The constant disk thrashing is a real drawback in Yakuza. On the streets, you can hear the crowd sounds in their tight little loop. Every time the view changes as you pass from one canned city slice to the next, there’s an aggravating hitch. It’s not aggravating because it takes so long. It’s brief enough. But it’s aggravating because it’s a constant reminder that this isn’t a city so much as a collection of screens built to pass for a city. In this post-Grand Theft Auto era, it’s disappointing to have to see the seams this blatantly, especially in a game that wants to present a sense of freedom and openness. Yakuza is a collection of little boxes at one and a half second intervals.

In the end, the storyline is the strength of Yakuza. There's a tipping point about four hours into the game, where you've gotten past the dense guided exposition that begins many Japanese games. Yakuza loosens its collar, so to speak. It starts to open up and give you some room to breathe. And this lasts for a few hours until you start to realize how futile so many of the side activities are, and how often you're going to have to sit through these obligatory fights, and how many loading screens sit between you and anything meaningful happening. Yakuza is at its best in that gap between hours four and seven. If only the developers had managed to stretch those three hours further.

The best case for Yakuza is accepting it as an example of narrative over gameplay. At the risk of making generalizations, this seems to be a facet of many Japanese games. Sometimes, it works to great effect. With something as mindblowing as Killer 7, you can power through a hundred trite shooting sequences based on the sheer ‘WTF?’ of it all. But the narrative in Yakuza isn’t quite at that level. It’s certainly good, with a strong sense of character and setting. It moves in a few surprising directions. In fact, you’ll be rewarded for sticking around by seeing that the writers didn’t take the cheap and easy route.

But the core mechanics of Yakuza – fighting and futzing around in this collection of city bits – are simply too disjointed to bear up under the fifteen or so hours it takes to reach the payoff. The gameplay wears out its welcome too soon to sustain the story. As a result, Yakuza is a game that manages to fall apart just as it’s getting under way. - Tom Chick