The Yakuza 2 Retrospective | Double Dragon

I never had any problems with the dragon engine combat so I wonder why you did

With both Kiryu getting stabbed and the bomb fake out at the end, I was in genuine shock and could fully believe that Kiryu COULD die. I knew he wouldn't and that there are many more games with him, but the scenes were presented so well.

Yakuza 2 probably has my favorite story, and kiwami 2 definitely has my favorite gameplay. I'm on 5 btw

Cvit, you started sounding pretty boring during this review. So many people loved cabaret, I definitely did. I digress tho.

I completely took the piss out of the ending by cheesing it with muscle soda, I was happy to see that the intense battle that I completely skipped over didn't intensify any meaningful lasting emotional moments

DID I HEAR MUSIC FROM THE SILVER CASE?? Dude literally my favorite game ever

That "Preserving the Original Experience" section was fantastic
I also like the music choice throughout

This guy Mod-dead his game. So much, that it's not the game I nearly 100% without seeing this review. I played through Steam, I did not have any of the technical issues.
Imagine throwing people in Yakuza 😂 .
Get gud.

I just got into the series and started at Yakuza 0 which I thought was super fun. Yakuza Kiwami, though I liked the story, wasn't as fun to me, so when I bought Kiwami 2 I was expecting the same shtick, but so far this game has saved me from dropping the series (I'm only on Chapter 10 of the game, the Cabaret Club takes too much of my attention)

Update: Beat the game, Fuck the Man in Black. Other than that the game was pretty easy. Enjoyed it very much, now I play 3

So ! I really really like this video because i didnt know all these small details and other things that were missing from the Kiwami remake of 2. With that being said , I am slowly playing through all the Yakuza/Like a dragon games over the past 2 years as i am also working on getting the platinums on them. that being said for someone who is new to the series the Kiwami remakes do a Goodjob still bringing out the messages and the story of the game. I really like the games , the story's they tell and the characters are so good that it hits me in the balls everytime. Now the part about remaking games , and the aviability of older games , together with emulation talk. I kinda agree , its rough. but with that being said, Even if i could get easily access to the ps2 version of this game all the other things that get in the way is indeed still a hassle. And even if the possibility for ports was out there , Companies tend to fuck those up aswell. Like really really badly. its just incredibly hard to archive these games sadly. I wish i still had all my ps2 games from back in the day and kept all the stuff i owned neat and clean but sadly i was a freaking kid, not knowing the worth and priceless things i gained from them back then. Now the dirt like filter on the game , that you fixed with a mod didnt feel like it was a thing on ps4/ps5 for me when playing so i dont know if that was a pc port thing , I could be wrong and it was there but not as noticeable for me but yeh. if it was a port thing it proves that the point of ports being messed up alot.

CONCLUSION love this video and all the extra info it gave me on things I didnt know and futher grows my appriciation and love for the series. even if i would probably never be able to play it on og hardware. this makes me smile . I'll probably go back to watching the original yakuza retrospective aswell At some point! btwi Love majima , :3 can never have enough majima Hahaha. also Can i say that my platinum run on each game has made me a better minigamer X'D God i hate these minigames sometimes. getting the hostesses to max friendship is the worst part of each game... Its slow , It makes Kiryu look bad as het get with each girl only to them to never exist again afterwards. BReaks my heart X'D. I gotta be honest this was a long video and if i didnt comment before finishing it i would lose all the things i wanted to say. Again thnx for this video. And i realize by the end you say that kiwami 2 isnt a bad game but just think of it as an infirior version to the ps2 og. Cause it felt like you actually found it bad and i felt like inwas defending it to much why i am editing my post again. So yeh thnx for this informative video !

Hey I really appreciate you going through the old games in a retrospective, I got into the franchise because I used to work at an arcade and a regular customer that was a huge yakuza fan told me to try out the games and to start with Zero since it makes the most sense and the Kiwami remakes go with the game, so that's where I started the games, I played Kiwami last year and a few days ago I finished kiwami 2 and I absolutely love these games, I wanted to see the difference between the old and the new games and it is why I watched both your yakuza 1 and 2 retrospective and now I have a bigger appreciation for these games, your videos made me want to play the old versions and I will be doing that as soon as I finish with the whole series as a whole because I want to see how it all wraps up. if it wasn't for these videos I would of not considered playing the old games any sooner so thank you again

There was a widescreen mode for this game, wasn't there?

Ik im a year late for this but in kiwami 2's defense they had to give kiryu cancer somehow lmao

Sounds like you must really hate every single mini game since you cry about them so much lol

I know this video is like a year long but Max Payne is available on steam, the sound issue is caused by modern operating systems not processing the audio for actually no reason at all

There is a patch for this if you're not scared of a .rar file

I love how well the metal gear music represents kazuma and ryuji

It seems clear to me that Kiwami 2's biggest problem is the Dragon engine. More specifically the "Early" dragon engine used in Yakuza 6 and K2. A lot of people who claim that K2 is better than K1 usually point to the Reuse of assets, that a lot of boss movesets are just reused from "later games" as well as locations and mini-games. To me, that sounds like cope for the Kiwami 2 apologists. They can't admit that outside of looking good and being seamless, that's all it has going for it. The fights are worse and clunkier, the ai is annoying, upgrades suck and overall the charm seen in Zero and 1 is gone as well. Despite literally being in the same locations it actively feels worse somehow. Something I've heard some people complain about K1 is that it rides Zero too hard, I'd argue that's just because it was a remake of the first game in the series, a game that had no extra stuff or bells and whistles, if that stuff wasn't included I'm confidant people would say Kiwami is a bad remake because it doesn't do much as a remake. Not to mention Zero was Based on the first game in the series (Running through Tojo headquarters, Nishiki, Side stories, etc.). K2 could've been the chance for the "Zero/Kiwami" engine to shine and set itself apart from K1, but it just doesn't. It's Yakuza 6 2, not Kiwami 2, the fighting mechanics and aesthetics in Zero and K1 were objectively better. I got into RGG with Zero and played 1 and was sold enough on the series to buy the whole mainline series and "Like a Dragon" (there was a sale, and 3-7 were only about 50 bucks altogether) I'm having more fun with 3, and 4 than I did with K2 I haven't started 5 or 6 yet but when I do. I'm confident I'll like 5 more than 6. Personally, I'm worried that when RGG remakes 3 and 4 they're gonna use their subpar dragon engine as opposed to the "Kiwami" engine Zero and K1 used. Not because I love Zero that much, but because Zero feels like the perfect Yakuza title and Yakuza 6 doesn't and Kiwami 2 shows that. Maybe the dragon engine will get better and work itself out, but for now, I'm not sure.

We need a kiwami 3

this guy is such a reddit nerd and i dont even like kiwami 2 tht much

yakuza 3 retrospective

coming in 2077

Just finished Kiwami 2. I decided to play the games in chronological order.

It's so wild how huge of remakes the Kiwami games are. Seeing how the original looked in this video is blowing my mind.

I'm nervous about starting 3 becuase 0, kiwami 1 and 2 had very consisted graphics be even the remaster of 3 looks..... um, doesnt look amazing lol.

did bro just spend ten years in the joint because my god you sound like kazuma kiryu

I just played through kiwami 2 recently and I legit took a minute to laugh at the fact that they kept the I peacocked your mom thing in when i got to that point

Yeah, I found Kiwami2 combat unenjoyable for all the reasons you just stated. It sucked a lot following the combat of 0 and Kiwami 1. Even now that I'm on Yakuza 3, I find the combat better than K2 just by the quickstep button alone. K2 felt so unresponsive and I thought I was just crazy. I also saw the change to the stabbing scene in a tweet and decided that I'm going to comb mod sites like Nexus for restoration mods for music before going through each game. The new pop song is very ill-fitting and removes all the drama from that scene.

The green filter always gave off a late 90s early 00s thriller/detective movie vibe to me

coming back after finishing Yakuza 5, and (SPOILERS FOR YAKUZA 5 FINAL BOSS BELOW)



Aizawa doesn't come near Ryuji man, not even close.. the amount of build up to Ryuji, the way you saw him act and the payoff are 20 times better

Aizawa just comes off as bipolar with the 180 turn that he makes in the last part of the game

Kiryu walks into the Tojo room and it's so fucking funny

Kiryu: wtf? why are you here?
Aizawa: idk lol but I, the bodyguard who was very upset at losing my bro like 5 hours ago, now take over the Tojo Clan, you stand in my way and I'm going to kick your ass
Kiryu: proceeds to tiger drop him like 20 times in between QTE's

(expanding on the point above) you can't punish him at all because he always tracks you and you can't combo him because he always blocks, so the only way to beat him without wasting 2 hours chipping away at his 20 health bars is to tiger drop/ komaki parry / bound throw him, it's such a low point in the ending and i finished the game thinking "bruh no way this is the final fight it's so ass", but it was.. the QTE's are very cool though

This video feels less like a Retrospective and more like a shitting on Kiwami 2. No hate at all, still a really well made video, but I wish Kiwami 2 was given a little more credit.

Yakuza 3 retrospective 😭

I’m glad he went hard on and crapped on the Kiwami’s. Can’t stand those poor man excuse for remakes for the Y0 saps who tried to gatekeep the original fans out of their own series.

Half your opinions i think are ragebait the other half are valid criticism i cant decide which are which

thank god i watched this after playing kiwami 2

I'm very late but I believe the black smudges around the characters you're talking about is screen-space ambient occlusion. This is used to make corners darker (it makes lighting a lot more believable for almost no performance cost), but in this case for whatever reason does not care whether its scenery or not

Waiting on and can't wait for Yakuza 3

I will take the kiwami games iver the outdated poorly translated original

Having trouble with the physics? Thats a skill issue.

Where’s my Yakuza 3 Retrospective C? 🤔

Intead of a playable majina 8n kiwami two, we should have Date or his cop friend they do move the plot and have misteries