Video games have been milking the wise-guy milieu for ages. It's a nice fit for a medium where violence is the path of least resistance for forwarding a narrative. Yakuza takes the idea of economy through knuckle sandwiches to an unfortunate conclusion, reducing the intricacies of organized crime to a series of brainless brawls. Imagine The Godfather relocated to Tokyo, with a fistfight between each scene, and you're in the right prefecture.
The game's lead is Kazuma Kiryu, a former clan golden boy just paroled after 10 years of imprisonment for offing his boss—a crime he didn't commit. See, Kazuma is a tattooed tough guy, but Yakuza plays the honor angle so hard that he hardly seems low enough for his underworld zip code. Kazuma protects an orphaned girl, returns a snatched purse, defends shop owners from shakedowns, and still finds time to save a puppy as he unravels the convoluted mystery at the game's heart. A story this principled feels a tad remedial now that filmmakers like Takeshi Kitano have mined so much depth and depravity from Japanese gangsters. It doesn't help that the game's translation from its native language reworks much of the dialogue in an excessively profane ghetto patois.