There is also the plot, which just really didn’t go anywhere, spending the first 15 hours performing a small laundry list of fetch quests for the children of Kazuma’s Morning Glory Orphanage. You were certainly finding more ingenious ways to avoid them at least. In addition, the most basic of enemies just seemed to be sponges for punches, often making random street fights a slog to get through. Even by 2010 standards, its levelling up system was bland and didn’t offer much in the way of freedom. However, these improvements felt like the bare minimum and there were a lot of flaws to Yakuza 3’s inner workings. While players can expect to spend some time in the familiar streets of Kamurocho, Yakuza 3 also introduced new locales, such as Ryukyu, a fictionalized setting in the Okinawa islands. The first person view also made its debut, bringing a collective sigh of relief for the completionists among us looking for those locker coins. For example, the Revelation system made its debut, with protagonist Kazuma Kiryu capturing photographs of the bizarre scenarios of the world around him, for a chance to unlock more moves for his expansive arsenal.

In terms of overall mechanics, Yakuza 3 had a few interesting ideas that would go into future titles. Though Yakuza has an eye-watering amount of spin-offs such as the historic settings of Ryu Ga Gotoku Kenzan! and Ishin!, or the mobile Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, these titles are not readily available on Western shores just yet. The only rule for this list is that we are going to focus on the mainline games. We decided to tiger drop through each game to find you the best of the best and the ones you could probably live without. Though we strongly advise that you play each game in order, we also appreciate there is probably not enough time in your day-to-day life to sit through 8 games that are 40+ hour experiences. The franchise does have recurring themes and characters throughout, but each instalment can be played separately without too much prior knowledge. With so many instalments available, someone looking to experience the franchise for the first time may feel overwhelmed over which one to play. To SEGA’s and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s credit, they have been on a mission to make the once niche PlayStation exclusive franchise readily available on most major platforms, winning over the hearts and minds of gamers in the process. In the past 5 years, there haven’t been many incredible turnarounds of success quite like the Yakuza franchise.

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