Yakuza 3 Remastered

Yakuza 3 Remastered picks up right where Kiwami 2 left off. Kiryu has earned his retirement and settled taking care of an orphanage on the beaches of Okinawa. Unfortunately, a power struggle falls on his doorsteps and he must step back to Kamuorcho and try to escape the past for good. With the gameplay-staples of the series, you will be roaming around the streets in hand-to-hand combat, leveling up, and experiencing the fantastic story.

Yakuza 3: Optimizing the Remaster

While every Yakuza game has been running well so far, we have to see if the streak can continue, and I can happily say it does! At max settings, the game can't perform as well and consistently hits high temperatures and battery drain around 23W - 24W with sub 30 FPS. But if we change a couple settings, we can get a TDP of 8 with high settings, 95% render scale, and a smooth 50 FPS that feels fantastic to use.

The recommended build consists of high settings, maximum LOD distance, and with the new render scale and TDP limit, we can get a smooth framerate with around 3 hours of battery. I would say this is the best compromise with battery, framerate, and visual quality.

On top of that, we can push the game a bit further in both directions with a focus on the highest quality possible and a 60 FPS framerate! Starting with the quality build, I wanted to push above 100% render scale and keep the highest settings. With a little bit higher TDP limit (11) and a 40 framerate cap, this can be achieved with the game looking more sharp than before.

For the framerate build, by turning the render scale down to 85% and keeping relatively similar settings to the recommended list, we can push TDP to 10 and play at a solid 60 FPS. It is a little bit blurrier, but overall, that smoothness can win out.

I did notice that going into new areas does create some framerate stutters, but this dissipated pretty quickly. It was also made a bit better thanks to the GPU Clock Frequency set at 1000. I will say I did expect this game to run better battery wise, but it isn't terrible. It's playable, but definitely not as optimal as I feel it should be.

The Shortcomings of Age

A couple things to note with Yakuza 3. This game is a remaster of the 3rd game, which means that some of the old gameplay elements have been brought over to this edition of the game. This doesn't really affect the game, but it does mean combat feels a little stiff compared to the Kiwami games. There are some other little things like the leveling system feeling a bit dated, but overall, it still plays great!

I did also see a couple of reports of the game's audio de-syncing in some "revelations" cutscenes in-game, but I didn't notice it. It does help that the game doesn't have English voice acting and subtitles are there, but it can be a bit annoying. Though it wasn't something I experienced, so take it with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

Yakuza 3 Remastered continues the story of Kiryu and doesn't pull back. While it doesn't reach the heights of the predecessors before it, the game is a great entry and really is a ton of fun. And on the Steam Deck, this is another entry that requires little-to-no compromise to run this optimally.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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