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Yakuza 4 Remastered I put this one off for like a year because of how utterly miserable of an experience Yakuza 3 was but that turned out to be a mistake. This one is actually pretty great! I played on hard again, because I don't learn from my mistakes. Fortunately for me, the combat in this one is nowhere near as obnoxious as in Yakuza 3. There's still some bullshit with boss enemies attacking or blocking in the middle of your combo string, which might be deliberate but seems fucking insane to me. And some large groups of enemies in some chapters will sometimes decide to all try to hit you at once and you end up getting stun-locked for a solid minute, which seems like incredibly sloppy combat design to me but what do I know? Anyway, the game overall was super fun so unlike the miserable slog that was Yakuza 3, here it's a minor complaint. The story is actually pretty good. At its best moments I was reminded of Yakuza 0, which is basically the highest praise I can give to one of these games. And at one point Majima referenced something that happened to him in the 80s and I got really excited that the game would have some kind of retroactive tie-in with 0 but it turned out to be some other event that happened 2 years before 0. I went into the game fully prepared to complain that there wasn't enough Kiryu (and he does play a disappointingly minor role in the game) but I ended up loving the new characters way more than I expected, so it turned out to not be such a huge deal. Akiyama is just a great character and Saejima is a fucking badass brick shithouse of a man that lifts dudes over his head and throws them into walls. What's not to love? That being said, most of the combat issues I described happened with the other characters. Once I finally got to play as Kiryu, it was like turning the game's difficulty down. I guess normal people just can't compare to the Dragon of Dojima. I was kinda meh on Tanimura as a character but apparently he doesn't come back in future games because his voice actor quit or something. The best part of his section was the gameplay because it kinda felt like proto-Judgment but we have Judgment now and Yagami is a much better character, so I guess that worked out in the end. Speaking of Judgment, maybe it's because it's the last one I played before this but I kinda felt the game's age while playing Yakuza 4. The textures on non-main characters are just a blurry mess and Kamurocho feels way more artificial by comparison. It's really tempting to jump right into Yakuza 5 so I can get the PS3 games out of the way and only have the more modern Dragon Engine games left but I'm worried about getting burned out on the series. Think I'll probably give it a month or so to play something else and come back to it in the near future.

I already owned Yakuza 7 since a friend gifted it to me a while back but rebuying the Legendary Hero Edition was the cheapest (and only) way to get all the DLC. If only Steam had features to help in cases like this like, idk, complete-the-bundle or upgrade paths for game editions... Normally, I'd say I'm not planning on buying anything else of the remainder of the sale but at this point I know better than that.