Despite a cast composed largely of gangsters, and a plot centring on the machinations of various families, Yakuza 5 is not by any stretch of the imagination a game about organised crime. Oh it's dressed up like that, and amidst battling endless thugs and police officers you could be forgiven for the mistake. But really Yakuza 5 is really a game about saving puppies, obeying traffic laws, and losing yourself in hobbies.
The first two Yakuza games, released for PS2, established the series as - in my mind - the more hard-edged successor to Shenmue. Original director and now series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi took the structure of Yu Suzuki's masterpiece, the small-but-dense style of open-world design, and layered atop it a more mainstream theme and a much more detailed, dynamic combat system. The connection between the two games is at its strongest in what you actually end up doing as Kazuma Kiryu or the four other lead characters - which is to say, anything other than progressing the main plotline.
The first few hours of Yakuza 5 are more or less an avalanche of minigames and side-quests, with the player shuttled forwards through the basics before being left (relatively) free to explore the opening town of Fukuoka. It's worth pausing, though, over exactly what kind of open-world this is. Yakuza 5's locations are compact but detail-rich places, where you can run end-to-end in a minute or two but spend hours walking the same distance. Everything is about density rather than scale. Kazuma Kiryu isn't the fourth chairman of the Tojo Clan, for me, so much as Ryo Hazuki's true heir.
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