The Yakuza Remastered Collection starts off with a game that, in my opinion, feels quite “relaxed” and chill, compared to other Yakuza games, at least the ones I’ve played.

I’m a PC player so I started with Yakuza 0 a few years back. Yakuza 3 has some really nice PC specific settings, like super sampling (resolution scale) or really great keyboard and mouse keybinds, we can basically set up controls for each activity in the game, and that includes every mini game out there. It’s not exclusive, we can use either gamepad or mouse and keyboard at will, but the changes we make for each activity will remain saved there.

Performance wise, I’ve played on a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060 Ti, quite a bit overkill on the GPU side of things specially but it’s what I run these days. I settled on using 4K DSR downsampling, Ultra Settings, adding an extra 125% super sampling via Resolution Scale on top, and with some FidelityFX Sharpening too to make up for the slight DSR blur….and the game looks great like this, and runs at stable 60 FPS with enough GPU usage headroom to stay at 60 every second of gameplay.

All of the games in this collection have an issue with variable frame-rate though, so if we don’t “respect” the in game caps, either 30 or 60, the game slows down, so we need to keep either a 30 or 60 cap, or use the “Auto” FPS limit setting in game. This, however, makes my camera movement stutter quite a bit, so I prefer to use a 60 FPS in game cap and adjust settings and resolution to keep that cap at all times.

The story in this game I found it quite interesting despite being perhaps a bit slower paced, especially at the beginning, without getting into spoilers (yeah I know, game is from the PS3 era but still, for those starting to play on PC first time, it’s still new).

Eventually, the story goes into overdrive mode, as usual, and I couldn’t stop playing until it was over, so that’s a good sign I guess? I had fun, lots of it, for sure.

It’s not really a very short game, if you do secondary stuff and enjoy some mini games now and then, overall it has a good length in my opinion, and as usual really interesting characters to discover.

It does have those special moments that hit you really hard in the feels too, as usual, part of the charm in the series is that, teaching important life lessons, and this game delivers on that front.

As the first entry in the remastered collection and if you have come from the previous game on the series and PC, Kiwami 2, it may feel like a huge graphical downgrade, only logical since these games are several engine generations behind the Dragon Engine the latest entries use, but the gameplay is very solid and responsive in my opinion, and with all the settings and resolution cranked up, it holds up well, being a PS3 era game after all. These are remasters too, from PS3 games, not remakes like the Kiwami series, keep that in mind before feeling the “downgrades”, and think in “PS3 generation mode”, or something like that :P

A solid game in my opinion, to start off this collection, probably the “weakest” of the three but that’s not saying much considering I still had a lot of fun with it.

"Mine taught me one thing..... You can learn to believe in others...even in the final moments of your life!". A really great game! About people complaining about the downgrade em relation of the kiwami 1 and 2, of course has a downgrade, kiwami 1 and 2 is a remake of the older game version who is kinda crap too, so we cant blame yakuza 3 for being ultrapassed! 9/10

it is disappointing the downgrade after playing yakuza kiwami 2, the combat is repetitive and boring, the story is cool until the scene after the last boss, but it is worth finishing it as fast as possible to play the yakuza 4

Ok this is an update since I'm almost done with this game just the final scene. At first the chases are a pain but you get the hang of them,y4/y5 have much better chases. This game starts off slow and then gets going and has some of the best side stories. The main story is typical yakuza soap opera stuff but does have some memorable moments. I'm at the finale and have about 18hrs in, but I use a trainer to make the many annoying random street fights as short as possible and don't really get into the minigames outside of the ones that involve side stories. You can only get the beads of good fortune by finding all the locker keys in kamurocho, what a PIA. The controller camera sensitivity takes some getting used to because it's way fast, but I'm real yakuza so no problem. I play 2k dsr which helps a bit with the dated graphics. I think this deserves kiwami treatment along with 4, 5 is fine. This game also seems to have the largest amount of street npcs, but they pop in a lot and if you turn your back and again they disappear. The patch actually introduced a periodic stutter when approaching high npc areas and other bugginess not there with just V1, so I'd steer clear if you can. Not going to lie though this is probably my least favorite afa graphics/mechanics, slow start and other parts that aren't crime drama oriented but the story is decent and makes more sense than most of the following titles. IMO 0-yk2 is a great arc storywise, everything after is just bonus material to me. RGG really needed to gradually move kiryu aside for other original characters to take the lead such as majima, saijima, daigo and akiyama but that's not what they did unfortunately.

Yakuza three falls down the steps and crumples from the previous games. The graphics are what you'd expect from a Ps3 title, with a repetitive combat system, and horrid enemy AI. The story is way more relaxed than previous entries which was different but still enjoyable. They introduce some characters that are likable along the way but just write other characters out of the story or just forget them in general. The combat drags and ruins something I used to love in the previous games. Every corner has an inescapable thug that turns into a group so it's incredibly harsh getting through the city. The story was moderate but nothing too special for a Yakuza game. Overall give it a try but don't expect much.

Unfortunately, this is probably one of the worse Yakuza game's but do not be saddened since there are still some good things in it. The combat is awful and really tedious and repetitive and there aren't really any memorable songs or mini games to keep your mind off in fact they are pretty boring. Yakuza is very well known for their amazing side stories but sadly this game didn't have any fun or that interesting side stories to begin with which kinda takes out of the experience. The only part that I really loved was the orphanage story which to be honest was amazing , the kids were so fun to get to know and I really wished that they would spent more time on that part than any other part of the game , hell one of the kid's even refused to date another kid because he was black(lmao) but by the end they learned tolerance and so on (which was amazingly well done). The story sadly is also not in par with the other Yakuza game's and the villain has the most basic and boring as **** motivation that you can find. I can only suggest this game when it's on a discount and of course if you are a yakuza fan (if you are not then don't buy this since it will most likely get you off the series , go play 0 you noob) 5/10 needs more orphans.

Para los que venimos de los Kiwami, Yakuza 3 es un inevitable paso atrás que se sabe de antemano ya que, al fin y al cabo, solo está remasterizado (haciéndolo, en su forma actual, el juego más viejo de la saga). Esto implica que a nivel de jugabilidad es con diferencia peor que los anteriores (los Kiwami y el Zero) tanto en combate como en los minijuegos o en el sistema de progresión de personaje. La historia también es probablemente la peor de los Yakuza hasta el momento, aunque no es mala tampoco llega a tener un gran impacto, y las subhistorias son las más aburridas hasta el momento como conjunto.

Gráficamente el juego cumple gracias al remastered, aunque sigue sin ser un juego gráficamente espectacular. El sonido si que está a muy buen nivel. Y al menos yo no me he encontrado con ningún bug grave, solo algún glitch gráfico (especialmente en la iluminación) puntual.

Por todo ello, no puedo decir que Yakuza 3 sea exactamente un mal juego, pero es peor de lo que me esperaba y yo ya contaba con que iba a ser peor que los que le preceden. Pero bueno, es un trozo más de la historia de Kiryu, a ver qué tal evoluciona en el 4. Un 4,5

After only recently getting into the Yakuza series and finishing Yakuza 0, Kiwami 1 & 2; I was really looking forward to continuing the series. However, starting from Yakuza 3 (the least demanding game in the series) the game demands AVX support and simply shut down. I was running Kiwami 2 with the new dragon engine at a solid 1440p-60, but this 2 console generations old relic can't even show me a loading screen...