Yakuza 4 feels like the more balanced game of the three present in this remastered collection
Firstly, compared to Yakuza 3, the game opensYakuza 4 feels like the more balanced game of the three present in this remastered collection
Firstly, compared to Yakuza 3, the game opens up a lot more when it comes to exploration and we get to play in a very nice expanded Kamurocho, with rooftops, underground areas and even sewers. It feels great to revisit our favorite city but expanded.
Then the game introduces new playable characters, each one with their own part and chapters in the story. At first it feels weird but that feeling goes away pretty fast because the new characters have incredible personalities and backgrounds. It feels like we’re being given a huge lot more of story with each of these characters, to discover, compared to just playing as Kiryu in previous games, and it also feels quite refreshing.
Similarly to Yakuza 3, on my Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060 Ti I’ve played this game at 4K DSR Downsampling and 125% extra Resolution Scale on top of that, and still enough GPU headroom to keep the 60 FPS cap. Keep in mind that these games, all of them, have an issue with variable frame-rate, and if you cannot keep either the 30 or 60 FPS cap, the game will slow down; to avoid this, either use the “Auto” FPS cap (but that makes the camera motion stutter a bit, for me at least) or make sure your settings and resolution are good enough to keep either of those FPS caps, at all times.
Once again, the PC specific settings like keybinds and remapping are great in this port, mouse input doesn’t feel perfect though, and you may prefer to use a gamepad, but definitely it’s not impossible to play with mouse and keyboard, especially because we can remap actions for all the side activities as well, something we don’t see in many PC games lately, some actual effort put into the keybinds, so good job there, QLOC.
The game has an adequate length, considering we play four characters, and the story is quite enjoyable in my opinion. By the time each character’s story reaches their “end point”, things get very intense and epic and, of course, the final boss battles are fun and flashy, as usual.
For being a game originally released on PS3, the animations and facial expressions on the characters’ faces is great, it’s a staple on the Yakuza series, I reckon, and they only keep better and more detailed in newer entries in the series.
I had one other small glitch in the game, related to entering cabaret clubs like Jewel or Shine in Kamurocho, at times the game could get stuck in an infinite loading screen, but found out that doing a combat encounter before entering again “fixed” it, and also going to a phone and save the game. Still, an annoying issue if you want to do the cabaret mini game, need to take this bug into consideration and save often. Hopefully they can patch this at some point, so far they have not.
Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this game, with all three really in the collection, but this one gets a 9, I’d give it a 10 if I ignored the couple technical issues that some people may encounter, actually I’d prefer 9.5 but can’t do that here. In any case, it is an excellent game, needs a patch to fix at least that infinite loading issue, but it only happens in cabarets AFAIK, so if you’re careful and do what I said, it can be avoided.… Expand
