Up until this point my only experience with the series was playing the Yakuza 3 demo once shortly after getting my PS3. Although I didn't hate what I saw, it didn't exactly hook me to want to go out and pay money to play more. I pretty much wrote off the series at that point and probably never would have givin it another thought.
I just finished playing Yakuza 4 though, and it was pretty fantastic. It starts off slow (with some heavy exposition dumps) but once it got going it got its hooks in me but good. The story ended up being quite good and once the gameplay started to flesh itself out smashing punks' faces in never quite got old. (I think the game switching between the different protags with different playstyles helped.)
Yakuza 5 has gone from complete indifference to one of my most anticipated games coming out this year. They really picked an excellent time to do this too. Right now is pretty dead for new games and it's not long after that Yakuza 5 announcement, so I don't have to worry about praying to the SEGA gods to actually know if I get to play it, unlike most existing Yakuza fans. Not yet anyway. I definitely recommend anyone who has been curious about these games but never took the plunge to give it an honest go.
On a random side-note, being able to take Haruka out to do Karaoke and bowling and stuff may be one of my favorite post-game bonuses in a video game. It's like if you got to take Nanako in Persona 4 out to Junes and buy her lamps whenever you pleased. Though on the subject of post-game, I really like the way the game handles that. Opening the game up into a free adventure mode where you can freely finish up any side-content you have yet to do, even the stuff that was time-sensitive in the story, is a really great way to handle that. More games should really do something like that.
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