A middle aged yakuza whose illness doesn't leave him with much time to live gets out of jail to find his boss has lost much of his territory and influence. Meet old friends, deal with your bosses problems and new young yakuza, start a romance, reminisce, and engage in beat em up gameplay as your wars with rivals lead to different endings but similar fates. Taking some of the mechanics and similar themes from The friends of Ringo Ishikawa and Arrest of a stone Buddha. After getting picked up from jail you are given some money and time paid for a hotel stay, from there what you do is up to you. You can travel to different locations by train during the day and afternoon before returning to sleep at your hotel or on the streets at night. There a lot of interactions you can do with some more hidden than other, combing your hair and shaving to keep your appearance tidy when you have a place to stay, subordinates can light your cigarettes, you can find certain people to start a relationship with, play roulette, attend a hostess club, bat at the batting cages, buy a gun and train with it to increase your accuracy, drinking can prevent you from taking defensive actions and walking around drinking from a bottle can lead you to passing out, once you are able to buy a car you can travel to the countryside and fish, you can find meetings with old friends and ways to learn about your character's past. Health can be maintained by eating at a restaurant, getting a free sandwich from an old friend's shop, going to the sauna, or by getting a massage. As you play new locations open with a main building type it is named after but sometimes with side people to talk to or businesses to enter that may introduce new activities and certain days and story paths might have you and possibly an underling traveling to different areas to do jobs for your boss. Good visual variety to some of the areas and the usual good sense of atmosphere. The main gameplay and narrative paths come from engaging in fights in territories owned by different rivals. Taking all the territory of a certain boss, spending a lot of time with certain characters, or engaging in turf wars with everyone can lead to different story outcomes. You start fights by approaching other Yakuza and hitting one of them which will then make that spot contested. Fighting off waves of enemies in a beat em up style for multiple days will lead to an information broker sending you two pictures of where the person controlling the territory hangs out and after fighting or shooting him you will unlock the area and a cut of the money if you visit your boss. Once wars break out your own territory can be attacked but fighting off an attack once or fighting at a territory once the person running it has been killed will reclaim it. Combat involves multiple punch and kick combos, different grab attacks, a tackle takedown move, punches or kicks at range launching your towards enemies, and holding the punch button to enter a defensive mode where you block and dodge most moves automatically where you can also counter enemy attacks to instantly incapacitate them while possibly stealing a knife, sword, or gun from them that have their own moves and combos. It's combining some elements of the gun and counter combat of Arrest of a stone Buddha with a movement style and wider variety of beat em up moves than The friends of Ringo Ishikawa. It's a fun looking system but just countering everyone and lack of enemy variety can make it become repetitive even for a beat em up, with it being very hard to lose if you are doing something to heal slightly before entering a fight, the healing itself becomes a tedious activity of traveling to the same spots sometimes after being forced out of an area with the restaurant for story purposes. You will basically be attacked by two enemies with one being replaced every time they are killed or incapacitated about 10+ times until you finish all the enemies. The impressive variety of moves and some varied animations would make it a very fun beat em up if it wasn't so simple when it comes to the environment, enemy design, and how you are attacked. The wide variety of moves and the somewhat delayed entrance of new enemies can also create some problem. There is an enemy type that throws a bottle at you that you can dodge while on defense but some areas limited your movement to one plane and entering that defense mode can be an overly difficult thing to do when your character punches or does some random animation instead of blocking right away, and going into the mode before seeing the enemies appear might work unless the bottle throwing guy enters from the opposite side of the screen than the angle you chose to block from. Good music and variety with vocal tracks being played in areas or during times when someone would be singing. I enjoyed it but not as much as Arrest of a stone Buddha that broke things up between a quick fun action sequence before going back to the more limited and somber setting than what you have here as you waste your life away waiting for your next job. In Fading Afternoon there was so much pay hotel rent, walk to restaurant for slight healing, fight at two or three areas, go back to sleep, repeated, and try to guess which of two places a guy might be in for me to kill if I even known, have seen before, or can guess the place in the pictures. Going for different endings also means completely restarting the game and doing a lot the same things over again. A helpful thing you can do is pausing and backing out to the main menu to the continue and go back to the last travel train/car map section before you entered an area without spending in game time, which can make your attempts to find a character or do certain things less tedious. It can also help with the way the game prevents you from entering certain buildings or areas multiple times a day, so you might get thrown into a new area and with the entrance sometimes being on the left side, right side, center door, center up and to the left door, you might enter a place only to accidentally leave it if you flick the stick or read the environment wrong after you load in. Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3m3osmjzntc27
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