What went wrong?

I've only played Kiwami 1. Should I play Kiwami 2 or Zero next?

If you're planning on playing both 0 and Kiwami 2 anyway, then play 0 before K2. The cabaret is a direct followup to the one in 0, and Majima's story in K2 has major spoilers for 0.

I did consider playing through all of them, but does each game give you a reason to play it? I can see the formula getting old

are you actually brain dead

Yeah I'm playing through all the yakuza games, it's taking me a while since I play other games in between but I'm on 3 right now and it's the first game where I'm just rushing through the story and skipping most of the side content so I can just get to 4 as quickly as possible

Nah this makes perfect sense what are you on about

You'll probably be just as impatient with 4. Saejima bits in that game are really shit and annoying, and they're also shit in 5.

>characters dying in preventable ways
I love kiryu and all, but his no murder policy pisses me off so much. I just finished the bull fighting arena and I was more annoyed than saddened by it

There's a reason people say to take breaks. 0 and K1 play incredibly similarly to one another because K1 is essentially an expansion pack shaped like a remake of the first game in the series. I went from 0 to K1, but you honestly might have a better time playing K1 to 0 because 0 introduces a new playable character with Majima, who has 4 of his own unique styles that are different than Kiryu's, a second city in the form of Sotenbori, and combat just feels a lot better. K1 nerfed Kiryu's styles and felt like it buffed enemies in general, probably due to how easy it was to level from Majima Everywhere.

Too much focus on the orphanage kids
Kills off Kashiwagi for no reason
A lot of the new characters from this game get ignored in the sequel

>Kills off Kashiwagi for no reason
Yeah, it sucks. Not sure how I feel that he's somehow back in 7 just fine.

Attached: Osamu_Kashiwagi_%2528Like_a_Dragon%2529_01.jpg (300x300, 15.08K)

wtf they made a whole game of that dame dane song?

Yakuza went straight into the shitter after Yakuza 2. The writer switch really killed this series for good.
I've played every game except for 0 and 6, and I lost all interest on the way there.
Is 0 any good?
Kiwami 1 is also an embarrassment to the original title.

The only good part about 3:
youtube.com/watch?v=VCCO4TfSadU

Yakuza is essentially a Drama game with action sprinkled into it.
This whole game's point was to show Kiryus transition from being a thug to a loving father figure to the kid. It's essential if you enjoy Yakuza for it's characters and story. But if you just want straight up action I could see why people would believe it to be the worst.

Also out of all the re releases of yakuza, this is aged the most. They just upscaled this one so the fighting mechanics are outdated more than kiwami 1 and 2

The absolute worst thing about this game is not having mahjong in the western release

They really didn't put any love into mantaining any kind of gameplay consistency over the numbered titles on this "kiwami" straight line.
>The gameplay scales in complexity from 1 to the original 5
>On 0 you have 4 styles and on 6 they do the engine switch
>They release kiwami with the 4 styles in 0 and kiwami 2 with the 6 engine
>If you play in the new release order, 0 has 4 styles, kiwami has 4 styles, 2 has the 6 engine, then you roll back for 3 4 and 5 which have either one style or styles tied to characters, and then flop back to 6 again
>Then 7 is a goddamn fucking turn based rpg
>All without accounting for kenzan and isshin which are complete fucking outcasts in all of this and the blatant copy and paste they did on Kiwami

What a mess of asset floppage this franchise is.
Also the problem of 3 isn't that the game is about Kazuma being a loving father which is actually excellent, but that everything else (which is most of the story meat) is bad.

The gameplay part is okay i guess, but the story is easily the lowest point of the series. It's the dumbest shit ever in the bad way, what few good ideas and moemnts it has, like Saejima's arc, are either poorly executed or outright ruined by later twists. The new protagonists are great (except for Tanimura, JESUS what a boring motherfucker) but they are wasted on a pretty terrible story. Specially Akiyama. I love the guy but his role in the story is having a shitty romance with a shitty character, romance that hardly even matter at all in the end and Akiyama himself seems to completely forget about, just a crappy excuse to get him involved in the story.
The only good part of the game is Saejima's. It actually expands and develops Majima's character too. Saejima is one of the few characters who has a compelling and satisfying story. Of course after his part ends his character is ruined by one of the worst twists in the series. I won't spoil what it is but holy shit is it fucking stupid.

ANIKI

I completely second everything this user said.
Just compare the retarded twists in Y4 with the godly twists on Y1 or Y2. What a mess.

F

It just drags on for too long, yakuza is possibly my favorite series but fuck it just goes on and on with almost no tension. Yakuza 0 was long as fuck but it was so good.