’s career went into a downward spiral due to her revealing to the public that her father is a former Yakuza thug. She realises that it could jeopardise the future of the children of the orphanage she runs so she runs away to Kamurocho to be closer to Kiyru when he gets out of prison.
Three years later Kiyru is released and the year is 2016 and it is a different place compared to the one he left, Kiyru finds out that Haruka is missing and he is then told she was involved in a hit run protecting a baby that turns out to be hers. Kiyru being unsurprisingly angry wants to know who the father is and no one knows, he then embarks on a journey to Hiroshima to look for clues. Once again the cast deliver excellent performances across the board, plus it helps the facial animations are at their all-time best. This is the first in the series to be developed exclusively for the PS4 as the other games where also made for the PS3 so they could put more detail into the animations.
Now we have got that big chunk of story out of the way, how is the bone crunching combat in this iteration of the series? It is excellent you really feel the weight of Kiyru as he has gotten older and as he is not as nimble as he was in Yakuza 0 or Kiwami. You are now bound to one fighting style in this game, so you no longer have four fighting styles like in Yakuza: Kiwami but honestly it doesn’t bother me as the one fighting style is not too slow or too fast. You can once again use anything to help you in a fight that is not nailed to the ground, it is still fun to pick up a bicycle and smash a gangster’s teeth in and see spokes and wheels fly across the street. Finishing moves are more brutal compared to the other games, with different objects or positions of the environments from stomping on someone’s face to shooting someone with a gun to then to pistol whip them.
It’s not all about smashing gangster’s teeth in, there are lots of mini games to partake in and I mean lots, you can play pool, darts, claw machines, mah-jong and of course classic Sega arcade games. The crippling amount of detail that went into these mini games is absolutely insane, you can get distracted for hours on these mini games because they are well designed and have had just as much effort put in as the combat.
With this being the first Yakuza game that has been developed for the PS4 only in mind it looks absolutely gorgeous; the streets of Kamurocho have never looked more alive. Character models have been given a huge bump in quality with more believable movements and superb facial animations; it really captures the emotions of the characters even down to subtle twitches. My only gripe with the presentation is that I noticed some screen tearing and we go from a smooth 60 frames per second to 30, but I understand the downgrade in framerate due to increase of detail.
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is a stunning conclusion to Kazuma Kiyru’s tale; I feel that I have gotten to know Kiyru throughout the series from a hardened gangster to a loving father figure to his adopted daughter. You owe yourself to play this game it will make you laugh and it will make you cry, it is one of the finest examples of interactive story telling which help this medium mature.
4.5/5
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
