about those yakuza remakes
There's an interesting thing within the yakuza game fandom when it comes to the remakes of Yakuza 1 and 2: longtime series fans really really don't want you to play them. This is both understandable and also kind of weird. Before diving into why, let's talk about why 1 and 2 needed remakes in the first place.
The first Yakuza game was released in a period when Western branches of Japanese publishers still didn't quite know how to bring uniquely Japanese games out to us dumb Americans. This was also a time when GTA was all the rage, with publishers all trying to ape its sensibilities. You hand an American publisher a nominally open-world game about a gritty criminal underworld in the mid-2000s and they are 100% certain try and follow the Rockstar model: Hollywood voice cast, lots of swearing, and Americanization of as much parts of the game as you can get.
This is how you get a script littered with swears that just didn't exist or make sense being said by a voice cast that while talented just weren't giving it their all (or in the case of Michael Madsen just really shouldn't be in a voice over booth). There's also just a lot of small things, like Kiryu being called Kazama, a general lack of honorifics, and in a few cases names straight up changed to make them easier to read. Yakuza 2 has some of these same issues, but at least was spared an English dub.
As time has gone on, the games have generally had a much improved translation into English, with 3 fixing many of the egregious errors and from 5 onward a more standardized set of practices for these localizations. In fact, when they re-released 3, 4, and 5 a few years ago they went in and made the overwhelming majority of the script consistent with each other.
But what about 1 and 2? More or less "trapped" on the PS2, there was no real easy way to play the foundational games in the series, and even if you did, you got a compromised experience. The most logical answer would be to, like many 6th gen games in this era, do an HD remaster. To their credit, that is exactly what Sega did... but never America. One potential reason for this is that the Yakuza games never really sold all that well in America. 5 wouldn't even get localized in America until 3 years after its original release, adding two whole games they needed to also localize on top of that was just not in the cards.
But then something interesting happened: Yakuza 0 came out in the west and sold stupendously amazing well. Not just in Japan, either. They finally cracked the west. Sensing the moment, they rushed to create a remake of the original game to match the gameplay, graphical style, and translation quality of 0, as well as including new content to bridge the gap between games. In essence, Kiwami was as much of a remake of 1 and it was a sequel to 0. Best of both worlds, right?
Wrong, apparently. Talk to some hardcore Yakuza fans long enough and you'll get an earful of a rant about the admittedly many issues with Kiwami. In order to get the game out in a timely enough fashion so as to not impede Yakuza 6's development, much of Kiwami was composed of borrowed assets and ideas from 5 and 0. For the most part, I personally think this is fine. However, there's two major differences in the remake that people really don't like: the combat and the Majima Everywhere system.
The combat is the easier story to discuss: they more or less copy pasted it into Kiwami. This is not an inherently bad idea, since in a couple ways I think it improves the combat of 0, namely in how they reverted the Heat system changes introduced in 0. However, Kiryu's iconic fighting style, dubbed the Dragon style, has been effectively locked behind a wall that is the Majima Everywhere system. Due to the popularity of Mr. Shakedown (and an overt intention to show the lighter side of Majima that simply wasn't present in the original release), RGG implemented a system wherein Majima will randomly attack Kiryu in order to train him up after being in jail.
This is a system that on paper and in execution is pretty successful. The interactions with Majima are fun and they provide a more meaty challenge from the typical street fights that get extremely boring and tedious by hour 30. However, all of the upgrades that make the Dragon style useful in any way are only given to you in the back half of Majima's upgrade tree. So in reality, this just means that you don't get to use Kiryu's character defining fighting style until the game is more or less over. It's also yet another form of grinding in a game that even I, a Kiwami defender, agrees has too much stuff to do.
Then we come to Kiwami 2. After doing the first remake, it was only logical to carry on and do the same for 2. However, this remake was being released after 6, which introduced a new graphics engine that while impressive in its graphical fidelity and more seamless open-world, also had some performance issues on the PS4, meaning a drop in framerate target of 60fps to 30.
So that's reason 1 people hate Kiwami 2. Reason 2 has to do with some cut content. A section of Yakuza 2's version of Osaka, Shinseicho, was deemed inessential and simply had the various elements of it either integrated into Sotenbori or just cut altogether. Reason 3 is a very specific thing that I personally don't think is as bad as described, but I have on multiple times received a massive earful over it. There's a pretty pivotal cutscene in the story was originally scored with a subtle jazz piece. This was licensed music that for whatever reason was either unavailable or unwanted by the dev team, so they used a piece of music they did have access to instead. This change in tone is treated as essentially a sin until itself and will get people yelling at you like the whiteboard explaining gif.
So where does that leave us? What is the "best" way to play these games? Do you start with the compromised PS2 games? Play the remakes that have their own issues and general feeling of being sequels to a prequel that came out in the middle of the series? And what of 0 itself? Many say, "dude just start at 0." This has its own issues! 0 has references to characters and plot elements that weren't introduced into the series chronology until well after the original Yakuza 1.
I'll be honest, I don't have an perfect answer to this question, becuase I don't think there really is a best answer for English speaking audiences. For myself, I opted to start with Kiwami, completely unaware of the complaints people had with it. While I did learn of those weaknesses during that playthrough, I was throughly hooked and is literally the reason I'm a fan to this day.
However, if I were to be making this decision now, I think I know what I would've done differently. A month ago, an undub mod was released for the original English PS2 release of Yakuza 1. This mod restores the Japanese VO to the game and retranslates the game's text to a more modern standard. While the gameplay is untouched and suitably dated, it would be more accurate to experience it as it was. There sadly is not an equivalent mod for Yakuza 2 to my knowledge, but who knows, that may change. Then I'd be able to see the games grow, change, and iterate at a natural pace. Maybe then I too would be a bitter oldhead who hates the Kiwamis?
As a final thought, I want to point out something curious. Despite all the various bits of negativity I've seen surrounding the Yakuza remakes, I've also seen calls for remakes of Yakuza 3 and 4, rather than the simple remasters we got. The cycle never ends.