Yakuza 6: The Song of Life

 PC
Metascore
82

Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 9
  3. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. Gaming Age
    Mar 26, 2021
    91
    As a swansong, the RGG team has crafted something that is absolutely befitting of the stoic hero who has carried the series for since 2005. It would’ve been easy to have this be the most bombastic entry of the series and have all the series fan favorites show up, however the fact that a majority of characters involved are mostly new allows you to really focus on Kiryu’s final story. We’re not gonna sugar coat that a new hero has already risen and has held his own, however it is heartening that the series has gotten enough support that it has finally escaped the PlayStation ecosystem and can be enjoyed by gamers everywhere!
  2. Jeuxvideo.com
    Mar 30, 2021
    90
    The realization lives up to this captivating tale. The photorealism of the environments and the cutscenes takes the jaw and propels the virtual Yakuza that we are in a fantasized Japan how intoxicating.
  3. The Games Machine
    Apr 9, 2021
    85
    With the launch of Yakuza 6: Song of Life, the saga of Kazuma Kiryu reaches its conclusion on PC and Xbox as well. The two years that passed since its launch on Sony consoles has provided it with technical improvements that, especially on PC, made the game’s visuals more in line with the times. Compared to Yakuza 0, the combat is a bit on the stiffer side, but still satisfying, and Yakuza 6 is a worthy final chapter in a fifteen-year long narrative arc.
  5. GameStar
    Mar 31, 2021
    85
    A gripping gangster drama combined with a somewhat loveless port. Nevertheless a very worthy farewell for Kazuma Kiryu.
  6. RPG Fan
    Sep 22, 2021
    81
    As a conclusion to Kiryu’s story, The Song of Life hit a few sour notes for me. However, as an installment of the Yakuza series, Yakuza 6 reaches new heights. The upgrade to the Dragon Engine set the stage for triumphs yet to come (including Yakuza Kiwami 2, Judgment, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon), and the game is an overall joy to play. It may be bittersweet to be leaving the Dragon of Dojima’s shoes, but I have no doubts that there will be several return journeys to the streets of Kamurocho in the future!
  7. PCMag
    Mar 30, 2021
    80
    Packed with action, side content, and heart, Yakuza 6 brings Kazuma Kiryu’s gangster journey to a close. Despite lacking challenge and snubbing important series characters, The Song of Life is an excellent beat-'em-up title.
  8. Multiplayer.it
    Mar 28, 2021
    80
    Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is a solid and beautiful final chapter, with an engaging narrative and the traditional abundance of extra activities and minigames.
  9. PC Gamer
    Mar 25, 2021
    79
    The setting of Onomichi proves that the long-running series still has some tricks, making Yakuza 6 a worthy finale for its main protagonist.
  10. Noisy Pixel
    Mar 24, 2021
    70
    Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is a must-play for long-time fans wanting to see how Kazuma Kiryu’s story ends. The game was released on more powerful hardware and brought the series up to a new generation’s standards. It does the same with this PC release, but sadly much of what held it back narratively before is still present today.
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  1. Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    Mar 26, 2021
    Yakuza 6 is an excellent standalone adventure for newcomers and a brilliant send off for Kiryu without the clutter of the other yakuza games, for better and for worse. I'm just happy I can hang out again with my favourite yakuza dad, who now smoulders at max settings.

Awards & Rankings

47
#47 Best PC Game of 2021

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
7.7

Generally favorable reviews- based on 37 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 27 out of 37
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 37
  3. Negative: 4 out of 37
  1. hertzian68
    Apr 7, 2021
    8
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Y6R has some nice QOL things, but not as much as Kiwami 2, that's the most all around up to date game with a better, more yakuza story. The 0-yk1-yk2 arc is the best in the series because of the tighter stories that are more focused. I do recommend Y6 but I'll be focusing on the negs here.

    Yakuza 6 has some odd things about it. You no longer have weapons or buy them, only what you can pickup and use for that fight. The items you can equip are hidden in the stats pause menu and hard to find. The troublr side missions are just basic stuff, nothing in depth to them at all and they do time out so if you don't do them they can disappear. You can buy the beads of good fortune early in the game from a pawn shop, which is a real good thing if you don't like constantly running away or fighting every hood walking around. It has no auto upgrade option which is a shame because it is an absolute chore to buy all those upgrades. Coming from 5 this is all pretty strange.

    Kamurocho is marvelous and looks amazing here, but all of Champion district is blocked off and the whole hotel alley all the way to the kamurocho hills building is all blocked off the whole game. There is no purgatory at all, the Florist is strangely missing since he's been in every game I can remember. There is no underground, no on top of buildings, no lockers etc It's a pretty short game tbh. Onimichi is ok, nothing too great. It's small and largely uninteresting but has it's moments I guess. The Secret of Onimichi is really dumb, really.

    The story is not too good either. If it isn't Kiryu being a blockhead and going off to prison yet again for some stupid stuff that could easily have been avoided with a lawyers help, then it's the braindead Haruka up to her idiocy again. Haruka as a young adult really seems to be disabled mentally. In 5 she puts Kiryu, who just accepts this idiocy and helps it along, through hell so she can be a shallow sex selling idol who gets a major concert after no time but then after she's just started to be a star she decides to give it up and also spill out her yakuza connections all on live tv! Brilliant! Then she leaves the orphanage over some paparrazi reporting and gets pregnant by someone she barely knows, but later on just decides to spend her life with this hookup out of the blue. Later on she and her baby are in the line of gunfire and her response is to just freeze in place, just like the car accident that gets her into a coma. Just. Freeze. In. Place. Haruka is an idiot. Kiryu is not that bright either in many situations.

    Kiryu's new "family" in Onomichi we're supposed to care about and the fact that they are all criminals shaking down honest people and other criminal stuff doesn't seem to rate any mention I guess. Daigo , Majima and Saijima all seem to completely disappear from any involvement with the Tojo Clan this whole game(among others in the series too). I guess they are incommunicado once they are behind bars, so Kiryu has to fight outside yakuza and all the TJC yakuza too, they seem to have forgot he was the 4th Chairman and an unbeatable TJC legend? Please. RGG clearly wanted their cake and to eat it too and they did I guess.

    From Kiryus letter to Daigo he regrets not just being full TJC yakuza the whole time and regrets abandoning the TJC and Daigo. But what does he do in the end, he disappears and runs away from the TJC/Haruka/Haruto! I mean Haruka would have been a lot safer the whole time if Kiryu was the Chairman or at least a top capt in the TJC so what a waste. It's also hard to believe that RGG just decided to throw away all those great characters, including Kiryu, with Yakuza LAD. Kiryu's stoic modesty worked because it was counterbalanced by the zanyness of the other parts of the games, that seems to be all gone with LAD sadly. Ok give us a Saijima, Majima, Akiyama series even Daigo finally being a full Chairman/yakuza in a game would be nice. With the ending there's no obstacle for another Kiryu main game either, which I'd welcome.

    RGG Sega released all these great classics on pc and it's caught on, but to then go away from them with the new "yakuza" game? What are these guys thinking??? I think they went KO-JIMA on us, ugh we don't need anymore (post-MGS) kojima-esque garbage.    … Full Review »
  2. Sholva
    Apr 3, 2021
    9
    I really like the story in all of the previous Yakuza games, and Yakuza 6’s is no less than amazing. It’s full of emotional moments, epicI really like the story in all of the previous Yakuza games, and Yakuza 6’s is no less than amazing. It’s full of emotional moments, epic confrontations, humor and everything we’re used to, with some moments that truly hit those feels. And, once again and without getting into any spoilers, we’re left with a smile in our faces at the very end after the credits, because “Kiryu’s saga may have ended” but the world of Yakuza is vast and full of promise and great characters.

    The most immediate game to compare Yakuza 6 with is of course Kiwami 2, both sport the same Dragon Engine, albeit Yakuza 6 came out earlier than Kiwami 2 if I’m not mistaken (like a year or so) on PS4, so I would say that Kiwami 2 is a tiny bit more refined in some aspects.

    Visually, Yakuza 6 looks great, but I still think Kiwami 2 looked a bit better, might be the different color palette, as RGG Studios are well known for not keeping the exact same colors and palettes between different games, but I’m not sure…both games run pretty similarly, but overall I felt that special tint Kiwami 2 used… made it look more gritty, which to me is a bit more appealing, but it’s just a small nitpick.

    Performance on my Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060 Ti is great, I played the whole game at 1080p native, all settings set to Ultra and Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing set to 1.5x, so a pretty decent effective resolution overall, and stable capped 60 FPS at all times, not a s ingle drop ever.

    But… this game also suffers from high amounts of aliasing and shimmering due to many lighting and specular effects primarily being rendered at way lower resolution than native (like Kiwami 2), so even when we raise the internal resolution, use DSR downsampling or add SSAA, we still see some shimmering and jaggies.
    It does seem RGG Studios corrected this finally in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, with the inclusion of Temporal Anti-Aliasing, but it’s a shame they never patched earlier Dragon Engine games like Kiwami 2 or Yakuza 6 to have this better looking AA.

    Another small issue I had with this game, is the combat: Kiryu is a very experienced character, he’s been doing this for 30 years by now, yet I felt his abilities were a bit lackluster in this game, compared to earlier ones, like Yakuza 3-5, were he was basically a Komaki techniques machine, with the drop, knockback and parries in there.
    We do have some of those techniques available in the game (but not all of them), sure, but the combat does not feel as responsive, I even reckon that Kiwami 2’s felt a bit better.

    Part of my gripes with the combat are due to the fact that some of the “elite” enemies, like the ones with special heath bars, but not bosses, have like an enormous amount of animation frames where we cannot interrupt them, this is normally called “armor” in brawler games, beat’em ups, etc. Normally we need to dodge them and hit from behind, or do a perfect parry, but when you’re in a crowd of 30 enemies, which happens quite often, it ain’t that simple…even when doing to spinning grab move, which is one of the best in the game for this reason, to remove cannon fodder quickly.

    Also, this creates funny situations where a pair of such, stronger, enemies can easily stun-lock Kiryu with some fun to watch combos and not letting us get back up, which is hilarious but again proves my point a bit.

    Also, perhaps I missed it, but there are no heat actions usable when enemies are knocked down on the ground, a staple in the whole series, which I really missed a lot here in Yakuza 6.

    At the end of the game, with like all the combat abilities unlocked Kiryu, more or less, resembles his old self (and not even that old, as I said, Yakuza 5, etc.), but still he feels a bit gimped compared to previous games, even Kiwami 2, were we could break enemies’ blocks by charging the light attack, instead of the heavy like in Yakuza 6.

    Anyhow, that aside, a minor issue if you know what you’re doing, the game is great, it’s full of what we love in these series, the graphics look nice, especially those cinematic close-ups, a staple in the series, with very detailed skin and animations, perfect to take some screenshots.

    After this game, like many of you who probably played it on PS4 or, like me, just finished it on PC, I’m left thinking how this franchise could still use all of these incredible characters in future games. I have not played Like a Dragon yet, but I heard it’s connected to the main series, a bit (and in Japan it’s still considered Yakuza 7), but I have no doubt we’ll see again the likes of Saejima, Akiyama and company in future main titles, because it seems there is still a whole huge bag of stories left to tell here, for sure.

    I have truly enjoyed playing all of these games on PC, and I cherish them as one of the best sagas I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, and I look forward to seeing more games in the Yakuza universe.    … Full Review »
  3. Ordinaryhuman
    Jul 15, 2023
    0
    This game is rubbish, Haruka what the hell did they do to you, you went from being a woman with more intelligence than Kiryu and who wouldThis game is rubbish, Haruka what the hell did they do to you, you went from being a woman with more intelligence than Kiryu and who would never accept being an idol to being a submissive woman, brainless and with less personality than a blank paper and the worst thing is what her fault kiryu almost died. And the worst does not end here since all the characters like Saejima, Majima, Akiyama and the florist are forgotten and you never play with them, what a shame and nonsense of a game. The creator of this garbage should be ashamed that this exists.… Full Review »
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