I still want a remake of Y3. It was very early PS3 graphics. It's the only main entry I have not played. I heard the story is great.
So I recently replayed Y3 Remastered. I’m going to say upfront that, if you don’t know, I am an absolutely dyed-in-the-wool Yakuza Fan, one who, maybe blindly, has a allegiance to RGG Studio and will follow them to the ends of the earth.
Let me tell you about Yakuza 3: It’s complicated.
I think it’s a part of Kiryu’s saga that holds a lot of weight, and in a way acts as a bridge between the ”Kiryu Becomes a Legend” arc (Zero, 1 and 2) and the “Kiryu IS a Legend and maybe you spend a lot of time NOT being Kiryu” arc of 4 and 5. I think there are narrative elements of 3 that are absolutely integral to the overall story of Kazuma Kiryu that you
should know going into 4.
It’s too bad that Yakuza 3 has severe narrative issues that a Kiwami remake could not fix.
I could talk about how bad the gameplay is. I recently replayed it on Easy just so my girlfriend can say she’s seen it, and even on Easy every enemy is a damage sponge who will block almost all of the time, turning every battle from “Kiryu vs. Enemy” to “Me vs. Thumb Fatigue and Controller Battery.” But this could get polished up and made infinitely better in a Kiwami Remake.
What a Kiwami Remake of 3 can’t accomplish is massively rewriting and re-structuring the narrative to not be a pacing nightmare. I don’t want to get into a lot of specifics here because, hey, maybe you do wanna see the game for yourself, but it has huge problems. Things of almost no significance are given the same weight as government-shattering, global political events. It’s like if the weakest, most forgettable substories in any other Yakuza game were suddenly forced upon you between huge narrative moments, with no way to skip them. I don’t think this is
inherently a bad idea: I think this style of juxtaposition can put a character’s internal priorities into perspective. That is, I think, what they were going for with this one and it was not executed well. It just frustrates the player and makes the big stuff feel inconsequential.
This is on-top of another huge pacing issue: the game’s narrative is extremely back-heavy. I don’t believe this constitutes a spoiler, but the narrative as it currently exists builds a few too many questions over almost 3/4s of the game, dumps all of the answers on you at once in, if you don’t understand spoken Japanese, a novel-length infodump of text over still images for what I believe takes over an hour (it certainly felt that long) and then you still have a few chapters of game to resolve everything. It comes off as the writers of the game having moments they wanted to include, but not being sure how to string them together into a cohesive story.
These narrative issues are compounded by the fact that, while the overall plot structure is a mess, the writing itself is very strong. The characters are wildly endearing (surprise surprise for this studio) and you want to spend time with them. But the story feels like it’s actively working against the strong character writing. You want to spend time with the characters, but not for this long, and not in this order.
For Yakuza 3 to truly have a “definitive version” they would really need to sit down and rethink how the narrative should work. I think this would constitute a massive re-write, to the point where it wouldn’t be a “remake” anymore, it’d be almost a replacement for what exists, and frankly I don’t think the studio wants to spend a game’s development time “fixing“ a 15 year old “mistake.”
I think Yakuza 3 is a game that is what it is. I think, if you’re gonna skip one game in this series, it should be this one. There was a handy 30 minute video included in the PS3 release of Yakuza 4 that recapped the story that I think is an adequate “replacement” for suffering through the game. It wasn’t included in the Remastered collection, but you can find it on Youtube easily enough. I won’t say “don’t play it,” it still has a significant chapter of Kiryu’s story that you should be made aware of. But know that you could NOT play it and, as long as you get caught up on the major story beats, you’ll be okay to continue onwards without needing to truly take the whole game in.
