Yakuza Kiwami 2 (Legacy)

majima is playable so it's good

alright i guess i dunno

Peak

gg

clunky combat

[h1]A much more polished game than Kiwami 1, everywhere except in performance.[/h1] I've been brought back into another Yakuza obsession phase, so decided to pick up 2 (not that you can buy this directly because Sega have been on a wild one). I thoroughly enjoyed 0 and Kiwami 1 and got this alongside its pointless 60GB re-release, so I was expecting similar results here. At first, this game was a thorough disappointment. Kiwami 2 runs on the same Drafgon Engine that The Song of Life (Yakuza 6) runs on, meaning performance is atrocious compared to the previous 2 games. I'll get into what I tried at the end, but it eventually improved. And with that... yeah, this was a lot of fun after 20.8 hours. At points it made me want to re-install the other 2 games for the sake of familiarity but both locations are done really well here (I'm aware a third exists but I don't care much). The Dragon engine combat took some adjustment (actually, a fair amount) but it's hilarious with its ragdoll physics sending people through buildings and then continuing the fight in that building. The worlds feel so much better because most doorways don't have loading screens (elevators an exception) and you can just go straight through them - no immersion break! The other gameplay elements are as you'd expect. The story is insane on every level yet in classic Yakuza fashion manages to tug at the heartstrings and entertain thrillingly in a space of 5 minutes. The music is good (although you'll recognise songs from prior games, again I don't care much in this case). Substories made me smile, the XP system got a bit hectic but it straightened itself out. To be honest, Kiwami 2 was solid and . It's just annoying that the game ran so terribly in comparison. [u]Technical stuff:[/u] Linux Mint 22.3 on Kernel 7.0 (yes, you can use that). The game defaulted me to 1080p with 100% render scale, 4x filtering, settings on high, SSAO/Realtime reflections, motion blur, depth of field and V-sync on. The menus were choppy like this and adjusting the volume crashed the game (X11 rendering quirks I'm guessing?). I tried DVXK and SilentPatch to little immediate avail although performance improved a bit. I bit the bullet and dropped down to 720p medium briefly and finally settled on: 720p, 90% render scale, 2x filtering, medium settings (textures on high), everything else on. At this point the game was much smoother, with some inevitable drops. Render scale seems to be a key component. Tinker with it if you're having problems.