Yakuza: Dead Souls Review

I bought this game out of curosity more than anything, I got this because I wanted to get Ratchet and Clank Full Frontal Assault and the only other games I wanted off the PS3 store at the time that I could get were this and Twisted Metal 2012. That was 2 years ago and I was hesistant towards playing because of the bad rep the game got, plus me not playing a Yakuza game in a long while and having finally played Dead Souls, what do I think of it?

It's not bad but definately not a great game or even a very good one but I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be. At the same time the thing that will make or break your enjoyment of Yakuza Dead Souls is the camera and controls. I am willing to bet the difference between people who enjoy and did not enjoy Dead Souls was this aspect.

The best way of describing the shooting mechanics and controls in Yakuza Dead Souls and since the game seems to be heavily inspired by the Resident Evil games is that what if you had the character relative aiming from the older games in the series like RE1-3 and the stationary turret aiming from RE4? That's Dead Souls' aiming and controls in a nutshell. You aim in DS using two buttons with two different aiming methods through L1 and L2. The L1 button is where you aim without the reticle, the auto aim kicks in and you can strafe left to right, where with L2 you can't move while aiming but a targeting reticle does appear much like RE4. Remember, the game does still use character relative aiming than camera relative so depending on where your character is facing, he will aim there, not where the camera is faced.

At first, when I played the game it felt pretty awkward and I already was glad I was playing on easy mode but eventually I understood that instead of adopting the universal aiming system that so many third person shooters at the time did, the game has two different aiming methods, I used the auto aim for the hordes of zombies and used the manual camera aim on the tougher enemies and killed them faster with headshots. Some enemies like the meatheads require you to shoot them in the head and there will be some weak point targetting on bosses especially so that can be a turn off.

It felt like the whole system could've been fixed if L1 or L2 was used for both strafing and aiming like every other shooter at the time and almost all the immediate problems with the game could've been avoided.

Once you get past everything I described, the game is mildly enjoyable if nothing special. The weapons have decent amount of kick when firing them and the damage animations when you pop zombies' heads off especially can feel pretty good. Ryuji's gattling gun, Kazuma's anti tank rifle, Majima's shotgun and Akiyama's hand canon can all feel very good to use.

I am glad they do because there is a lot of zombie killing in this game, and I know complaining about that in a game like this is weird. But there is a lot of it, so many of the scenerios you partake involve killing hordes of them, I like games like Serious Sam and Doom but those games are much shorter and have far more enemies than Dead Souls does by comparison. I did enjoy the act of shooting in DS but I really wish the game changed things up after a point. Maybe it's because I am not big on the zombie genre as a whole, so this could play a part.

The story...is okay, it's primarily carried by the premise and the character interactions more than anything. It was fun seeing characters like Majima in a story like this and seeing Ryuji Goda with mechanical arm is pretty cool but what holds back the story is the amount of padding there is. It takes a while to get from A to B in this game. For example, Majima's chapter has Ryuji sighted at the batting center and you don't even get there and meet up with the latter until the end of the former's section, all of it is spent doing tasks that had nothing to do with the main plot.

Another example, Goda has to find the whereabouts of a character who might give him the information he needs, before that he needs to save 3 groups of survivors before he can advance the plot, there is another point where Goda needs to get somewhere but before he can do that he save some random old man from dying.

The game is full of padding like this and it can detract from an otherwise decently presented story, the devs put a surprising amount of production value in a spinoff game like this, and their love does show in some ways especially in an area where they could've pulled punches. The final boss was also great in how much of a Resident Evil homage it was. They could've made a lesser game in terms of production values since it's a non canon spinoff but they chose not to and it benefits the game all the more for it. 

Also, be warned there a lot of load times in the game. 

Overall, Dead Souls isn't a terrible game but at the same time, its controls takes getting used to and even then once you get past that, the game still doesn't rise above being serviceable. I could imagine the game benefitting with some kind of remake, the Yakuza series has been no stranger to that.