Anyone else been playing through the Demo, played it for the last week or so and Sega have done a really good job of squeezing the PS2 Yakuza style game onto an handheld.
The game starts off with a few cutscenes, this time your a young man called Tatsuya who breaks into a Chinese loan sharks office to steal some cash, once inside your confronted by Toda Naoki who's associated with Tojo clan of the Yakuza, a fight breaks out and Tatsuya ends up killing him. Toda was the righthand man of a guy called Ryutaro Kuki and when he catches Tasuya rather than killing him he sees his potential as a fighter so makes him fight in an underground league called Dragon Heat.
Graphically it's excellent, character detail on the various enemies you fight is a big step up from the PS2 games it also has some great animated cutscenes similar to MGS:PW, think they are actually done by the same company as well, only small let down is that Kamurocho is now prerendered similar to the old RE games, probably due to the PSP's limitations, still it works quite well. The music in the demo is also excellent during the fights, sort of a cross between rock and techno.
The demo gives you a small area of Kamurocho to explore along with a tutorial, the main mission of the demo just involves you getting to the hostess bar JeweL which ends in a small boss fight involving a wave of enemies to fight through. Theres also one of two small quests you can run into along the way.
Most of the stores are accessible but you can't do much in them other than buy health items, places like Club Sega just allow you to go in and view a video of the various mini games and features that will be in the full game, looks quite varied though, theres the usual baseball, UFO catchers, Karaoke along with one that looks like your serving fast food.
The fight engine in this one does differ slightly from previous games, the demo gives you 3 fighting styles which can be levelled up, you have Kenka (brawling), Boxing & Pro Wrestling, before each random fight you get a menu where you can switch between styles. Each style has a positive and negative outcome as well, boxing will increase you punching power by 20% but reduce kicking power by 20%.
You can still run around like in previous games while fighting but when your punching an enemy the camera zooms in, it feels a lot more like VF or Tekken because of this, they've also added a cool counter move as well, if you time pressing the L button and the D-Pad at correct moment you can grab a kick or punch.
Heat moves are still here although I can't work out if you can do them with objects in your hand, so far it only looks like you can do them while grabbing, not sure if this will change in the full game once levelled up. Theres also no visible energy bar either, you can only see it if you pause, the screen does start going red when your low though.
Controls are good despite less buttons, probably works better than most games seeing as the PS2 games never really used the second analogue, one really odd choice though is that you now have to hold L1 & O to pick things up, you soon get used to it though.
One cool feature of the fights now is that when they end your also given an option of either taking more EXP or Money.
Overall it's looking like they've pulled off Yakuza on the PSP quite well, just looking at the videos in the game theres a ton of content as well as multiplayer, you also get a code at the end of the demo to unlock extra items in the full game, really looking forward to picking this one up on the 22nd of this month.
The game starts off with a few cutscenes, this time your a young man called Tatsuya who breaks into a Chinese loan sharks office to steal some cash, once inside your confronted by Toda Naoki who's associated with Tojo clan of the Yakuza, a fight breaks out and Tatsuya ends up killing him. Toda was the righthand man of a guy called Ryutaro Kuki and when he catches Tasuya rather than killing him he sees his potential as a fighter so makes him fight in an underground league called Dragon Heat.
Graphically it's excellent, character detail on the various enemies you fight is a big step up from the PS2 games it also has some great animated cutscenes similar to MGS:PW, think they are actually done by the same company as well, only small let down is that Kamurocho is now prerendered similar to the old RE games, probably due to the PSP's limitations, still it works quite well. The music in the demo is also excellent during the fights, sort of a cross between rock and techno.
The demo gives you a small area of Kamurocho to explore along with a tutorial, the main mission of the demo just involves you getting to the hostess bar JeweL which ends in a small boss fight involving a wave of enemies to fight through. Theres also one of two small quests you can run into along the way.
Most of the stores are accessible but you can't do much in them other than buy health items, places like Club Sega just allow you to go in and view a video of the various mini games and features that will be in the full game, looks quite varied though, theres the usual baseball, UFO catchers, Karaoke along with one that looks like your serving fast food.
The fight engine in this one does differ slightly from previous games, the demo gives you 3 fighting styles which can be levelled up, you have Kenka (brawling), Boxing & Pro Wrestling, before each random fight you get a menu where you can switch between styles. Each style has a positive and negative outcome as well, boxing will increase you punching power by 20% but reduce kicking power by 20%.
You can still run around like in previous games while fighting but when your punching an enemy the camera zooms in, it feels a lot more like VF or Tekken because of this, they've also added a cool counter move as well, if you time pressing the L button and the D-Pad at correct moment you can grab a kick or punch.
Heat moves are still here although I can't work out if you can do them with objects in your hand, so far it only looks like you can do them while grabbing, not sure if this will change in the full game once levelled up. Theres also no visible energy bar either, you can only see it if you pause, the screen does start going red when your low though.
Controls are good despite less buttons, probably works better than most games seeing as the PS2 games never really used the second analogue, one really odd choice though is that you now have to hold L1 & O to pick things up, you soon get used to it though.
One cool feature of the fights now is that when they end your also given an option of either taking more EXP or Money.
Overall it's looking like they've pulled off Yakuza on the PSP quite well, just looking at the videos in the game theres a ton of content as well as multiplayer, you also get a code at the end of the demo to unlock extra items in the full game, really looking forward to picking this one up on the 22nd of this month.
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