Fan of Sega’s long-running modern-day JRPG series Yakuza? Then you may want to give Kotaku a wide berth today, as they published an article (FreezePage link so as not to direct traffic to the piece in question; petty, I know, but I know a few people who won’t click Kotaku links on principle) which has incited the ire of an angry mob of Yakuza fans. And since Yakuza is a fairly niche game with a dedicated core of fans keen to see Sega continue to bring it to the West, they’re pretty passionate about the series that they love.

The main issue with the article is that it is clearly written by someone who has very little knowledge of the Yakuza series at all — the author even states this up-front, noting that prior to taking Yakuza 5 for a spin they had played nothing more than the demos of Yakuza 3, 4 and Dead Souls and hadn’t felt inspired to purchase or try the full games. Leaving aside the fact that he was coming in at the fifth installment to a series that is very strict about its chronology — each subsequent game follows on directly from the previous one — the bigger question is why on Earth this writer was picked to write an “Import Preview” for this game when his familiarity with the series is questionable by his own admission?

Of course, there is merit in judging the accessibility of a long-running series to newcomers, but just as certain series of books, movies and TV shows expect you to start from the very beginning and work your way along, so too are there series of games that demand the same of their audience. Yakuza is one of these, though it does give a cursory nod to newcomers in each game by allowing them a sequence where the protagonist “reminisces” about the events of the previous installment. These are primarily intended for series veterans who have endured a significant wait between games, however, and are designed to remind them of the key events rather than the actual experience of playing through a Yakuza game. They are not really designed to tell the entire story of a whole game in 30 minutes of cutscenes. You want to know what happened in, say, Yakuza 2? Go play it — it’s still out there and (relatively) readily available.

I won’t go through and address all of Eisenbeis’ five points in the article one at a time as that just seems somewhat petty, but it’s abundantly clear from the things he says that he is unfamiliar with the series and its conventions, and has also not spent a significant amount of time with it to discover its hidden depths. Pleasingly, the comments from Yakuza fans beneath the article have mostly been relatively respectful (if incredulous) and systematically point out how most of his arguments are flawed or, in some cases, completely incorrect.

I will address one point specifically, however, and that is the matter of “unskippable conversations”. This is a particular bugbear for me. Yakuza is notorious for being a story-heavy, character-focused game in which the moments when you’re kicking back in a hostess club attempting to woo your lady of the hour are just as important as the times when you’re punching goons in the face and smashing traffic cones over their heads. If anything, they’re more important, as they’re where the characters get to demonstrate their hidden depths — far from being generic, silent protagonists, the playable characters in the Yakuza series are all very complex people with interesting motivations and outlooks on life. More interestingly, they’re all grown-ups.

Brief aside: a friend and I were discussing this recently, and we thought it would be very interesting if there was a Japanese-style role-playing game that instead of featuring your usual band of Plucky, Idealistic Teens Who Are Always Right getting to save the world from Some Great Evil, put the spotlight on a group of older, more jaded and cynical adults who maybe had more complex motives for embarking on whatever the game’s “quest” happened to be. The Yakuza series provides just that sort of experience, with characters who age and evolve as the series progresses, giving the complete franchise a truly remarkable feeling of coherence and changing with the times. At the same time, however, certain things remain constant — Kazuma will always care for his adoptive sort-of-“daughter” Haruka; Kamuro-cho will always be by turns beautiful and terrifying; Majima’s sanity will always be somewhat questionable.

Anyway, my point with all that was that the very essence of Yakuza is in the story, so why would you skip it? I’ll allow you the answer “because I died on a boss fight and I’ve already seen this bit”, but anything beyond that — such as the reason Eisenbeis gives in his article — is very much missing the point. “I started to dread playing through the plot, knowing that the game’s pace would be about to grind to a halt,” he writes. Good grief, man. The point is the plot. If you were hoping for a brawler or character action game — or even a Grand Theft Auto-alike — there are plenty of other titles that will better fit your needs.

One thing I will say at this point is that I’m not attempting to convert anyone to the Yakuza fold who isn’t already there. As has probably been made clear by the fact I’m writing this at all, you’re either “in” or you aren’t, and getting “in” these days involves playing four (possibly five if you count Dead Souls) games of between 10-40+ hours that straddle the generation gap between PS2 and PS3. From the second game onwards, you also have to be able to deal with the fact that there’s no English dub, either — it’s all subtitled with Japanese speech (and is an infinitely better experience as a result, I might add). It’s a worthwhile experience, but equally it’s one I’d understand people forgoing as the perceived barrier of entry gets higher.

Consequently, I’m not denying that some of the criticisms Eisenbeis makes of Yakuza in his article are valid; many of them are, and yes, they’re offputting to series newcomers. However, this article really didn’t need to be written, and in the worst-case scenario, it may have done some damage to the already-tenuous chances of Sega bringing this latest installment to the West. The piece’s content essentially boils down to “Guy Who Doesn’t Like Yakuza Doesn’t Like Latest Yakuza“, which is a matter for a personal blog, not for one of the world’s most heavily-trafficked video games websites. Fans of the Yakuza series who see the “Import Preview” header would likely have been hoping for some insights on the ways in which the new game has evolved its systems and what has happened to the characters in the intervening time since Yakuza 4 and Dead Souls; instead, what they get is a poorly-researched opinion piece that does nothing but frustrate the people who are most likely to read it.

I’m sorry that Eisenbeis didn’t enjoy his time with Yakuza 5, but it’s his prerogative to dislike it if he pleases. He should clearly not, however, have been given the opportunity to write about it in the way that he did, as it does a great disservice to both the game and its fans who were hoping for some genuine new information. I hope that Kotaku will think much more carefully about who they assign preview articles to in the future, but I won’t hold my breath.