Bamba wrote:
I've just given up on Yakuza Kiwami after about an hour or so because the combat just wasn't gelling for me.
I got through it all okay up until what felt like the first 'proper' fight in the club. On my first go I just got destroyed which taught me to move around a lot more; after which I was getting through the henchmen pretty easily. It always then boiled down to a really miserable war of attrition with the boss guy and, even with the two AI helpers, he'd always eventually drop me.
The dodge barely seems to move you more than a millimeter so couldn't be relied on to get you out of trouble, and any given attack would either do a tiny amount of damage or just get blocked. It always just seemed like total chaos with the characters flipping around constantly and no real strategy that I could pick out. Treating it like a Final Fight style brawler just gets you murdered but, at the same time, your character doesn't have a fraction of the agility required for a proper fighting style like your Bloodbornes etc so, in the end, I just couldn't find a level with it.
Which is a shame because even at that early stage I was enjoying the story and characters a lot. Also, interestingly, when playing a few demos of Yakuza games over the years, I've felt like I was starting to grasp the combat even based on such short experiences. Given a full game though I've just fallen off the back of it entirely. Ah well.
I've been eyeing this up in my library. Though you've had a bad experience with it, is Kiwami the one to start with rather than Zero? I have both.