Yakuza Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties hands-on preview – remake redemption

Don’t mess with the orphanage manager (Sega)

GameCentral goes hands-on with the remake of Yakuza 3 and its new spin-off, as one of the lesser entries gets a substantial makeover. 

If you looked at any respectable ranking of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, Yakuza 3 would routinely be near the bottom. Released in 2009 on the PlayStation 3, Kazuma Kiryu’s third outing was a meditative, left-field swerve, where the usual gangster operatics are bolted onto a quieter, slice of life tale featuring the Dragon of Dojima as the owner of an island orphanage. 

Story-wise, it’s one of the series’ most distinctive titles, despite its uneven tone. Yet, as the oldest Yakuza game which hasn’t so far received the remake treatment, playing Yakuza 3 today is a painful rewind to stiff combat and tedious tussles with the AI. Of all the games in Kiryu’s saga so far, this is the one you beeline through for the narrative and not much else. 

That makes the prospect of Yakuza Kiwami 3 welcome and necessary, even if it isn’t as exciting as a brand new title. However, after going hands-on in a brief capacity, this remake feels like a transformative overhaul, which could catapult the third entry towards the top of the rankings. 

Aside from the visual revamp courtesy of the Dragon engine (in use since Yakuza 6), the most transformative change here is the combat. Unlike the original game, Kiryu can now switch between two fighting styles: the Dragon of Dojima, his main style used in prior games, and the new Ryukyu style. In the latter, Kiryu wields a variety of weapons which originate from the Japanese island of Okinawa, where the game is mostly set. 

All six weapons Kiryu wields are tied to each attack button – either via taps or by holding down each input. For example, if you tap the strong attack, Kiryu will launch into a combo with a pair of tonfa sticks, but these will switch into nunchuks if you hold down the same button.

Other weapons in his arsenal include a spear and shield (known as tinbe-rochin), knuckleduster type gear known as tekkō, a wooden oar called eiku, and a surujin – a weight attached to a rope which Kiryu can swing around his head and launch at foes in satisfying fashion. 

Kiryu is a master of weapons (Sega)

The moveset is reminiscent of Majima’s swashbuckling array of tools in Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, albeit without the jump button, and it feels just as slick to execute. It’s equally absurd visually, as Kiryu chaotically flips between wooden oars, spears, and nunchuks, sometimes within the same combo and with no transition animation between them. 

Yakuza Kiwami 3 borrows mechanics from modern Like A Dragon titles too. You can now travel around Okinawa on the street surfer Segway, while the ‘Search’ mode and customisation options from Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii are carried over, and expanded on, here. You can even customise Kiryu’s flip phone, used to make friends with others, in the same vein as Infinite Wealth’s Alola Links, with different wrist straps, antennas, and lock screens. 

Our 30 minute session only allowed a brief roam around Okinawa, and while it had the same layout, it was more densely populated and far richer in detail. Better yet, returning side stories have been revamped too. We stumbled into the classic side mission where you have to carry two stacked ice cream cones to a group of kids around the street, while avoiding any collisions with pedestrians.

This time, however, the streets were littered with sumo wrestlers conducting side-stepping training exercises, amping up the comedic novelty. 

If Yakuza Kiwami 3 is the overhaul you expect, the surprising part of the package is Dark Ties – a completely new campaign that will bundled with the remake. In Dark Ties, you play as Yakuza 3 antagonist Yoshitaka Mine, who is in pursuit of Tojo Clan leader Daigo Dojima after an event triggers his curiosity in the yakuza underworld. 

Based on our 30 minute hands-on in this section, the campaign serves as an origin story for Mine’s ascent up the ranks, prior to the events in Yakuza 3. It’s unclear how substantial Dark Ties actually is, but it carries equal billing with Yakuza Kiwami 3 on the menu screen, and you can even switch between each campaign on the fly in the pause menu, which suggests they must be somewhat comparable in length. 

The section we played was set in Kamurocho, where we got to grips with Mine’s combat moves in a string of encounters. Unlike Kiryu, Mine has only one main fighting style, based around shoot boxing, with jabbing punches and kicks, elaborate submissions, and elastic movements.

By holding down one attack button, you can kick an enemy in a hovering motion, but press another attack in quick succession and you’ll launch off his knees and cascade into someone behind you. There’s a learning curve in its execution, but it feels notably different to any other characters in the series’ history. 

A jaw-dropping ride with Mine (Sega)

The gimmick with Mine’s combat is the Dark Awakening mode. As you land attacks on foes, you’ll unlock Shackled Hearts you can consume to activate a powered-up state with increased damage and new moves. You can trigger up to three hearts at once on a gauge, with the more you consume, the stronger the overall effect. In this brief preview session, it was hard to tell which moves were exclusive to Dark Awakening, but we did trigger one particularly gratifying combo where Mine grabs someone by the jaw and drags them across the ground. 

Beyond Mine’s combat and the story, we didn’t see anything specific to Dark Ties which makes it more distinctive. There were no side stories on the Kamurocho map, that we could see, but this might be because we were too early in the story, and the minigames were all the same as you’d find on the same map in previous titles (arcade, karaoke, etc). We expect there’ll be more to show in the future, but at this point, it’s difficult to gauge how meaningful Dark Ties will actually end up being in the grand scheme. 

If there are questions hanging over Dark Ties, the improvements to Yakuza 3 alone will likely make this dual package a worthwhile stop-gap before the next mainline Like A Dragon game. It might be a peculiar proposition, as neither is a good entry point for newcomers, but Yakuza Kiwami 3, at the very least, could spur a re-evaluation of one of Kiryu’s most maligned, yet most narratively important, chapters. 

Formats: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC
Price: £54.99
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Release Date: 12th February 2026
Age Rating: 18

Okinawa has never looked better (Sega)

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