As a game on its own it's decend but as a remake and in light of the delisting of OG yakuza 3 a replacement this game misses the mark in many ways, i would even call it awful.
but i wanna start with something i enjoyed
dark ties: dark ties is based, it gave me what i wanted from this series in a while, a dark story without unecissary humor forced onto you.
just be warned that Dark Ties is really short, if you only play the story between 4-6 hours.
the minigame survival hell was also alot of fun and a neat time waster.
kiwami 3: absolute doozy
if you only want a modern way to play through the story of yakuza 3 with some newly added scenes (minus the ending because that one is changed heavily, i'd say for the worse as it retcons an entire story arc in yakuza 4 and also retcons character development of a character that happened 5 or so minutes prior) this is a fine way to play the game.
i don't really mind the new actors, except for Kagawa who plays Hamazaki, not because of the SA stuff but because his acting is just awful, he does not fit the character and scenes like the one in the chinese restaurant turn from revolting into "this looks like the meme of the guy loudly eating chips in a zoom call."
if you are like me and enjoy the side content OOF
they removed so much from the original, 75% less substories, from 120 down to 31, and those 31 are either the most mundane substories ever, as in you can see all of them in any other game, or they have really weirdly forced in slapstick elements that either makes kiryu act very stupid or make another character usually a woman fall for him because comedy.
in one specific sidequest kiryu acts like a teenager and Haruka like a motherly figure which just breaks their character cuz why not.
they removed some of the greatest substories in the original game cuz they were "too hard to make"
the reaper side story got more or less gutted, the mystery was removed and instead you have something mindless like the bounty missions from pirate yakuza (which they just copied tbf)
the orphanage is more fun in some aspects like the newly added minigames, but the old orphanage stories were completely removed and the new ones while decend don't hit the same and you have to grind your bond ranks with the children to unlock them which can take a few hours.
the motorbike gang is pretty fun and a neat twist on the pirate crew minigame from pirate yakuza, only issue i have with it is how much you are forced to play in the story, i had to play it for about 3 hours i think and depending on how much you play you get interrupted twice.
now onto other issues like the combat.
it is more mindless than OG but for those that hated enemies blocking, these enemies do it less.
i don't really care about that though, what i have more gripes with is literal unavoidable damage.
if an enemy grabs you you cannot counter it at all, you get a reversal very late into the skill tree but that one only covers one of multiple enemy grab types.
other unfair damage is that when you grab an enemy and they free themselves, which to my knowledge is random, you WILL get damaged, making no damage runs very restrictive and a pain.
the skill tree is also kinda bad, the point system is the worst it has been so far as the game forces you to do side activities to gain points, it also will not tell you how many you have unless you open the menu.
base abilities like the afforementioned reversal and even taunting are hid behing late game skill tree unlocks, and especially taunting is awful as instead of you gaining a fixed amount, with the chance increasing the more drunk you are it is seemingly random how much heat you gain, sometimes you gain tons sometimes you get almost nothing, like a non exaggerated 1% increase.
heat in general once again is stupidly difficult to gain and it's uses are, like in pirate yakuza, very limited for seemingly no reason.
skills in general suck to unlock as you sometimes have to unlock certain skills of a specific style to get the next of the style you want.
lastly the technical issues:
this game specifically kiwami 3, dark ties had no issues for me, is probably the buggiest yakuza game since yakuza 6 íf it isn't even buggier.
crashes, softlocks, weird collision and physics going whack plus Kashiwagi talking bug fixes (the developers left a dev note in the dialogue, this was patched but really funny.)
this game got it all.
conclusion: this game is a way to experience yakuza 3, but it neither is a definitive way to do so, nor does it in my eyes capture what the original was going for.
if after all of this, you still think "this game is cool, i wanna check it out!!" you do you, i recommend to buy it at a discount after all of the technical issues have been patched.
i rate dark ties an 8/10 and kiwami 3 a very generous 5/10
