Yeah, great boss battles. I think the Rush fighting style makes all the difference in one-on-one fights. I'm back to playing Y5 now, and the fighting just feels so... loose. Granted, I'm playing as Akiyama, but still. In Yakuza Zero, the fighting feels so tight and precise, and the Rush style in particular makes those boss battles feel so much more on-point.
Have to say though, by the third Kuze fight, I was just kind of laughing at him. :lol:
I don't think he was supposed to come off as a laughing stock, but the frequency of Kazuma handing his ass to him just made it so.
I will say, my one genuine complaint is the sort of... disparity, I guess, between gameplay and thematic story content.
What I mean by that is, the gameplay itself can get so incredibly brutal, with Majima kicking daggers into people's abdomens, snapping necks and so on, and Kazuma literally shooting people in the head during the car chase sequence... and yet so much of the story revolves around their unwillingness to kill.
I mean... what?
I guess this has always been a little bit of an issue, since some level of fatal-ish violence has always been there throughout the series' gameplay, but it's much more present here, since there's just so much more impact to the action. Likewise, it almost feels like a weird retcon that both Kazuma and Majima refuse to kill so steadfastly, since it always felt pretty implicit from the original game on that these were some genuinely hardboiled criminal characters. Majima in particular certainly seemed like the murder-willing type from his very first appearance back in 2005.
I get why the disparity is there (you want the action to hit hard, and yet idealized Japanese characters typically don't kill... so what's a developer to do?), it just feels more present than ever in this particular game.
But yeah, having played this, I don't mind the mass of Majima appearances anymore. Before Zero, I thought of him one way (entertaining as hell, but a little one-note), but then Zero changes all that. Can't wait to see more in Kiwami and Kiwami 2 (and 6, if he's in that at all).
So yeah, I'd agree the game is a masterpiece. If I'd played it back in 2015, I'd definitely call it my own personal GOTY.
Reminds me of this part in yakuza 1 lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKzWB3sDFc