5/5 ★ – BigManScoob's review of Yakuza 5.

I still remember my first time playing this game, seeing Kiryu depressed and living a new life as a taxi driver. The melancholy that was conveyed by the opening cutscenes and wandering around the expansive Fukuoka with bright lights. I knew this game was something special right from the get go. While the rest of the story wasn’t as special as Kiryu’s section, I still had a lot of fun with the different characters, especially Shinada, who was a nice charming one off character. The combat is even better than the previous games, offering the best versions of Kiryu’s, Saejima’s, and Akiyama’s styles with tons of unique heat actions. The bosses were not too difficult and not too easy, with the final boss fight sticking out as being extremely memorable. Going back to what makes this game so special though, the atmosphere. This game has the most amount of places to visit in the series with 5 unique locations that all feel really nice to walk around in. I have to give a special shout out to Fukuoka again for looking really pretty at night and it’s my go to place for completing minigames and wandering around. However, the cities aren’t all perfect, and each one has one glaring flaw… THE GODDMAN ENEMY ENCOUNTER RATE IS REALLY DAMN HIGH HOLY HELL. Every time you walk by an intersection you’ll see three dudes waiting to pounce on you and start a fight that you absolutely didn’t want. You can get items that show you where nearby encounters are and one that stops encounters from happening though so this is more of problem during the story. There’s also a lot of side content in this game so 100%ing it would take quite a while, but the content is varied and entertaining enough. Overall this game is just slightly below 3 as my favorite Yakuza game. Tons of fun content with quite a fun story if you are patient enough.