YAKUZA: BLACK PANTHER
Original Release: Sega, 2010, PSP
Also frequently called Yakuza Kurohyō, this Japan-only Yakuza spinoff introduces a new main character and changes the fighting engine to be a little more "serious", among other tweaks
Yakuza: Black Panther (PSP, Sega, 2010)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Yakuza:Black Panther:Like A Dragon:New Chapter:Shenmue was never translated and released outside of Japan, but it turns out it's for the better that it wasn't. Sega basically slaps the Yakuza name and a token section of Kamurocho onto a crummy MMA sim for a bait-and-switch.
There has been an unofficial English fan translation for some time now, which translates 100% of the story but is missing a lot of side quests, random NPC dialogue and item descriptions. Unfortunately, the translation removes the Japanese characters from a lot of the untranslated segments and replaces them with "*"s so even if you can read a little of the language you'll still be out of the loop at points.
The strength of the game is the manga-like panels that advance the story (reminiscent of Peace Walker), paired with some good voice acting. That's in spite of the main character being an extremely unlikable psycho with a truly obnoxious mullet. The story is that he's some delinquent teen who got expelled for Fightin' Round The School, so he decides to rob a Chinese loan shark for some quick cash. Unfortunately some Yakuza happen to be there already shaking the guy down when he wanders in, he beats them all up and apparently kills the underboss. So the clan leader has him kidnapped, but he presses the kid into underground fighting all Spartacus-style rather than killing him.
Eventually you get your Kamurocho privileges back and do a bunch of the usual Yakuza side stuff like making time with the hostess ladies, but the vast bulk of the game is spent in obnoxious combat that makes a lot of changes from the mainline Yakuza series. I was surprised to learn that this game was turned over to AKI (now Syn Sophia apparently), whom I have a generally quite high opinion of due to their excellent wrestling games on the N64. But the fighting engine here is apparently lifted from their PS2 Def Jam games, which I haven't played and I might not ever bother to if they work like this game does.
Now, at this point my basis for comparison is the first two Yakuza games on PS2 (the only other ones I've played yet). But that's a fair basis as at the time this PSP game came out, the only other entry was Yakuza 3 on the PS3. I don't mean to hold up those first two Yakuza games as some excellent combat engine, in fact I took them both to task for being repetitive and basically putting you in a suit of invisible Iron Man power armor making most encounters a triviality with an inevitable result. Black Panther swings way too hard in the other direction, though; the fun over-the-top environmental heat moves are mostly gone, the camera has changed to some pseudo fighting/MMA game perspective that's terrible for fighting multiple enemies or locating weapons on the ground, there are no health bars, there's a weird overly complicated limb damage system that requires you to buy different healing items for different wounds, and there's a new stamina mechanic that blows your character up after he does like a couple basic combos and dodges.
All these changes might be something you could get used to, but combat feels like it ultimately boils down to the computer doing whatever it feels like and you hoping it doesn't do too much. If the computer feels like dodging or blocking everything, it's dodging or blocking everything while you flail and then huff and puff. It feels more like playing a slot machine at times than an actual fighting game.
The streets also now have randomized endlessly respawning punks. I guess that's good for those who want to grind and stock up tons of money, but it also means your explorations are more frequently interrupted by an "OI!" and a trip into the tedious combat engine. And the static screens of the city you move between are more poorly plotted out here than they were in the PS2 game, there are a bunch of places where you just start pinballing between two screens just by continuing to hold the stick down in the direction you were going.
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