I played Yakuza 3 last year. Ugh. I loved Yakuza 0. Yakuza 1 and 2 were pretty good, too. Yakuza 3 was not. The bosses are still fun, but the rest of the enemies block constantly. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out how to deal with that. Once you do, the fights end up simply being more tedious, not more challenging. PLUS, it's very hard to avoid fights on the street.
PLUS the street fights give 0 xp, just money and weapon parts. I didn't see much point in crafting weapons, so the only real money sink left was the cabaret mini-game. Unfortunately, that mini-game wasn't very fun in 3, either. The end result being that all those many, many random street fights I got into were not only tedious, but they also gave no reward I cared about.
Nearly all the zaniness was gone, too. Instead of some guy in his underwear whispering at you from behind a bush, asking if he could please borrow your pants, you're giving life advice to children. The main story is OK, but not particularly good. All in all, the game just wasn't any fun. I got all the way to the end, then flat out quit instead of trying to fight the main boss. I simply didn't care enough to learn how to beat the guy, so I just watched the ending on YouTube.
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I got Yakuza 4, 5, and 6 as a bundle at the start of the Autum Steam sale and started playing 4. It's worse than 3. Now, instead of the enemies playing turtle, they don't do much of anything. Seriously. This video is recorded on normal difficulty:
View: https://youtu.be/ecEn9L1EoPI?si=IWKVJDlBlnVyTIj8
And before you ask, no, you can't increase the difficulty after the game starts. I stopped bothering to spend my skill points at level 5.
Again, the zaniness is completely absent. Instead of giving little kids obvious life advice, you give other adults life advice like "she's not really desperate for money - if she was, she would have gone to the red-light district to get a job."
I powered through 3 so I could keep up with the Yakuza story line. It wasn't worth it, and I'm not going to make the same mistake again. I quit after about 8 hours of play.
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Yakuza 6 was made AFTER Yakuza 0, and 0 was awesome. So, they must have turned it around, right?
YEP! Give me a physics engine, and I shall be happy.
View: https://youtu.be/y8IFeoC-x8o
There's still not as much zaniness, but there's some - and the physics engine gives you some, too.