Yakuza Kiwami 3 review: Blurring the line between remake and rewrite

3 days ago 2

Published Feb 9, 2026, 12:25 PM EST

There is such a thing as too much revision

The Yakuza series only became enormously popular after much of its story had already been told. Though it had been around since the mid ‘00s, the series wasn’t a massive hit outside Japan until Yakuza 0 in the mid-2010s. In the years since, Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has been revamping the early adventures of Kazuma Kiryu with a series of remakes: 2016’s Yakuza Kiwami, 2017’s Yakuza Kiwami 2, and now Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties. These remakes look fantastic and feature new sidequests and minigames, which occasionally reference the later events in the storyline. It makes sense to be loosey-goosey with the chronology, since it’s a series many — if not most — fans have experienced entirely out of order.

But in Yakuza Kiwami 3, a remake of 2009’s Yakuza 3, this approach of embroidering the new onto the old feels more heavy-handed than its predecessors. From throwaway NPC dialogue to retconning huge plot twists, Kiwami 3 is conspicuously littered with anachronistic links to 2020’s Like a Dragon and 2024’s Infinite Wealth. Remember the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, where George Lucas inserts Dewbacks, Stormtroopers, and a strangely svelte CGI Jabba the Hutt into random scenes? There’s a strong whiff of that here, and it’s hard not to feel as though allowing certain elements of Yakuza 3 to simply be a little rough or imperfect would have been less intrusive. That awkward revision project keeps Yakuza Kiwami 3 from matching the series' highs, but it’s still an enjoyable romp, in no small part thanks to its truly heinous group of villains.

As the story begins, Kiryu leaves Tokyo to run the Morning Glory Orphanage in Okinawa. His farewell-for-now brawl with longtime frenemy Goro Majima helps liven things up, but the pace drags for the first several chapters. This series can thrive outside of dense urban environments, but there just isn’t enough to see and do in Ryukyu compared to Yakuza 6’s seaside town of Onomichi or Infinite Wealth’s luxe-yet-seedy Honolulu. The dull addition of a riff on Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth’s social media mechanic and Segway scooter only underscores how much Kiwami 3 would have benefited from an expanded Ryukyu map.

The table-setting early chapters moved at a brisker clip in the original Yakuza 3, but Kiwami 3 pads this section out with the addition of two new, in-depth minigames. The first, Bad Boy Dragon, sees Kiryu join forces with a women's motorcycle gang in a turf war. It sounds fantastic on paper, but is overly complicated in practice. It combines elements of several Yakuza minigames: the horde-mode brawls of 2023 sidequel The Man Who Erased His Name, the auto-battler mechanic of Clan Creator from Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2, and the catch-’em-all hijinks of Yakuza 0’s Cabaret Club and Infinite Wealth’s Sujimon. The result is like making a Crunchwrap out of a Mexican Pizza that’s also a Meximelt: it’s fine, but just one of those things on its own probably would have been better.

Kiwami 3’s other major minigame, raising Kiryu’s Daddy Rank among the kids at Morning Glory, is more open-ended and enjoyable. To level up, you’ll need to stockpile ingredients and cook an elaborate dinner for the children. The cooking minigames are simple stuff, like snagging grease blobs with a skimmer, whirling a whisk, and keeping a steady rhythm with the saltshaker. They’re charming little diversions that don’t overstay their welcome, and Kiryu’s pride in these big family dinners is an endearing reminder of his softer side.

Once Kiryu returns to Kamurocho to aid the floundering Tojo Clan, Kiwami 3 finally begins to heat up. One especially memorable sequence sees you kicking down doors in a love hotel while chasing the portly, greased-up gangster Kanda in his tighty-whities. The quieter moments are equally captivating, like an interlude where Kiryu and his Okinawan protege Rikiya visit Kamurocho’s legendary tattoo artist and philosophize about their elaborate back pieces.

In typical Yakuza fashion, there are numerous villains for Kiryu to punch his way through, and Kiwami 3 serves up some of the most memorable and loathsome creeps in the bunch. These are vulgar bastards who have no qualms about forcing themselves on women and roughing up kids, and it’s immensely satisfying when Kiryu finally gets to pummel them. Still, it’s hard to reconcile that with the hypocrisy of RGG casting an actor that’s been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual assault to play one of those villains, Hamazaki, despite months of vocal outcry from fans. There are several instances in Kiwami 3 when Kiryu is moved to rage at the sight of a man mistreating a woman, but those moments ring hollow here in a way they haven’t before.

The other villains get a bit more fleshing out in the Dark Ties campaign, which can be accessed at any time separately from the main game. It’s a 6-8 hour sidestory set entirely in Kamurocho, and runs parallel to the events of Yakuza Kiwami 3. You play as Mine, a former startup bro who’s tossed out of the company he founded due to his single-minded focus on profit. He partners with the hedonistic sleazebag Kanda to make a power grab within the Tojo Clan, violently taking over smaller families to make more money. At the same time, Mine must raise Kanda’s reputation around town by beating up goons and doing little favors for people, like getting a hungry office worker a bento box. It’s familiar Yakuza fare, but Mine gets a unique, acrobatic fighting style that lets him bounce between baddies and keeps the action feeling fresh.

Mine’s move to implement startup culture within the Tojo Clan soon attracts the attention of its head honcho, Daigo Dojima. Dark Ties will do nothing to dissuade you from thinking that Dojima is hopelessly unqualified to be leader of a conga line, but the obsessive yearning between Dojima and Mine caught me by surprise in a good way. (I’m never gonna complain about Heated Rivalry vibes in a Yakuza game.) The final moments of Dark Ties also lay some compelling — if bewildering — groundwork for what’s to come after Infinite Wealth.

I played the Switch 2 version of Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, and though there were noticeable load times ahead of cutscenes and between fights, the visuals were on par with recent Yakuza titles on PS5 and Series X. I found it a fair trade-off for portability, but your mileage may vary. RGG Studio excels at characterful, grizzled faces and impeccable suit fabrics, and little of that meticulous attention to detail is lost in either docked or portable mode on Switch 2.

Though Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties doesn’t stand toe-to-toe with the best entries in the series, there’s plenty of fun to be had if you don’t get waylaid by the minigames in the early hours. The obvious attempts to retrofit a game from 2009 into an ongoing 2020s storyline can feel clunky, but they don’t manage to ruin the fun once everyone starts whipping their tops off and beating the crap out of each other.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties will be released Feb. 12 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Switch 2 using a prerelease early access version provided by Sega. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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