Yakuza 7

Yakuza 7 is probably the ballsiest genre shift I have ever heard of. The previous games in the series were largely beat 'em up action RPGs. 7 is a turn based RPG. I'm not sure any franchise has done that with a mainline entry. Certainly not in recent memory, where the majority of RPG franchises have been steadily either dying off or turning into Action RPGs (even Final Fantasy starting with XV, and Dragon Quest nearly did so with IX were it not for fan backlash). The pressure to sell more copies to the largest possible audience has pushed developers into turning every game into an action game. So it's absolutely bonkers Yakuza would go the opposite direction, even considering its target audience in Japan being more receptive to it. To top it off is the actual premise of why it's turn based: the protagonist is so obsessed with Dragon Quest that he sees real life like an RPG. I couldn't not play this game. I didn't have time to play the rest of the series (of which I've only seen/played like 2.5 games prior), but I still had to play this game.

The Battle System

So how does a game from genre newcomers (who allegedly slammed the new battle system into the game in like a year, which is absurd and I'm not sure I believe) actually play? The fundamentals are really strong. The main gimmick here is that while actions are turn based, enemies and players move around on the battlefield in real time while you decide your turn. It's a simple enough twist, but it has a lot of really cool elements that fall out from it: objects in the world get turned into extra damage attacks if a character touches them on their way to an enemy, area of effect attacks are a constantly shifting factor so you need to be fast before enemies scatter, allies will throw in free bonus attacks if they're nearby a knocked down enemy, and most interestingly enemies tend to attack the character nearest to them- so if you used a ranged ability, you'll tend to get attacked less while using a melee attack will put you in harms way. To play into the real time element there are also cases where some moves knock enemies down, giving you a few seconds to decide whether to follow it up with a souped-up regular attack or not. Rounding out the action elements, they include Super Mario RPG-esque attack and guard boosts with good timing (albeit presented as button prompts, rather than the more natural animation timing). What I dig about the system conceptually is that it allows the battle system to have the depth of positional choices, without slowing it down with full movement that turns tactics RPGs into slogs.

I only said that the fundamentals are strong. In practice, most battles involve you spending the first two turns using area of effect attacks and then focus firing remaining enemies because the previous attacks will have hopelessly spread out the enemies such that you will never get them in an area again. Things like knockdown attacks are OK for conserving MP on trash battles, but against bosses you will pretty much just spend every turn spamming whatever your highest damage attack is. Clever ideas like knocking an enemy down near your mage so they do a follow-up attack to regain MP without spending a turn don't actually matter in practice, since MP costs are sky high. About the only positional element that gets much play is keeping damaged allies away from bosses with ranged attacks, but healing is prolific enough that even that doesn't get much play. Basically, all the neat ideas don't actually matter that much.

Even so, I would still say the first half of the game is a perfectly good chill out RPG. It's a game about hanging out and talking with your party members in a bar, and helping naked strangers replace their lost clothing by clearing a path- battles don't need to be everything. They're smooth and fast paced enough with just enough action timing flavor and basic depth. Except the second half of the game makes it a lot harder to say they're fine. The short description is just that the game's approach to increasing difficulty is to just give more and more HP to every boss enemy. Actually, I'm not sure it's necessarily their HP so much as giving near-blanket elemental resistances while also having a very restrictive class system that makes it really hard/impossible to have elemental coverage on every party member while still having so much HP that having just one party member exploiting a weakness generally still takes forever? Even attack/defense buffs/debuffs didn't seem to help much. It's kind of odd, honestly. It mostly makes me feel like I was playing it wrong (particularly with odd cases where an enemy was weak to magic lightning attacks, but not my lightning-element weapon- and the game being inconsistent at displaying whether something is weak before using an ability) despite doing every side quest, beating the arena, experimenting with several jobs, and doing a significant amount of weapon upgrading. But I think just...maybe that's how the game is? Trying to create long-boss fight RPG tension, but failing because the enemies only have very basic gimmicks and only really change patterns once per fight, and often just to deal a little more damage. I wouldn't say it ruins the game, but it's kind of a bummer that I almost started to miss the old beat em up style by the end.

The Story

I played Yakuza 1 to completion somewhere around when Yakuza 4 came out and people were starting to praise the series as coming into its own (previously just dismissing it as a bad Shenmue clone). I only barely finished it after taking several months to beat a rather short game. The primary problem was just random encounters combined with PlayStation 2 load times, but I also found the story pretty unremarkable (made more interesting by the sequels always being direct, and involving characters aging over time- but I didn't get that far). The attempt at crime drama/mystery was admirable, but I wasn't that into it. I mention all this just to say: god damn did they get way better at writing stories since then. It's still a deathly serious crime drama with soap opera level absurd coincidences (side quests meanwhile completely contrasting it with silly comedy and sudden heartwarming endings), but a lot of the drama actually lands and it's usually compelling. It's one of those games with a 4 hour opening story setup where you barely play it, but you're OK with it because it's good. And also one of those games with hour long exposition that gives you 3 breaks to save. You're uh. You're less OK with that.

Game stories have progressively gotten more and more streamlined. Partially because games have gotten really expensive, which cuts down on the number of characters and locations you can have at full quality (consider how many original Final Fantasy VII scenes were probably done in under a week by a couple dudes, while the remake had to have full teams to create the equivalent scene). Partially because direction has shifted towards streamlined movie-like narratives over traditional RPG narratives that gravitate more towards a sprawling series of short stories connected by a main thread. It's in this regard that I kind of really appreciate Yakuza 7's frankly meandering plot. 

It basically spends 4 hours setting up the main Yakuza family story, before taking a hard turn into spending a significant chunk of the run time on the trials and tribulations of the 40-something protagonists working their way out of homelessness. It just keeps going from there with numerous subplots along the way, and by the end of it I felt like I had played through 3 games worth of plot. Somehow, it even manages to connect most of it together into a cohesive theme. Kind of- your party members are probably the weakest link, with a few of them not making that much sense to be hanging with you for the entire game and hardly even showing up in scenes. Likely the result of radical shifts mid-development, but it doesn't hurt much. Still, I really appreciated how they managed to pull off such a sprawling plot these days (admittedly mostly achieved by having such a limited setting of "the city" and "some office buildings", while something like Dragon Quest XI's globe trotting ambitions are more obviously cramped by budget).

What Is a Yakuza Game Anyway

Yakuza 7 basically just takes the existing formula and replaces the battle system. Structurally the games are kind of an odd duck to begin with. You might be tempted to call them open world: run around a city that unlocks over time, do side quests, shop, run into random encounters, do minigames for rewards in the rest of the game, etc. But the city is tiny. You don't have a car. The battles are siloed off from the world, so it isn't really an open world game. There's one single linear main plot. I don't know what to call it, and it's even weirder when you slap a traditional RPG battle system into it- effectively stripping the globe trotting formula out and replacing it with a sequence of events and a tiny overworld. 

I will say that 7 (and probably other recent incarnations) is a big step over 1's version of the formula (and not just because the load times aren't terrible). The sidequests are entertaining, and create a vague sense of a living city if you let yourself bump into them between tasks rather than beelining to them. The business minigame is great until you learn it, then the only joy is watching numbers go up. The can collecting one would be a legitimately great arcade game if it was played purely overhead. Picking up itemsin the world is baseline satisfying. So it's not necessarily terrible.

Yet I still don't know what to make of the structure when I let my brain ponder over it. I actually felt similarly "huh" about the beat em up version of it. I kind of hate it. The random encounters don't really add anything in a world where a restaraunt to heal at is always just down the street? Really it may be the main thing that makes me dread playing the rest of the series, even though it sometimes works.

Conclusion

I should probably take the time to mention that the personality of this game is actually really great. The reason I haven't is because by the end of a 60hr game, that kind of thing ends up forgotten. But it's great. Summoning works by using an app on your phone, and they all have delightfully lengthy animations. You get everything from a lobster pinching the enemy's nose to calling down an orbital laser. The game explains that a party member is resistant to cold because they're homeless. There is a tasteful amount of the protagonist comparing everything to Dragon Quest. A side quest tasks you with distinguishing a public urinator from a line up of suspects such as a really energetic fisherman. Mimics are just dudes jumping out of safes. This list is but a sample. 

Even outside of the quirky comedic elements, it also nails a comfy atmosphere with quietly chatting with your party members at your bar in between karaoke rhythm minigame sessions. The only real downside of it all is that the goofy combat animations diminish the serious "two shirtless men fighting about serious drama" boss battles that the previous games pulled off so well. I honestly think they might need to separate them into a different battle system in the sequels? But it doesn't hurt the game too much as-is.

So should you play Yakuza 7? If you can stomach occasional damage sponge RPG boss battles, possibly being forced to do side activities to power up, relatively bland battles, and slow paced storytelling then absolutely. I came close to quitting during my four month long play through, but I always came back. And I'm glad I did. (Even though I grew to loathe the battles, I still prefer them to the even worse beat em up style. It certainly took a lot longer for me to hate fighting.)

Bonus

I wanted to make a slick comment that Yakuza was smart enough to avoid doing a party-based game until going turn based, contrasting it with how Final Fantasy XV's action focus actually hurts its attempted themes of friendship because having dopey AI team mates running into walls is far worse at presenting comradery than a turn based game where working as a team is baked into the systems. But Yakuza 7 is still full of AI path finding running into things in the field and in battle so I can't honestly make that statement. And I haven't actually played enough Yakuza games to be certain there isn't a party based one (but I am under the impression they expanded by having multiple protagonists rather than parties, outside of temporary battle allies).