Kurohyou: Like a Dragon - New Chapter

 This game rules.

I emulated a patched version of this. I'll explain more below.

While I was able to play and enjoy Kenzan! through the use of Google Translate and a lot of patience, when I saw that this game had an English patch available I was excited. I had a great time experiencing Kenzan!, partially because it feels like such an oddity lost to time, and I was eager to take a crack at one of these other spinoffs without needing to jump through as many hoops. Because I'm not sure how I'd go about getting a modified ISO onto a PSP (or Vita), emulation was the play here. 

This English patch, brought to us by TeamK4L, isn't perfect. I can't vouch for its accuracy and it's incomplete (most of the dialogue with the hostesses is not only untranslated, but is actually nonsense placeholder text) but I'm thankful that it exists because a human hand localizing something should almost certainly be better than the machine translation I experienced with Kenzan!

Even if there are sometimes errors.

I suppose I should get into the game itself. Kurohyou, which I think translates to "Black Panther" so you'll sometimes hear people refer to this game by that name, is effectively another Yakuza game. You're on the streets of Kamurocho playing a character who crosses paths with the Tojo Clan and you get into a lot of random fights along the way. You'll be spending your time in many recognizable areas and, on a surface level, the gameplay is also pretty dang similar to the previous Yakuzas.

There are occasionally some familiar faces.

Kamurocho is still Kamurocho, so navigating the city has become almost second-nature to me. Due to the PSP's hardware the perspective returns to the fixed-camera angles of the PS2 games, though the camera's been elevated and the 3D environments have been largely replaced with pre-rendered backgrounds. There's only one area to explore in this game, unlike other recent Yakuza games, though with the scope of the game being what it is it doesn't feel like you're missing out on a Sotenbori or an Okinawa. Kamurocho is also a single-level affair in this one, unlike Yakuza 4, though you can still see the staircases and manholes that those characters hopped in and out of so it at least still feels like the same city.

This menu item is what lets me know it's set after Yakuza 4. Neat!

While it has a lot in common with the other games, the combat has a very different vibe because it's a slower, somewhat scaled back affair. You'll still be beating people up with the square and triangle buttons, but the camera's pulled in and you have some directional control over your attacks. In general, there's more of a focus on the nitty-gritty of hand-to-hand combat as you can no longer craft or purchase weapons. You can still pick up traffic cones and signs and whatnot to beat people senseless, but these are all fairly fragile and there's usually not too many of them in a given arena so the focus is clearly on the hand-to-hand (and, uh, foot-to-face) mechanics.

You can aim your attacks at various enemies' body parts, and there's an injury system that slowly accrues over time as you or an enemy take damage. Repeated blows to the legs can cause you to move slower, for instance, and managing your injuries is something you might need to do between battles. There are still heat actions, but these have been simplified somewhat as you have less direct control over what heat action you'll be activating; it's largely contextual based on how much "Heat" you've accumulated and whether there's anything in the environment for you to smack enemies into.

The other notable change to the combat is that you now have access to a variety of fighting styles. You start with just one, but eventually gain access to a number of different styles that each have their own combo strings, heat actions, and associated stats. These stats can include anything from increased punch and/or kick damage, better dodges,  or reduced injuries; essentially, each style has its own tradeoffs and vibe and switching between them as you work through the game kept the combat from ever getting too stale. In a way it reminded me of how Yakuza 4's multiple characters each played a little differently.

There are a lot of systems in this game.

The story also feels noticeably different to the console games. While, yes, it's set in Kamurocho and the Tojo Clan is involved, it's a very different affair because it's focused on a part of the world those games don't really involve themselves with. You play as a 17-year-old hotheaded delinquent named Ukyo Tatsuya who, after getting mixed up with the yakuza, gets blackmailed into fighting in an underground arena. An unrelated underground arena, mind you, to the one in Purgatory, but a yakuza-affiliated fight club nonetheless. 

Tatsuya is... much less even-keeled than Kiryu and while he still helps people out in substories he's a far more selfish and violent character than any of the existing Yakuza protagonists. This game has a different vibe as a result and truly feels like its own thing. Due to the limited resources and scale of the game, most cutscenes are presented via motion comics, which also helps give the game some of its own identity. 

I happen to like the art in this.

Substories once again make a comeback and are where I spent what feels like a majority of my time, and if I have to criticize this game it would be to say that most of them felt pretty forgettable. There are a few noteworthy quest-chains, I suppose, but most of them seemed pretty uninspired. Of course there are a lot of side activities and minigames to play too, if you're so inclined. Bowling, Club Sega, and the batting cage, among others, make a return, while there are now part time jobs to work at that each have their own mechanics. Most of these minigames are pretty simple when compared to the ones in "proper" Yakuza games, but they're fun enough. 

This is how you drain the water while preparing ramen, obviously.

Hostesses once again make a return, though I effectively didn't engage with them here because the hostess translations aren't finished (and given how much time has passed since this fan-translation has come out, will probably never be finished) and are genuinely impossible to proceed in without a guide. It's not just that they're untranslated; if that were the case, I could rely on Google Translate. No, here most of the hostess dialogue is gibberish placeholder text. While it's neat that these sequences have some actual camera-work unlike the rest of the game, it just didn't seem worth my time to sit through several hours of unintelligible nonsense (that probably wouldn't be that interesting even if I could understand it).

If these were left in Japanese I could try to translate them myself, but this is incomprehensible.

Because this was a PSP game and it was the style at the time, there's also a multiplayer mode in this. I wasn't able to interact with most of the multiplayer stuff in this, but it looks like there's a competitive mode (that I assume has you directly fighting another player) as well as a co-op mode. That co-op mode, luckily, can also be played Solo so I played through that. It seemed fine? It's this game's equivalent to the earlier installments' "Ultimate Match" and has you taking on various challenges. These are generally timed combat encounters, though there are occasional wrinkles and gimmicks to be found as you work through them.

The main reward for doing those missions is to gain new cosmetic items for the character creator because, yep, there's a character creator in this that lets you make your own custom gang member. You can either use this custom character (who has access to whatever styles you've unlocked as Ukyo in the story) or, somewhat interestingly, you can also use someone you've encountered in that main game. As you're getting into random battles as Ukyo, you'll sometimes be given an option to "recruit" someone you've defeated,  adding them to your pool of playable characters for the multiplayer modes. None of the people I fought (and recruited) were as good as my custom character, but it was neat to see something akin to the soldier-capturing of the later Metal Gear Solid games in this.

Because I'm me, I made (inFAMOUS 1-era) Zeke. This game is from 2010, after all.

As always, I've included my completion screen below. Well, I've included what my stats look like immediately after completing the game. While I tried to engage with all of the side content at least once, I didn't want to 100% this game so my completion percentage is at least closer to something normal. With that being said, I did spend a fair amount of time grinding. For example I did every substory (excluding the Amon-equivalent in this as you need to have gone through each of the hostesses), unlocked every fighting style, and did all of the co-op missions, so my hour-count is inflated when compared to someone who didn't go out of their way to do all that.

I realize most of these blog posts end up just being descriptions of what's in the games I'm playing so I thought I'd talk a bit more about what I actually think of this one. It was great! I went in without any real expectations and, maybe because this game was kind of out-of-the-way and I needed to jump through a hoop or two to play it, I wound up feeling like I'd stumbled across a hidden gem. This is every bit as solid as any of the Yakuza games I've played up to this point and the fact it's on the PSP is not at all a mark against it. In fact, this is a contender for my favorite entry in the whole series. It's that good.

I mentioned earlier that I emulated this, and I highly recommend that others interested in the series do the same. You can map a gamepad's joystick to the d-pad for analog movement, and I found it ran well and looked good (well, good enough for a PSP game). Installing the patch was simple enough and the translation felt decent even if there were, as I mentioned, some errors. 

It's hard for me to say definitively that it's an ideal translation because there's a bit of blind faith on my part that there wasn't any undue editorializing from the team, but the writing felt like Yakuza which is all I can really hope for. I got the impression at least one substory was modified to make sense for an English-speaking audience, but that's the sort of localization that I think is for the best. A one-to-one translation isn't always the correct approach, but I am also at least aware that this isn't a "perfect" recreation of the Japanese experience as a result.

While I initially planned to play these two PSP games out of a sort of obligation, now I'm genuinely excited to see Kurohyou 2. I know this character and these events will almost certainly never be acknowledged in the mainline series, but I can treat this as a sort of precursor to the Judgment games; a kind of alternate-take on Kamurocho that'll be good while it lasts, however short that may be.