Kazuma is kind of a dork. It’s partly the way he wears his collar turned up, as if it were still the 80s (he’s only been in prison ten years, so you’d think he knows better). But he’s mainly a dork because he’s got that earnest/clueless do-the-right thing quality that made the character in Shenmue so annoying. Even when he kicks ass – and lord knows, there’s plenty of that in Yakuza – he’s still your typical stuffed-shirt dorky hero.

So when a little girl says to him, “Mister, this puppy is hungry”, you know what’s coming next: a giant in-your-face splash screen announcing a quest titled “Save The Puppy!” At which point Kazuma trots obligingly to various stores in search of dog food. He’s just that kind of guy.

But about a third of the way into the game, Kazuma takes off his shirt to fight an underground cage match. That’s when you first see the tattoo (well, other than the box cover). Yakuza knows what a reveal this is. It will come back to it later on. In a nutshell, this is what makes Yakuza worth playing: in spite of how silly things may look, there’s almost always something cool waiting to be revealed.

This is an ambitious game for the breadth of the story it’s telling, and Sega deserves credit for trying to tell it. Kazuma is the lead character in Yakuza’s ensemble cast, which consists of equal parts ‘who is that guy again?’ characters and ‘ah, that guy!’ characters. For the most part, the voicework is really bad (there’s even a police detective who, if you listen just right, seems to be trying to do a Humphrey Bogart impression). This epic Japanese gangster yarn would have fared better if Sega had included an option to listen to the original Japanese voices. Instead, they hired a few moderate name actors and Tarantino’ed up the localization with profanity so earnest and studied that it’s laughable. Imagine fourth-graders using swear words they’ve just learned. That’s how Yakuza sounds most of the time.

Yakuza is from some of the creative team who brought you the Shenmue games, which were positively Hamlet-esque for the main character’s refusal to do anything but avenge his murdered father. In Shenmue, you fed kittens, drove forklifts, and collected action figures. In fact, the storyline required so much dawdling around that it was never resolved, even over the course of two games.

And now comes Yakuza, which owes a lot to Shenmue. The core of Yakuza is a relatively simple (sometimes even simplistic) fighting game. You start with a few basic moves and gradually layer in some new moves with a thin pretension towards RPG mechanics. Most of the fights are ridiculously easy, little more than busywork. But on a few occasions, Yakuza will throw cheap tricks at you, such as pitting you against characters who dodge your attacks, having thugs shoot guns at you to knock you down, forcing you to fight a succession of three bosses with all of your equipment taken away, or dumping you into a mandatory shooting minigame.

Between fights, you move around the city and let the plot unfold. There are occasionally moments of ridiculous Shenmue-style cognitive dissonance. You might be tasked with the urgent rescue of a girl, but first you’re going to chat up some nightclub hostess and buy her a drink, and then you’re going to go to a batting cage to hit some balls. But for the most part, the story unfolds at a measured pace that makes the expected dawdling less ridiculous. Yeah, so what if you want to pull a stuffed animal out of a machine with one of those mechanical cranes? So what if you want to collect lost locker keys? So what if you want to play a silly dating minigames to earn some experience on the side? Yakuza readily allows and encourages it. And then there’s a central relationship – no, not the kind you’re thinking of – that can unlock unique items if you carefully develop it.

Unfortunately, few of these side activities fold into the actual gameplay very well. Money, and therefore items, are pretty easy to come by with a little patience. The main currency in Yakuza are your experience points, but they don’t change the gameplay very much. Character progression is slow and often inconsequential. You only have three stats, and they don't mean anything beyond a rigid sequence of new moves and slight improvements. The basics of fighting are fixed throughout most of the game. You maneuver into position for a square, square, square, triangle (later, you'll get a square, square, square, square, triangle). The goal during a fight is to fill up a power meter by inflicting damage. Once it's full, you can grab an opponent and slam him into a wall for some of Sony's trademark Massive Damage, which gives you an experience point bonus. Sometimes you’ll use weapons, which degrade so you have to buy new ones (can you say “money sink”?).

But even if the side activities are ultimately inconsequential, at least they’re a great way to sight see. Yakuza’s city is nicely realized. Street toughs throw rocks at puppies. The park is overrun by bums, who won't let anyone in. What lies beneath and above, the underlords and overlords, aren’t what you’d expect. And at any moment, some trash-talking punk will pick a fight, get his ass beat, and then offer you his money. You can shrug off damage by getting some soba noodles or a gelato. Buy nice things to give to girls, but don’t forget to put on a dab of cologne first. It's a weird and distinctly Japanese combination of metrosexuality and neon mean streets.

The graphics are very 90s. The art design of the city is great, but otherwise, the visuals in Yakuza are often bad, with coarse textures, rough geometry, primitive character models, and poorly synced animations. A lot of this is forgivable. After all, Yakuza is big on storytelling instead of story showing; this is a very verbal game. But during the fights, which should infuse the game with a thrill and a sense of power, you get the feeling that you’re playing a half-baked River City Ransom remake. The hard fast music kicks in, a splash screen pops up telling you whose ass you’re about to kick, there’s a profanity-laced taunt, and then the bruising begins. And lasts for all of about three minutes, tops. The ratio of brawling to loading time is probably about three-to-one.