So the news that Yakuza 5 will be getting a western release was very exciting, but some of you might not have actually played a Yakuza game before. So it’s a good thing that next month all Playstation Plus subscribers will be able to download Yakuza 4 for the Playstation 3. You won’t need to have played any of the previous Yakuza games to start with it either, as every Yakuza game includes hefty recaps of the games before it.
NeoGAF member YianGaruga spotted that the game will be included in next month’s Playstation Plus games on the German Playstation Blog. (Update: Now confirmed for the US as well) The other games that’ll be available are Apotheon and Transistor for Playstation 4, Thief for the Playstation 3, Kick and Fennick for the Playstation Vita, and Rogue Legacy for all of the previously mentioned platforms. So overall a pretty good selection of games, though Yakuza 4 is the only one of them that’s about being a bad-ass in Japan.
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Yep, excpected.
Free Yakuza 4 is a good way of making up for a heavily delayed Yakuza 5.
Still you’d need to play and complete the others for the full proper experience as it was meant to be, ‘re-caps are the next best thing right enough and fills in the most necessary basics of what’s been happening up to that point. Seeing as it’s for PSN, will it be playable for the PS4 also? Kind of missing the boat a bit if it can only be played via a PS3 when everybody is steadily migrating over to the next gen, it’s not like is needs any additional development time if it was built for backward compatibility, it’ll still always be a PS3 title just running on a PS4.
Well yeah, obviously if you want to get into Yakuza, just starting from the beginning might be the best option (though the first game and to a certain extend the second game haven’t aged well at all IMO). But if you don’t want to commit that much time to it, starting with Yakuza 3 or 4 is fine.
Also, the Playstation 4 isn’t backwards compatible, so it won’t be able to play this or the upcoming Yakuza 5 localization. A lot of people still have a Playstation 3 though.