I think one of the reasons Yakuza series can't even be considered to be underrated to me is the crazy number of people who put it on a pedestal, the game has serious lack of criticism, i rarely heard people complain about it and this is one of the reasons that im vocal about criticizing it often, the series deserves way more criticism, I find it strange how many people give this franchise a pass on legitimate issues that plague other games that constantly get called out, one of those issues for example is bad combat system.
But i guess if i want to break my issues down without explaining in detail they would amount to variety of issues.
1)Presentation: The Yakuza series is known for being heavy on cutscenes, sadly the presentation does not keep up, its inconsistent, for example you will be in the middle of some intense cutscenes, then after a minute the game freezes, goes black and then takes you back to the usual static faces and dialogue boxes that lack voice acting and has this annoying keyboard typing sound, the cutscenes are long but they are poorly directed, if you are a cinematic director this is not a good way to present your scene, you have to commit, either keep it dialogue only or cutscene only, this weird mish mash of cinematic and static ruins the immersion, kills the tension and makes the flow of events laughable.
Aside from its poor directing, the game has barely average voice acting, subpar graphics, subpar animations, and mediocre audio design.
I think its suffice to say even for its hardcore fans that Yakuza presentation is not up to the standard level, its not amazing thats for sure, but even as a standard for story heavy games i would say its mediocre.
2)Gameplay: Gameplay in Yakuza games consists of two main things: Minigames and Combat; the minigames are a mixed bag of good timesink and generic trash, for example i think the Cabaret minigame was pretty good, but the 8ball or darts or the small car racing games were boring and just generic if i wanted to play that i can easily go to any flash website and play them quicker and without the clunky slow dialogue. I think for people who love to play minigames the gameplay can be enjoyable, but im not the kind of player who buys a game to play minigames, so for me while this is a small plus, it doesnt carry the gameplay.
The other major part of the gameplay is the combat and imo it sucks, I always find it hilarious how people never shut up about the combat in Witcher 3 or Skyrim, yet for some reason this kind of shallow combat in Yakuza nobody pats an eye, the combat in Yakuza is repetitive, easy, clunky and mechanically shallow, the enemies are always the same, enemy variety is extremely low, the enemy A.I in the games is braindead, the thugs basically take turns in getting beat up by the player, one of the unique encounters Mr.Shakedown for example can be easily exploited because his A.I is terrible, and yet people never shut up about Cyberpunk or the first Last of Us A.I which makes me confused, why this bias? is it just because this is a Japanese games and weebs love its poser characters?
Because of the combat's nature of being shallow and repetitive, it becomes tedious, because the game loves to shove the thugs in your face on every 3 meters you walk in the city, every step you take you have those 3-4 thugs who want to take you down, doing their angry cringe posing. If at the fucking least they can acknowledge you later for being a renown Yakuza member and run away from you then it would be bearable, but NO, you have to fight them every while or run using the horrible stamina system in the city. But then you are basically avoiding the game. Also one thing to note is that even in the quests the same thing happens you fight the same thugs over and over: Square Square Square X Triangle = Enemy fall down, go near enemy click finishing move, watch a 2-3 second of cutscene of Kiryu finishing the thug, this makes the combat tedious as everytime you want to finish them you have to watch those cutscenes, for the first hours its cool af, then later in the game it starts to become tedious.
One last problem with the gameplay is the controls: they are stiff, clunky, and the targeting feels awful, its as clunky as RDR2 a game that gets a lot of shit for being clunky, yet nobody pats an eye for Yakuza. Also the hitbox targeting system was weird and kinda flawed too.
Suffice to say the Gameplay in Yakuza was crap, and even LAD which had a turnbased combat (works better since they can't get action right) still suffers from being broken and unbalanced, i can point its issues but the post will be too long.
3)Story: Now if the gameplay sucked and the presentation is below average then definitely the story has to be good right? NO, its poorly written and full of tons of problems too. Lets take Yakuza 0 for example: For the first 6 chapters i found the story to be actually engaging, and i was intrigued with the plot i wanted to see what will happen, Majima Chapters were fantastic, but after chapter 6 the game starts to fall apart. Story becomes nonsensical, a lot of events are poorly thought out, there was many plot holes in the events, i found it annoying that many of the characters keep getting revived, this shit sucks, i dont like writing that keeps changing 180 of the characters, or using them as plot devices all the time, characters that start to randomly act stupid or strong or characters who have no personality except being posers. I actually written a page will all the plot problems if i put it here it will be too long, but one quick example i can give is Sagawa shooting Majima, then Sera shooting Sagawa and saving the day, this was not only contrived writing as Sagawa instantly knew how and where to look without explanation, he also survived a fatal shot that showed his blood on the floor, just few hours later we find him torturing Majima, i cant take the story seriously when it keeps doing the same lame plot tricks that a shitty TV show does. Another extremely bad example is the scene at the Prison with Majima and the Police officer, that was like super bad, how the gang disappeared suddenly, how the cop changed his mind suddenly for a bad reason, how the whole murder scene played out, its stupid and melodramatic for no good reason.
Its just bad writing, the characters and the story is poorly written, i can say the only good character in the whole game was Majima followed by the only decent character being Tachiban.
With its boring pacing and bad writing i think its suffice to say that Story in Yakuza is not good.
4)Side Content: How many times have you heard about that the side quests in Yakuza games are good? i heard that shit many times, only to be extremely disappointed by them every time i played them.
To put it short, the side story in Yakuza games consist of gag comedy pranks, where the plot is meaningless cringe just to provide some chuckles, too bad i found them cringe. The design for the quests always plays out the same way, you are walking in the city, someone interrupts you and asks for you to help them, usually a poorly thoughtout reason, then after that you do some really stupid task only in the end to be just a prank.
One example i can give is a quest i played where someone was creeping on a girl, Kiryu comes by and notices him, he freaks out and then after a small exchange Kiryu learns that this creep lost his daughter and he saw a girl working at a Bar that looks like her, but he is scared to go ask her, so he sends Kiryu as undercover client to ask her, after you click click to advance the dialogue (because thats all you do) and answer few questions, then you learn they are very identical, so you take her to the dad, he is scared to look into her face then after they see each other they freak out and turns out she is not his daughter cause her name is different, its just a prank bro. I dont like this kind of side quests.
One other quick example is i was walking by as Majima, in a hurry to do serious quest, then a girl stops me tells me i need to play boyfriend with her so that her father can see she got a boyfriend, she tells you say X,Y,Z and then the father comes you say X,Y,Z and then she goes to bathroom, her father tells you i know you are fake, you smile, he tells you please be her boyfriend for real, you decline and the quest end. Bravo RGG! good side quests there, yeah definitely among the best amirite?
The side quests are full of this stuff, i found them unworthy of praise because to me, a good side quests has to follow a certain standard, i can explain that further but im sure by now nobody is reading this anyway.
5)World Design: The hub area of the Yakuza games looks full of life, thats a plus, but sadly, how you interact with it is barebones, you can't jump around, you can't interact with NPCs, you can't interact with the levels, its all linear hallways, even in the quest you have to exactly follow the line, you can't stray from the path, its a shame because this cool looking place is just there as a setdressing, even Ubisoft style of games have more interactivity and better level design than this, the exploration of the hub-area is not worth it as you won't get worthwhile loot from exploring or any meaningful discovery, all you are going to find is more and more thugs to punch.
Sure you can go inside shops and restaurants but those places fall back into the same initial problem and thats generic design, and nothing to do, in the restaurant all you are doing basically is click on the menu and choose a meal, then watch a poorly made cutscene where Kiryu/Majima eat their food. All you ae going to do is follow a path from A to B and do Quests which all follow the same repetitive gameplay formula, what is left are the stories and i found them meh as i explained above.
6)Character Progression: The Yakuza games offer each character 3 styles of fighting, and each style has a skill tree with perks to unlock as part of the progress, but sadly its mostly passive perks that do nothing, just more health, more heat, more damage, and only a few of them unlock a move that you will barely use anyway, this is barebones progression, worse is that you have to buy the skills with money, now money wasn't an issue as minigames and thugs on the street give you millions?? which is weird how can thugs give that much money lol, but anyway you unlock them easy, i dislike that you need money as part of progression, i prefer the TES/Fallout style of progression where the more you use a skill the more you progress in it, In Yakuza is just give me money and take the skill, and the perks are just boring anyway.
With all that said, i think Yakuza fails at many issues for me to be able to consider it good, i finished 3 games, tried to complete more games later and tried to force myself into them but then i find they are all more of the same crap anyway, so i just drop them. Good thing i only bought Yakuza 0, cause the others were on gamepass, otherwise i would be furious.
That is not to say there is zero redeeming qualities in the game, i think some of the minigames are good, the story was engaging up until the middle way, Majima is a good character. But aside from that it has a lot of problems and the mixture of over the top silly posing and the serious dramatic story just didnt work, if it was like Devil May Cry or JOJO Bizzare Adventure, sticking only to over the top then it would've worked better, but a mixture like that didnt work and keeps taking me out of the scenes and seriousness, and ofcourse the gameplay didnt help to carry the stylish over the top factor either.
I actually have way more to say but i will stop here.
For me Yakuza is most definitely overrated and overrated AF too. I guess im a big hater, but fuck it, everybody showers this game with undeserved praise anyway.
