This thread marks the second in my playthrough of the entire localized Yakuza series leading up to the upcoming release of Yakuza 5 in the West. If you're interested in my reflection on the first Yakuza game, please give it a read.
With that out of the way, I'll gather my thoughts on Yakuza 2, which is almost everyone's favorite Yakuza game. Do I agree? Read on to find out!!!!1
Unlike in my Yakuza 1 thread let's save some of the technical talk for later and get right into the story of Yakuza 2, reason being is that it's a lot better. While I still feel that many of the characters aren't being used to their fullest (Daigo Dojima!), overall the main narrative of Yakuza 2 not only makes more sense to me but also is just more gratifying overall. The love story is given more elbow room than the first game's, the villains are given more screen time, and the urgency of most of the chapters is tuned up a bit.
Ryuji Goda is an excellent foil to Kiryu, and Majima is so awesome in this game. We don't see as much of Date, but it is great to have him back, and Haruka's inclusion feels a little unnecessary, but not unwelcome. There's some gorgeous set-pieces, such as the sword fight in the snow at the Tojo HQ, with the full moon's reflection beaming from the enclosed pond, and lots of great action sequences like when the helicopters descend upon Kamurocho.
Since these games lean heavily on narrative it's really nice that everything goes down a lot easier this time around.
I'm not sure where to put this stuff so I'll just throw it all here. That UI bug in the first game where if you set the game to widescreen the radar would be stretched out has been fixed, and load times when the camera cuts are reduced but still present. The transition into battle looks a whole lot better - in Y1 it was just a black screen with a logo representing your opponent's clan, but here it's more cinematic and nice looking.
Gone, of course, is the english dub. This has major, major consequences and all of them are good. Most importantly the script is a LOT better (as I mentioned in the Y1 discussion, it felt like lines were rewritten to fit the character's mouth, at the expense of whatever the line was meant to convey). The japanese cast is overall a massive improvement, but Kaoru really got on my nerves in the final act with all that shrill blubbering. That minor complaint aside, good change all around.
Performance wise, it seems that the dev team was able to make some really good adjustments to make better use of the Playstation 2's architecture. This manifests itself most obviously in the duration of cutscenes, which are much much longer than those in Yakuza 1, which felt like they couldn't exceed 40 seconds before you'd have to load the next scene. Obviously, this makes a HUGE difference in the dramatic value of cutscenes, since they were able to have more stuff go on, and for longer.
There were some hiccups, notably in the last few scenes, where the framerate would again dip during cutscenes pretty noticeably, especially jarring since it felt like gameplay ran much more solidly this time around.
I wish I did this in my last thread - dedicate a section to the not-story parts of Yakuza, which constitute a good deal of the franchise's personality and value. New to Yakuza 2 is the ability to fail missions, as in complete them but do so with a "bad ending". The dude told me not to look in the box, but I did anyway. I have mixed feelings about this, especially since some of the missions seem to deliberately mislead you towards the bad ending, but it's not too big of a deal. The mission screen now displays information that give you an idea of what you need to do to fulfill a mission, which is a welcome change. In the last game, I missed where someone told me to go and never got around to finishing the mission as such.
Let's talk about the two big side-missions in Yakuza 2: playing host at Adam and managing the Marietta. The Adam quest feels a little too trial and error for me, like I'd pick the wrong things to say the first two times I attempted playing host to some girl, so the third time around, I knew what to say by the process of elimination. If you're familiar with the Shin Megami Tensei games, it sorta felt like how you convince demons to join you in those games, in that there's SOME room for intuition, but at the same time it feels random in many cases. Nevertheless, I found the Adam side-quest to have a satisfying conclusion and worth the effort.
Managing the Marietta however... Okay, I don't know what the consensus on this mission is in the Yakuza community, but for me, it really, REALLY overstayed its welcome and felt like a spoiled opportunity. I say spoiled because the actual mechanics of managing the club are really fun - gradually replacing the furniture and keeping the girls happy while occasionally renovating the club and having little crisis arise on occasion. Fine. Good. Except for the last stretch of the mission where every piece of furniture costs millions and millions of yen and you only make 600,000 or so per night, meaning I really had to grind to get the furniture rating where it needed to be. To wrap this rant up, I genuinely liked the Marietta mission until I ended up wasting a shitload of my own money to keep the models happy while I slowly... slowly but surely grinded my way through getting all the furniture the customers wanted.
Also I couldn't figure out how to complete the training quests. Didn't really care though...
And lastly bowling is awesome. I'm really glad I did the bowling stuff.
The general consensus on Yakuza 2's combat seems to be that it's a significant improvement over the combat in the first game, and I mostly, but not completely, agree. There's definitely a lot MORE you can do, and counters were fixed (you may have read that the counters weren't reliable in Y1 - now they are), but I miss the parry. The parry was cool. It's honestly overwhelming how many heat moves there are, and I feel sour that there was so much I never got around to using, such as many of the weapon heat moves. Even at the last fight I found a HEAT move I had never used before, and it was something as banal as holding your opponent from the back while facing the wall.
In general, the game felt a lot easier, and maybe too easy. I only died once and that was because of a QTE that killed me when I failed it.* Contrast this with my Y1 experience where I died like 17 times...
* DEAR GAME DEVELOPERS: NEVER. NEVER DO THIS. STOP PUTTING THIS IN GAMES.
Yakuza 2 is on every level and from almost every angle a better video game than Yakuza 1. While I still feel that the cast is occasionally misused or underused I had a blast tearing through the two (and a half?) major locations in the game and soaking up all there was to see and do. Just like Y1, I approached this game with the feeling that I didn't want to use a guide to 100% the game, but did want to do everything I could. I'm honestly surprised at how low my side-mission completion is, as I truly tried to visit and revisit every place in the game (check that locker key completion!).
It's a shame that so many people are going to skip this game because it's on the PS2 and instead jump into Yakuza with 3 or 4. I feel that Yakuza 2 should have a home in every self-respecting PS2 owner's library, despite its current market price (which, really, is about what video games cost...)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Difficulty: Normal
Temporary EASY uses: 0
Retries: 1
Food completion: 47%
Drink completion: 85%
Side mission completion: 57%
Hostess completion: 0%
Coliseum completion: 27%
Locker completion: 94%
HEAT action completion: 61%
Play time: 35:24
With that out of the way, I'll gather my thoughts on Yakuza 2, which is almost everyone's favorite Yakuza game. Do I agree? Read on to find out!!!!1
Story
Unlike in my Yakuza 1 thread let's save some of the technical talk for later and get right into the story of Yakuza 2, reason being is that it's a lot better. While I still feel that many of the characters aren't being used to their fullest (Daigo Dojima!), overall the main narrative of Yakuza 2 not only makes more sense to me but also is just more gratifying overall. The love story is given more elbow room than the first game's, the villains are given more screen time, and the urgency of most of the chapters is tuned up a bit.
Ryuji Goda is an excellent foil to Kiryu, and Majima is so awesome in this game. We don't see as much of Date, but it is great to have him back, and Haruka's inclusion feels a little unnecessary, but not unwelcome. There's some gorgeous set-pieces, such as the sword fight in the snow at the Tojo HQ, with the full moon's reflection beaming from the enclosed pond, and lots of great action sequences like when the helicopters descend upon Kamurocho.
Since these games lean heavily on narrative it's really nice that everything goes down a lot easier this time around.
Changes from Yakuza 1
I'm not sure where to put this stuff so I'll just throw it all here. That UI bug in the first game where if you set the game to widescreen the radar would be stretched out has been fixed, and load times when the camera cuts are reduced but still present. The transition into battle looks a whole lot better - in Y1 it was just a black screen with a logo representing your opponent's clan, but here it's more cinematic and nice looking.
Gone, of course, is the english dub. This has major, major consequences and all of them are good. Most importantly the script is a LOT better (as I mentioned in the Y1 discussion, it felt like lines were rewritten to fit the character's mouth, at the expense of whatever the line was meant to convey). The japanese cast is overall a massive improvement, but Kaoru really got on my nerves in the final act with all that shrill blubbering. That minor complaint aside, good change all around.
Performance wise, it seems that the dev team was able to make some really good adjustments to make better use of the Playstation 2's architecture. This manifests itself most obviously in the duration of cutscenes, which are much much longer than those in Yakuza 1, which felt like they couldn't exceed 40 seconds before you'd have to load the next scene. Obviously, this makes a HUGE difference in the dramatic value of cutscenes, since they were able to have more stuff go on, and for longer.
There were some hiccups, notably in the last few scenes, where the framerate would again dip during cutscenes pretty noticeably, especially jarring since it felt like gameplay ran much more solidly this time around.
Side content
I wish I did this in my last thread - dedicate a section to the not-story parts of Yakuza, which constitute a good deal of the franchise's personality and value. New to Yakuza 2 is the ability to fail missions, as in complete them but do so with a "bad ending". The dude told me not to look in the box, but I did anyway. I have mixed feelings about this, especially since some of the missions seem to deliberately mislead you towards the bad ending, but it's not too big of a deal. The mission screen now displays information that give you an idea of what you need to do to fulfill a mission, which is a welcome change. In the last game, I missed where someone told me to go and never got around to finishing the mission as such.
Let's talk about the two big side-missions in Yakuza 2: playing host at Adam and managing the Marietta. The Adam quest feels a little too trial and error for me, like I'd pick the wrong things to say the first two times I attempted playing host to some girl, so the third time around, I knew what to say by the process of elimination. If you're familiar with the Shin Megami Tensei games, it sorta felt like how you convince demons to join you in those games, in that there's SOME room for intuition, but at the same time it feels random in many cases. Nevertheless, I found the Adam side-quest to have a satisfying conclusion and worth the effort.
Managing the Marietta however... Okay, I don't know what the consensus on this mission is in the Yakuza community, but for me, it really, REALLY overstayed its welcome and felt like a spoiled opportunity. I say spoiled because the actual mechanics of managing the club are really fun - gradually replacing the furniture and keeping the girls happy while occasionally renovating the club and having little crisis arise on occasion. Fine. Good. Except for the last stretch of the mission where every piece of furniture costs millions and millions of yen and you only make 600,000 or so per night, meaning I really had to grind to get the furniture rating where it needed to be. To wrap this rant up, I genuinely liked the Marietta mission until I ended up wasting a shitload of my own money to keep the models happy while I slowly... slowly but surely grinded my way through getting all the furniture the customers wanted.
Also I couldn't figure out how to complete the training quests. Didn't really care though...
And lastly bowling is awesome. I'm really glad I did the bowling stuff.
Combat
The general consensus on Yakuza 2's combat seems to be that it's a significant improvement over the combat in the first game, and I mostly, but not completely, agree. There's definitely a lot MORE you can do, and counters were fixed (you may have read that the counters weren't reliable in Y1 - now they are), but I miss the parry. The parry was cool. It's honestly overwhelming how many heat moves there are, and I feel sour that there was so much I never got around to using, such as many of the weapon heat moves. Even at the last fight I found a HEAT move I had never used before, and it was something as banal as holding your opponent from the back while facing the wall.
In general, the game felt a lot easier, and maybe too easy. I only died once and that was because of a QTE that killed me when I failed it.* Contrast this with my Y1 experience where I died like 17 times...
* DEAR GAME DEVELOPERS: NEVER. NEVER DO THIS. STOP PUTTING THIS IN GAMES.
Conclusion
Yakuza 2 is on every level and from almost every angle a better video game than Yakuza 1. While I still feel that the cast is occasionally misused or underused I had a blast tearing through the two (and a half?) major locations in the game and soaking up all there was to see and do. Just like Y1, I approached this game with the feeling that I didn't want to use a guide to 100% the game, but did want to do everything I could. I'm honestly surprised at how low my side-mission completion is, as I truly tried to visit and revisit every place in the game (check that locker key completion!).
It's a shame that so many people are going to skip this game because it's on the PS2 and instead jump into Yakuza with 3 or 4. I feel that Yakuza 2 should have a home in every self-respecting PS2 owner's library, despite its current market price (which, really, is about what video games cost...)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The numbers
Difficulty: Normal
Temporary EASY uses: 0
Retries: 1
Food completion: 47%
Drink completion: 85%
Side mission completion: 57%
Hostess completion: 0%
Coliseum completion: 27%
Locker completion: 94%
HEAT action completion: 61%
Play time: 35:24
