Her interactions with Kiryu are some of the strongest character moments in the game. Female characters don’t have key roles in Yakuza games often outside of Haruka, but Sayama’s great strong and driven, but with a softer side making her more well-rounded. There are some good new characters though, the best two being the “Yakuza Huntress” detective Kaoru Sayama, who puts Kiryu into protective custody and, pleasingly, straightaway realises that her best course of action is to team up with Kiryu and help him out, rather than stop him doing anything illegal. More and more people are revealed to have survived, one of them is a character that other characters know and interact with in later life but apparently never recognise, and the fact that the most interesting characters related to the Jingweon do not include any of its members is a damning indictment of the gang as a whole. While I’m pointing out flaws, however, the actual massacre is shown repeatedly throughout the story with extra information added each time to the point where it starts to make less and less sense. Chief among them is Detective “Killer” Kawara, a cop on the edge of the law with a grudge against the group, and naming anyone else would spoil the best parts of the story. Unfortunately, they don’t have anything else going on besides that threat the only interesting thing about them is the effect they’ve had on several key characters in the plot, and how those characters behave in response to the massacre and the current state of the Jingweon. They’re less an organised crime group and more a sort of psychotic death cult clad in a uniform of black fatigues and heavy boots, packing knives, treating any slight against their honour as an offence worthy of death, and willing to die themselves rather than act in any way against the clan, they pose a physical threat unlike that of the Yakuza and thugs Kiryu normally deals with. Seeing as the two men responsible for the massacre, Kiryu’s adoptive father Kazama and Majima’s old boss Shimano are both dead at this point, the Jingweon are planning much delayed revenge on Kamurocho as a whole. The game is actually about the Jingweon Mafia a Korean organised crime group seeking revenge for the Tojo clan wiping almost all of them out years prior. See, the game isn’t really about the Omi Alliance and a potential truce, that’s just a framing device. Unfortunately this is spoilt when, after a boss fight with Ryuji, Daigo and Jin Goda flee back to Kamurocho, and throughout the story Kiryu travels between the two locations as he pleases. Kiryu venturing into enemy territory, on a mission the Tojo higher-ups reckon may well kill him, with the promise of safe passage stolen by a coup headed up by a powerful, intimidating fellow Dragon. See, much like Kiryu’s “Dragon of Dojima” moniker and matching back tat, Ryuji wears a golden dragon and is known as “The Dragon of Kansai”, a title he hates with a passion, due to the implication that there are other dragons out there disputing his status. The truce is struck with chairman Jin Goda, only to be almost immediately undermined by his son Ryuji, a sort of beautiful beige beef mountain who stages a coup, with the two goals of starting an Omi-Tojo war, and killing Kiryu to become the sole Dragon in the entire Yakuza world. Tagging along at Kiryu’s insistence is Daigo Dojima, son of Sohei and current acting chairman (the term they use despite her being a woman) Yayoi, whom Kiryu believes to be the one man who can keep the clan going, and who had trouble in Osaka five years previously. However, after being gunned down in a cemetery, the clan’s Chairman Yukio Terada implores Kiryu to come back into the fold for a task of utmost importance: travel to Sotenbori, Osaka (last seen in Yakuza 0) and broker a truce with the Omi Alliance, the Tojo’s main rival and Terada’s previous clan. Having dealt with the fallout from the murder of Sohei Dojima and the missing ten billion yen, Kazuma Kiryu has left the Tojo Clan to live a peaceful civilian life with his adopted daughter Haruka. Unfortunately, Kiwami 2 is a mess of highs and lows great ideas undermined by some mediocre elements and occasionally poor execution. I’ve heard from a reliable source that it’s the best one, and from what I’ve seen I was all ready for it to be the best Yakuza game I’ve played, or at least the best of this current run. Apart from 5, which I own but haven’t played yet, Yakuza 2 is the only one in the main series I’ve never played or had the opportunity to play: I jumped from the original straight to Yakuza 3.
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