Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties review: Dark vibes

Sega and RGG's latest remake is an odd package. To say the least.

The somewhat controversial Yakuza Kiwami series continues, with its most controversial entry yet. There’s a lot to unpack here, but needless to say the internet has been alight with discourse, with hardcore, longtime Yakuza/Like a Dragon fans clashing with more casual or newer fans over retcons, casting decisions, gameplay changes, and more. The icing on the cake, of course, being Yakuza 3 Remastered’s looming execution date. Is this remake actually a problematic mess, a tipping point for a once strong franchise teetering on the edge of chaos? Probably, yeah. It’s a whole thing. Let’s try to break it down.

Kiryu x Mine Generations

Yakuza (or Like a Dragon as it has been more accurately rebranded these days) is a long-running crime drama series that’s kind of like a massive, 3D, less cartoony (but somehow also more cartoony) take on River City Ransom. You run around a Japanese city getting into trouble, fighting random thugs, eating food, playing various minigames, and running into side stories ranging from the wholesome to comically absurd. You can even go into arcades and play video games. Yakuza 3 follows protagonist Kazuma Kiryu as he attempts to transition from Yakuza legend to orphanage “Daddy.” The orphanage is going great, but a criminal conspiracy involving real estate threatens the space and yanks Kiryu out of his retirement.

As a new piece of an evolving trend, Yakuza 3 Kiwami also includes a bonus game in Dark Ties, which explores the backstory of Yakuza 3 antagonist Yoshitaka Mine. While nothing can be as rad as Shadow Generations, Dark Ties has similar vibes, with Mine acting as a more sociopathic counterpoint to Kiryu’s gruff heroism. The gameplay is similar, but every piece of it is colored with more evil-sounding verbiage. Even substories in which Mine ends up helping people are seasoned with remarks on how he doesn’t understand why he should bother. It’s a neat twist that adds more video game bang for your buck, but doesn’t add a ton to the story that wasn’t already covered where needed.

Remakes are weird sometimes

The thing about some of the controversial aspects of this game is that, if you haven’t already played Yakuza 3, you wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not like the game pops up with a warning label letting you know about its ugly color saturation, missing features like the beloved Revelations mechanic, or story retcons. But that’s true of any remake project that makes significant changes to the original. Do you want to just casually play Yakuza 3 so you can cross it off your list, or do you want to experience the original creative vision from the folks who originally made the game? This is something I wrangled with already this year with Dragon Quest 7, and wrangle with now in Yakuza Kiwami 3. I suspect it won’t be anywhere near the last time as remakes continue flourishing in games.

Is it really necessary to delist the original, though? It’s disingenuous to suggest remakes aren’t artistically harmful when the original still exists, when publishers seem to be willing to put said originals on death row the moment a remake launches. For real, though, the colors are pretty ugly even if you haven’t seen the original. Who locked Kiryu in the tanning booth?

Oh, good

The other elephant in the room is the casting controversy surrounding Teruyuki Kagawa. This series has a long history of hiring famous actors, and crucially, using their likeness for the characters they voice. Famously, some games in the RGG library have been modified (even recalled in Japan) to replace actors who end up involved in real-life controversy, especially when they’re drug-related. Kagawa has a different kind of real-life controversy, one that seemed to end his public-facing career, at least until now. After being caught assaulting women in hostess clubs, admitting to it, and subsequently backing off from show business, Kagawa appears to be working on a comeback tour, with Kiwami 3 being his first major stop. Sega hadn’t commented on the matter at all until recently, with a bizarre statement that side-steps the issue to talk about Kagawa’s history of creepy, villainous performances. It seems like his creepy, villainous performance in the real world will simply be left for the audience to contend with.

In a series like Yakuza, which has in the past included storytelling threads coming to the defense of sex workers, this feels gross to engage with. It colors the experience in a similar fashion to Cristiano Ronaldo in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, if not worse due to the lack of legal ambiguity working in Ronaldo’s favor. If you’re a Yakuza fan and want to play the new game, and have issues with literal sex pests, you have to look at this dude’s face, bolted onto a major character, all the way to the end of the game. We’re supposed to be above this. Vic Mignogna, one of the most popular and successful voice actors in anime, is donezo despite being the lead in Fullmetal by-god Alchemist. But here’s this dude and it’s not even just his voice embodying a character. It’s his actual face, in a role he’s been typecast for; it’s him.

So, here’s the new Yakuza game. It does all the things a Yakuza game does, well enough. You can run around Kamurocho and Okinawa getting up to all the usual shenanigans, with lots of new minigames and whatnot engineered to make these remakes more like the well-regarded Yakuza 0 in style and structure. It’s fun to beat people up, then press the big button to burn a special meter that gives you wrestling moves. There’s even a big chunk of new content letting you play as the villain. You can play well-emulated Game Gear games! You can play weird old Sega arcade games nobody talks about (and popular ones too)! That stuff is awesome! But the vibes are off.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 isn’t a well-reasoned, but flawed remake of an old PS2 game not easily playable anymore. It’s a meddled-with version of a PS3 game that already has an accessible PS4/PC remaster, which is being removed from sale for this. Major features are missing from the original. The story seems to have been changed in ways returning fans will take issue with, continuing a trend that’s upsetting more and more people. And to top it all off, this game (perhaps accidentally) is the tip of the spear of an effort to culturally rehabilitate a sex offender who is on the public record as going beyond “allegations.” Feels bad.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties is available on February 12, 2026 for the PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties
6
Pros

• Fun video game!
• Game Gear!

Cons

• Very egregious remake that feels shallow and more meddled with than "improved"
• Dark Ties doesn't add much besides content volume
• Kagawa "controversy" is impossible to ignore