Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is, by this point, the undisputed master of recycling. By reusing characters and environments and minigames across the Like a Dragon series (and then remaking the games to do it all over again), it’s able to pack each new game with a luxurious volume of stuff while simultaneously piling cutscenes to the rafters.
So it’s not at all surprising that the biggest new feature of Yakuza Kiwami 3’s Dark Ties expansion is a roguelite mode that lets you beat up hordes of thugs copy-pasted from the streets of Kamurochō. Even so, there’s something cleverly meta in building an entirely new and compulsively replayable randomized mode out of spare parts.
It’s almost a flex on games that do just one thing. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth contained within itself a whole Pokémon subsystem and Animal Crossing-style island building as mere side activities; why shouldn’t Dark Ties tempt you to spend 20 hours doing runs to level up sidekicks, unlock new weapons, and earn stat-boosting gear like you would in any other roguelite?
That’s the gist of Hell’s Arena, a new underground fight club hiding down a Kamurochō back street in the expansion starring Yakuza 3 villain (antihero?) Yoshitaka Mine. Despite being a series baddie, the bit of the Dark Ties plot I got to play at a recent Sega preview event seems to suggest Mine will spend most of his expansion going around doing good deeds, not unlike Kiryu in the main game. “Most,” of course, depending on how hard you get hooked on the new roguelite mode.
Where the two yakuza differ most is in combat: Kiryu fights with a bruising heft while Mine is snappy and light on his feet, with a marquee move that I instantly fell in love with. While performing a heavy attack, a well-timed button press lets Mine leap off the chest of an enemy and ping-pong to another.
It’s a really fun “offense is the best defense” trick for avoiding an incoming attack or seeing how quickly you can make it through a brawl. It also reminded me of the rhythm of the Batman Arkham combat, even if Yakuza welcomes a bit more frantic mashing than the more measured timing of Batman’s punches and parries.
Mine’s the ideal character, in other words, to steer through a fast-paced combat dungeon that spurs you from floor to floor with a constantly ticking timer. Hell’s Arena consists of Brawler Hell, a basic cage match situation, and Survival Hell, which is where the real meat is. There’s a real Squid Game air to the setup, with masked VIPs watching contestants try to battle their way through the gauntlet. If you die on a run you’ll lose all the money and treasure you accrued, but you’ll unlock shortcuts as you go that let you cut and run when continuing gets too risky.
If Survival Hell were just “fight a bunch of dudes while a timer ticks down” it’d be a mild diversion, but as usual RGG has assembled its leftovers into a buffet. There’s a lot more going on here:
- Unlockable Survival Weapons you can equip before a run, mapped to the D-Pad, with a wide range of bonus effects like healing you or freezing enemies
- Unlockable Mercenaries you can take into fights with you, each with their own stats and perks like boosting drop rates or stunning enemies
- Findable treasures called Gospels with delightful names like “Quadriceps of the Gods” that offer you permanent stat boosts across runs
- Random drops that can refill your Survival Weapon uses or boost your healing or money earned for a brief time
- Multiple difficulty levels to clear, each featuring more enemies that hit harder and rewards in the form of new Survival Weapons and Mercenaries
- Minibosses guarding the ends of each floor, as well as optional treasure chests holding tempting Gospels
- A shopkeeper who’ll sell you songs from a boatload of other Sega games, like Persona and Virtua Fighter
Survival Hell’s mazelike concrete corridors are fitting for a literal underground fighting ring, though it’s a bit of a shame that a mode encouraging just one more run isn’t set in Yakuza 3’s beachy Okinawa map instead.
Still, the variety of Survival Weapons and Mercenaries and the light buildcrafting potential of finding ones that work well together has me scared of how much time I could dump into Survival Hell while ignoring the plights of Kamurochō’s citizens. Even on a save file with almost everything unlocked and loads of Gospels under Mine’s belt, I was humbled by the hardest difficulty level. The second brawl knocked my ass out, meaning I dropped all my potential earnings and the 5,659,300 yen I’d paid to bring along four strong sidekicks.
That was a lot of dough! I’m sure Dark Ties is full of other ways to make money, but I have a feeling I know exactly what I’d do if that had actually been my save file: Drop the difficulty down a notch and head straight back into hell.
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